Tomaytoe, tomahtoe… as far as the Otsusuki are concerned I don't think they saw a problem or even a difference between those. A detailed enough simulation of an object would functionally be that object, and all that.
Tome of the Orange Sky (Naruto/MGLN)
- Thread starter CmptrWz
- Start date
- Crossover
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- Tags
- mgln naruto naruto uzumaki complete
Jordisk
<Unverified N00B>
- Location
- Blind Eternities
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
This is magic, so use the right terminology. Law of Similarity. The Image of a Thing is Equivalent to the Thing, Part of the Whole is Equivalent to the Whole. Voodoo, Hoodoo, and all the magic you do.
@Mr_Rose naruto wiki states in naruto canon between kaguya's sealing and the end of the '4th shinobi war' where kaguya was 'resurrected' and her resealing only hours or days later after near constant battling by naruto and the brother killing emochiha that was is naruto's former team mate is 1,000 years, so it's not an unknown amount of time XD at most between the tome being lost on naruto's homeworld and naruto finding it makes it between 1,100 years at most and around 1,000 years at minimum
Post-Chunin promotion, Hanabi's seal was removed and direct (clothing-capable) shapeshifting was granted instead.
Both of these are fixed, thanks.
A thousand years between those dates, but also at least a thousand years for the God Tree to make a chakra fruit for Kaguya to eat, and for this story I decided that it took a thousand years before the tree was even ready to begin the chakra fruit stage (source: the Prologue of this story, paragraph 5).
So just "after the Tome's crash-landing" we're looking at over three thousand years, plus however long the Tome was drifting before the crash landing...
- Location
- Here
Some may compare this to the X that is how long the device that would become Hive drifted in space.
Personally, I doubt there will be any further connection. Mostly because there is no need for further interaction at this time...
Chapter 100 - Improved Exam Automation
Naruto sighed as he looked over the horrible mess, his clones having pulled basically everyone out to the hospital already. "What, exactly, happened?"
Teni grimaced. "Kumin warned that some of the power flows didn't look like they'd be able to handle the draw on a couple of the experimental weapons, but someone decided to prove he was wrong through powering them up."
"I dropped six warnings into the system about that last month."
"You did?"
"Yes, the calculations used to prove they were 'good enough' obviously didn't include the reduced transfer capacity from impurities and what would happen when the power conduits heated up. I got around some of that by not having impurities and I still left a larger safety margin. My designs also include temperature sensors that can cut the flow down to safer levels."
"Huh. That's not a bad idea, and it makes me think that I need to review more than just my personal parts of things more often. You don't feel like the kind of person who considers safety limits on your technology though."
"...I've consistently had wider safety margins on things than Hinata because I never trust that I've gotten things correct. A relatively small fizzle is better than a large explosion you weren't expecting, as the crater we're staring at can attest to."
"Good point."
"Of course, I also test copies of everything at various scales when possible and push them to destruction to see what the failure states are. Had someone built a smaller-scale power conduit and tested it then you might've picked up on some of this yourselves. You can do that with most technology, unlike most seals, though I do realize that not everyone is going to be able to reasonably scale things up one centimeter at a time."
Teni turned to stare at him. "You scale things up a centimeter at a time?"
"Yes. It makes it easier to tell what shouldn't be scaled at all and when I need to start adding relays and contactors too."
"And you test each one to destruction?"
"Well, no. After the first few I only test every tenth or hundredth iteration unless things go wildly out of predictions. Figuring out the prediction curves is admittedly complicated with some technologies. Much easier with seals when you can scale them at all, but I think I'm going to propose new testing rules for everyone going forward."
She flinched at that, probably guessing that she wasn't going to like how comprehensive he made those rules.
Gaara sighed as he looked over the list of potential genin to send to the upcoming Uzushio-hosted chunin exams. It was likely that things were going to be 'spectacular' again, though how much more you could improve upon a flying examination island was another question entirely. Of course, changing out the challenges for completely new ones nobody was expecting would be enough...for everyone else.
If their new island survived then they'd likely use it at least a few times without changing things up significantly, but Uzushio didn't currently feel 'settled' enough to stick to anything that long.
Notice had already gone out that they were going to allow anyone to participate in the 'genin checking' portions, and had provided a list of 'known genin exempt from testing due to previous completions' as well. A surprisingly small list in general, especially as it covered the entirety of the Elemental Nations, but the real annoyance there was that they knew about unadvertised promotions and deaths...and were essentially advertising that the shinobi in question were no longer genin in some fashion through excluding them from the list.
Of course, this was also a reasonably subtle 'reminder' that Uzushio would know if someone tried to sneak someone in that wasn't actually genin rank. Suna's records showed that they'd done that every so often for various reasons and had a few dozen 'believed someone else did it' based on post-exam reviews...but with broadcasting everything there had been some push to ensure that they 'looked good' internationally. Being able to point at Uzushio and rightfully claim that they would likely know and call them out publicly should hopefully be enough to shut those idiots up.
It was also annoyingly impossible to tell if the list of genin eligible to skip the test for being genin had been provided specifically to serve as a warning against sending non-genin, sending a direct and indirect message at the same time.
At least there hadn't been any requests for another exhibition match with Kankuro, even if they'd not actually come off too bad from the last one. How much of that was because they knew that he was still working out the kinks in his latest designs was another question entirely, because they definitely knew that detail. A letter had come just a few days ago with a list of obvious problems and a couple of suggested fixes, entirely unsolicited.
Hinata found Naruto in his office finishing up paperwork. "I thought you'd finished all of that for the day."
He scoffed. "Decided to take care of the latest round of complaints that various divisions have made about the new safety rules for anything experimental."
"Ah. Anyone else I need to talk to in the technology division?"
"Not this round. The only complaint there was a misreading. Lots of stupidity from those making experimental weapons though. If there's a chance of things exploding then you need to have a way to test it safely, but making a funnily-shaped blade with known-good techniques isn't even the right kind of experimental for the new rules to kick in."
"Oh, those idiots. Do you think they're complaining just to get back at you for calling their designs stupid and wasteful?"
"I don't think so, but only because I was able to demonstrate why they were stupid and wasteful on zombies. When the blunt spine of your blade is easier to kill a zombie with than the actual cutting edge then your blade design sucks."
Yeah, that had been a spectacular failure in blade design. "I see."
"Were you looking for me because you thought I was done with paperwork, or because you ran into something you wanted to ask me about?"
"I ran into your testing rules for joint jounin exams."
"...yes?"
"Why are you compiling rules for a joint jounin exam?"
"Because I'm thinking about running one?"
"It was bad enough getting everyone to sign a new chunin exam treaty. Unless you're going to limit things to Konoha and maybe Iwa?"
"Why would a new treaty be needed?"
Hinata sighed. "Because nobody is going to risk attending an exam without one?"
"I think you misunderstood my question. We've already got a treaty that'll cover it, why would we need another one?"
That...what? "When did you push through a jounin exam treaty?"
"I didn't?"
"Then the only exam treaty we have is for the chunin exams."
Naruto snorted. "No, that's the old one. The new one mentions 'chunin' exactly once, and that's in the 'this supersedes the previous joint chunin exam treaty' block. It covers any exam for promotion without naming ranks at all, provides for 'reasonable testing of a reasonable rank to obtain promotion from' as a pre-test, and does not mention any rank otherwise. Officially, that was done so that we can rename or insert new ranks or so that the Land of Iron can host and/or send their people that don't use the genin/chunin/jounin ranking system. In practice it means that anyone can host a joint promotion exam, including in theory for academy students to genin. The list of required areas to test candidates in would make that a bit mean though as generally you don't start on half the skills listed until you're already a shinobi."
"You...convinced everyone to replace a very specific exam treaty with an intentionally generic one?"
"Yes, and that was in the private notes on our end. Didn't share the full justification with allies, but I did include the desire to not mention ranks in a general sense in their briefings."
Okay, she'd known that Naruto had gotten scarily good at the diplomatic side of things, generally through being blunt and throwing out generations of 'traditional bullshit', but she'd not realized just how subtle he'd started being with his manipulations. "Is anyone else going to spot that?"
He shrugged. "If I go through with it then the announcement messages will cite the treaty directly. That should save six or seven waves of others claiming that we can't do that. I've actually got a draft of that part of such an announcement in the appropriate place for such things, if you want to take a look."
Twenty minutes later she was incredibly annoyed because the history of the draft in question indicated that it had been written before treaty negotiations had begun and had only been updated with the final treaty name and signing dates for Uzushio and the 'big five'. Even that was a minor change from the expected name in the original draft and the expected final signing dates had been within two days of the actual dates.
...then she realized that there was a question that she didn't have the answer to, and wasn't sure if she wanted to know. That is, where such an exam would be held, because she knew that even the new exam island was specifically geared towards chunin testing and would be difficult to re-scale some elements safely.
Ganbold scowled as they moved through the trees. How they'd lost all records of the settlement that had repeatedly repelled their forces was a mystery, but several of them had recalled enough to find it again. Except that none of the signs of its presence seemed to remain, somehow, even if several of the natural landmarks used to locate the place were still there. As such, they were obviously in the right place...if you ignored that there was no sign that the group of foreigners had ever existed and their impossible automated weapons were no longer present.
If not for the death records from the attempts against the settlement they'd not have any official proof that it had existed, and even those were...oddly vague. He knew that they'd been far more detailed originally, describing the mechanisms that had killed the men, because he'd personally written several of them. But now they only referred to an unspecified enemy. Some of the men were a bit spooked as a result, wondering if the settlement itself had been a mass hallucination of some kind or a test from the spirits.
He was pulled out of his somewhat circular musings on the settlement by coming to a small clearing...with an obvious gate sitting in a gap in a fence. The gate design wasn't one that he recognized, and it was wildly different from anything that had been seen of the settlement. Two primary vertical posts with two primary horizontal ones and nothing actually barring entry, and not actually connected to the fence itself, but it was obviously denoting a border of some kind. A path beyond the gate led to what looked like stairs going up the side of the mountain.
"I don't like this," Erdem said. "Nothing I remember says that there was anything to speak of on the mountain itself."
"And yet now the settlement is gone and this is here," Ganbold agreed, starting to wonder if the more superstitious men had the right idea after all.
"Even the plants look different on the mountain, as though they're not quite the same species as those on this side of that fence."
That...was a good and yet incredibly disturbing point. He looked back at the men following him. "We're going to explore a bit further, but do not attack anything that does not attack us for now."
The more...violent of his men looked annoyed at that, but all of them nodded. He then led them through the gate, gulping at the seemingly...otherworldly feeling on the other side. As though the very environment around them wanted them to be peaceful, at least a little? And possibly as though the air itself was cleaner than it should be.
Not far up the mountain was another of the gates, the path splitting beyond it. One path went further up, the other looked more like it was going around the mountain. Possibly to a cave? There was another fence and yet another shift in the appearance of the plants to either side of said fence. He signaled his men to stay back for the moment, stepping through the gate...and finding that the otherworldly feeling intensified.
He was nearly ready to call his men forward, feelings be damned, when he spotted something in the trees. Focusing, he realized that it looked like a person in odd clothing...except that they appeared to have a fox tail. And, as their head became more visible, fox ears. That twitched like a fox's would. Gulping, he glanced around and realized that he could see two other foxes watching him...with far more intelligence than foxes should show.
There might be something to the beliefs of the more...superstitious men after all, and he decided that they were not prepared for this. He backed up through the weird gate, gesturing for his men to retreat back down the mountain. They didn't question him, though he wasn't sure if they'd seen the fox person. This had become a 'document what they found so far and let someone else investigate more deeply' situation, especially as so far it didn't seem to be a combat problem. The settlement with the people that might have some information on the flying fortress, or possibly a way to take the fight to it, was missing anyway and might never have existed, as problematic that was for this new situation's potential long-term existence.
