I miss good doge shame it dident continue 😪
Tome of the Orange Sky (Naruto/MGLN)
- Thread starter CmptrWz
- Start date
- Crossover
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- mgln naruto naruto uzumaki complete
And fox tails!
I put in as much effort as I thought was needed and figure that anything I might have wrong is attributable to "fictional world, drift over time, and it obviously being ninja faking it (no matter how well they're doing so)"
- Location
- Scotland
Don't worry, from the sounds of things the gods are more amused than anything else, especially since this is likely to get them far more worshipers. I won't ask for spoilers but I strongly suspect that the shrines are going to find themselves far more effective and powerful than they ever expected.I put in as much effort as I thought was needed and figure that anything I might have wrong is attributable to "fictional world, drift over time, and it obviously being ninja faking it (no matter how well they're doing so)"
- Location
- Alabama
- Location
- Georgia
Nobody knew where the white dog came from, nor why the foxes accepted its presence, but the fact that Sunny was a Good Dog was clear to see...
Chapter 94 - Islands of Power
"Kind of funny that the second shrine had a bigger crowd than the first," Naruto said as he looked over the plans for putting in a complete 'five shrine' setup on the flying island. Most of which involved figuring out how, or perhaps if, to include some of the underground aspects of the other shrines. "Despite being a new shrine built ahead of the enshrining."
"Yoko still put on a show," Ino pointed out.
"Well yes, that would be stupid to skip with an audience."
"Have you approved the requests for missions on the other continent?"
"Which one?"
Ino looked up at him. "What do you mean?"
"We've got outposts on or near three other continents now."
"...when did that happen?"
Hinata scoffed. "Before Yoko did the Land of Fire's shrine revitalization."
"Oh."
Naruto shrugged. "I've approved basic 'defend travelers' missions on two of them, pending approval from local governments to operate in the area anyway. It's the warring continent that I'm annoyed about. As far as the infiltration teams gathering information can tell there isn't a government there at all that doesn't want to continue on to world conquest. Any that might've been content with local concerns were wiped out years ago."
"Ugh. So if any of them win they become everyone else's possible problem?"
"Yep. There are proposals being worked on for various ways to handle things. Some think we should arrange for everyone to no longer have militaries, others that we should just take over, there was one mention of arranging travel for other countries here to conquer over there instead of duking things out here. The destruction of the moon apparently accelerated things too, each country assuming one of the others over there did it alongside the final shutdown of several superweapons that suddenly no longer had functional power sources."
The girls both grimaced, and he went back to focusing on flying island updates. There were requests to rent the thing for an exam and that put it at the top of his priority list for now.
Yoko sighed as she prepared for the third enshrinement trip. The first two had passed through the Land of Hot Water to reach the Land of Fire, the second then hitting Uzushio's old Amegakure territory to hit the Land of Earth. This one was going to start in the same place, at the mainland dock facility, but then go straight from Shrine Island to a Land of Wind dock. Work was already happening to get the set of mobile houses into position more reasonably than them just 'being there' on arrival, and without needing to unload them from the ship.
Getting more trained priestesses, and the first few priests, was going slower than she'd like it to though. Not because of a lack of enthusiasm, but because it wasn't an instant process with the standards she'd set. A shrine maiden or helper was essentially a genin. The priestesses were at least chunin level, though in some cases you could call them special jounin. She was currently the only one that was jounin or higher level in skills, but wasn't trying to hold the others to that standard.
As it was, the 'shrine maidens' making the trip to the Land of Wind with the mobile houses, using one to carry the packed-up others, had shown that they aren't pushovers by defeating six groups of bandits. Two of those groups had been hired to test the shrine maidens as well, thanks to groups with ties to the Land of Demons that felt that those working in shrines needed to have actual combat skills.
Uzushio teams had been deployed to show that it hadn't been appreciated, though whether the two groups that had hired the bandits realized what the problem was when they were looted to the ground was another question entirely. Not that they'd be in any position to retaliate at that point, and it was a useful training exercise for a couple of teams.
The preparations for this trip didn't include recordings though, which was nice. Nor did they include Daimyo going along for the entire trip. A single noble was joining them, one from the area that the shrine was being set up in, arguably to ensure that there were 'no tricks'. In reality his daughter had pushed for it, with the end result hopefully being a more relaxing journey than the previous two.
Assuming, of course, that the little girl's enthusiasm could be kept in check through 'lessons in proper shrine maiden behavior'. The girl had her own pink shrine maiden outfits and even a pair of fake fox ears.
"...what?" Naruto asked as he looked at Teni. She was one of the more...enthusiastic technology division members.
"We want to work with you to build a combat island," Teni repeated.
"Why?"
"So that we can fly it over the warring continent. Maybe head for the volcano near the far side? Do something there that seems like it was the only goal, then fly back. Attack anything that attacks us, but otherwise just travel through and back."
"That's a plan, but not an explanation."
"It should be obvious? The existence of something like that, essentially ignoring them unless provoked, should hopefully cause the entire continent to calm down on the 'world conquest' angle. That we'd then have it available in case it's needed for an actual war would be a bonus."
"You want to work with me to build a combat-grade flying island entirely so that we can fly it over a warzone, pretend to not care about the war part of that, and then leave. Presumably with a trail of destruction behind us where various groups attacked us and we retaliated."
"Yes."
"And presumably so that you can see me building things directly to see what you can learn from that."
"...no? We've given up on figuring out the interactions with seals due to a lack of seal expertise in our ranks and that's the only part of things we don't understand when it comes to what you do with technology. Usually you're just taking what we've already done and compressing it down a hundred fold with seals, but you don't actually change the way the technology itself works when you do. There's definitely some 'see if the full-scale weapons work' desires though."
Naruto sighed. "Going this route is probably too likely to create a broader arms race."
Teni blinked. "Yes? That's kind of part of the goal."
"...what?"
"I guess nobody mentioned that?"
"No, they didn't. Why do we apparently want to create an arms race?"
"Because we already know of at least three groups from other planets or dimensions that have interacted with Earth, one of which aimed to wipe us out for their own benefit. Keeping everyone assuming that they have to work their way towards better weapons, defenses, self-sufficiency, and so on will hopefully mean that the next time a hostile group finds the planet we'll have a better chance at protecting it. Counterbalancing that would be Yoko's 'Land of Shrines' to promote not needlessly wiping out others."
It was very annoying that the idea of keeping everyone in a low-grade 'true peace is impossible' state was possibly the best option for long-term survival in the face of known off-planet threats.
Hiashi looked down at the report he was holding, then up to Hanabi and Himeki. "You two hospitalized your teammate."
"He got caught in a training exercise," Hanabi defended, obviously annoyed. "When he was supposed to be with Haini-sensei working on his kunai throwing."
"What kind of 'training exercise' removes three limbs when someone 'gets caught in it'?"
"Only his left arm was caused by his interruption," Himeki offered, with a more respectful tone. "And that was due to the experimental kunai launcher in Hanabi's puppet failing and overpowering the last two kunai it fired as it tore itself out of the puppet. His right arm and leg were caused by him detonating his own explosive tags in his flailing from the loss of his arm."
That...sounded reasonable enough, actually. Hanabi had been having problems with reliability on his new kunai launchers and there was an ongoing argument in the chunin and jounin ranks regarding if they should deny all shinobi access to explosive tags without passing safety exams. "I suppose I can't fault you for that, if the full report concurs. But a request has been made to split your team up because of this."
Hanabi snorted. "I filed one, Haini-sensei said she filed one, and the only reason Himeki didn't file one was because she countersigned mine. I think Dohide even wanted to file one, but couldn't write well enough with his left leg. We aren't sure how he graduated with how stupid and reckless he's been acting and Tsunade-sama thinks it'll be a few months before he recovers without Uzushio's aid, unless someone convinces Yoko to heal him when she gets back anyway."
That was an interesting detail. He'd not spoken to Tsunade to find out if she'd asked for aid and been rebuffed due to the boy's idiocy or opted not to ask for the aid to give the boy a reason to care about his training. "As it stands, I've still been asked to look at the request for a team change in my capacity of clan head for both of you. A temporary member while he recovers in the hospital is different from a permanent shift."
"Is there a problem with the requests or are you just trying to figure out why we made them?"
"On paper, I'm supposed to be ensuring that no...inappropriate actions were taken to lead to the request. I highly doubt that you'd have left him as intact as he was if that was the case, but I still needed to speak with you about it. Unfortunately, I'm likely to not have much say in potential replacement team members due to how few options there likely are."
"Rizo is in need of a new team and was planning on putting in a request to work with us," Himeki replied with a small smile.
"I don't recall any incidents with their team?"
Hanabi sighed. "His sensei and teammates were the latest to attempt to grab a canister of the beast man formula for another nation to examine. They weren't injured by the release of the formula due to prior exposure, but he claimed that the Anbu were...less than gentle with the three after he reported the attempt in progress."
Ah. One of the few good ways to not be caught up in the punishment when your teammates were being idiots was to report them while they were in the middle of things. "I'll need to check on that, but it sounds like it may be acceptable. Though I am curious what you're doing with your kunai launchers to have them tear apart your puppets while removing limbs from bystanders."
He watched as his daughter-turned-son winced. "I'm trying to use a couple of seals to reset the spring. One setting it to the 'cocked' shape with no pressure, the other to then change it back to the 'ready to fire' shape once it hooks on the release lever. But if I screw up and activate both at the same time it suddenly wants to curl up into a small spiral and doesn't care what's in the way."
It was somewhat interesting how much trouble his children had with seals when they were excellent with technology...but then again, Naruto seemed to be the opposite. Perhaps they required ways of thinking that were too unique for a single person to manage both well? "Maybe you should let someone else review those before you try using them again?"
Hanabi nodded, obviously embarrassed at needing help with something he probably saw as 'simple'.
Despite the technology division's assurances, Naruto had decided to personally investigate the capabilities of the various groups on the warring continent before agreeing to building a new flying island. He wanted zero chance of it not being able to appear as an unstoppable, indestructible force on its flight across the continent. If there was a possibility of some weapon causing significant damage then the entire plan was going to be discarded.
In the process of doing this he expanded the bunker network already present, located every facility that seemed to be building or designing weapons, and evaluated capabilities. He found that the vast majority of things present weren't designed to hit anything flying, and in fact the continent had nothing that could fly. One nation had records of using stones as a power source for super soldiers that read like the stones generated a form of chakra, or perhaps pure mana, but those had all stopped working at the same time.
At the same time, not being designed to hit something flying didn't mean incapable of it, and you didn't necessarily need accuracy when your target was an island. Building copies of some of their larger and more powerful cannons was done to see just how dangerous they were at the ranges they'd likely be able to hit the island at, followed by improving the designs repeatedly. Both for eventual possible inclusion on the island and to hopefully figure out the next few years of development to be well beyond the current versions for future-proofing.
By the time Yoko was done with her trip he'd determined that they could indeed easily build a flying island that nothing on the warring continent, or on any other they had access to, was likely to be able to touch before adding in magic shielding. Magic-based weapons added to chakra-based weaponry and the various weapons that needed neither should make the island incredibly powerful and very likely make it the kind of thing that could take over entire continents if they wanted to.
He'd also figured out where the target of the island's trip would be and the approach vector for it to cause hopefully equal devastation across all the warring countries on the continent instead of taking out significant abilities of only a couple that could then be overrun by the others. At least if their borders didn't change significantly in the next few months while the flying island was built, anyway. And of course, he also had to ensure that there was something believable for the island to collect, which would be an entirely different construction project...
Odoroki looked over the 'construction area' for the new island, slightly annoyed that she'd essentially been kicked out of shrine maiden training by Yoko. It made sense that not having the light chakra node was a problem, and they didn't know how to safely add nodes to any of them connected to the Tome, but it was still annoying. Not quite a personal insult, exactly, mostly because it implied that Yoko had taken things to a new level which was a 'parental pride' bonus, but it had left little to do on the personal projects front.