Yoko sighed as she settled into her office, finally done with the Land of Demons shrine network. It had taken longer than she'd have liked, and had involved far too much 'putting on a show' prepwork, but all of the shrines Shion had been in charge of were either replaced or removed. In the former case, several of them had the added show of the 'dark chakra' demon they'd been holding being forced out of containment and torn apart by light chakra during the enshrinements.
That alone had very obviously 'sold' the legitimacy of the Land of Shrines to the locals, above and beyond Shion's personal approval. Mortals could contain demons, but the general opinion of the people was that it took more than that to destroy them. Nevermind that the 'demons' seemed to largely be the remains of people who had delved too deeply into dark chakra and lost themselves to it. Nor that most of the 'demons' had been starting to fall apart on their own, possibly because the effects that had been anchoring them had failed.
At this point the running theory was that the bulk of them had only been able to maintain themselves due to the lingering effects of the God Tree and the destruction of it had caused them to start to fade. The exceptions seemed to have stone tablets as anchors instead, and when dealing with the 'body shrine' of Mōryō they'd destroyed such a tablet that had been placed inside of the seal there. Not that said tablet had been 'active' after Mōryō's defeat.
Regardless, she had to go through and double-check records before being unavailable again due to needing to help Naruto with construction tasks. She'd had clones looking over things, but wanted to go back over it all and compare progress notes on training. There had also been an issue with omamori stock that had supposedly been resolved properly by the individual shrines but that she'd not double-checked on yet and possibly a need to order more sealing ink for making the things from Uzushio.
Creating a reliable way of producing that for Shrine Island was proving to be difficult. The process was far too fiddly and even the bulk ink production that Konoha and Uzushio managed had a handful of people monitoring it at all times. Automating it would be nice, but was proving difficult, and it was specialized enough to not be a good fit for shrine maidens to learn to handle. Luckily they had enough money coming in from donations and omamori sales to cover just buying it by the barrel.
Ino sat down to dinner, shaking her head. "Naruto, I know you're busy with moon building prep, but you really need to get around to putting in the rest of the requests for staff for the exams."
Naruto blinked. "I'm reasonably certain I already finished that, and even included extra observers and medical staff."
"...you've barely touched the testing station staff."
"Oh. They're not needed."
Hinata sighed. "What did you do to automate things this time?"
"Sanshi made a breakthrough on some of the automated puppet personality routines, coupled with me figuring out one of the Tome's control systems. Well, I figured out what it does, but my version is still around ten times larger than it's version, but I was able to bury those in the infrastructure instead of needing to put copies in the puppets anyway."
"You're going to do most of the testing with automated puppets."
"Yes, because I was unhappy with Iwa's standards for some of the testing when they rented the previous island. Automated testers means you don't need to worry about most of the staffing and finding those with the right skills and should smooth out the differences between villages running exams on the island. It also means that I can quadruple the number of testing stations without issue and let all of them run overnight."
Ino nodded as she considered that. "And you don't have to dedicate anywhere near as many people to things, leaving Uzushio itself in a better position for continuing to take care of day to day items. The hospital will be seriously reduced in staff, but is rarely stressed and summoning means that medic-nin can be moved around quickly if needed anyway."
"So," Hinata said. "Have you stress-tested the system yet?"
Naruto shrugged. "I threw four times the expected number of testees in clones at it every few days for a few weeks to try and spot problems. None came up, but monitoring things to ensure that everything appears to be going well is part of the reason we're running things instead of renting the new island out first."
That was admittedly a good point, though how the other villages would react to the testing being handled by automatons instead of actual people was another question entirely. Then again, until things had been shaken up the bulk of the villages tested with methods that barely tested candidates at all. Having a method requiring a comparable number of shinobi that did a lot more direct testing would essentially be doing what had been done before, just better.
And Naruto was very good at 'replace what someone else was doing with a better option'.
Onoki looked around at the arrival area for the replacement island, finding that it was very similar to the old one's. A map with multiple arrival pads in the proper places for the countries you might be arriving from, based on how many departure pads were expected to be in use from each of them. This one was circular instead of rectangular though, and included some pads in spots that were further out than expected.
He led the way along the path to the nearest stairs, finding that a legend was sitting next to them. Finding that the new pads corresponded to the area around the Land of Demons. That made sense, given that he knew the Land of Shrines had expanded out that way, though he didn't think that they ran shinobi training like others did. Not that things didn't change over time, of course, and being a bit 'too far away' wasn't a factor anymore.
"Good morning," Naruto greeted, startling some of the group. It had been half-expected though, as the Uzukage was unnervingly stealthy...as were a significant number of his people at this point.
"Morning," Onoki replied, glancing around the area for signs of 'expansion zones'. There seemed to still be plenty for that. "I see there's a wider distribution of possible attendees this time."
"Mostly spectators from the new areas, though I wouldn't put it past some of the shrine maidens or guards to show up for the genin testing phase."
"Ah, yes. Is that going to become a thing that we're all expected to open up to the masses?"
"No, I just figured that people would want a chance to see the new island."
"About that. Reports are that it's...smaller than expected, with far fewer testing areas."
The grin on the blond's face was disturbing. "Reports can be deceiving. We didn't even have to mess with them to accomplish that."
For some, claiming you could mess with someone else's reports would be overestimating your abilities. Unfortunately, not for Uzushio. They were known to be able to do things such as put appointments down in his own handwriting while also trapping his office. Merely 'messing with reports' would be trivial for them. On the other hand, the statement said a number of other things about the island, the biggest being an acknowledgement that the island was deceptively small.
How you made a flying island deceptively small was something that he couldn't figure out though.
Mei looked at the map, frowning. It was a digital screen, which was nice because you could 'search' for specific destinations with the little keyboard under it, but punching in 'arena' had simply returned a 'not currently available' message. "How is the arena not currently available?"
"I have no clue," Ao replied. "Though I note that the meeting time is in two hours and the information provided said that we could head to the arena starting in around ten minutes. Perhaps this is a test of patience?"
"Showing up early is rarely a problem and we're not actually at the testing phase for anything yet."
"Um," one of the genin said, before clamming up. She sighed and turned to the boy, Shatomo, raising her eyebrow to prompt him to continue. He gulped, but held up the sheet he was holding. "The wording implies that we literally can't head to the arena before the time mentioned, though I don't yet know why that would be the case."
She pulled out her own copy and re-read that section, finding that she concurred with the assessment. In fact, now that she was paying it proper attention, it was using standard wording for missions for things such as 'do not arrive before this time'. Except that normally it was a bit more flexible on missions. "Well, that's interesting. I wonder if they've just locked it out of the maps until then or if there's something else going on."
Someone else might've said something, but a horn sounding and lights appearing on the dome that dominated the island interrupted. As a group they moved up to the rooftops, wondering what was going on, and she noted that several other villages had done the same thing nearby. She didn't get a lot of time to process that before movement dropped her into a state of shock, the entire central forest tilting and spinning out of the way...to reveal a larger than she'd expected arena in a safer-looking forest.
"I do believe that Naruto has outdone himself," Ao commented. "Again."
"Several times over," Mei agreed. "Because I know there are animals in the forest that just flipped upside-down, and I highly doubt that they'd be able to handle things suddenly being the wrong way up normally."
"...I hadn't considered that part, but if the island has a giant hole in the middle of it to hold both areas for the dome then everything is likely compressed into a much smaller area."
Somehow she thought that there was a lot more to this trick than the obvious, but they now had an arena to head towards.
Naruto looked out over the group as one of his clones let him know that the broadcasts were all active. "Hello and welcome to the new examination island. We've improved upon the design significantly, but I'm sure those of you paying attention have noticed some of that already. As is now standard procedure, there will be a day of testing to see if you're worthy of the rank of genin to ensure that you can handle the rigors of the actual examination. As an excuse to let more people see the island, this testing will start at sunrise tomorrow, and will accept anyone who can make their way to the island. Everyone will have until sunset to complete the testing, and those participating in the exams will have until an hour after sunset to submit their paperwork."
He let that sit for a moment, in part so that the broadcast could show when sunrise and sunset were for those watching from elsewhere, before continuing. "This afternoon is a different matter, of course. While it won't be as important for tomorrow's portion of things, anyone continuing on to the chunin testing itself will need to familiarize themselves with the island's map stations. To provide an incentive, your 'first exam on the island' gifts are not being delivered. If you want three single-use meal scrolls, a new weapon pouch with built-in refilling seal, and your choice of one chakra-conducting blade then you will need to go fetch them. The tokens for them can be retrieved from the registration offices, one set per individual registered to take the exams, along with the list of places you will need to travel to in order to redeem them."
Pausing, he looked over the group that appeared ready to bolt out of the arena, before grinning. "If you want to show off, anyone claiming all their gifts in the next two hours can then attempt a skill test for one of Uzushio's deluxe tents as well, though that will require finding the test and accomplishing the task set forth. Good luck."
The genin flowed out of the arena at the obvious dismissal, and it was nice to see that they wouldn't be likely to be marking any of them down for being stupid enough to not feel that the gifts were worth the effort. Some of them already had decent tents though, so not going for it would be less of a concern. Once all the genin were out of the arena, and those who had stopped at the in-arena map stations instead of waiting until they were out of the dome had been noted, he jumped down into the group of leaders and sensei.
"You're making the rest of us look cheap," A noted. "Giving away valuable gifts like this all the time."
"I disagree," Naruto replied. "I'm showing how much Uzushio has available to export. The rest of you just don't have a proper advertising budget for your exports. We even got the meal scrolls to work without chakra at all by rigging them with a pull tab."
"Ruri is going to be disappointed that she isn't old enough to participate," Orochimaru commented, shaking her head. "She's definitely going to show up in the morning no matter what Guren might say otherwise, of course, but not being able to get the gifts is going to have her pouting."
"I anticipated that. Anyone who earns an honorary forehead protector tomorrow and isn't registered for the exams will get their own gifts." He then pulled out a stack of packets. "Anyone want copies of the details on the items mentioned and the price sheets for them?"
He wasn't surprised that all of the packets were claimed, even Shisui grabbing one.
Isato had found the computer maps to be incredibly easy to use, provided you had ever used a computer for anything. Admittedly, in Suna that was probably a rare skill right now. Getting to a registration office, having her exam entrance identification checked, and obtaining the gift tokens had been easy enough. Running around the outside of the island to reach the places with the gifts had been harder and was kind of a test of stamina all on its own, and she'd been surprised that there were choices for every one of them to suit personal tastes, but she'd managed it with enough time to be told the name of the location the skill challenge was in.
...that had turned out to be inside the island. Down into the basement of a building and into a tunnel system, one that wouldn't let her go anywhere but where she was supposed to and was thus trivial to navigate. Eventually this led her to a room with a giant opening along one side, leading outside. With the bulk of the island obviously above them.
"Welcome," a woman with a weird forehead protector called out. "Here to try to earn a tent?"
"Of course," Isato replied.
"You get to choose one of three tests. The easiest is to simply survive jumping to the ocean surface without major injuries. If the medic has to fix broken bones or you need to be fished out of the water because you can't swim then you fail. Next is hitting one of the floating targets from up here with kunai, you'd need to hit three targets with no more than thirty throws. Last is to climb back up the outside of the island to the platform above here, though if you fall off and meet the requirements of jumping then you'll be considered to have passed. Note that the outside of the island is resistant to surface-sticking so you'll be restricted to the handholds available."