Relocating the Tome to the construction area for the new flying island at least helped solve the lack of things to do, and she really shouldn't have been quite so vocally annoyed at boys being included in the training program anyway.
"It seems wrong that we're not even starting with dirt and rock," she finally said. "Eventually for the surface, but making an 'island' that's mostly support structures in the bottom two thirds feels wrong."
"Naruto already did that for the exam island," Futo pointed out.
"And it feels wrong there too. I understand why, and how not doing so would increase the energy requirements of keeping it together in the air significantly, but it still feels wrong."
"So focus on the other things, like the seals for the various seal-based effects."
"That's why we're here. These things combine everything. Chakra, magic, technology, horticulture..."
"Naruto said something about having figured out a way to not need a forest on this one."
"...he did?"
"The explanation was far beyond my understanding and I think he had to be pretending to be six members of the technology division to understand it himself."
"Oh."
Onoki looked over the latest version of the updated chunin exam treaty paperwork, wanting to ensure that nothing unexpected had slipped in. This was the culmination of far too much time and effort by a group formed from all the major and many of the minor countries. Naruto had provided what he thought should be the final goal in private to Uzushio's allies though, and this was startlingly close to that despite the original proposals being wildly different.
Unlike the previous treaty, this one included language to explain the reasoning behind each item right in the treaty itself. That would help with later interpretation, as nobody knew why some of the first treaty's conditions had been added. For example, promotion was for individuals, so genin would enter as individuals instead of being sent as teams. This would also remove concerns about partial teams from a member being promoted in previous exams and similar items.
Not that teamwork was skipped over. A requirement to test teams, and team formation, was included. This was part of overall skill tests listed though, and cited that it was a rare shinobi that spent their entire post-genin career working solo. There was even a recommendation to have those teams be intentionally cross-village to encourage working with those you might not normally have needed to instead of those that you already had experience with.
Uzushio's definition of chunin wasn't quite defined in the new treaty, but many elements of it basically were in the lists of things to test. The pre-test for genin level was also specified outright here, justified as being intended to reduce serious injury and death in the chunin testing, including an actual requirement that if the pre-test was run then shinobi of participating villages had to be allowed to pass through it for evaluation purposes. Allowing non-shinobi to make the attempt was mentioned as permitted, but not required, but more in the context of specifically denying those not registered for the exams to continue into the chunin testing stages.
The new treaty also codified some details that were previously done as a courtesy, such as trying to keep a village's genin from fighting each other in preliminary elimination matches if it was possible to do so and definitely keeping teammates from fighting each other in such a situation.
Running through to the end, he found that it was as expected. Going through and signing each page followed, after which he'd go to the Daimyo and have him repeat that. They both wanted the new rules to be in place before they ran exams on the rented flying island in a couple of months.
Yoko looked over the construction area for a new flying island, figuring that it was a good distraction from Hoshi and Suzu working with their kits back in Konoha. Even that was only an issue due to the number of people that were visiting the shrine just to see the kits. Of course, she also wanted to avoid being sought out by those looking to see the Head Priestess of Shrine Island.
She and Naruto were the only ones that knew that the 'joint project' island was one of four planned. Her addition to the plans was a flying shrine island and he was building a combat island without the aid of others to see how his plans stacked up against the plan from the combination of seal and technology division members. Right now the assumption was that his version would be far more capable because he wasn't trying to compromise on understanding between multiple groups. Then he'd decided that the 'target' on the other continent should be able to lift off and return, which was going to need to be built in place.
Her island was going to be one of the smaller ones. Pentagonal for the five primary deities enshrined on Shrine Island. The center of the surface of the island would be a 'common area' with the outer ring holding the five shrines. Travel to and from the island would happen through transport devices and by going down into the lower areas of the island, and the whole thing would lack offensive abilities. Defensive, but not offensive.
"Guess I should start with the basic framework," she said to herself as she created a bunch of clones.
Wame had been 'stubborn' and asked to learn 'spells' through books instead of through the 'spell tablets'. This was partially out of a desire to learn to create her own Knight Armor templates as instant outfits for infiltration, but also out of a curiosity of how 'magic' worked compared to chakra. The Uzukage had been kind enough to grant her request, and she'd figured out how to cast the Knight Armor spell without the crutch of the spell tablet. She'd followed that with the flight spells, marveling at how similar the three variants really were in the background, and then quickly picked up on spell bullets.
She loved spell bullets.
While instructions for the teleportation spell would be nice, she'd been told that for security reasons she had to wait on that one. It made sense though, so she was fine with that, and instead had started to play with things. She'd quickly figured out that chakra was just pre-modified mana, made easier to use but losing flexibility in the process.
Carefully focusing, she worked on pushing fire chakra into a spell bullet. It required a little manipulation of the bullet to let it hold the fire chakra, and her previous attempts at doing that had failed. This time it didn't explode in her face, and she found herself with a glowing red ball of her magic. Grinning, she directed the ball to impact the target stone in the training area. Slowly, admittedly, but she wanted to make sure she didn't miss anything. When it finally hit it blew a chunk of stone off and created a fireball.
"Awesome," she whispered, even as she wondered what else she could do through mixing chakra with the spells. Then she blinked and remembered the notebook sitting next to her, quickly grabbing it to update her notes on how she'd managed to get fire chakra into the bullet.
Hopefully the other elemental chakra variations would work similarly, but if she needed to figure things out per element then she wanted to ensure that she'd taken proper notes.
"It's going to be annoying working on this while you're in Iwa," Miho commented as they assembled a cannon. "You'll be all distracted with the exams instead of helping us assemble things."
"This is honestly taking far longer than I expected it to," Naruto admitted.
"You can't just slap together a combat island."
He grinned, which caused her to worry. "Mine has been finished for over a month."
Several others in the area stopped what they were working on to turn to stare at him, even as she blinked. "You...made another island?"
"Yoko made one too, but hers is more of a flying shrine than anything else."
"And you didn't tell anyone?"
"Nobody asked and we've not had a good reason to pull them out yet."
It took an hour to gather basically everyone working on the nowhere-near-complete island to convince Naruto to show them the completed one. He merely sighed and brought them all over. A brief overview of things was followed by everyone spreading out to examine specific elements they were curious about, and of course Miho ended up looking at seals.
...but the seals here were deeply integrated into everything else and difficult to examine directly. She was certain that he'd incorporated magic into several things directly and was using both technology and seals to integrate with the magic in different ways. Power flowed through a dozen different mechanisms as well, seemingly using whatever method was best for the destination, and she nearly had to be dismissed and reformed by the Tome when her headache from trying to understand it all peaked.
Eventually the various groups came back together in the 'command center', which appeared to be designed to run the entire island from the one room if you wanted to and had a place to set the Tome in for some reason.
"This is nearly twice the volume we're aiming for with the other island," Akira noted. "And is much more densely-packed with things. A quarter of the access hallways, probably because the Uzukage cares not for the abilities of normal people to access things."
"Nah," Naruto replied. "I just assumed that people would be willing to open hatches and crawl so that I could fit more things in. Well, that and I didn't need the larger interconnect areas you're all putting into the other island where seals and technology interact."
"Not because you can simply transform into a smaller, more-compact form?"
"Crawling is needed, not transforming. Anyone over two meters tall might have issues in some places, but that's about it."
Hotose sighed and shook her head as she gestured at the screens around them. "I find myself thinking that if we continue the other project it will be more of a 'testing ground' for our various projects. This is the island that should be used to intimidate the warring continent. Everything is far more integrated and some of the items installed here seem to be improvements on our own designs."
"And included a dozen different things that I don't even recognize," Hinata added, giving Naruto a look. "Like the four systems with what appear to be dedicated mana generators apparently hooked up to them."
"Those are for power transfers," Naruto answered. "To bootstrap another island when needed."
"...why would that be needed?"
"So that I can leave the other island powered down and less noticeable to the locals."
"...what other island?"
"The plan involves fetching something from the warring continent. I figured another flying island would be ideal there."
"Naruto, did you build a flying island on that continent?"
"Converted the top of a mountain into one, but yes."
"I think that might qualify as excessive showing off."
Miho was reasonably certain that she agreed with the look Naruto was giving that seemed to scream that the flying island itself qualified as that. Building a second one for the first one to leave with wasn't really that much worse. She coughed to get attention though. "That aside, who do you expect to operate this as it travels across the continent?"
Naruto gestured to where the spot to place the Tome sat. "I was thinking Matatabi might like to take a crack at it, though you and the others would obviously get dragged along for the ride in that case."
...he'd built a giant flying war island designed to be operated by the Tome?
Naruto somewhat enjoyed showing up at the flying exam island without needing to run anything, but had clones slip away to prepare a few things anyway.
"I'm unusually annoyed that you didn't include instructions for the chairs," Onoki said after initial greetings. "Your manuals covered basically everything else we cared about, but not the chairs."
"Not sure that there's anything to do with them," Naruto replied. "Though I was pleasantly surprised to not have you calling repeatedly with questions as you set things up."
"Even with three months to examine them, and four teams taking a look, we couldn't figure out how to get the chairs to show village symbols."
"Again, not sure that there's anything to do with them. Getting things under them is tricky, but the chairs themselves not so much."
"Bah. Not worth the effort of pushing you far enough to reach 'village secret' claims. I see you skipped having a bodyguard?"
"Would anyone believe that I needed one?"
"I doubt it. Still, there are a couple of things I'm hoping you can take a look at before the rest of the village leaders show up, specifically regarding the arena. We seem to have gotten the controls stuck this morning. I suspect that the night shift was playing with things and left something in the wrong configuration. We'd likely spot it if we had a few hours to dig through things..."
"But you don't have a few hours to go over the manuals."
"Right."
"That shouldn't take long. Probably just a mismatch in the priority selectors."
"I'd nod along if I had any clue what you were talking about."
As it turned out, they'd not only gotten the priority selectors wrong but had also drained the chakra batteries. Onoki was visibly awed at how much chakra Naruto was able to pump into those to recharge them for the day, instead of relying on the much slower recharge from the forest. A quick check of the system logs showed that someone had spent several hours flipping through the different arenas until there wasn't enough energy left to manifest another arena. Then they'd started trying to change settings to try to fix it, instead of realizing that the battery meters showed that the batteries were dead.
Onoki was very annoyed at that aspect of things and had gone off to yell at idiots before he'd need to welcome the other village leaders as they arrived for the day. Naruto had checked on some of the merchants that were set up semi-permanently on the island at this point and on the shrine maidens before heading back to the arena itself. By then his clones had reinitialized the chakra signature list for the chairs and started populating it, and would continue to do so as village leaders arrived.
Unlike the war island, in this case you did need to be able to transform to reach the seal in question though. It was a mystery that he wanted to stay a mystery for the time being. Onoki would likely realize at least the basics of what had happened to cause the chairs to start showing village symbols, but probably wouldn't call it out. At least not in public, anyway. In private after the day's fights, or possibly after the finals were over entirely, but not in public.
"Yoko still put on a show," Ino pointed out.
"Well yes, that would be stupid to skip with an audience."
"Have you approved the requests for missions on the other continent?"
"Which one?"
Ino looked up at him. "What do you mean?"
"We've got outposts on or near three other continents now."
"...when did that happen?"
Hinata scoffed. "Before Yoko did the Land of Fire's shrine revitalization."
"Oh."
Naruto shrugged. "I've approved basic 'defend travelers' missions on two of them, pending approval from local governments to operate in the area anyway. It's the warring continent that I'm annoyed about. As far as the infiltration teams gathering information can tell there isn't a government there at all that doesn't want to continue on to world conquest. Any that might've been content with local concerns were wiped out years ago."
"Ugh. So if any of them win they become everyone else's possible problem?"
"Yep. There are proposals being worked on for various ways to handle things. Some think we should arrange for everyone to no longer have militaries, others that we should just take over, there was one mention of arranging travel for other countries here to conquer over there instead of duking things out here. The destruction of the moon apparently accelerated things too, each country assuming one of the others over there did it alongside the final shutdown of several superweapons that suddenly no longer had functional power sources."
The girls both grimaced, and he went back to focusing on flying island updates. There were requests to rent the thing for an exam and that put it at the top of his priority list for now.
Yoko sighed as she prepared for the third enshrinement trip. The first two had passed through the Land of Hot Water to reach the Land of Fire, the second then hitting Uzushio's old Amegakure territory to hit the Land of Earth. This one was going to start in the same place, at the mainland dock facility, but then go straight from Shrine Island to a Land of Wind dock. Work was already happening to get the set of mobile houses into position more reasonably than them just 'being there' on arrival, and without needing to unload them from the ship.
Getting more trained priestesses, and the first few priests, was going slower than she'd like it to though. Not because of a lack of enthusiasm, but because it wasn't an instant process with the standards she'd set. A shrine maiden or helper was essentially a genin. The priestesses were at least chunin level, though in some cases you could call them special jounin. She was currently the only one that was jounin or higher level in skills, but wasn't trying to hold the others to that standard.
As it was, the 'shrine maidens' making the trip to the Land of Wind with the mobile houses, using one to carry the packed-up others, had shown that they aren't pushovers by defeating six groups of bandits. Two of those groups had been hired to test the shrine maidens as well, thanks to groups with ties to the Land of Demons that felt that those working in shrines needed to have actual combat skills.
Uzushio teams had been deployed to show that it hadn't been appreciated, though whether the two groups that had hired the bandits realized what the problem was when they were looted to the ground was another question entirely. Not that they'd be in any position to retaliate at that point, and it was a useful training exercise for a couple of teams.
The preparations for this trip didn't include recordings though, which was nice. Nor did they include Daimyo going along for the entire trip. A single noble was joining them, one from the area that the shrine was being set up in, arguably to ensure that there were 'no tricks'. In reality his daughter had pushed for it, with the end result hopefully being a more relaxing journey than the previous two.
Assuming, of course, that the little girl's enthusiasm could be kept in check through 'lessons in proper shrine maiden behavior'. The girl had her own pink shrine maiden outfits and even a pair of fake fox ears.
"...what?" Naruto asked as he looked at Teni. She was one of the more...enthusiastic technology division members.
"We want to work with you to build a combat island," Teni repeated.
"Why?"
"So that we can fly it over the warring continent. Maybe head for the volcano near the far side? Do something there that seems like it was the only goal, then fly back. Attack anything that attacks us, but otherwise just travel through and back."
"That's a plan, but not an explanation."
"It should be obvious? The existence of something like that, essentially ignoring them unless provoked, should hopefully cause the entire continent to calm down on the 'world conquest' angle. That we'd then have it available in case it's needed for an actual war would be a bonus."
"You want to work with me to build a combat-grade flying island entirely so that we can fly it over a warzone, pretend to not care about the war part of that, and then leave. Presumably with a trail of destruction behind us where various groups attacked us and we retaliated."
"Yes."
"And presumably so that you can see me building things directly to see what you can learn from that."
"...no? We've given up on figuring out the interactions with seals due to a lack of seal expertise in our ranks and that's the only part of things we don't understand when it comes to what you do with technology. Usually you're just taking what we've already done and compressing it down a hundred fold with seals, but you don't actually change the way the technology itself works when you do. There's definitely some 'see if the full-scale weapons work' desires though."
Naruto sighed. "Going this route is probably too likely to create a broader arms race."
Teni blinked. "Yes? That's kind of part of the goal."
"...what?"
"I guess nobody mentioned that?"
"No, they didn't. Why do we apparently want to create an arms race?"
"Because we already know of at least three groups from other planets or dimensions that have interacted with Earth, one of which aimed to wipe us out for their own benefit. Keeping everyone assuming that they have to work their way towards better weapons, defenses, self-sufficiency, and so on will hopefully mean that the next time a hostile group finds the planet we'll have a better chance at protecting it. Counterbalancing that would be Yoko's 'Land of Shrines' to promote not needlessly wiping out others."
It was very annoying that the idea of keeping everyone in a low-grade 'true peace is impossible' state was possibly the best option for long-term survival in the face of known off-planet threats.
Hiashi looked down at the report he was holding, then up to Hanabi and Himeki. "You two hospitalized your teammate."
"He got caught in a training exercise," Hanabi defended, obviously annoyed. "When he was supposed to be with Haini-sensei working on his kunai throwing."
"What kind of 'training exercise' removes three limbs when someone 'gets caught in it'?"
"Only his left arm was caused by his interruption," Himeki offered, with a more respectful tone. "And that was due to the experimental kunai launcher in Hanabi's puppet failing and overpowering the last two kunai it fired as it tore itself out of the puppet. His right arm and leg were caused by him detonating his own explosive tags in his flailing from the loss of his arm."
That...sounded reasonable enough, actually. Hanabi had been having problems with reliability on his new kunai launchers and there was an ongoing argument in the chunin and jounin ranks regarding if they should deny all shinobi access to explosive tags without passing safety exams. "I suppose I can't fault you for that, if the full report concurs. But a request has been made to split your team up because of this."
Hanabi snorted. "I filed one, Haini-sensei said she filed one, and the only reason Himeki didn't file one was because she countersigned mine. I think Dohide even wanted to file one, but couldn't write well enough with his left leg. We aren't sure how he graduated with how stupid and reckless he's been acting and Tsunade-sama thinks it'll be a few months before he recovers without Uzushio's aid, unless someone convinces Yoko to heal him when she gets back anyway."
That was an interesting detail. He'd not spoken to Tsunade to find out if she'd asked for aid and been rebuffed due to the boy's idiocy or opted not to ask for the aid to give the boy a reason to care about his training. "As it stands, I've still been asked to look at the request for a team change in my capacity of clan head for both of you. A temporary member while he recovers in the hospital is different from a permanent shift."
"Is there a problem with the requests or are you just trying to figure out why we made them?"
"On paper, I'm supposed to be ensuring that no...inappropriate actions were taken to lead to the request. I highly doubt that you'd have left him as intact as he was if that was the case, but I still needed to speak with you about it. Unfortunately, I'm likely to not have much say in potential replacement team members due to how few options there likely are."
"Rizo is in need of a new team and was planning on putting in a request to work with us," Himeki replied with a small smile.
"I don't recall any incidents with their team?"
Hanabi sighed. "His sensei and teammates were the latest to attempt to grab a canister of the beast man formula for another nation to examine. They weren't injured by the release of the formula due to prior exposure, but he claimed that the Anbu were...less than gentle with the three after he reported the attempt in progress."
Ah. One of the few good ways to not be caught up in the punishment when your teammates were being idiots was to report them while they were in the middle of things. "I'll need to check on that, but it sounds like it may be acceptable. Though I am curious what you're doing with your kunai launchers to have them tear apart your puppets while removing limbs from bystanders."
He watched as his daughter-turned-son winced. "I'm trying to use a couple of seals to reset the spring. One setting it to the 'cocked' shape with no pressure, the other to then change it back to the 'ready to fire' shape once it hooks on the release lever. But if I screw up and activate both at the same time it suddenly wants to curl up into a small spiral and doesn't care what's in the way."
It was somewhat interesting how much trouble his children had with seals when they were excellent with technology...but then again, Naruto seemed to be the opposite. Perhaps they required ways of thinking that were too unique for a single person to manage both well? "Maybe you should let someone else review those before you try using them again?"
Hanabi nodded, obviously embarrassed at needing help with something he probably saw as 'simple'.
Despite the technology division's assurances, Naruto had decided to personally investigate the capabilities of the various groups on the warring continent before agreeing to building a new flying island. He wanted zero chance of it not being able to appear as an unstoppable, indestructible force on its flight across the continent. If there was a possibility of some weapon causing significant damage then the entire plan was going to be discarded.
In the process of doing this he expanded the bunker network already present, located every facility that seemed to be building or designing weapons, and evaluated capabilities. He found that the vast majority of things present weren't designed to hit anything flying, and in fact the continent had nothing that could fly. One nation had records of using stones as a power source for super soldiers that read like the stones generated a form of chakra, or perhaps pure mana, but those had all stopped working at the same time.
At the same time, not being designed to hit something flying didn't mean incapable of it, and you didn't necessarily need accuracy when your target was an island. Building copies of some of their larger and more powerful cannons was done to see just how dangerous they were at the ranges they'd likely be able to hit the island at, followed by improving the designs repeatedly. Both for eventual possible inclusion on the island and to hopefully figure out the next few years of development to be well beyond the current versions for future-proofing.
By the time Yoko was done with her trip he'd determined that they could indeed easily build a flying island that nothing on the warring continent, or on any other they had access to, was likely to be able to touch before adding in magic shielding. Magic-based weapons added to chakra-based weaponry and the various weapons that needed neither should make the island incredibly powerful and very likely make it the kind of thing that could take over entire continents if they wanted to.
He'd also figured out where the target of the island's trip would be and the approach vector for it to cause hopefully equal devastation across all the warring countries on the continent instead of taking out significant abilities of only a couple that could then be overrun by the others. At least if their borders didn't change significantly in the next few months while the flying island was built, anyway. And of course, he also had to ensure that there was something believable for the island to collect, which would be an entirely different construction project...
Odoroki looked over the 'construction area' for the new island, slightly annoyed that she'd essentially been kicked out of shrine maiden training by Yoko. It made sense that not having the light chakra node was a problem, and they didn't know how to safely add nodes to any of them connected to the Tome, but it was still annoying. Not quite a personal insult, exactly, mostly because it implied that Yoko had taken things to a new level which was a 'parental pride' bonus, but it had left little to do on the personal projects front.
Relocating the Tome to the construction area for the new flying island at least helped solve the lack of things to do, and she really shouldn't have been quite so vocally annoyed at boys being included in the training program anyway.
"It seems wrong that we're not even starting with dirt and rock," she finally said. "Eventually for the surface, but making an 'island' that's mostly support structures in the bottom two thirds feels wrong."
"Naruto already did that for the exam island," Futo pointed out.
"And it feels wrong there too. I understand why, and how not doing so would increase the energy requirements of keeping it together in the air significantly, but it still feels wrong."
"So focus on the other things, like the seals for the various seal-based effects."
"That's why we're here. These things combine everything. Chakra, magic, technology, horticulture..."
"Naruto said something about having figured out a way to not need a forest on this one."
"...he did?"
"The explanation was far beyond my understanding and I think he had to be pretending to be six members of the technology division to understand it himself."
"Oh."
Onoki looked over the latest version of the updated chunin exam treaty paperwork, wanting to ensure that nothing unexpected had slipped in. This was the culmination of far too much time and effort by a group formed from all the major and many of the minor countries. Naruto had provided what he thought should be the final goal in private to Uzushio's allies though, and this was startlingly close to that despite the original proposals being wildly different.
Unlike the previous treaty, this one included language to explain the reasoning behind each item right in the treaty itself. That would help with later interpretation, as nobody knew why some of the first treaty's conditions had been added. For example, promotion was for individuals, so genin would enter as individuals instead of being sent as teams. This would also remove concerns about partial teams from a member being promoted in previous exams and similar items.
Not that teamwork was skipped over. A requirement to test teams, and team formation, was included. This was part of overall skill tests listed though, and cited that it was a rare shinobi that spent their entire post-genin career working solo. There was even a recommendation to have those teams be intentionally cross-village to encourage working with those you might not normally have needed to instead of those that you already had experience with.