Blinking, she moved over to the opening and found that straight down was the ocean...with a platform holding a transport pad off to the side, presumably to get back up. Several floating targets were spread out as well, visible but not all that large. Turning to look up had her grimacing, because it was obvious that the handholds were not going to be easy to use. Luckily she could swim, and had practiced diving from heights.
"Do I need to do anything before jumping?" she asked.
The woman shook her head. "No, if that's the route you want to go then you can jump when ready."
It took a moment to mentally prepare, but when she was ready she jumped. Angling herself for entry was easy enough, and she formed the basic chakra protection on her hands that should let her enter the water more safely. This was much higher than she'd ever done this before though, and she was starting to panic by the time she finally reached the surface. Her chakra did its job and allowed her to not feel like she'd struck solid rock, and she angled herself to come back up where she thought the platform was.
She got that a little too accurate as she slammed into the bottom of the platform and had to make her way out from under it.
"Good job," a man said as she pulled herself onto the platform. He handed her a token. "You can take this to one of the tent shops to claim your tent."
"Thank you," she replied, putting the token in her pocket. "I assume the transport pad will bring me back up to the island."
"Of course, to a dedicated arrival point. Follow the signs."
"Thank you."
Teni grimaced. "Kumin warned that some of the power flows didn't look like they'd be able to handle the draw on a couple of the experimental weapons, but someone decided to prove he was wrong through powering them up."
"I dropped six warnings into the system about that last month."
"You did?"
"Yes, the calculations used to prove they were 'good enough' obviously didn't include the reduced transfer capacity from impurities and what would happen when the power conduits heated up. I got around some of that by not having impurities and I still left a larger safety margin. My designs also include temperature sensors that can cut the flow down to safer levels."
"Huh. That's not a bad idea, and it makes me think that I need to review more than just my personal parts of things more often. You don't feel like the kind of person who considers safety limits on your technology though."
"...I've consistently had wider safety margins on things than Hinata because I never trust that I've gotten things correct. A relatively small fizzle is better than a large explosion you weren't expecting, as the crater we're staring at can attest to."
"Good point."
"Of course, I also test copies of everything at various scales when possible and push them to destruction to see what the failure states are. Had someone built a smaller-scale power conduit and tested it then you might've picked up on some of this yourselves. You can do that with most technology, unlike most seals, though I do realize that not everyone is going to be able to reasonably scale things up one centimeter at a time."
Teni turned to stare at him. "You scale things up a centimeter at a time?"
"Yes. It makes it easier to tell what shouldn't be scaled at all and when I need to start adding relays and contactors too."
"And you test each one to destruction?"
"Well, no. After the first few I only test every tenth or hundredth iteration unless things go wildly out of predictions. Figuring out the prediction curves is admittedly complicated with some technologies. Much easier with seals when you can scale them at all, but I think I'm going to propose new testing rules for everyone going forward."
She flinched at that, probably guessing that she wasn't going to like how comprehensive he made those rules.
Gaara sighed as he looked over the list of potential genin to send to the upcoming Uzushio-hosted chunin exams. It was likely that things were going to be 'spectacular' again, though how much more you could improve upon a flying examination island was another question entirely. Of course, changing out the challenges for completely new ones nobody was expecting would be enough...for everyone else.
If their new island survived then they'd likely use it at least a few times without changing things up significantly, but Uzushio didn't currently feel 'settled' enough to stick to anything that long.
Notice had already gone out that they were going to allow anyone to participate in the 'genin checking' portions, and had provided a list of 'known genin exempt from testing due to previous completions' as well. A surprisingly small list in general, especially as it covered the entirety of the Elemental Nations, but the real annoyance there was that they knew about unadvertised promotions and deaths...and were essentially advertising that the shinobi in question were no longer genin in some fashion through excluding them from the list.
Of course, this was also a reasonably subtle 'reminder' that Uzushio would know if someone tried to sneak someone in that wasn't actually genin rank. Suna's records showed that they'd done that every so often for various reasons and had a few dozen 'believed someone else did it' based on post-exam reviews...but with broadcasting everything there had been some push to ensure that they 'looked good' internationally. Being able to point at Uzushio and rightfully claim that they would likely know and call them out publicly should hopefully be enough to shut those idiots up.
It was also annoyingly impossible to tell if the list of genin eligible to skip the test for being genin had been provided specifically to serve as a warning against sending non-genin, sending a direct and indirect message at the same time.
At least there hadn't been any requests for another exhibition match with Kankuro, even if they'd not actually come off too bad from the last one. How much of that was because they knew that he was still working out the kinks in his latest designs was another question entirely, because they definitely knew that detail. A letter had come just a few days ago with a list of obvious problems and a couple of suggested fixes, entirely unsolicited.
Hinata found Naruto in his office finishing up paperwork. "I thought you'd finished all of that for the day."
He scoffed. "Decided to take care of the latest round of complaints that various divisions have made about the new safety rules for anything experimental."
"Ah. Anyone else I need to talk to in the technology division?"
"Not this round. The only complaint there was a misreading. Lots of stupidity from those making experimental weapons though. If there's a chance of things exploding then you need to have a way to test it safely, but making a funnily-shaped blade with known-good techniques isn't even the right kind of experimental for the new rules to kick in."
"Oh, those idiots. Do you think they're complaining just to get back at you for calling their designs stupid and wasteful?"
"I don't think so, but only because I was able to demonstrate why they were stupid and wasteful on zombies. When the blunt spine of your blade is easier to kill a zombie with than the actual cutting edge then your blade design sucks."
Yeah, that had been a spectacular failure in blade design. "I see."
"Were you looking for me because you thought I was done with paperwork, or because you ran into something you wanted to ask me about?"
"I ran into your testing rules for joint jounin exams."
"...yes?"
"Why are you compiling rules for a joint jounin exam?"
"Because I'm thinking about running one?"
"It was bad enough getting everyone to sign a new chunin exam treaty. Unless you're going to limit things to Konoha and maybe Iwa?"
"Why would a new treaty be needed?"
Hinata sighed. "Because nobody is going to risk attending an exam without one?"
"I think you misunderstood my question. We've already got a treaty that'll cover it, why would we need another one?"
That...what? "When did you push through a jounin exam treaty?"
"I didn't?"
"Then the only exam treaty we have is for the chunin exams."
Naruto snorted. "No, that's the old one. The new one mentions 'chunin' exactly once, and that's in the 'this supersedes the previous joint chunin exam treaty' block. It covers any exam for promotion without naming ranks at all, provides for 'reasonable testing of a reasonable rank to obtain promotion from' as a pre-test, and does not mention any rank otherwise. Officially, that was done so that we can rename or insert new ranks or so that the Land of Iron can host and/or send their people that don't use the genin/chunin/jounin ranking system. In practice it means that anyone can host a joint promotion exam, including in theory for academy students to genin. The list of required areas to test candidates in would make that a bit mean though as generally you don't start on half the skills listed until you're already a shinobi."
"You...convinced everyone to replace a very specific exam treaty with an intentionally generic one?"
"Yes, and that was in the private notes on our end. Didn't share the full justification with allies, but I did include the desire to not mention ranks in a general sense in their briefings."
Okay, she'd known that Naruto had gotten scarily good at the diplomatic side of things, generally through being blunt and throwing out generations of 'traditional bullshit', but she'd not realized just how subtle he'd started being with his manipulations. "Is anyone else going to spot that?"
He shrugged. "If I go through with it then the announcement messages will cite the treaty directly. That should save six or seven waves of others claiming that we can't do that. I've actually got a draft of that part of such an announcement in the appropriate place for such things, if you want to take a look."
Twenty minutes later she was incredibly annoyed because the history of the draft in question indicated that it had been written before treaty negotiations had begun and had only been updated with the final treaty name and signing dates for Uzushio and the 'big five'. Even that was a minor change from the expected name in the original draft and the expected final signing dates had been within two days of the actual dates.
...then she realized that there was a question that she didn't have the answer to, and wasn't sure if she wanted to know. That is, where such an exam would be held, because she knew that even the new exam island was specifically geared towards chunin testing and would be difficult to re-scale some elements safely.
Ganbold scowled as they moved through the trees. How they'd lost all records of the settlement that had repeatedly repelled their forces was a mystery, but several of them had recalled enough to find it again. Except that none of the signs of its presence seemed to remain, somehow, even if several of the natural landmarks used to locate the place were still there. As such, they were obviously in the right place...if you ignored that there was no sign that the group of foreigners had ever existed and their impossible automated weapons were no longer present.
If not for the death records from the attempts against the settlement they'd not have any official proof that it had existed, and even those were...oddly vague. He knew that they'd been far more detailed originally, describing the mechanisms that had killed the men, because he'd personally written several of them. But now they only referred to an unspecified enemy. Some of the men were a bit spooked as a result, wondering if the settlement itself had been a mass hallucination of some kind or a test from the spirits.
He was pulled out of his somewhat circular musings on the settlement by coming to a small clearing...with an obvious gate sitting in a gap in a fence. The gate design wasn't one that he recognized, and it was wildly different from anything that had been seen of the settlement. Two primary vertical posts with two primary horizontal ones and nothing actually barring entry, and not actually connected to the fence itself, but it was obviously denoting a border of some kind. A path beyond the gate led to what looked like stairs going up the side of the mountain.
"I don't like this," Erdem said. "Nothing I remember says that there was anything to speak of on the mountain itself."
"And yet now the settlement is gone and this is here," Ganbold agreed, starting to wonder if the more superstitious men had the right idea after all.
"Even the plants look different on the mountain, as though they're not quite the same species as those on this side of that fence."
That...was a good and yet incredibly disturbing point. He looked back at the men following him. "We're going to explore a bit further, but do not attack anything that does not attack us for now."
The more...violent of his men looked annoyed at that, but all of them nodded. He then led them through the gate, gulping at the seemingly...otherworldly feeling on the other side. As though the very environment around them wanted them to be peaceful, at least a little? And possibly as though the air itself was cleaner than it should be.
Not far up the mountain was another of the gates, the path splitting beyond it. One path went further up, the other looked more like it was going around the mountain. Possibly to a cave? There was another fence and yet another shift in the appearance of the plants to either side of said fence. He signaled his men to stay back for the moment, stepping through the gate...and finding that the otherworldly feeling intensified.
He was nearly ready to call his men forward, feelings be damned, when he spotted something in the trees. Focusing, he realized that it looked like a person in odd clothing...except that they appeared to have a fox tail. And, as their head became more visible, fox ears. That twitched like a fox's would. Gulping, he glanced around and realized that he could see two other foxes watching him...with far more intelligence than foxes should show.
There might be something to the beliefs of the more...superstitious men after all, and he decided that they were not prepared for this. He backed up through the weird gate, gesturing for his men to retreat back down the mountain. They didn't question him, though he wasn't sure if they'd seen the fox person. This had become a 'document what they found so far and let someone else investigate more deeply' situation, especially as so far it didn't seem to be a combat problem. The settlement with the people that might have some information on the flying fortress, or possibly a way to take the fight to it, was missing anyway and might never have existed, as problematic that was for this new situation's potential long-term existence.
Yoko sighed as she settled into her office, finally done with the Land of Demons shrine network. It had taken longer than she'd have liked, and had involved far too much 'putting on a show' prepwork, but all of the shrines Shion had been in charge of were either replaced or removed. In the former case, several of them had the added show of the 'dark chakra' demon they'd been holding being forced out of containment and torn apart by light chakra during the enshrinements.