Uzushio's definition of chunin wasn't quite defined in the new treaty, but many elements of it basically were in the lists of things to test. The pre-test for genin level was also specified outright here, justified as being intended to reduce serious injury and death in the chunin testing, including an actual requirement that if the pre-test was run then shinobi of participating villages had to be allowed to pass through it for evaluation purposes. Allowing non-shinobi to make the attempt was mentioned as permitted, but not required, but more in the context of specifically denying those not registered for the exams to continue into the chunin testing stages.
The new treaty also codified some details that were previously done as a courtesy, such as trying to keep a village's genin from fighting each other in preliminary elimination matches if it was possible to do so and definitely keeping teammates from fighting each other in such a situation.
Running through to the end, he found that it was as expected. Going through and signing each page followed, after which he'd go to the Daimyo and have him repeat that. They both wanted the new rules to be in place before they ran exams on the rented flying island in a couple of months.
Yoko looked over the construction area for a new flying island, figuring that it was a good distraction from Hoshi and Suzu working with their kits back in Konoha. Even that was only an issue due to the number of people that were visiting the shrine just to see the kits. Of course, she also wanted to avoid being sought out by those looking to see the Head Priestess of Shrine Island.
She and Naruto were the only ones that knew that the 'joint project' island was one of four planned. Her addition to the plans was a flying shrine island and he was building a combat island without the aid of others to see how his plans stacked up against the plan from the combination of seal and technology division members. Right now the assumption was that his version would be far more capable because he wasn't trying to compromise on understanding between multiple groups. Then he'd decided that the 'target' on the other continent should be able to lift off and return, which was going to need to be built in place.
Her island was going to be one of the smaller ones. Pentagonal for the five primary deities enshrined on Shrine Island. The center of the surface of the island would be a 'common area' with the outer ring holding the five shrines. Travel to and from the island would happen through transport devices and by going down into the lower areas of the island, and the whole thing would lack offensive abilities. Defensive, but not offensive.
"Guess I should start with the basic framework," she said to herself as she created a bunch of clones.
Wame had been 'stubborn' and asked to learn 'spells' through books instead of through the 'spell tablets'. This was partially out of a desire to learn to create her own Knight Armor templates as instant outfits for infiltration, but also out of a curiosity of how 'magic' worked compared to chakra. The Uzukage had been kind enough to grant her request, and she'd figured out how to cast the Knight Armor spell without the crutch of the spell tablet. She'd followed that with the flight spells, marveling at how similar the three variants really were in the background, and then quickly picked up on spell bullets.
She loved spell bullets.
While instructions for the teleportation spell would be nice, she'd been told that for security reasons she had to wait on that one. It made sense though, so she was fine with that, and instead had started to play with things. She'd quickly figured out that chakra was just pre-modified mana, made easier to use but losing flexibility in the process.
Carefully focusing, she worked on pushing fire chakra into a spell bullet. It required a little manipulation of the bullet to let it hold the fire chakra, and her previous attempts at doing that had failed. This time it didn't explode in her face, and she found herself with a glowing red ball of her magic. Grinning, she directed the ball to impact the target stone in the training area. Slowly, admittedly, but she wanted to make sure she didn't miss anything. When it finally hit it blew a chunk of stone off and created a fireball.
"Awesome," she whispered, even as she wondered what else she could do through mixing chakra with the spells. Then she blinked and remembered the notebook sitting next to her, quickly grabbing it to update her notes on how she'd managed to get fire chakra into the bullet.
Hopefully the other elemental chakra variations would work similarly, but if she needed to figure things out per element then she wanted to ensure that she'd taken proper notes.
"It's going to be annoying working on this while you're in Iwa," Miho commented as they assembled a cannon. "You'll be all distracted with the exams instead of helping us assemble things."
"This is honestly taking far longer than I expected it to," Naruto admitted.
"You can't just slap together a combat island."
He grinned, which caused her to worry. "Mine has been finished for over a month."
Several others in the area stopped what they were working on to turn to stare at him, even as she blinked. "You...made another island?"
"Yoko made one too, but hers is more of a flying shrine than anything else."
"And you didn't tell anyone?"
"Nobody asked and we've not had a good reason to pull them out yet."
It took an hour to gather basically everyone working on the nowhere-near-complete island to convince Naruto to show them the completed one. He merely sighed and brought them all over. A brief overview of things was followed by everyone spreading out to examine specific elements they were curious about, and of course Miho ended up looking at seals.
...but the seals here were deeply integrated into everything else and difficult to examine directly. She was certain that he'd incorporated magic into several things directly and was using both technology and seals to integrate with the magic in different ways. Power flowed through a dozen different mechanisms as well, seemingly using whatever method was best for the destination, and she nearly had to be dismissed and reformed by the Tome when her headache from trying to understand it all peaked.
Eventually the various groups came back together in the 'command center', which appeared to be designed to run the entire island from the one room if you wanted to and had a place to set the Tome in for some reason.
"This is nearly twice the volume we're aiming for with the other island," Akira noted. "And is much more densely-packed with things. A quarter of the access hallways, probably because the Uzukage cares not for the abilities of normal people to access things."
"Nah," Naruto replied. "I just assumed that people would be willing to open hatches and crawl so that I could fit more things in. Well, that and I didn't need the larger interconnect areas you're all putting into the other island where seals and technology interact."
"Not because you can simply transform into a smaller, more-compact form?"
"Crawling is needed, not transforming. Anyone over two meters tall might have issues in some places, but that's about it."
Hotose sighed and shook her head as she gestured at the screens around them. "I find myself thinking that if we continue the other project it will be more of a 'testing ground' for our various projects. This is the island that should be used to intimidate the warring continent. Everything is far more integrated and some of the items installed here seem to be improvements on our own designs."
"And included a dozen different things that I don't even recognize," Hinata added, giving Naruto a look. "Like the four systems with what appear to be dedicated mana generators apparently hooked up to them."
"Those are for power transfers," Naruto answered. "To bootstrap another island when needed."
"...why would that be needed?"
"So that I can leave the other island powered down and less noticeable to the locals."
"...what other island?"
"The plan involves fetching something from the warring continent. I figured another flying island would be ideal there."
"Naruto, did you build a flying island on that continent?"
"Converted the top of a mountain into one, but yes."
"I think that might qualify as excessive showing off."
Miho was reasonably certain that she agreed with the look Naruto was giving that seemed to scream that the flying island itself qualified as that. Building a second one for the first one to leave with wasn't really that much worse. She coughed to get attention though. "That aside, who do you expect to operate this as it travels across the continent?"
Naruto gestured to where the spot to place the Tome sat. "I was thinking Matatabi might like to take a crack at it, though you and the others would obviously get dragged along for the ride in that case."
...he'd built a giant flying war island designed to be operated by the Tome?
Naruto somewhat enjoyed showing up at the flying exam island without needing to run anything, but had clones slip away to prepare a few things anyway.
"I'm unusually annoyed that you didn't include instructions for the chairs," Onoki said after initial greetings. "Your manuals covered basically everything else we cared about, but not the chairs."
"Not sure that there's anything to do with them," Naruto replied. "Though I was pleasantly surprised to not have you calling repeatedly with questions as you set things up."
"Even with three months to examine them, and four teams taking a look, we couldn't figure out how to get the chairs to show village symbols."
"Again, not sure that there's anything to do with them. Getting things under them is tricky, but the chairs themselves not so much."
"Bah. Not worth the effort of pushing you far enough to reach 'village secret' claims. I see you skipped having a bodyguard?"
"Would anyone believe that I needed one?"
"I doubt it. Still, there are a couple of things I'm hoping you can take a look at before the rest of the village leaders show up, specifically regarding the arena. We seem to have gotten the controls stuck this morning. I suspect that the night shift was playing with things and left something in the wrong configuration. We'd likely spot it if we had a few hours to dig through things..."
"But you don't have a few hours to go over the manuals."
"Right."
"That shouldn't take long. Probably just a mismatch in the priority selectors."
"I'd nod along if I had any clue what you were talking about."
As it turned out, they'd not only gotten the priority selectors wrong but had also drained the chakra batteries. Onoki was visibly awed at how much chakra Naruto was able to pump into those to recharge them for the day, instead of relying on the much slower recharge from the forest. A quick check of the system logs showed that someone had spent several hours flipping through the different arenas until there wasn't enough energy left to manifest another arena. Then they'd started trying to change settings to try to fix it, instead of realizing that the battery meters showed that the batteries were dead.
Onoki was very annoyed at that aspect of things and had gone off to yell at idiots before he'd need to welcome the other village leaders as they arrived for the day. Naruto had checked on some of the merchants that were set up semi-permanently on the island at this point and on the shrine maidens before heading back to the arena itself. By then his clones had reinitialized the chakra signature list for the chairs and started populating it, and would continue to do so as village leaders arrived.
Unlike the war island, in this case you did need to be able to transform to reach the seal in question though. It was a mystery that he wanted to stay a mystery for the time being. Onoki would likely realize at least the basics of what had happened to cause the chairs to start showing village symbols, but probably wouldn't call it out. At least not in public, anyway. In private after the day's fights, or possibly after the finals were over entirely, but not in public.
- Location
- Georgia
You want to go to great lengths just to troll an entire continent? I didn't set out to become a role model, but I suppose you are Uzumaki.
Jordisk
<Unverified N00B>
- Location
- Blind Eternities
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Uzumaki.
We do what we must because we can.
For the good of all the clan,
Even the ones that are dead.
And there's no use crying over every broke brain
And we'll keep on building till we run out of space
For there is SCIENCE to be done
And we'll make a island
For the end of the war.
- Location
- Scotland
That almost sounds like the SPARKS from Girl Genius. I shudder to think of the sheer madness that would result should an Uzumaki ever actually meet one of them, let alone decide to have kids with one. I certainly wouldn't want to be on the same planet as that. Perhaps not even the same reality strand.
I can think of a scarier combo chain addition.
Spark+uzumaki+weasley twins
Spark+uzumaki+marauders 7th year
Spark+uzumaki+discord(mlp)
Spark+uzumaki+ harlaquin\poisin ivy
Is this him working his way up to a Coconut? Cause it sounds like it.
- Location
- Scotland
You forgot the scariest chain combo of them all. First Spark + Uzumaki has a child, then Discord and Poison Ivy have a kid, finally the two children come together in the Great Granddaddy of all Unholy unions to create a new god of CHAOS which then proceeds to seduce Eris the primordial goddess of Chaos herself and their child decides to go out and one up every other Chaos god/goddess to prove themselves the Ultimate Chaos Deity by driving every other Chaos Deity Sane
.You forgot married luna lovegoodYou forgot the scariest chain combo of them all. First Spark + Uzumaki has a child, then Discord and Poison Ivy have a kid, finally the two children come together in the Great Granddaddy of all Unholy unions to create a new god of CHAOS which then proceeds to seduce Eris the primordial goddess of Chaos herself and their child decides to go out and one up every other Chaos god/goddess to prove themselves the Ultimate Chaos Deity by driving every other Chaos Deity Sane
Jordisk
<Unverified N00B>
- Location
- Blind Eternities
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Who do think that Spark's mom was?
pity they only have one tail
In the corner a certain Daedric Prince will start writing odes to cheese in your honour while wielding herring as a writing implement for the herring is mightier than the sword. Don't forget to sing the colour purple while painting a picture of the perfect C sharp played on an accordion while you're at it.You forgot the scariest chain combo of them all. First Spark + Uzumaki has a child, then Discord and Poison Ivy have a kid, finally the two children come together in the Great Granddaddy of all Unholy unions to create a new god of CHAOS which then proceeds to seduce Eris the primordial goddess of Chaos herself and their child decides to go out and one up every other Chaos god/goddess to prove themselves the Ultimate Chaos Deity by driving every other Chaos Deity Sane
Chapter 95 - Iwa’s Finals and Launching a War Island
Naruto hid his smirk as the village symbols appeared on the chairs, unnoticed by those sitting in them. It was a smaller group, and you could call it the 'big five' if you counted Naruto as representing Konoha as well as Uzushio as Shisui had run into other obligations. He'd sat down second-to-last, Onoki taking the center seat as the last one to sit. Nodding, he decided to deflect a little with some 'idle chat' while they waited for the crowd itself to finish gathering. "So, I hear Iwa has a full 'culinary academy' now."