That alone had very obviously 'sold' the legitimacy of the Land of Shrines to the locals, above and beyond Shion's personal approval. Mortals could contain demons, but the general opinion of the people was that it took more than that to destroy them. Nevermind that the 'demons' seemed to largely be the remains of people who had delved too deeply into dark chakra and lost themselves to it. Nor that most of the 'demons' had been starting to fall apart on their own, possibly because the effects that had been anchoring them had failed.
At this point the running theory was that the bulk of them had only been able to maintain themselves due to the lingering effects of the God Tree and the destruction of it had caused them to start to fade. The exceptions seemed to have stone tablets as anchors instead, and when dealing with the 'body shrine' of Mōryō they'd destroyed such a tablet that had been placed inside of the seal there. Not that said tablet had been 'active' after Mōryō's defeat.
Regardless, she had to go through and double-check records before being unavailable again due to needing to help Naruto with construction tasks. She'd had clones looking over things, but wanted to go back over it all and compare progress notes on training. There had also been an issue with omamori stock that had supposedly been resolved properly by the individual shrines but that she'd not double-checked on yet and possibly a need to order more sealing ink for making the things from Uzushio.
Creating a reliable way of producing that for Shrine Island was proving to be difficult. The process was far too fiddly and even the bulk ink production that Konoha and Uzushio managed had a handful of people monitoring it at all times. Automating it would be nice, but was proving difficult, and it was specialized enough to not be a good fit for shrine maidens to learn to handle. Luckily they had enough money coming in from donations and omamori sales to cover just buying it by the barrel.
Ino sat down to dinner, shaking her head. "Naruto, I know you're busy with moon building prep, but you really need to get around to putting in the rest of the requests for staff for the exams."
Naruto blinked. "I'm reasonably certain I already finished that, and even included extra observers and medical staff."
"...you've barely touched the testing station staff."
"Oh. They're not needed."
Hinata sighed. "What did you do to automate things this time?"
"Sanshi made a breakthrough on some of the automated puppet personality routines, coupled with me figuring out one of the Tome's control systems. Well, I figured out what it does, but my version is still around ten times larger than it's version, but I was able to bury those in the infrastructure instead of needing to put copies in the puppets anyway."
"You're going to do most of the testing with automated puppets."
"Yes, because I was unhappy with Iwa's standards for some of the testing when they rented the previous island. Automated testers means you don't need to worry about most of the staffing and finding those with the right skills and should smooth out the differences between villages running exams on the island. It also means that I can quadruple the number of testing stations without issue and let all of them run overnight."
Ino nodded as she considered that. "And you don't have to dedicate anywhere near as many people to things, leaving Uzushio itself in a better position for continuing to take care of day to day items. The hospital will be seriously reduced in staff, but is rarely stressed and summoning means that medic-nin can be moved around quickly if needed anyway."
"So," Hinata said. "Have you stress-tested the system yet?"
Naruto shrugged. "I threw four times the expected number of testees in clones at it every few days for a few weeks to try and spot problems. None came up, but monitoring things to ensure that everything appears to be going well is part of the reason we're running things instead of renting the new island out first."
That was admittedly a good point, though how the other villages would react to the testing being handled by automatons instead of actual people was another question entirely. Then again, until things had been shaken up the bulk of the villages tested with methods that barely tested candidates at all. Having a method requiring a comparable number of shinobi that did a lot more direct testing would essentially be doing what had been done before, just better.
And Naruto was very good at 'replace what someone else was doing with a better option'.
Onoki looked around at the arrival area for the replacement island, finding that it was very similar to the old one's. A map with multiple arrival pads in the proper places for the countries you might be arriving from, based on how many departure pads were expected to be in use from each of them. This one was circular instead of rectangular though, and included some pads in spots that were further out than expected.
He led the way along the path to the nearest stairs, finding that a legend was sitting next to them. Finding that the new pads corresponded to the area around the Land of Demons. That made sense, given that he knew the Land of Shrines had expanded out that way, though he didn't think that they ran shinobi training like others did. Not that things didn't change over time, of course, and being a bit 'too far away' wasn't a factor anymore.
"Good morning," Naruto greeted, startling some of the group. It had been half-expected though, as the Uzukage was unnervingly stealthy...as were a significant number of his people at this point.
"Morning," Onoki replied, glancing around the area for signs of 'expansion zones'. There seemed to still be plenty for that. "I see there's a wider distribution of possible attendees this time."
"Mostly spectators from the new areas, though I wouldn't put it past some of the shrine maidens or guards to show up for the genin testing phase."
"Ah, yes. Is that going to become a thing that we're all expected to open up to the masses?"
"No, I just figured that people would want a chance to see the new island."
"About that. Reports are that it's...smaller than expected, with far fewer testing areas."
The grin on the blond's face was disturbing. "Reports can be deceiving. We didn't even have to mess with them to accomplish that."
For some, claiming you could mess with someone else's reports would be overestimating your abilities. Unfortunately, not for Uzushio. They were known to be able to do things such as put appointments down in his own handwriting while also trapping his office. Merely 'messing with reports' would be trivial for them. On the other hand, the statement said a number of other things about the island, the biggest being an acknowledgement that the island was deceptively small.
How you made a flying island deceptively small was something that he couldn't figure out though.
Mei looked at the map, frowning. It was a digital screen, which was nice because you could 'search' for specific destinations with the little keyboard under it, but punching in 'arena' had simply returned a 'not currently available' message. "How is the arena not currently available?"
"I have no clue," Ao replied. "Though I note that the meeting time is in two hours and the information provided said that we could head to the arena starting in around ten minutes. Perhaps this is a test of patience?"
"Showing up early is rarely a problem and we're not actually at the testing phase for anything yet."
"Um," one of the genin said, before clamming up. She sighed and turned to the boy, Shatomo, raising her eyebrow to prompt him to continue. He gulped, but held up the sheet he was holding. "The wording implies that we literally can't head to the arena before the time mentioned, though I don't yet know why that would be the case."
She pulled out her own copy and re-read that section, finding that she concurred with the assessment. In fact, now that she was paying it proper attention, it was using standard wording for missions for things such as 'do not arrive before this time'. Except that normally it was a bit more flexible on missions. "Well, that's interesting. I wonder if they've just locked it out of the maps until then or if there's something else going on."
Someone else might've said something, but a horn sounding and lights appearing on the dome that dominated the island interrupted. As a group they moved up to the rooftops, wondering what was going on, and she noted that several other villages had done the same thing nearby. She didn't get a lot of time to process that before movement dropped her into a state of shock, the entire central forest tilting and spinning out of the way...to reveal a larger than she'd expected arena in a safer-looking forest.
"I do believe that Naruto has outdone himself," Ao commented. "Again."
"Several times over," Mei agreed. "Because I know there are animals in the forest that just flipped upside-down, and I highly doubt that they'd be able to handle things suddenly being the wrong way up normally."
"...I hadn't considered that part, but if the island has a giant hole in the middle of it to hold both areas for the dome then everything is likely compressed into a much smaller area."
Somehow she thought that there was a lot more to this trick than the obvious, but they now had an arena to head towards.
Naruto looked out over the group as one of his clones let him know that the broadcasts were all active. "Hello and welcome to the new examination island. We've improved upon the design significantly, but I'm sure those of you paying attention have noticed some of that already. As is now standard procedure, there will be a day of testing to see if you're worthy of the rank of genin to ensure that you can handle the rigors of the actual examination. As an excuse to let more people see the island, this testing will start at sunrise tomorrow, and will accept anyone who can make their way to the island. Everyone will have until sunset to complete the testing, and those participating in the exams will have until an hour after sunset to submit their paperwork."
He let that sit for a moment, in part so that the broadcast could show when sunrise and sunset were for those watching from elsewhere, before continuing. "This afternoon is a different matter, of course. While it won't be as important for tomorrow's portion of things, anyone continuing on to the chunin testing itself will need to familiarize themselves with the island's map stations. To provide an incentive, your 'first exam on the island' gifts are not being delivered. If you want three single-use meal scrolls, a new weapon pouch with built-in refilling seal, and your choice of one chakra-conducting blade then you will need to go fetch them. The tokens for them can be retrieved from the registration offices, one set per individual registered to take the exams, along with the list of places you will need to travel to in order to redeem them."
Pausing, he looked over the group that appeared ready to bolt out of the arena, before grinning. "If you want to show off, anyone claiming all their gifts in the next two hours can then attempt a skill test for one of Uzushio's deluxe tents as well, though that will require finding the test and accomplishing the task set forth. Good luck."
The genin flowed out of the arena at the obvious dismissal, and it was nice to see that they wouldn't be likely to be marking any of them down for being stupid enough to not feel that the gifts were worth the effort. Some of them already had decent tents though, so not going for it would be less of a concern. Once all the genin were out of the arena, and those who had stopped at the in-arena map stations instead of waiting until they were out of the dome had been noted, he jumped down into the group of leaders and sensei.
"You're making the rest of us look cheap," A noted. "Giving away valuable gifts like this all the time."
"I disagree," Naruto replied. "I'm showing how much Uzushio has available to export. The rest of you just don't have a proper advertising budget for your exports. We even got the meal scrolls to work without chakra at all by rigging them with a pull tab."
"Ruri is going to be disappointed that she isn't old enough to participate," Orochimaru commented, shaking her head. "She's definitely going to show up in the morning no matter what Guren might say otherwise, of course, but not being able to get the gifts is going to have her pouting."
"I anticipated that. Anyone who earns an honorary forehead protector tomorrow and isn't registered for the exams will get their own gifts." He then pulled out a stack of packets. "Anyone want copies of the details on the items mentioned and the price sheets for them?"
He wasn't surprised that all of the packets were claimed, even Shisui grabbing one.
Isato had found the computer maps to be incredibly easy to use, provided you had ever used a computer for anything. Admittedly, in Suna that was probably a rare skill right now. Getting to a registration office, having her exam entrance identification checked, and obtaining the gift tokens had been easy enough. Running around the outside of the island to reach the places with the gifts had been harder and was kind of a test of stamina all on its own, and she'd been surprised that there were choices for every one of them to suit personal tastes, but she'd managed it with enough time to be told the name of the location the skill challenge was in.
...that had turned out to be inside the island. Down into the basement of a building and into a tunnel system, one that wouldn't let her go anywhere but where she was supposed to and was thus trivial to navigate. Eventually this led her to a room with a giant opening along one side, leading outside. With the bulk of the island obviously above them.
"Welcome," a woman with a weird forehead protector called out. "Here to try to earn a tent?"
"Of course," Isato replied.
"You get to choose one of three tests. The easiest is to simply survive jumping to the ocean surface without major injuries. If the medic has to fix broken bones or you need to be fished out of the water because you can't swim then you fail. Next is hitting one of the floating targets from up here with kunai, you'd need to hit three targets with no more than thirty throws. Last is to climb back up the outside of the island to the platform above here, though if you fall off and meet the requirements of jumping then you'll be considered to have passed. Note that the outside of the island is resistant to surface-sticking so you'll be restricted to the handholds available."
Blinking, she moved over to the opening and found that straight down was the ocean...with a platform holding a transport pad off to the side, presumably to get back up. Several floating targets were spread out as well, visible but not all that large. Turning to look up had her grimacing, because it was obvious that the handholds were not going to be easy to use. Luckily she could swim, and had practiced diving from heights.
"Do I need to do anything before jumping?" she asked.
The woman shook her head. "No, if that's the route you want to go then you can jump when ready."
It took a moment to mentally prepare, but when she was ready she jumped. Angling herself for entry was easy enough, and she formed the basic chakra protection on her hands that should let her enter the water more safely. This was much higher than she'd ever done this before though, and she was starting to panic by the time she finally reached the surface. Her chakra did its job and allowed her to not feel like she'd struck solid rock, and she angled herself to come back up where she thought the platform was.
She got that a little too accurate as she slammed into the bottom of the platform and had to make her way out from under it.
"Good job," a man said as she pulled herself onto the platform. He handed her a token. "You can take this to one of the tent shops to claim your tent."
"Thank you," she replied, putting the token in her pocket. "I assume the transport pad will bring me back up to the island."
"Of course, to a dedicated arrival point. Follow the signs."
"Thank you."
- Location
- poland
New Moon second function - Jounin Exam grounds?
And the truly terrifying thing about that, for the candidates at least, is the exam is mostly paperwork.
The first portion of the exam is: The Desk Job. Finish all the paperwork before more piles up on you.
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- Location
- Deep in the Badlands of Equestria
And Naruto continues proving just how much attention to detail he gives Q.C. testing for any project he is even slightly involved with. As well as still doing everything possible to make others convinced he isn't actually pushing that hard to stay on top of everything.
And once again Uzushio is piling on so much razzle dazzle that no one has any real chance of separating actual action from things that are being set up purely for distractions.
Though, it looks like at least some of the Kage are starting to expect to be shocked every time any interaction with Uzushio takes place.
And once again Uzushio is piling on so much razzle dazzle that no one has any real chance of separating actual action from things that are being set up purely for distractions.
Though, it looks like at least some of the Kage are starting to expect to be shocked every time any interaction with Uzushio takes place.
- Location
- USA somewhere
Battle on the Moon for the chance of advancement
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
New broadcasted event: the KoN Tournament! (Kage of Ninja) Fortunately, unlike most similarly named fighting events it's not a tournament ran by a would be supervillain.
The first test is getting there, unassisted.
either that or at as a defence satellite for their world, or possibly both XD, but yeah i expect naruto and uzushio to be soon putting planetary defence satellite's into orbit to defend against possible hostiles
I kind of geting the fealing that thos islands could attleast extrema stratosphere/lov orbital defens plattforms in a pinch
Naruto: "Don't be ridiculous. No, it's not a planetary defence satellite, it's a moon. That makes it a lunar defence satellite. The planetary ones go further out, and orbit the sun."
Chapter 101 - Open Genin Testing, Take Two
Naruto looked over at the screen scrolling through running tallies of participants from each region. This time they didn't have any shrine maidens or helpers coming through, Yoko having impressed upon them that they didn't need to show off more than anything else, but there were a lot of students and civilians. The Land of Fire also had a bunch of satellite village shinobi showing up to prove that they could handle the testing, having intentionally made the trip to either Konoha or the capital to get to a transport pad.
All of the counts were broken out into registered shinobi, student, and civilian categories and was keeping track of those who were in each stage, had passed a stage, or had failed at a stage. The chakra meter test was currently the highest failure rate for civilians and the 'written' test was tripping up students with the international travel questions, but they'd just gotten started. Nobody had even reached the fifth test yet, and he'd put in ten total this time. Eleven if you counted the initial 'reach the island' component.
Still, all the village leaders and a good portion of the higher-ranked sensei were also running through things. This left him with no meetings for the day, so he was going to shortly return to working on preparing construction items. Building things ahead of time for something as large as a moon was far more time-consuming than he'd like.
Shisui had decided to give the genin testing a shot this time, mostly because he'd been teased about skipping it previously but also because he was eligible for whatever 'gifts' were going to be handed out. He obviously had no problems with his chakra levels, wondered if the pain-generating seal was set lower than before, and was a little embarrassed to admit that he'd needed to think about one of the questions on the written exam. To his credit it was a reasonably new change to things implemented due to the transport pads and he'd not done much traveling with them that would normally apply.
He was a little weirded out by the island's digital maps though. He had to loop around the island to a specific point on the far side of the central forest, which was back to being the dangerous forest instead of the arena today, and every map he got close to popped up with an indicator telling him that he was going the right direction. Stopping a distance away from one showed that it did the same for a civilian obviously participating in things, making him wonder how Naruto and/or Uzushio's technology division had pulled that off.
It also had him feeling jealous, because if the island was able to track everyone within it that easily then it was likely that all of Uzushio's other facilities could too. Automatic tracking of everyone, even if only applied to secure areas, would be an incredible security boon. Knowing where everyone was supposed to be going was the best part of it though, and he hoped that it could be applied to things like automatic unlocking of doors you should be going through and only those doors...when not using access cards, anyway.
As for the actual trip, he suspected that most civilians could make it if they pushed themselves a little. He'd barely needed a quarter of the time even with his quick stop to observe others.
Kushi had reviewed the information gathered through the combined intelligence networks of the Land of Shrines, Konohagakure, and Uzushiogakure on the five people wanting healing blessings today. Even without that she could feel that one of them was far too 'evil' for her tastes...and wondered why it was that was so obvious to her. She was reasonably certain that she'd shivered when he'd set foot on the shrine's grounds, despite not being there to watch him do so. Yoko claimed that this kind of reaction was probably due to people like him being subconsciously 'in tune' with dark chakra, but Shion's explanation was that a proper priest or priestess could sense evil.
Being in his presence was worse, but she had to put on a good show. He was a minor daimyo, after all, no matter what atrocities he was paying people to perform in the name of his greed.
"You have come asking for a blessing of healing," Kushi said to the five. "Be warned that if the gods do not find you worthy then the healing may not take, or they may enact their own punishment on you."
None of the five seemed worried about that, and the Fire Daimyo nodded as this was part of the script. She then moved down the line of them, forming a medical chakra Rasengan with light chakra mixed in for a purple sphere and pressing it into their chests. First the woman who had been injured and told that she'd never be able to have children, then a man who had lost all feeling in his left arm. Two of the shrine maidens that were better at medical diagnosis, nurses or so in level, had come over to bring the woman to an examination room at that point.
Kushi continued though, with a man who had gone blind in one eye being next. The next Rasengan she made was made with a medical scalpel base, looking identical despite being far deadlier, and was pressed into the minor daimyo's chest. He'd claimed joint pain from an old injury, but wouldn't have that problem anymore. She was back to a normal medical chakra base for the last man, who had been attacked by a wild animal and had deep infections the doctors didn't think they could help him with.
The minor daimyo had taken a few seconds to fall over, obviously dead, even as the other three men had started to comment about feeling much better. At least until they realized that there was a dead man among them now and quieted down.
"It appears that he wasn't worthy," Kushi said with a properly mournful tone, despite the man's death making the shrine feel cleaner to her. A couple of the other shrine maidens were obviously scrambling to gather items for moving the apparently-unexpected corpse, even though they'd all been informed of this during their morning meeting.
Having it obvious that they hadn't expected a death today was important, but spending too long trying to find the things they needed would create an entirely different problem for how they were perceived.
The Fire Daimyo took some time to recover himself, carefully moving over. "He...what would have made him unworthy?"
Kushi sighed. "I cannot say, though perhaps his family or advisors will be able to find out if he had particularly dark secrets? They would be able to determine things better than I can."
Fat chance of that, given how detailed the information brief was, but admitting that the Land of Shrines had access to that kind of thing would be insane.
Mei wasn't positive, but thought that Uzushio might've dropped their overall genin standards slightly. Either that or she'd improved more than she thought she had, which was possible. Though she'd been surprised when after running around the island she'd been tasked with proving she could consciously use her chakra. Any technique that was obviously performed with chakra, including bodily reinforcement or boosting of your physical abilities. The latter had to obviously be beyond what happened just because you had chakra though.
She'd easily handled that, of course.
Now she was considering two different things. One was that there were samurai in the mix this time, despite the Land of Iron not officially taking part in the full exams, and at least three she could see had made it past the using chakra stage. The other was that there was nowhere on the island to do the bulk of the chunin testing that Konoha and Uzushio had pioneered...which either meant doing something entirely new despite the treaty changes or that there was something else about the island that hadn't been revealed yet.
Personally, she was betting on the latter. Genin had supposedly wandered down into the innards of the island for their skill challenge yesterday, so who knew how much more was hiding down there.
She was pulled out of her musing when her turn came up, those registered for the exams having a priority queue that had delayed them slightly. Walking into the next room, which was larger than she'd expected and seemingly too large for the building they were in, she frowned slightly as she considered the forehead protector on the test's proctor. Six circles, a large one surrounded by five smaller ones. It wasn't the symbol of any village she knew of, yet all of the individual test proctors had one so far and the genin had commented on that being the case for their 'gifts' yesterday as well.
"This is a hand-to-hand combat test," the man said. "To pass you need to defeat all your opponents up to the yellow line before the timer hits zero. You can choose to continue to the orange and red lines if you wish to, but are forbidden from using weapons or visible attack techniques. Alternatively, you use weapons and techniques, but need to defeat all enemies in half the time and will be penalized for damage done to the surroundings."
Examining the area behind him, she noted that there was a white line that seemed like it was the edge of the 'testing area'. Halfway between that and the yellow line was a green line. "Crossing each line is a new difficulty level, I assume?"
"That's correct."
"Then let's get started."
He nodded and stepped off to the side. She wondered if there was a hidden control panel, only for zombies to suddenly pull themselves up out of the floor. Five in the first area, twenty in the second, and then it looked like thirty or so in each of the third and fourth areas. Screens in the walls lit up and displayed a countdown timer...that wasn't running yet. A gesture from him had her realizing that the timer would likely start when she crossed the line.
Mentally shrugging, she darted forward and took a slightly zig-zagging path to take off the heads of all five zombies in the first area. She then discovered that the second area wasn't just more zombies, but more skilled zombies. One of them had even managed to dodge her first, admittedly sloppy, punch. Cleaning up her form and pushing a little more chakra into her legs let her push though all of them, and when the last one fell a time appeared on the screens. She continued into the third area and found that these were probably mid-genin to low-chunin level, still trivial to deal with, and the last area were all solidly chunin level in their hand-to-hand skills.
When she was done she looked up at the screens and grinned. Well under half the allotted time, but under the constraints for only taking out the first two groups to pass.
Orochimaru sighed as she walked to the next testing station, annoyed with her performance so far due to odd fluctuations in her chakra control. She'd given herself a quick check-up a couple of days ago and found nothing obviously wrong, but had long known that having a different medic check on you was far more reliable. Especially for issues affecting your chakra control, which your lack of control might prevent you from spotting. Maybe she'd get lucky and find that Tsunade was working in the on-island hospital for the bulk of the exams? As annoying as her former teammate could be at times, she was very thorough with examinations.
Whatever the cause, it had caused a fizzle on a low-powered technique during the 'can you use chakra' test, but luckily you only needed to prove that you could use chakra in a specific time window. Switching to a less-fiddly but more powerful technique had been enough, if annoying to keep from damaging the room with. She was still unsure how the room fit into the building it was in though, as she'd ended up on the third floor and the room seemed to be larger than the building itself. Perhaps there had been seals involved that she'd not noticed?
Spotting Guren in the distance, she nodded to herself as that definitely confirmed that Ruri was somewhere on the island. There were far too many people with chakra to feel out individual signatures at any significant distance, on top of the entire island itself having its own overpowering feel masking weaker signatures. Ruri was now able to be left mostly on her own anyway, provided that she'd not had too many nuts from the chipmunks recently, and today had been anticipated and planned for on that front. Guren was mostly tasked with keeping the girl from going a bit too far with experiments at this point, and that experimenting wouldn't be happening here anyway. Perhaps they'd meet up and have dinner together after they were all done with their testing?