"We do," Onoki admitted. "Though of course you know, with Deidara swinging through nearly weekly to teach lessons. I'm surprised you haven't started charging us for his time."
"What he does on his own time is his own business. So long as he teaches the lessons he's paid to teach in Uzushio he can do whatever he wants in Iwa."
"...he's teaching in Uzushio?"
"Yes. Our academy is structured quite differently than anyone else's, with a lot more specialty classes. He's not good enough with metalworking to teach that yet. I'm not sure if Sasori has realized that he's basically gone full 'teaching researcher' either? Deidara at least takes the occasional 'go blow something up' mission."
"He does like those.'
"Sasori is teaching?" Gaara questioned.
Naruto nodded. "Yes. Mostly basic construction and maintenance as he's working on improving his chakra capacity to be able to manage the paperwork puppeteer trick."
"Chiyo isn't going to be happy about that."
"Well, then she can start doing a better job of teaching or picking up puppet construction. Kankuro is currently the only puppeteer Sasori seems to approve of in Suna because he does help the younger puppeteers and is working towards building his own designs from scratch. Chiyo only seems to ever use puppets made by others, even if she does modify them, and she's holding onto but has stopped using the most famous of them."
There was a moment of silence as Gaara nodded, and then when it was obvious that discussion was over A looked over. "So. Konoha and Uzushio are obviously outliers, but what have the rest of you done with your former jinchuriki? Rumor has it that the remaining ones all changed, but it seems like B and Taki's girl are the only ones anyone ever sees out and about."
"Yagura has stuck to training," Mei said. "And Utakata is off trying to raise a family."
"Han and Roshi are largely non-combat these days as well," Onoki admitted. "Roshi helps with construction, being quite good at laying incredibly strong foundations, and Han sticks to the region he settled down in."
"It does occur to me that nobody ever found out what happened to the Nine-Tails though, beyond it being 'gone'. And the Uzukage here has a second girl able to keep up with him these days, when the first was bound to the remains of the Two-Tails."
Naruto shrugged. "There are ten of us total with the remains of a tailed beast. Yoko and I have the One-Tail and Nine-Tails pieces between us."
The other four paused, and turned to stare at him in shock. A was the first to recover though. "Ten? Did one of them get split in two?"
"No, there was a juvenile ten-tails that needed to be taken care of before it became a problem. Luckily Ino was available to bind the remains to at the time."
That had likely obliterated their focus for the rest of the morning, but seeing what they did with that information later would be interesting.
Matatabi was impressed with Naruto's creation of an interface for operating the entire island. Futo, Odoroki, and Ren were manifested in the control room but didn't really need be, with Miho at a simulated world station to help out as well. How being set in place in the holder had connected so completely was a bit of a mystery, but it had been done exceptionally well. More interestingly, a number of things were obviously just scaled-up versions of things in the Tome, such as the small mana reactor the Tome had for internal power that had been scaled up significantly to power the island without a forest in place. The spell processors were another detail, though the larger ones worked a little differently.
Powering the island's mana reactor up to full strength took an hour, at which point they were able to start on the various other systems. Flight, shielding, various sensory systems, weapons, and of course spell casting for a teleport spell to get into position. Everything had redundant backups, and there was an emergency 'systems failing' teleport back to the drydock system that the first flying island also had. Getting all of that powered on and prepared took another hour as most of the systems were doing a 'cold start' instead of the 'teleported in, landed in the water for some final tweaks, and then took off again' of the exam island.
Eventually everything was powered on, all self-checks had completed successfully, and they'd done half an hour of more manual checking of things that looked 'weird' but mostly turned out to just be due to the scaling of things. In three cases it was because the in-Tome version of things was actually entirely different in implementation, presumably because scaling it up didn't actually work.
Technology was hard to understand at the best of times, and it felt like most of the ability to examine things now was only working because the entire island felt like it was an extension of the Tome. Before that had happened it had all been horribly incomprehensible and didn't look like any of it should work at all.
Lifting off into the air went reasonably smoothly, as did the initial teleport to Earth. Out in the middle of nowhere over the ocean in this case, but equidistant from three different hidden island outposts used for targeting. The island's computers triangulated its position automatically at that point, confirmed where it was and the flight path, and they started along it.
"I don't think Naruto trusts us as much as I thought," Matatabi finally noted to the others, in and out of the Tome itself.
"Why do you think that?" Miho asked.
"We don't actually have full control over the island. I can't direct us out of a specific travel band, now that we're here I can't disengage several systems, and it seems like the most powerful weapons are locked out from being able to be fired."
"I can confirm the latter," Ren said from outside. "I'm getting authorization code prompts for taking control over three quarters of the weapon systems, but it seems that there are automated routines in the island's computer to operate them under specific circumstances."
"Think he discovered something about the Tome that has him worried about unrestricted access to the island's systems?" Futo questioned.
"Or he's just more paranoid than he lets on," Odoroki offered. "Magic book from another civilization entirely that sat buried for who knows how long before connecting to him? He probably assumed someone else has a backdoor, even if he didn't find one outright. Or maybe just that someone else knows enough to take over control even without a backdoor."
"I don't like thinking that I'm less in control of things than I thought," Matatabi replied. "But I unfortunately have to agree with his precautions. We're largely in an automated approach to the warring continent now, though we'll need to power up the other island when we reach it."
"He left a phone in here. We can call and ask him questions."
"Probably not important. The more I go through things the more I'm agreeing with the decision to not trust the Tome in general. There are too many things we don't know about it, and that he might not have been able to figure out when examining it. Come to think of it, he never gave me full access to Uzushio's computer network either."
"Which means he's likely been taking proper precautions with the Tome for years without us noticing," Futo said with a tone of pride. "And without letting us realize he was doing so. Even building special holding areas for the Tome to sit in instead of being worn all the time, once he knew he didn't need it for aid in examining things or casting spells, would be part of that."
"And he only did that once he had areas he trusted to be secure to build them in," Odoroki noted. "So he sees the Tome as personally important, but likely doesn't trust that it has the same goals as he does even if it looks like it does on the surface."
Having a Lord with a working brain and the ability to be subtle about things was nice, though finding out in this particular manner was a little annoying.
"Your girlfriend's brother was brutal with his puppets," Gaara said after the end of the first day of fighting.
"That would be brother-in-law at this point," Naruto corrected. "And honestly, most of the 'brutal' aspects were needing to get through the earth walls and domes being used against him."
"Didn't expect that from a Suna kunoichi," Onoki added with a frown. "It was far closer to our tactics than I was comfortable with."
Gaara nodded. "Probably because she's descended from a defected Iwagakure kunoichi."
"And that would be why she looked familiar. Married someone in Suna, taking their name, and thus the connection wasn't obvious when we don't ask for a full family history for the exams."
"Gotta keep some secrets out of the paperwork."
"Iwa got three Suna shinobi out of that incident anyway," Naruto pointed out. "Though for some reason they never pushed for their children to enter the ranks. All eight married civilians throughout the Land of Earth, and only one could be justified through marrying a noble's kid."
Onoki sighed. "Of course you know our records better than we do."
"Most of that was in Suna's records, or your Daimyo's. Your records barely acknowledge that the eight children existed."
"You are allowed to pretend to not have examined everyone's records."
"Of course I am, but where's the fun in that? You know that Uzushio has probably seen everything, I know that we definitely have, and pretending otherwise would be a disservice to the infiltration teams that keep everything up to date."
"I was thinking less about Uzushio and more that you, personally, seemed to have examined everything."
"Oh, I stopped doing that and mostly stick to what my analysts brief me on. But they're very good at their jobs." He stopped at a wall and tapped the light strip next to it, causing a door to open and reveal a hidden transport pad. "Want to skip the longer walk? Departure only from this point."
The rest of them stared at the pad, then sighed. Onoki looked at Naruto. "How long has that been there?"
Naruto grinned. "It's part of the emergency evacuation network. I believe the map of their locations is in appendix six, though actually opening the doors without an emergency isn't in the manuals provided to you for the island. In an actual evacuation event you'd also see signs directing people to them popping down from the ceilings."
Yoko looked over the report on sales vs production of omamori, nodding. Each of the shrines tended to pull from the Shrine Island supplies every so often, but at this point they were solidly a profit item from a materials point of view. Shrine donations in general were also quite good recently, with Uzushio's main island being the obvious outlier due to the lack of tourist traffic. Training of new priests and priestesses was also moving along and they'd likely be able to open another couple of shrines in the next few months. Maybe as many as four if granting the additional medical chakra nodes to a couple of potentials pushed their control to the point where they could make medical chakra Rasengan.
Then she started on the reports from the individual shrines. Those were reasonably straightforward, at least at first. Minor problems with visitors looking to create trouble to see how that would be taken, or that had shown up intoxicated. The Land of Fire's capital already had to raise prices for the use of the meeting hall due to demand, which implied that they might want another Omoikane shrine to reduce the load on that one. Requests for access to Shrine Island were up as well, and setting up a system for that probably needed to happen. It had been intended to be a thing from the start, but the 'mystical fog bank' made it harder for random people to show up.
Hitting the first report of things happening outside of the shrines had her pausing. A poisoned well outside of the 'range' of a Suijin shrine had stopped being poisoned, with no actual actions taken to correct that. Mostly because it was due to runoff from a mine and was incredibly difficult to do anything about without cleaning up the mine itself. She switched to checking Uzushio's records, in case someone there had authorized things, only to find that the only report there was someone noticing that something had shifted in the mine.
This was all confusing enough that she made a clone and sent it to investigate directly.
A few reports later she found that the effects of the Inari shrine on crops was extending further than predicted. Four times further, in a pattern that captured all the village's crops, and with the shrine maidens unable to feel the direct effect of the honden past the predicted range. Though they were now making weekly trips out to each of the smaller 'roadside' style shrines set up around the crops by the farmers, so it was possible that there was a 'clinginess' to the honden effects following the light chakra in the shrine maidens. Or perhaps the Suijin-shrine water was bringing the effects further as it was directed into the irrigation channels?
Then she saw a report that the other Suijin shrine had seen a couple of nearby wells stop holding 'saltwater' like they had for a decade due to underground erosion opening them up to the sea. They now held drinkable water instead. A clone was sent to check that too, though it could be due to excess water from the honden overcoming the flow from the ocean. The shrine itself wasn't in a good position to have accidentally closed off the flow of saltwater itself due to construction.
...if she hadn't personally built everything and knew it had no real 'divine' origins she'd be thinking that things were actually inviting legitimate miracles.
Day two of the finals started similarly to the previous day, minus the need to recharge chakra batteries. Except that someone had made the other leaders aware that the village symbols had appeared on their chairs the day before. Onoki had just given Naruto a look and deflected as it being something Uzushio had built into things when asked how it was arranged. Which was entirely accurate, so hard to refute. The man likely wasn't aware that changing out the set of five seats for a different set in the storage room would have no effect though. Or maybe he'd figured that out on his own and had just done the swap to prove it?
Whatever the case, today they were getting a single round of single-combat matches before moving into a 'special' match.
"Any clues for the others on the day's surprise match?" Naruto asked Onoki.
"No," Onoki replied, with a tone that screamed 'of course you know'.
The best part of that was that Naruto didn't know. Uzushio's analysts did, and said it should be a good one, but hadn't provided details. He hadn't asked for any either, but had clones available to check details in case he needed them due to Onoki calling the bluff.