She paused and turned to look at the map screen she'd been passing. It was telling her where her next testing station was, which was honestly incredible monitoring capability that implied nobody was going to be going anywhere they weren't supposed to on this iteration of the island, but also where the hospital was. Had something spotted her using medical chakra to check herself?
Yoko frowned as she looked over an alert. It seemed that their guesses for when they'd get another visiting group at the shrine on the other continent had been wrong as a group had tripped the outer perimeter array and was on approach. Much faster than expected, so someone must've decided that this was a priority. Or perhaps they just wanted to get those sent to investigate more deeply out of their hair. Whatever the case, she'd need to take a nap this afternoon so that she was fully awake in the middle of the night for when the group arrived there early in the morning.
It was annoying enough working across a single continent with the differences in sunrise and sunset times. Adding in other continents was proving to be annoying. Sadly, the automated 'shrine keeper' system wasn't good enough for the deeper interactions expected of curious and clueless visitors. Without a full local computer system it couldn't even fill in for shrine maidens in the most basic of interactions with visitors and the entire current generation of things wasn't that great at dealing with completely unexpected questions.
Naruto had to have the exam island's systems monitored by a small team that could provide answers to such questions if they came up. They had no such system set up for Shrine Island or the other continent's outpost, and only five people that even properly understood the language spoken in that part of the continent. Other parts of the continent had enough interaction with the Elemental Nations via merchants right now to make the language barrier less of an issue, but Yoko was the only one directly affiliated with the shrines that could likely communicate with these visitors.
Training shrine maidens or a potential permanent priestess, or priest, for the outpost was going to be problematic from that point of view alone.
Still, there were things that they'd been working on that had been put into place. Specifically, signage in the local language explaining some details about how to properly interact with a shrine, which gods were enshrined there and why they were important, and warnings about violence on the shrine grounds. She instructed the shrine keeper system to double-check all that signage, just in case, so that she'd know if she needed to start with replacing any of it after her nap.
A was much happier with his performance with kunai and shuriken today, compared to his first evaluation of genin testing, though hadn't expected the follow-up test to see if you knew how to take care of your weapons. It was a critical, if frequently overlooked, skill and he was honestly happy that it had been included. At the same time, he wasn't surprised that it had obviously tripped up some civilians that had likely never needed to properly maintain an actual weapon. They'd...done decently enough, based on tool maintenance, but not well enough.
That a couple of samurai had sat down with a small group of said civilians to teach them properly after seeing them fail was mostly notable in that they'd beaten several shinobi to the punch. Seeing anyone disrespect weapons that badly was annoying, and it was very likely that anyone who specialized in weapon use would've wanted to correct the group.
Still, that left him able to continue on, and based on the flag he'd been given he suspected that there was a tower to climb. That hadn't been outright stated, but seemed reasonably obvious based on the previous time he'd done this. Following the prompts of the map screens was simple enough though, and it wasn't long before he came to...a small park? Looking up, there was a platform floating in the air above the park, with not-quite-taut ropes leading down to several of the trees.
Apparently 'walk or climb up a tower' was too pedestrian for Uzushio these days.
Shrugging, he moved into the trees to see how the ropes were anchored. They seemed to be solidly attached to a ring that was solidly anchored in the tree, too solidly really. There had to be a bar or something embedded in the tree itself for this. However it was done, he started walking up the rope anyway, a combination of balance and surface-sticking making it trivial for him. Halfway up he paused as a young...chipmunk girl? She scurried up one of the other ropes at high speed, swapping her flag, and then diving down another rope. Despite her age, she'd moved almost like she was on flat ground, which was honestly impressive. He also thought she looked familiar, but wasn't sure where from.
Shaking his head, he continued his more leisurely walk up to the platform. It was surprisingly stable in the air, as though fixed in place and not floating, and swapping his flag was easy enough. Instead of going down one of the ropes he instead flipped over to the underside of the platform, partially out of curiosity if there was something hard to see holding it there, but found nothing before he dropped down to the ground with a gentle flip to land on his feet.
As he walked away he noticed that one of his own genin was moving up the rope by essentially climbing it instead of balancing and using surface-sticking...but then again, the rope wasn't taut enough to overcome balance issues. If you weren't confident you could stay on top then it made more sense to do things that way, and the previous towers had handholds for those unsure of their ability to use surface-sticking to get up the towers as well.
Mifune was finding the genin testing both easier than expected and much harder than expected. It was very obviously not designed around being in full armor in particular, but very few shinobi wore full armor and instead relied on the improved mobility not wearing such protections granted them. This affected the comfort of the written test and the combined stamina and endurance test quite a bit and served as a major hindrance to getting up to the impossibly-floating platform.
That his people still weren't used to using chakra as freely as shinobi did was another matter, of course. The overall attitude was changing, with a larger number of utility techniques now in use, but anything 'deceptive' was still looked at as dishonorable. They were starting to use surface-sticking and water-walking quite a bit more than they used to though, and elemental techniques that didn't rely on a weapon were starting to pick up in popularity as well. Illusions of any kind were currently being ignored, but non-illusionary clones were a topic of interest.
Arriving at the point to turn in his flag, he glanced at the monitors there showing progress. He already knew that probably half of his people had failed at the fifth test where obvious use of chakra had to be demonstrated, but was a little annoyed at how many had failed at the following zombie elimination as well. Then again, samurai rarely practiced fighting without any weapons at all and the last group of zombies had been surprisingly skilled at dodging. Most of those who had reached the flag-swapping had succeeded though.
He was given a new destination by the woman behind the counter for the last test though, so thanked her for her time and moved on.
Ruri was happy that she'd made it through all of the tests so far and knew that this was the last one before she was done. But there was a line, and she wasn't participating in the chunin exams, so anyone who was got priority. Which would be a lot less annoying if a bunch hadn't been sent to this particular testing station. She was distracting herself from the annoyance by trying to figure out how every building she'd entered today seemed to be larger on the inside than the outside would imply.
She wasn't figuring much out there. Seals could store things inside of them, and could make openings smaller, but she'd never seen anything that said they could make the inside of something bigger. Unless the building had been built bigger and then seals had been used to make it smaller? But that seemed far too dangerous because of what would happen if the seals failed and the building was suddenly full-size again. Plus the only seals she'd seen able to make things smaller only worked on openings.
...but she and Orochimaru-mama weren't very good with seals. Maybe they just didn't know enough?
"Ruri," the man at the desk called, snapping her out of her thoughts. A moment later she'd moved down the hall to her assigned room. The door was open, though closed behind her when she entered.
"Your final test is to make it through the next room in under ten minutes," the woman in the room said, gesturing at another door. "If you retreat back through this room then you fail."
Ruri nodded, then opened the door and stepped through. She found herself faced with three large cats. Her first instinct was to jump back out of the room, but stopped when part of her screamed that would be failing.
She was not going to fail again!
It was obvious that the cats were guarding the door at the other end of the room, and they were focused on her. Going up and over was probably not going to work, but she darted to the side and went up the wall anyway. They were less...
Her train of thought was obliterated by one of the cats chasing her up the wall. She sped up, continuing across the ceiling and darting around the lights with the cat following her, before finally recalling that she had kunai and a sword. One of the former was pulled out just in time to throw it into the face of one of the other two cats that had tried going up one of the other walls to get ahead of her.
Swinging around one of the lights, she pulled the small sword out and used it to block an attempt at getting her with claws, then pushed back towards the cat and cut its head mostly off. She then swung down under the lights, diving at the last of the three cats. Twisting in mid-air let her dodge a lunge and she put the sword through the cat's side, tumbling as she did so and landing on her tail. The cat didn't get back up though, and she collected the one kunai she'd thrown before leaving out the back door...to come out in the room she'd left? Or maybe the woman had just gone around some other way.
"Good job," the woman said. "You can claim your forehead protector from any of the registration desks."
"Thank you," Ruri replied, wondering how long it was going to take her heart to stop feeling like it was trying to escape her chest.
Naruto looked over the sizable crowd that had gathered on the edge of the island, in what was ostensibly a park with a great view off the edge of the island. This one held the village leaders, including Mifune, as well as the chunin exam hopefuls and their sensei. The other four 'parks' had clones and held the rest of those that had made it through things.
"Congratulations to those of you who passed today's testing," he said. "As promised, those of you who are not participating in the rest of the exams will be receiving a prize. Those in the other four gathering points will be able to visit the shops on the island for two free meal scrolls and a weapon pouch, as can those other than the village leaders here. For those concerned about how useful a weapon pouch will be to them, it should also trivially hold various tools and the storage seals in them are food-grade so you can even use them as a snack pouch instead."
"Now I kind of want one," Mei half-mumbled.
Ignoring that, he continued. "But that brings up the question of what I'm giving your leaders, and the answer to that is in the boxes behind us." He gestured at a table with boxes, each a little over thirty centimeters tall. "One for each leader, they're all the same so no need to worry about who gets which one."
He waited as all of the boxes were claimed, and then on unspoken agreement they all opened them together. Inside each found a scale model of the island set on a stand with a small set of controls. All of the leaders looked a little confused, though the controls were still 'locked'.
"I'm not sure what we'd want with a decorative copy of the island," Onoki commented.
"Ah," Naruto said. "Right now they're all synchronized to the island's current state."
"Okay?"
Horns suddenly going off startled everyone. The dome in the middle of the island, and the domes on all the models, lit up with warning lights. Then the doors on the sides of the models opened up, startling those holding them, and the platforms started to emerge. It took a few minutes for the entire deployment process to happen, causing shock in all five areas outside of those from Uzushio, and then the domes on the five platforms deployed so that they could flip to individual elemental areas.
"First thing in the morning the chunin exams themselves begin," Naruto said. "And we need plenty of room for everyone to get their testing in." He then turned to the leaders. "In an hour your models will finish powering up and you'll be able to turn off the synchronization so that you can play with configurations."
The looks on their faces, especially the few that had obviously realized that the models could not possibly have held the platforms with normal physics just as the island couldn't have, were quite amusing.
Onoki looked over the model of the exam island, which as promised had unlocked and was now able to be customized instead of staying in sync with the real one. There was a button to retract the five outer platforms, dials to pick the environment for each platform and central dome, and a toggle switch to change back to mirroring the real island. An instruction booklet, that doubled as a description of the island's actual capabilities for 'if you want to rent it' purposes, that the models were as much for planning purposes as anything else, allowing them to play with layouts they might want to use.
Just the model was plainly impossible, let alone the island itself, and the combined implications for what Uzushio could do were worrying. At the same time, it was obvious that a less-significant version of the tricks needed had been used on most of the island's buildings as you'd need things to be much bigger on the inside than the outside to make any of this possible.
He was pulled out of his musing by Kurotsuchi coming in. "I've got an initial report from the science-types."
"Oh?" he asked.
"They think that Uzushio figured out how to build things in four physical dimensions instead of three. Maybe five."
"...I have no idea what that means."
She dropped a very thick stack of paper on his desk. "This is supposedly the short explanation, pulled from archives, though they've promised a summary in the next three days."
"Doubt I'll understand the summary either."
"I'd say that was a sign that it was time to retire if I thought I had any hope of understanding it."
"Might retire to leave all this insanity to you anyway."
"And I'm not sure I want the job right now."
"Which is, ironically enough, a sign that you're more ready for it than you were before."
"At least we have a better clue about all the proctors with the weird forehead protectors. They're indicating affiliation with the island instead of Uzushio."
He snorted and grabbed the book on the island, flipping to the right chapter. It took a moment to find the page he wanted. "Take a look at this."
She took the book and glanced over the page, then obviously stopped and started reading it more carefully. "They're all puppets of some kind?"