"I hate being out of the loop," Mei said with a sigh.
"It can be annoying," Naruto replied. "Though I do hope that your first genin of the day has a ready-to-fail kunai in their pouch intentionally instead of not taking care of their equipment properly."
Unfortunately for said genin, it hadn't been intentional. The Kumo genin's sword had gone right through the thing as a result, and Naruto had made a clone to help put the Kiri genin back together.
Futo had moved to watch as they reached land this morning, Odoroki following him not long after. There were observation rooms in various places that should let them see out but not let them be seen, and one of them was well-placed on approach. The first signs of civilization were the metal ships, but they were high enough in the air to be out of range of their weapons. Not that they didn't try anyway, but none of their shots got close to hitting the island.
...having a giant metal island floating along through the air was probably creating some panic down there.
"Do you think they have anything that can actually reach this high?" Odoroki questioned after seeing how far away the shots from the ships had been.
"Naruto said that at least three groups should be able to hit the shields," Futo reminded her. "But that could be deeper in when we're closer to the ground at this altitude."
"True. I wonder if they think this is an existing enemy or a new one?"
"I'm hoping Naruto gets good reports on the reactions so that we can see a timeline of what the various countries think. None of the ships down there have gotten any shots close enough to warrant retaliation though."
"Yeah, I thought the ships were supposed to be more dangerous than that. Konoha probably has longer-range options at a couple of the border outposts."
"Oh, definitely, though they're more for show than to be effective. I believe that Suna also..."
He trailed off as one of the ships recoiled hard and a projectile from the main gun on the ship fired practically straight at them. Odoroki pulled him down, despite the chances of the shot reaching them being basically zero, and he felt a pulse of energy as it likely struck the shield. A slight rumbling indicated that something was happening below them, and he jumped back up to see what was happening.
A red line was passing across the entire area, as though scanning it. He wasn't sure what that was supposed to be doing though. When the light finished passing across the area it vanished. Moments later there was a series of energy pulses as what were probably magic bullets in the shape of cannonballs launched. Each one took a different route through the air, splitting off one or two at a time to redirect into specific ships, and a minute later every metal ship in sight had been struck. Most of the strikes went through the surface of the ships and exploded inside, but a couple seemed to turn into giant spikes of ice instead.
"Explosions for the armed vessels," Matatabi explained without needing to be asked. "Ice for the unarmed ones. Entirely automated based on the ranges of detected weaponry, but Ren and I had access to abort buttons if we wanted to stop it. I think the system is based in part on the automated puppet defenses now that I see things happening."
"Naruto made a fully-automated flying war island and put us in charge of telling it to stop," Odoroki said, sounding a little shocked.
"How many other 'surprises' do you think he's put into the defenses on Uzushio?" Futo wondered, while noting that the whole 'scan with the red line' had probably been for show. "He's made comments that anyone making actual progress into attacking would have 'problems'..."
"Every last one of them he could fit in, knowing him. And several that shouldn't be able to fit anyway."
Onoki looked over the group of genin, doing his best to ignore the likely-smirking Naruto. The Uzukage was far too smug about knowing and holding all the secrets. "Your numbers aren't good for narrowing you down to a final match, so we're going to eliminate a third of you in a single match. In front of you is a dispenser used in lottery game drawings. Each of you will turn the crank forward five to ten times, then reverse it to dispense a ball holding a colored armband. This will split you into three teams. You will then have twenty minutes to come up with a strategy with your teammates. The first team to be fully eliminated is disqualified as a whole and the members of the other two will be healed up and continue on through the final set of elimination matches."
They went through the process and each team ended up with members from each village. The blue team had more Konoha and Uzushio members though, including both Hyuga. Not that the cat-featured boy fought like a Hyuga with his puppets, but his rabbit-featured teammate and seeming-girlfriend did. The two had proven to be skilled individually and far too good at working alongside each other for most others to handle...and somehow they were able to get a few things with stealth without anyone spotting them.
The Konoha jounin had simply smirked at that, implying that they'd figured it out when the rest of the observers had missed it, but it didn't seem to be 'secrets of the island' bypasses. Just some unknown skill the pair had that most of the genin didn't. It seemed likely that the two had also figured out how to intentionally end up on a team together, possibly because most villages had insufficient knowledge of how to place seals that could block byakugan sight.
When the match started it was obvious that the red team had opted for a unified defense while the yellow and blue teams had decided to go entirely offense. Except that within a couple of minutes it was obvious that the red and blue teams were working together, some unnoticed communication between them having the red team's fortifications used by the blue team to escape some of the yellow team's attacks.
What should've been a three-way battle had become two-sided, and the yellow team didn't last long against the combined strength of the other two.
"I find myself wondering when they decided to work together," A said as the proctor called the match.
"In the first two minutes of planning," Naruto answered. "Red team had a Yamanaka with a grudge against one of the yellow team's genin. They reached out to Himeki Hyuga on the blue team and used her to facilitate cooperation as only one of the three teams would be eliminated. Splitting the 'combined' team into a defending side and an attacking side made sense at that point."
"Interesting. Good leadership skills there, but those technically aren't being tested for in a general sense anymore."
"I'm more curious how Naruto here noticed those details," Mei said. "Because I don't think I noticed anything of the sort."
"Yamanaka techniques are somewhat distinctive when you're used to them," Naruto answered. "But mostly it was Himeki's body language changing for a couple of minutes and spotting the signs of a Yamanaka being unconscious due to being in someone else's body."
Onoki hoped that some of the observing jounin had spotted those details. It was excusable to miss them when you weren't tasked with watching for stuff like that, and from positions that were theoretically a poor spot to be watching from, but not for those who had been told to watch for any sign of cross-team planning.
Hinata frowned as the crystal she'd fit into place sent out a veritable flood of mana. It was supposed to be a trickle, which meant that the input flow limiter wasn't working properly. The electric 'valve' that stopped mana flowing through the crystal then couldn't hold enough mana back. Deciding to see if it was a bad limiter first, she powered everything down and grabbed another one from the bin. It didn't take long to fit that into place, and when she powered everything up the problem persisted.
Sighing, she started checking connections to the limiter, and eventually found that she'd somehow plugged in the connector at the board backwards and made it so that it would open when told to close and close when told to open. In a production unit that wouldn't be a problem due to keyed connectors, but she was running on a development board that didn't have those niceties.
Fixing that and powering things up resulted in the trickle she was expecting, so she started attaching the ink line and brush head. The latter had a chakra-based ring for both controlling the flow of the ink and pushing elemental chakra in if needed. Previous examples of the entire idea that she'd found only used chakra and had no provision for pure mana, and she was reasonably certain that was why they'd never worked.
Triple-checking the connections happened before checking the ink flow circuit. Mana trickled in as the ink flowed, but stopped when the ink stopped, and adding in the various chakra elements seemed to work as well. Nodding, she made note of the success and loaded up the next test program. This was based on a pile of data they'd fed into an entirely different program for analysis to look for possibly-useful patterns, but it was detailed enough to work for this as well.
If this worked she'd be making a pile of people annoyed...but Naruto and Yoko had done their own best to annoy them as well. She couldn't let them have all the fun, right? Besides, Ino had claimed the task of 'corrupting' the infiltration students into proper specialists and seemed to be doing a good job of it.
Naruto sat down after saying his part in the promotions list, having personally conferred with Shisui via clone and got paperwork to and from Konoha so that he could include the Konoha genin with the Uzushio genin. Even that was only permissible because he was officially a Konoha elite jounin, but as that was the case it had simply resulted in a few curious looks.
"We don't have the same variety of skills that the Uzukage has," Onoki said, gesturing as though referring to the entirety of their surroundings. Which he probably was. "But he has also made it a bit of a tradition to give gifts at some point in the exams, and as such has put some indirect pressure on everyone else to do so." There was some chuckling at that, and the proctor brought out a box. "Luckily, Iwagakure has its new culinary corps, and they've come up with 'Soldier Cakes'. A variant of the Rock Rice Cake intended specifically for shinobi. They contain a bit too much chakra for civilians, but function as a decent replacement for soldier pills."
Packages of the snacks were handed out to all the genin in the arena, and Naruto was pleased when all of the Uzushio and most of the Konoha genin immediately dropped them into storage tags.
"I do believe that's all," Onoki said once all the genin had their gifts. "Unless one of the other leaders has anything?"
Naruto stood up, and Onoki gestured him forward. "A different tradition is less tradition and more courtesy while we still hold items. Hanabi Hyuga of Konohagakure and Kodori Izunari of Iwagakure, please step forward." The two stepped forward, and two of Naruto's Anbu-disguised clones dropped in front of them. Hanabi with the small cats contract with Kodori with the large cats contract. "Each of you has gained the attention of a summoning clan that Uzushio obtained the contracts for. As it happens, these two summoning clans have a history of working together, so I'm personally a little surprised that they wish to go to different villages."
Both newly-promoted chunin read through the contracts and signed them, but would handle initial summonings later. With that done, Naruto nodded back to Onoki and sat back down.
"I feel that I should complain about being upstaged," Onoki said once he'd stood back up. "But Uzushio has been very upfront that they are merely acting in the wishes of those they temporarily hold the contracts of...and my own village appears to have just gained another summoner. With that though, I believe that we're done. The island will remain where it sits for the next week, at which point it will begin its journey back to Uzushiogakure. Those here for the exams will need to have departed by then."
Hanabi had been slightly embarrassed that he'd not saved a ticket for the finals for Hinata, but she'd not been put out by it. She did show up for the celebration party though, and commented that the cats had decided to wait until he'd made chunin at her recommendation. Afterwards he'd barely made it through cleaning up before collapsing into bed after a very long day.
But this morning Himeki had woken him up and dragged him to a suitable training ground to summon a cat in.
"You seem awfully excited about me having a summoning contract," Hanabi pointed out.
Himeki blinked, cutely tilting her head. "You know I like cats so long as they aren't hissing at me."
...yeah, that felt obvious in hindsight. He sighed and went through the hand seals, but realized that he'd not gotten blood the first time. Wincing, he tried again, this time making sure he'd actually bled from the bite to his own thumb, and completed the summoning while focusing on wanting an introduction to the summoning clan.
A black cat appeared a moment later, larger than the domestic cats in the Land of Fire. More 'dog-sized' than 'cat-sized', perhaps?
"You're comparing me to a dog," the cat accused.
"I live in Konohagakure with the Inuzuka clan," Hanabi retorted. "Though I'm not sure how you picked that up."
"That...is unfortunately a fair point, and I have some skill in picking up surface thoughts of my summoner to aid in coordination. I am Yuuma, and we've been waiting for you to be ready to be our summoner."
"Because I like turning into a cat?"
"That admittedly does not hurt, but we're actually more interested in your indirect combat through chakra strings and puppets. The majority of others that use those skills either do not focus on it or live in places with far too much sand for our liking."
"You like puppets?"
"Yes." The cat paused, and turned to look at Himeki. "...why is she shaking like that?"
Hanabi sighed. "She's holding back from snatching you up and calling you cute while cuddling you."
"That's an unexpected potential downside of being summoned by you, but at least she has some control over her reaction."
"I assume because she's afraid of you."
Yuuma looked between them. "She's afraid, yet wants to cuddle me?"
"You're large enough to get her to scamper into the trees if you made any threatening moves at all, at least until she gets to know you better."
"...this has to be one of the reasons we were comfortable with not having a summoner for so long."
"We do," Onoki admitted. "Though of course you know, with Deidara swinging through nearly weekly to teach lessons. I'm surprised you haven't started charging us for his time."
"What he does on his own time is his own business. So long as he teaches the lessons he's paid to teach in Uzushio he can do whatever he wants in Iwa."
"...he's teaching in Uzushio?"