"Apparently. With a small team of observers that also act as question-checkers for when the automated control system has no answer for a question that someone asked them. Their use comes standard with renting the island, drastically reducing the number of shinobi needed to run an examination cycle."
"Uzushio automated examinations?"
"Not entirely. You still need observer teams, medics, and a few proctors for specific things."
"But...even a minor village could probably run...oh. That's the point, isn't it?"
He nodded. "They've negated the 'only major villages can run exams' problem by removing ninety percent of the things the minor villages don't have available. There's a claim in there that this also helps ensure that anyone using the island can meet minimum standards for testing, which is hard to disagree with. When we rented the previous iteration we couldn't run things nearly as well due to not dedicating as many shinobi to running testing stations."
She flipped through the small book, checking other areas, before closing it and sighing. "They're determined to scream that they're moving along faster than anyone has any hope of catching up with."
"Honestly? I think Naruto just doesn't know when to take a vacation."
All of the counts were broken out into registered shinobi, student, and civilian categories and was keeping track of those who were in each stage, had passed a stage, or had failed at a stage. The chakra meter test was currently the highest failure rate for civilians and the 'written' test was tripping up students with the international travel questions, but they'd just gotten started. Nobody had even reached the fifth test yet, and he'd put in ten total this time. Eleven if you counted the initial 'reach the island' component.
Still, all the village leaders and a good portion of the higher-ranked sensei were also running through things. This left him with no meetings for the day, so he was going to shortly return to working on preparing construction items. Building things ahead of time for something as large as a moon was far more time-consuming than he'd like.
Shisui had decided to give the genin testing a shot this time, mostly because he'd been teased about skipping it previously but also because he was eligible for whatever 'gifts' were going to be handed out. He obviously had no problems with his chakra levels, wondered if the pain-generating seal was set lower than before, and was a little embarrassed to admit that he'd needed to think about one of the questions on the written exam. To his credit it was a reasonably new change to things implemented due to the transport pads and he'd not done much traveling with them that would normally apply.
He was a little weirded out by the island's digital maps though. He had to loop around the island to a specific point on the far side of the central forest, which was back to being the dangerous forest instead of the arena today, and every map he got close to popped up with an indicator telling him that he was going the right direction. Stopping a distance away from one showed that it did the same for a civilian obviously participating in things, making him wonder how Naruto and/or Uzushio's technology division had pulled that off.
It also had him feeling jealous, because if the island was able to track everyone within it that easily then it was likely that all of Uzushio's other facilities could too. Automatic tracking of everyone, even if only applied to secure areas, would be an incredible security boon. Knowing where everyone was supposed to be going was the best part of it though, and he hoped that it could be applied to things like automatic unlocking of doors you should be going through and only those doors...when not using access cards, anyway.
As for the actual trip, he suspected that most civilians could make it if they pushed themselves a little. He'd barely needed a quarter of the time even with his quick stop to observe others.
Kushi had reviewed the information gathered through the combined intelligence networks of the Land of Shrines, Konohagakure, and Uzushiogakure on the five people wanting healing blessings today. Even without that she could feel that one of them was far too 'evil' for her tastes...and wondered why it was that was so obvious to her. She was reasonably certain that she'd shivered when he'd set foot on the shrine's grounds, despite not being there to watch him do so. Yoko claimed that this kind of reaction was probably due to people like him being subconsciously 'in tune' with dark chakra, but Shion's explanation was that a proper priest or priestess could sense evil.
Being in his presence was worse, but she had to put on a good show. He was a minor daimyo, after all, no matter what atrocities he was paying people to perform in the name of his greed.
"You have come asking for a blessing of healing," Kushi said to the five. "Be warned that if the gods do not find you worthy then the healing may not take, or they may enact their own punishment on you."
None of the five seemed worried about that, and the Fire Daimyo nodded as this was part of the script. She then moved down the line of them, forming a medical chakra Rasengan with light chakra mixed in for a purple sphere and pressing it into their chests. First the woman who had been injured and told that she'd never be able to have children, then a man who had lost all feeling in his left arm. Two of the shrine maidens that were better at medical diagnosis, nurses or so in level, had come over to bring the woman to an examination room at that point.
Kushi continued though, with a man who had gone blind in one eye being next. The next Rasengan she made was made with a medical scalpel base, looking identical despite being far deadlier, and was pressed into the minor daimyo's chest. He'd claimed joint pain from an old injury, but wouldn't have that problem anymore. She was back to a normal medical chakra base for the last man, who had been attacked by a wild animal and had deep infections the doctors didn't think they could help him with.
The minor daimyo had taken a few seconds to fall over, obviously dead, even as the other three men had started to comment about feeling much better. At least until they realized that there was a dead man among them now and quieted down.
"It appears that he wasn't worthy," Kushi said with a properly mournful tone, despite the man's death making the shrine feel cleaner to her. A couple of the other shrine maidens were obviously scrambling to gather items for moving the apparently-unexpected corpse, even though they'd all been informed of this during their morning meeting.
Having it obvious that they hadn't expected a death today was important, but spending too long trying to find the things they needed would create an entirely different problem for how they were perceived.
The Fire Daimyo took some time to recover himself, carefully moving over. "He...what would have made him unworthy?"
Kushi sighed. "I cannot say, though perhaps his family or advisors will be able to find out if he had particularly dark secrets? They would be able to determine things better than I can."
Fat chance of that, given how detailed the information brief was, but admitting that the Land of Shrines had access to that kind of thing would be insane.
Mei wasn't positive, but thought that Uzushio might've dropped their overall genin standards slightly. Either that or she'd improved more than she thought she had, which was possible. Though she'd been surprised when after running around the island she'd been tasked with proving she could consciously use her chakra. Any technique that was obviously performed with chakra, including bodily reinforcement or boosting of your physical abilities. The latter had to obviously be beyond what happened just because you had chakra though.
She'd easily handled that, of course.
Now she was considering two different things. One was that there were samurai in the mix this time, despite the Land of Iron not officially taking part in the full exams, and at least three she could see had made it past the using chakra stage. The other was that there was nowhere on the island to do the bulk of the chunin testing that Konoha and Uzushio had pioneered...which either meant doing something entirely new despite the treaty changes or that there was something else about the island that hadn't been revealed yet.
Personally, she was betting on the latter. Genin had supposedly wandered down into the innards of the island for their skill challenge yesterday, so who knew how much more was hiding down there.
She was pulled out of her musing when her turn came up, those registered for the exams having a priority queue that had delayed them slightly. Walking into the next room, which was larger than she'd expected and seemingly too large for the building they were in, she frowned slightly as she considered the forehead protector on the test's proctor. Six circles, a large one surrounded by five smaller ones. It wasn't the symbol of any village she knew of, yet all of the individual test proctors had one so far and the genin had commented on that being the case for their 'gifts' yesterday as well.
"This is a hand-to-hand combat test," the man said. "To pass you need to defeat all your opponents up to the yellow line before the timer hits zero. You can choose to continue to the orange and red lines if you wish to, but are forbidden from using weapons or visible attack techniques. Alternatively, you use weapons and techniques, but need to defeat all enemies in half the time and will be penalized for damage done to the surroundings."
Examining the area behind him, she noted that there was a white line that seemed like it was the edge of the 'testing area'. Halfway between that and the yellow line was a green line. "Crossing each line is a new difficulty level, I assume?"
"That's correct."
"Then let's get started."
He nodded and stepped off to the side. She wondered if there was a hidden control panel, only for zombies to suddenly pull themselves up out of the floor. Five in the first area, twenty in the second, and then it looked like thirty or so in each of the third and fourth areas. Screens in the walls lit up and displayed a countdown timer...that wasn't running yet. A gesture from him had her realizing that the timer would likely start when she crossed the line.
Mentally shrugging, she darted forward and took a slightly zig-zagging path to take off the heads of all five zombies in the first area. She then discovered that the second area wasn't just more zombies, but more skilled zombies. One of them had even managed to dodge her first, admittedly sloppy, punch. Cleaning up her form and pushing a little more chakra into her legs let her push though all of them, and when the last one fell a time appeared on the screens. She continued into the third area and found that these were probably mid-genin to low-chunin level, still trivial to deal with, and the last area were all solidly chunin level in their hand-to-hand skills.
When she was done she looked up at the screens and grinned. Well under half the allotted time, but under the constraints for only taking out the first two groups to pass.
Orochimaru sighed as she walked to the next testing station, annoyed with her performance so far due to odd fluctuations in her chakra control. She'd given herself a quick check-up a couple of days ago and found nothing obviously wrong, but had long known that having a different medic check on you was far more reliable. Especially for issues affecting your chakra control, which your lack of control might prevent you from spotting. Maybe she'd get lucky and find that Tsunade was working in the on-island hospital for the bulk of the exams? As annoying as her former teammate could be at times, she was very thorough with examinations.
Whatever the cause, it had caused a fizzle on a low-powered technique during the 'can you use chakra' test, but luckily you only needed to prove that you could use chakra in a specific time window. Switching to a less-fiddly but more powerful technique had been enough, if annoying to keep from damaging the room with. She was still unsure how the room fit into the building it was in though, as she'd ended up on the third floor and the room seemed to be larger than the building itself. Perhaps there had been seals involved that she'd not noticed?
Spotting Guren in the distance, she nodded to herself as that definitely confirmed that Ruri was somewhere on the island. There were far too many people with chakra to feel out individual signatures at any significant distance, on top of the entire island itself having its own overpowering feel masking weaker signatures. Ruri was now able to be left mostly on her own anyway, provided that she'd not had too many nuts from the chipmunks recently, and today had been anticipated and planned for on that front. Guren was mostly tasked with keeping the girl from going a bit too far with experiments at this point, and that experimenting wouldn't be happening here anyway. Perhaps they'd meet up and have dinner together after they were all done with their testing?
She paused and turned to look at the map screen she'd been passing. It was telling her where her next testing station was, which was honestly incredible monitoring capability that implied nobody was going to be going anywhere they weren't supposed to on this iteration of the island, but also where the hospital was. Had something spotted her using medical chakra to check herself?
Yoko frowned as she looked over an alert. It seemed that their guesses for when they'd get another visiting group at the shrine on the other continent had been wrong as a group had tripped the outer perimeter array and was on approach. Much faster than expected, so someone must've decided that this was a priority. Or perhaps they just wanted to get those sent to investigate more deeply out of their hair. Whatever the case, she'd need to take a nap this afternoon so that she was fully awake in the middle of the night for when the group arrived there early in the morning.
It was annoying enough working across a single continent with the differences in sunrise and sunset times. Adding in other continents was proving to be annoying. Sadly, the automated 'shrine keeper' system wasn't good enough for the deeper interactions expected of curious and clueless visitors. Without a full local computer system it couldn't even fill in for shrine maidens in the most basic of interactions with visitors and the entire current generation of things wasn't that great at dealing with completely unexpected questions.
Naruto had to have the exam island's systems monitored by a small team that could provide answers to such questions if they came up. They had no such system set up for Shrine Island or the other continent's outpost, and only five people that even properly understood the language spoken in that part of the continent. Other parts of the continent had enough interaction with the Elemental Nations via merchants right now to make the language barrier less of an issue, but Yoko was the only one directly affiliated with the shrines that could likely communicate with these visitors.
Training shrine maidens or a potential permanent priestess, or priest, for the outpost was going to be problematic from that point of view alone.
Still, there were things that they'd been working on that had been put into place. Specifically, signage in the local language explaining some details about how to properly interact with a shrine, which gods were enshrined there and why they were important, and warnings about violence on the shrine grounds. She instructed the shrine keeper system to double-check all that signage, just in case, so that she'd know if she needed to start with replacing any of it after her nap.
A was much happier with his performance with kunai and shuriken today, compared to his first evaluation of genin testing, though hadn't expected the follow-up test to see if you knew how to take care of your weapons. It was a critical, if frequently overlooked, skill and he was honestly happy that it had been included. At the same time, he wasn't surprised that it had obviously tripped up some civilians that had likely never needed to properly maintain an actual weapon. They'd...done decently enough, based on tool maintenance, but not well enough.
That a couple of samurai had sat down with a small group of said civilians to teach them properly after seeing them fail was mostly notable in that they'd beaten several shinobi to the punch. Seeing anyone disrespect weapons that badly was annoying, and it was very likely that anyone who specialized in weapon use would've wanted to correct the group.
Still, that left him able to continue on, and based on the flag he'd been given he suspected that there was a tower to climb. That hadn't been outright stated, but seemed reasonably obvious based on the previous time he'd done this. Following the prompts of the map screens was simple enough though, and it wasn't long before he came to...a small park? Looking up, there was a platform floating in the air above the park, with not-quite-taut ropes leading down to several of the trees.
Apparently 'walk or climb up a tower' was too pedestrian for Uzushio these days.
Shrugging, he moved into the trees to see how the ropes were anchored. They seemed to be solidly attached to a ring that was solidly anchored in the tree, too solidly really. There had to be a bar or something embedded in the tree itself for this. However it was done, he started walking up the rope anyway, a combination of balance and surface-sticking making it trivial for him. Halfway up he paused as a young...chipmunk girl? She scurried up one of the other ropes at high speed, swapping her flag, and then diving down another rope. Despite her age, she'd moved almost like she was on flat ground, which was honestly impressive. He also thought she looked familiar, but wasn't sure where from.
Shaking his head, he continued his more leisurely walk up to the platform. It was surprisingly stable in the air, as though fixed in place and not floating, and swapping his flag was easy enough. Instead of going down one of the ropes he instead flipped over to the underside of the platform, partially out of curiosity if there was something hard to see holding it there, but found nothing before he dropped down to the ground with a gentle flip to land on his feet.
As he walked away he noticed that one of his own genin was moving up the rope by essentially climbing it instead of balancing and using surface-sticking...but then again, the rope wasn't taut enough to overcome balance issues. If you weren't confident you could stay on top then it made more sense to do things that way, and the previous towers had handholds for those unsure of their ability to use surface-sticking to get up the towers as well.
Mifune was finding the genin testing both easier than expected and much harder than expected. It was very obviously not designed around being in full armor in particular, but very few shinobi wore full armor and instead relied on the improved mobility not wearing such protections granted them. This affected the comfort of the written test and the combined stamina and endurance test quite a bit and served as a major hindrance to getting up to the impossibly-floating platform.
That his people still weren't used to using chakra as freely as shinobi did was another matter, of course. The overall attitude was changing, with a larger number of utility techniques now in use, but anything 'deceptive' was still looked at as dishonorable. They were starting to use surface-sticking and water-walking quite a bit more than they used to though, and elemental techniques that didn't rely on a weapon were starting to pick up in popularity as well. Illusions of any kind were currently being ignored, but non-illusionary clones were a topic of interest.
Arriving at the point to turn in his flag, he glanced at the monitors there showing progress. He already knew that probably half of his people had failed at the fifth test where obvious use of chakra had to be demonstrated, but was a little annoyed at how many had failed at the following zombie elimination as well. Then again, samurai rarely practiced fighting without any weapons at all and the last group of zombies had been surprisingly skilled at dodging. Most of those who had reached the flag-swapping had succeeded though.
He was given a new destination by the woman behind the counter for the last test though, so thanked her for her time and moved on.
Ruri was happy that she'd made it through all of the tests so far and knew that this was the last one before she was done. But there was a line, and she wasn't participating in the chunin exams, so anyone who was got priority. Which would be a lot less annoying if a bunch hadn't been sent to this particular testing station. She was distracting herself from the annoyance by trying to figure out how every building she'd entered today seemed to be larger on the inside than the outside would imply.
She wasn't figuring much out there. Seals could store things inside of them, and could make openings smaller, but she'd never seen anything that said they could make the inside of something bigger. Unless the building had been built bigger and then seals had been used to make it smaller? But that seemed far too dangerous because of what would happen if the seals failed and the building was suddenly full-size again. Plus the only seals she'd seen able to make things smaller only worked on openings.
...but she and Orochimaru-mama weren't very good with seals. Maybe they just didn't know enough?
"Ruri," the man at the desk called, snapping her out of her thoughts. A moment later she'd moved down the hall to her assigned room. The door was open, though closed behind her when she entered.
"Your final test is to make it through the next room in under ten minutes," the woman in the room said, gesturing at another door. "If you retreat back through this room then you fail."
Ruri nodded, then opened the door and stepped through. She found herself faced with three large cats. Her first instinct was to jump back out of the room, but stopped when part of her screamed that would be failing.
She was not going to fail again!
It was obvious that the cats were guarding the door at the other end of the room, and they were focused on her. Going up and over was probably not going to work, but she darted to the side and went up the wall anyway. They were less...
Her train of thought was obliterated by one of the cats chasing her up the wall. She sped up, continuing across the ceiling and darting around the lights with the cat following her, before finally recalling that she had kunai and a sword. One of the former was pulled out just in time to throw it into the face of one of the other two cats that had tried going up one of the other walls to get ahead of her.
Swinging around one of the lights, she pulled the small sword out and used it to block an attempt at getting her with claws, then pushed back towards the cat and cut its head mostly off. She then swung down under the lights, diving at the last of the three cats. Twisting in mid-air let her dodge a lunge and she put the sword through the cat's side, tumbling as she did so and landing on her tail. The cat didn't get back up though, and she collected the one kunai she'd thrown before leaving out the back door...to come out in the room she'd left? Or maybe the woman had just gone around some other way.
"Good job," the woman said. "You can claim your forehead protector from any of the registration desks."
"Thank you," Ruri replied, wondering how long it was going to take her heart to stop feeling like it was trying to escape her chest.
Naruto looked over the sizable crowd that had gathered on the edge of the island, in what was ostensibly a park with a great view off the edge of the island. This one held the village leaders, including Mifune, as well as the chunin exam hopefuls and their sensei. The other four 'parks' had clones and held the rest of those that had made it through things.
"Congratulations to those of you who passed today's testing," he said. "As promised, those of you who are not participating in the rest of the exams will be receiving a prize. Those in the other four gathering points will be able to visit the shops on the island for two free meal scrolls and a weapon pouch, as can those other than the village leaders here. For those concerned about how useful a weapon pouch will be to them, it should also trivially hold various tools and the storage seals in them are food-grade so you can even use them as a snack pouch instead."
"Now I kind of want one," Mei half-mumbled.
Ignoring that, he continued. "But that brings up the question of what I'm giving your leaders, and the answer to that is in the boxes behind us." He gestured at a table with boxes, each a little over thirty centimeters tall. "One for each leader, they're all the same so no need to worry about who gets which one."
He waited as all of the boxes were claimed, and then on unspoken agreement they all opened them together. Inside each found a scale model of the island set on a stand with a small set of controls. All of the leaders looked a little confused, though the controls were still 'locked'.
"I'm not sure what we'd want with a decorative copy of the island," Onoki commented.
"Ah," Naruto said. "Right now they're all synchronized to the island's current state."
"Okay?"
Horns suddenly going off startled everyone. The dome in the middle of the island, and the domes on all the models, lit up with warning lights. Then the doors on the sides of the models opened up, startling those holding them, and the platforms started to emerge. It took a few minutes for the entire deployment process to happen, causing shock in all five areas outside of those from Uzushio, and then the domes on the five platforms deployed so that they could flip to individual elemental areas.
"First thing in the morning the chunin exams themselves begin," Naruto said. "And we need plenty of room for everyone to get their testing in." He then turned to the leaders. "In an hour your models will finish powering up and you'll be able to turn off the synchronization so that you can play with configurations."
The looks on their faces, especially the few that had obviously realized that the models could not possibly have held the platforms with normal physics just as the island couldn't have, were quite amusing.
Onoki looked over the model of the exam island, which as promised had unlocked and was now able to be customized instead of staying in sync with the real one. There was a button to retract the five outer platforms, dials to pick the environment for each platform and central dome, and a toggle switch to change back to mirroring the real island. An instruction booklet, that doubled as a description of the island's actual capabilities for 'if you want to rent it' purposes, that the models were as much for planning purposes as anything else, allowing them to play with layouts they might want to use.
Just the model was plainly impossible, let alone the island itself, and the combined implications for what Uzushio could do were worrying. At the same time, it was obvious that a less-significant version of the tricks needed had been used on most of the island's buildings as you'd need things to be much bigger on the inside than the outside to make any of this possible.
He was pulled out of his musing by Kurotsuchi coming in. "I've got an initial report from the science-types."
"Oh?" he asked.
"They think that Uzushio figured out how to build things in four physical dimensions instead of three. Maybe five."
"...I have no idea what that means."
She dropped a very thick stack of paper on his desk. "This is supposedly the short explanation, pulled from archives, though they've promised a summary in the next three days."
"Doubt I'll understand the summary either."
"I'd say that was a sign that it was time to retire if I thought I had any hope of understanding it."
"Might retire to leave all this insanity to you anyway."
"And I'm not sure I want the job right now."
"Which is, ironically enough, a sign that you're more ready for it than you were before."
"At least we have a better clue about all the proctors with the weird forehead protectors. They're indicating affiliation with the island instead of Uzushio."
He snorted and grabbed the book on the island, flipping to the right chapter. It took a moment to find the page he wanted. "Take a look at this."
She took the book and glanced over the page, then obviously stopped and started reading it more carefully. "They're all puppets of some kind?"
"Apparently. With a small team of observers that also act as question-checkers for when the automated control system has no answer for a question that someone asked them. Their use comes standard with renting the island, drastically reducing the number of shinobi needed to run an examination cycle."
"Uzushio automated examinations?"
"Not entirely. You still need observer teams, medics, and a few proctors for specific things."
"But...even a minor village could probably run...oh. That's the point, isn't it?"
He nodded. "They've negated the 'only major villages can run exams' problem by removing ninety percent of the things the minor villages don't have available. There's a claim in there that this also helps ensure that anyone using the island can meet minimum standards for testing, which is hard to disagree with. When we rented the previous iteration we couldn't run things nearly as well due to not dedicating as many shinobi to running testing stations."
She flipped through the small book, checking other areas, before closing it and sighing. "They're determined to scream that they're moving along faster than anyone has any hope of catching up with."
"Honestly? I think Naruto just doesn't know when to take a vacation."
You know, I think Onoki might just have the right of it!
Missing word.
Well, of course the samurai would know all about proper weapon maintenance. They literally live and die by the sword, and those who are negligent in maintaining said weapons have extremely short careers.
- Location
- Deep in the Badlands of Equestria
Nah, at this point Naruto's juggling so many balls (about half of which only he and Yoko know about right now) that he can't afford to take a break personally. Though, I suppose that he could send a few clones out to do a bit of R&R. Knowing how things seem to run, they'd probably find situations that they felt obligated to get involved in, though.You know, I think Onoki might just have the right of it!
"If it took you until just now to realize that, maybe you're less ready than I thought."
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
Something that Danzo never did actually understand. He shall not be missed, although the reason he died shall be laughed at.
- Location
- Canada
Well, killing people based on them feeling evil without knowing of any actually evil acts they commit would be a bit far for me personally but I'm not a ninja. As well if the body is checked over and later someone not a shrine maiden kills using that same move would that not given away the game?