"Yes. Our academy is structured quite differently than anyone else's, with a lot more specialty classes. He's not good enough with metalworking to teach that yet. I'm not sure if Sasori has realized that he's basically gone full 'teaching researcher' either? Deidara at least takes the occasional 'go blow something up' mission."
"He does like those.'
"Sasori is teaching?" Gaara questioned.
Naruto nodded. "Yes. Mostly basic construction and maintenance as he's working on improving his chakra capacity to be able to manage the paperwork puppeteer trick."
"Chiyo isn't going to be happy about that."
"Well, then she can start doing a better job of teaching or picking up puppet construction. Kankuro is currently the only puppeteer Sasori seems to approve of in Suna because he does help the younger puppeteers and is working towards building his own designs from scratch. Chiyo only seems to ever use puppets made by others, even if she does modify them, and she's holding onto but has stopped using the most famous of them."
There was a moment of silence as Gaara nodded, and then when it was obvious that discussion was over A looked over. "So. Konoha and Uzushio are obviously outliers, but what have the rest of you done with your former jinchuriki? Rumor has it that the remaining ones all changed, but it seems like B and Taki's girl are the only ones anyone ever sees out and about."
"Yagura has stuck to training," Mei said. "And Utakata is off trying to raise a family."
"Han and Roshi are largely non-combat these days as well," Onoki admitted. "Roshi helps with construction, being quite good at laying incredibly strong foundations, and Han sticks to the region he settled down in."
"It does occur to me that nobody ever found out what happened to the Nine-Tails though, beyond it being 'gone'. And the Uzukage here has a second girl able to keep up with him these days, when the first was bound to the remains of the Two-Tails."
Naruto shrugged. "There are ten of us total with the remains of a tailed beast. Yoko and I have the One-Tail and Nine-Tails pieces between us."
The other four paused, and turned to stare at him in shock. A was the first to recover though. "Ten? Did one of them get split in two?"
"No, there was a juvenile ten-tails that needed to be taken care of before it became a problem. Luckily Ino was available to bind the remains to at the time."
That had likely obliterated their focus for the rest of the morning, but seeing what they did with that information later would be interesting.
Matatabi was impressed with Naruto's creation of an interface for operating the entire island. Futo, Odoroki, and Ren were manifested in the control room but didn't really need be, with Miho at a simulated world station to help out as well. How being set in place in the holder had connected so completely was a bit of a mystery, but it had been done exceptionally well. More interestingly, a number of things were obviously just scaled-up versions of things in the Tome, such as the small mana reactor the Tome had for internal power that had been scaled up significantly to power the island without a forest in place. The spell processors were another detail, though the larger ones worked a little differently.
Powering the island's mana reactor up to full strength took an hour, at which point they were able to start on the various other systems. Flight, shielding, various sensory systems, weapons, and of course spell casting for a teleport spell to get into position. Everything had redundant backups, and there was an emergency 'systems failing' teleport back to the drydock system that the first flying island also had. Getting all of that powered on and prepared took another hour as most of the systems were doing a 'cold start' instead of the 'teleported in, landed in the water for some final tweaks, and then took off again' of the exam island.
Eventually everything was powered on, all self-checks had completed successfully, and they'd done half an hour of more manual checking of things that looked 'weird' but mostly turned out to just be due to the scaling of things. In three cases it was because the in-Tome version of things was actually entirely different in implementation, presumably because scaling it up didn't actually work.
Technology was hard to understand at the best of times, and it felt like most of the ability to examine things now was only working because the entire island felt like it was an extension of the Tome. Before that had happened it had all been horribly incomprehensible and didn't look like any of it should work at all.
Lifting off into the air went reasonably smoothly, as did the initial teleport to Earth. Out in the middle of nowhere over the ocean in this case, but equidistant from three different hidden island outposts used for targeting. The island's computers triangulated its position automatically at that point, confirmed where it was and the flight path, and they started along it.
"I don't think Naruto trusts us as much as I thought," Matatabi finally noted to the others, in and out of the Tome itself.
"Why do you think that?" Miho asked.
"We don't actually have full control over the island. I can't direct us out of a specific travel band, now that we're here I can't disengage several systems, and it seems like the most powerful weapons are locked out from being able to be fired."
"I can confirm the latter," Ren said from outside. "I'm getting authorization code prompts for taking control over three quarters of the weapon systems, but it seems that there are automated routines in the island's computer to operate them under specific circumstances."
"Think he discovered something about the Tome that has him worried about unrestricted access to the island's systems?" Futo questioned.
"Or he's just more paranoid than he lets on," Odoroki offered. "Magic book from another civilization entirely that sat buried for who knows how long before connecting to him? He probably assumed someone else has a backdoor, even if he didn't find one outright. Or maybe just that someone else knows enough to take over control even without a backdoor."
"I don't like thinking that I'm less in control of things than I thought," Matatabi replied. "But I unfortunately have to agree with his precautions. We're largely in an automated approach to the warring continent now, though we'll need to power up the other island when we reach it."
"He left a phone in here. We can call and ask him questions."
"Probably not important. The more I go through things the more I'm agreeing with the decision to not trust the Tome in general. There are too many things we don't know about it, and that he might not have been able to figure out when examining it. Come to think of it, he never gave me full access to Uzushio's computer network either."
"Which means he's likely been taking proper precautions with the Tome for years without us noticing," Futo said with a tone of pride. "And without letting us realize he was doing so. Even building special holding areas for the Tome to sit in instead of being worn all the time, once he knew he didn't need it for aid in examining things or casting spells, would be part of that."
"And he only did that once he had areas he trusted to be secure to build them in," Odoroki noted. "So he sees the Tome as personally important, but likely doesn't trust that it has the same goals as he does even if it looks like it does on the surface."
Having a Lord with a working brain and the ability to be subtle about things was nice, though finding out in this particular manner was a little annoying.
"Your girlfriend's brother was brutal with his puppets," Gaara said after the end of the first day of fighting.
"That would be brother-in-law at this point," Naruto corrected. "And honestly, most of the 'brutal' aspects were needing to get through the earth walls and domes being used against him."
"Didn't expect that from a Suna kunoichi," Onoki added with a frown. "It was far closer to our tactics than I was comfortable with."
Gaara nodded. "Probably because she's descended from a defected Iwagakure kunoichi."
"And that would be why she looked familiar. Married someone in Suna, taking their name, and thus the connection wasn't obvious when we don't ask for a full family history for the exams."
"Gotta keep some secrets out of the paperwork."
"Iwa got three Suna shinobi out of that incident anyway," Naruto pointed out. "Though for some reason they never pushed for their children to enter the ranks. All eight married civilians throughout the Land of Earth, and only one could be justified through marrying a noble's kid."
Onoki sighed. "Of course you know our records better than we do."
"Most of that was in Suna's records, or your Daimyo's. Your records barely acknowledge that the eight children existed."
"You are allowed to pretend to not have examined everyone's records."
"Of course I am, but where's the fun in that? You know that Uzushio has probably seen everything, I know that we definitely have, and pretending otherwise would be a disservice to the infiltration teams that keep everything up to date."
"I was thinking less about Uzushio and more that you, personally, seemed to have examined everything."
"Oh, I stopped doing that and mostly stick to what my analysts brief me on. But they're very good at their jobs." He stopped at a wall and tapped the light strip next to it, causing a door to open and reveal a hidden transport pad. "Want to skip the longer walk? Departure only from this point."
The rest of them stared at the pad, then sighed. Onoki looked at Naruto. "How long has that been there?"
Naruto grinned. "It's part of the emergency evacuation network. I believe the map of their locations is in appendix six, though actually opening the doors without an emergency isn't in the manuals provided to you for the island. In an actual evacuation event you'd also see signs directing people to them popping down from the ceilings."
Yoko looked over the report on sales vs production of omamori, nodding. Each of the shrines tended to pull from the Shrine Island supplies every so often, but at this point they were solidly a profit item from a materials point of view. Shrine donations in general were also quite good recently, with Uzushio's main island being the obvious outlier due to the lack of tourist traffic. Training of new priests and priestesses was also moving along and they'd likely be able to open another couple of shrines in the next few months. Maybe as many as four if granting the additional medical chakra nodes to a couple of potentials pushed their control to the point where they could make medical chakra Rasengan.
Then she started on the reports from the individual shrines. Those were reasonably straightforward, at least at first. Minor problems with visitors looking to create trouble to see how that would be taken, or that had shown up intoxicated. The Land of Fire's capital already had to raise prices for the use of the meeting hall due to demand, which implied that they might want another Omoikane shrine to reduce the load on that one. Requests for access to Shrine Island were up as well, and setting up a system for that probably needed to happen. It had been intended to be a thing from the start, but the 'mystical fog bank' made it harder for random people to show up.
Hitting the first report of things happening outside of the shrines had her pausing. A poisoned well outside of the 'range' of a Suijin shrine had stopped being poisoned, with no actual actions taken to correct that. Mostly because it was due to runoff from a mine and was incredibly difficult to do anything about without cleaning up the mine itself. She switched to checking Uzushio's records, in case someone there had authorized things, only to find that the only report there was someone noticing that something had shifted in the mine.
This was all confusing enough that she made a clone and sent it to investigate directly.
A few reports later she found that the effects of the Inari shrine on crops was extending further than predicted. Four times further, in a pattern that captured all the village's crops, and with the shrine maidens unable to feel the direct effect of the honden past the predicted range. Though they were now making weekly trips out to each of the smaller 'roadside' style shrines set up around the crops by the farmers, so it was possible that there was a 'clinginess' to the honden effects following the light chakra in the shrine maidens. Or perhaps the Suijin-shrine water was bringing the effects further as it was directed into the irrigation channels?
Then she saw a report that the other Suijin shrine had seen a couple of nearby wells stop holding 'saltwater' like they had for a decade due to underground erosion opening them up to the sea. They now held drinkable water instead. A clone was sent to check that too, though it could be due to excess water from the honden overcoming the flow from the ocean. The shrine itself wasn't in a good position to have accidentally closed off the flow of saltwater itself due to construction.
...if she hadn't personally built everything and knew it had no real 'divine' origins she'd be thinking that things were actually inviting legitimate miracles.
Day two of the finals started similarly to the previous day, minus the need to recharge chakra batteries. Except that someone had made the other leaders aware that the village symbols had appeared on their chairs the day before. Onoki had just given Naruto a look and deflected as it being something Uzushio had built into things when asked how it was arranged. Which was entirely accurate, so hard to refute. The man likely wasn't aware that changing out the set of five seats for a different set in the storage room would have no effect though. Or maybe he'd figured that out on his own and had just done the swap to prove it?
Whatever the case, today they were getting a single round of single-combat matches before moving into a 'special' match.
"Any clues for the others on the day's surprise match?" Naruto asked Onoki.
"No," Onoki replied, with a tone that screamed 'of course you know'.
The best part of that was that Naruto didn't know. Uzushio's analysts did, and said it should be a good one, but hadn't provided details. He hadn't asked for any either, but had clones available to check details in case he needed them due to Onoki calling the bluff.
"I hate being out of the loop," Mei said with a sigh.
"It can be annoying," Naruto replied. "Though I do hope that your first genin of the day has a ready-to-fail kunai in their pouch intentionally instead of not taking care of their equipment properly."
Unfortunately for said genin, it hadn't been intentional. The Kumo genin's sword had gone right through the thing as a result, and Naruto had made a clone to help put the Kiri genin back together.
Futo had moved to watch as they reached land this morning, Odoroki following him not long after. There were observation rooms in various places that should let them see out but not let them be seen, and one of them was well-placed on approach. The first signs of civilization were the metal ships, but they were high enough in the air to be out of range of their weapons. Not that they didn't try anyway, but none of their shots got close to hitting the island.
...having a giant metal island floating along through the air was probably creating some panic down there.
"Do you think they have anything that can actually reach this high?" Odoroki questioned after seeing how far away the shots from the ships had been.
"Naruto said that at least three groups should be able to hit the shields," Futo reminded her. "But that could be deeper in when we're closer to the ground at this altitude."
"True. I wonder if they think this is an existing enemy or a new one?"
"I'm hoping Naruto gets good reports on the reactions so that we can see a timeline of what the various countries think. None of the ships down there have gotten any shots close enough to warrant retaliation though."
"Yeah, I thought the ships were supposed to be more dangerous than that. Konoha probably has longer-range options at a couple of the border outposts."
"Oh, definitely, though they're more for show than to be effective. I believe that Suna also..."
He trailed off as one of the ships recoiled hard and a projectile from the main gun on the ship fired practically straight at them. Odoroki pulled him down, despite the chances of the shot reaching them being basically zero, and he felt a pulse of energy as it likely struck the shield. A slight rumbling indicated that something was happening below them, and he jumped back up to see what was happening.
A red line was passing across the entire area, as though scanning it. He wasn't sure what that was supposed to be doing though. When the light finished passing across the area it vanished. Moments later there was a series of energy pulses as what were probably magic bullets in the shape of cannonballs launched. Each one took a different route through the air, splitting off one or two at a time to redirect into specific ships, and a minute later every metal ship in sight had been struck. Most of the strikes went through the surface of the ships and exploded inside, but a couple seemed to turn into giant spikes of ice instead.
"Explosions for the armed vessels," Matatabi explained without needing to be asked. "Ice for the unarmed ones. Entirely automated based on the ranges of detected weaponry, but Ren and I had access to abort buttons if we wanted to stop it. I think the system is based in part on the automated puppet defenses now that I see things happening."
"Naruto made a fully-automated flying war island and put us in charge of telling it to stop," Odoroki said, sounding a little shocked.
"How many other 'surprises' do you think he's put into the defenses on Uzushio?" Futo wondered, while noting that the whole 'scan with the red line' had probably been for show. "He's made comments that anyone making actual progress into attacking would have 'problems'..."
"Every last one of them he could fit in, knowing him. And several that shouldn't be able to fit anyway."
Onoki looked over the group of genin, doing his best to ignore the likely-smirking Naruto. The Uzukage was far too smug about knowing and holding all the secrets. "Your numbers aren't good for narrowing you down to a final match, so we're going to eliminate a third of you in a single match. In front of you is a dispenser used in lottery game drawings. Each of you will turn the crank forward five to ten times, then reverse it to dispense a ball holding a colored armband. This will split you into three teams. You will then have twenty minutes to come up with a strategy with your teammates. The first team to be fully eliminated is disqualified as a whole and the members of the other two will be healed up and continue on through the final set of elimination matches."
They went through the process and each team ended up with members from each village. The blue team had more Konoha and Uzushio members though, including both Hyuga. Not that the cat-featured boy fought like a Hyuga with his puppets, but his rabbit-featured teammate and seeming-girlfriend did. The two had proven to be skilled individually and far too good at working alongside each other for most others to handle...and somehow they were able to get a few things with stealth without anyone spotting them.
The Konoha jounin had simply smirked at that, implying that they'd figured it out when the rest of the observers had missed it, but it didn't seem to be 'secrets of the island' bypasses. Just some unknown skill the pair had that most of the genin didn't. It seemed likely that the two had also figured out how to intentionally end up on a team together, possibly because most villages had insufficient knowledge of how to place seals that could block byakugan sight.
When the match started it was obvious that the red team had opted for a unified defense while the yellow and blue teams had decided to go entirely offense. Except that within a couple of minutes it was obvious that the red and blue teams were working together, some unnoticed communication between them having the red team's fortifications used by the blue team to escape some of the yellow team's attacks.
What should've been a three-way battle had become two-sided, and the yellow team didn't last long against the combined strength of the other two.
"I find myself wondering when they decided to work together," A said as the proctor called the match.
"In the first two minutes of planning," Naruto answered. "Red team had a Yamanaka with a grudge against one of the yellow team's genin. They reached out to Himeki Hyuga on the blue team and used her to facilitate cooperation as only one of the three teams would be eliminated. Splitting the 'combined' team into a defending side and an attacking side made sense at that point."
"Interesting. Good leadership skills there, but those technically aren't being tested for in a general sense anymore."
"I'm more curious how Naruto here noticed those details," Mei said. "Because I don't think I noticed anything of the sort."
"Yamanaka techniques are somewhat distinctive when you're used to them," Naruto answered. "But mostly it was Himeki's body language changing for a couple of minutes and spotting the signs of a Yamanaka being unconscious due to being in someone else's body."
Onoki hoped that some of the observing jounin had spotted those details. It was excusable to miss them when you weren't tasked with watching for stuff like that, and from positions that were theoretically a poor spot to be watching from, but not for those who had been told to watch for any sign of cross-team planning.
Hinata frowned as the crystal she'd fit into place sent out a veritable flood of mana. It was supposed to be a trickle, which meant that the input flow limiter wasn't working properly. The electric 'valve' that stopped mana flowing through the crystal then couldn't hold enough mana back. Deciding to see if it was a bad limiter first, she powered everything down and grabbed another one from the bin. It didn't take long to fit that into place, and when she powered everything up the problem persisted.
Sighing, she started checking connections to the limiter, and eventually found that she'd somehow plugged in the connector at the board backwards and made it so that it would open when told to close and close when told to open. In a production unit that wouldn't be a problem due to keyed connectors, but she was running on a development board that didn't have those niceties.
Fixing that and powering things up resulted in the trickle she was expecting, so she started attaching the ink line and brush head. The latter had a chakra-based ring for both controlling the flow of the ink and pushing elemental chakra in if needed. Previous examples of the entire idea that she'd found only used chakra and had no provision for pure mana, and she was reasonably certain that was why they'd never worked.
Triple-checking the connections happened before checking the ink flow circuit. Mana trickled in as the ink flowed, but stopped when the ink stopped, and adding in the various chakra elements seemed to work as well. Nodding, she made note of the success and loaded up the next test program. This was based on a pile of data they'd fed into an entirely different program for analysis to look for possibly-useful patterns, but it was detailed enough to work for this as well.
If this worked she'd be making a pile of people annoyed...but Naruto and Yoko had done their own best to annoy them as well. She couldn't let them have all the fun, right? Besides, Ino had claimed the task of 'corrupting' the infiltration students into proper specialists and seemed to be doing a good job of it.
Naruto sat down after saying his part in the promotions list, having personally conferred with Shisui via clone and got paperwork to and from Konoha so that he could include the Konoha genin with the Uzushio genin. Even that was only permissible because he was officially a Konoha elite jounin, but as that was the case it had simply resulted in a few curious looks.
"We don't have the same variety of skills that the Uzukage has," Onoki said, gesturing as though referring to the entirety of their surroundings. Which he probably was. "But he has also made it a bit of a tradition to give gifts at some point in the exams, and as such has put some indirect pressure on everyone else to do so." There was some chuckling at that, and the proctor brought out a box. "Luckily, Iwagakure has its new culinary corps, and they've come up with 'Soldier Cakes'. A variant of the Rock Rice Cake intended specifically for shinobi. They contain a bit too much chakra for civilians, but function as a decent replacement for soldier pills."
Packages of the snacks were handed out to all the genin in the arena, and Naruto was pleased when all of the Uzushio and most of the Konoha genin immediately dropped them into storage tags.
"I do believe that's all," Onoki said once all the genin had their gifts. "Unless one of the other leaders has anything?"
Naruto stood up, and Onoki gestured him forward. "A different tradition is less tradition and more courtesy while we still hold items. Hanabi Hyuga of Konohagakure and Kodori Izunari of Iwagakure, please step forward." The two stepped forward, and two of Naruto's Anbu-disguised clones dropped in front of them. Hanabi with the small cats contract with Kodori with the large cats contract. "Each of you has gained the attention of a summoning clan that Uzushio obtained the contracts for. As it happens, these two summoning clans have a history of working together, so I'm personally a little surprised that they wish to go to different villages."
Both newly-promoted chunin read through the contracts and signed them, but would handle initial summonings later. With that done, Naruto nodded back to Onoki and sat back down.
"I feel that I should complain about being upstaged," Onoki said once he'd stood back up. "But Uzushio has been very upfront that they are merely acting in the wishes of those they temporarily hold the contracts of...and my own village appears to have just gained another summoner. With that though, I believe that we're done. The island will remain where it sits for the next week, at which point it will begin its journey back to Uzushiogakure. Those here for the exams will need to have departed by then."
Hanabi had been slightly embarrassed that he'd not saved a ticket for the finals for Hinata, but she'd not been put out by it. She did show up for the celebration party though, and commented that the cats had decided to wait until he'd made chunin at her recommendation. Afterwards he'd barely made it through cleaning up before collapsing into bed after a very long day.
But this morning Himeki had woken him up and dragged him to a suitable training ground to summon a cat in.
"You seem awfully excited about me having a summoning contract," Hanabi pointed out.
Himeki blinked, cutely tilting her head. "You know I like cats so long as they aren't hissing at me."
...yeah, that felt obvious in hindsight. He sighed and went through the hand seals, but realized that he'd not gotten blood the first time. Wincing, he tried again, this time making sure he'd actually bled from the bite to his own thumb, and completed the summoning while focusing on wanting an introduction to the summoning clan.
A black cat appeared a moment later, larger than the domestic cats in the Land of Fire. More 'dog-sized' than 'cat-sized', perhaps?
"You're comparing me to a dog," the cat accused.
"I live in Konohagakure with the Inuzuka clan," Hanabi retorted. "Though I'm not sure how you picked that up."
"That...is unfortunately a fair point, and I have some skill in picking up surface thoughts of my summoner to aid in coordination. I am Yuuma, and we've been waiting for you to be ready to be our summoner."
"Because I like turning into a cat?"
"That admittedly does not hurt, but we're actually more interested in your indirect combat through chakra strings and puppets. The majority of others that use those skills either do not focus on it or live in places with far too much sand for our liking."
"You like puppets?"
"Yes." The cat paused, and turned to look at Himeki. "...why is she shaking like that?"
Hanabi sighed. "She's holding back from snatching you up and calling you cute while cuddling you."
"That's an unexpected potential downside of being summoned by you, but at least she has some control over her reaction."
"I assume because she's afraid of you."
Yuuma looked between them. "She's afraid, yet wants to cuddle me?"
"You're large enough to get her to scamper into the trees if you made any threatening moves at all, at least until she gets to know you better."
"...this has to be one of the reasons we were comfortable with not having a summoner for so long."
- Location
- Scotland
I smell Divine Trolling Shenanigans
. Now I'm also wondering just how long Yoko is going to obsess over this little issue and whether she'll actually find a reason for it.Poor Yuuma but on the other hand this sort of thing should have been expected. After all, while many people find cats cute, one at least the size of a medium dog also sends warning signals to our hind-brain saying "Danger Will Robinson, Danger". I do wonder though, how big is the boss of the cat summons? Tiger sized? Or are we talking a cat the size of Gamabunta? The latter would have everyone within a significant radius needing new underwear.
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
As my dad puts it...
Cats are the ultimate predator
,,,
and humans tend to pick them up, cuddle them, and coo about how adorable they are.
Cats are the ultimate predator
,,,
and humans tend to pick them up, cuddle them, and coo about how adorable they are.
The boss summons is a polecat. Instead of getting bigger as he grew in power, he just got longer.
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
So long as the boss isn't the Cat in the Hat.
- Location
- none of your business
Well last I checked Dr. Seuuss wasn't part of the crossover so......
M. H. Fuzzball
Aperture Science-certified Horrible Person
- Location
- Sector 2814
It has been a saying for centuries that 'the Gods help those who help themselves'...