Tome of the Orange Sky (Naruto/MGLN)
Zebrin
Don't bread on me.
- Location
- Wherever you go, there you are.
And possibly a full dossier on who actually attacked his village.
Tell me the world you live in is a strange place, without saying its a strange place.
Yup, that'd do it.
Yup, that'd do it.
- Location
- Michigan
"You are being refused promotion, and no it isn't because you tried to kill your partner, it's because you were just that bad at it."
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
... Wow, did he manage to dodge every single Clue-by-four that was swung at him? You'd think if he kept failing, he'd give up due to realizing he's not capable of his self imposed task.
So it seems like, while the first few may have been genuine attempts to kill Sasori, the later attempts were a combination of "keeping up appearances", "testing out new methods/techniques on a target who can and will give feedback", and "what can I learn from how he survives this one?"
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- Location
- Scotland
For a perfect score you need to bait someone else into doing the dirty deed without anyone (save maybe the proctors and even then they shouldn't be 100%) realizing that you baited them.
- Location
- Maryland
Properly baiting is the sign of a true master.
And IF he can convince people that that was his actual motivation, he's probably a shoo-in for the next time.
To quote the Spartans: IF.
- Location
- Earth, Sol System, Virgo Supercluster, Earth-1218
You also need to be sure they don't die before the end of this phase, otherwise you're out of the competition
Chapter 113 - Moon Exam: Training Break
Naruto was pleased with the initial results of the incomplete computer array. They were getting much fewer false positive hits on the system scanning now that there was sufficient storage to keep more detailed previous scans and the scientists seemed happy with the improved tracking. Not that they knew the full extent of that, and he was reasonably certain that there were less than five people aware that the monitoring extended around the Sun now.
Admittedly, the 'around the Sun' monitoring was barely there and low-quality right now due to an insufficient number of satellites, but it existed. Being blindsided to a threat because it appeared on the other side of the local star felt like something to be avoided.
Unfortunately, while he was continuing expanding the computer and satellite arrays, he didn't think he had any good options for advance warning of something arriving from another dimension he wasn't monitoring or through a teleportation spell. Then there was the fact that the science-types seemed to think that there might be ways for things to approach or exceed the speed of light and all of the monitoring required light to reach something. Communication back to processing systems happened near-instantly, but only once the light arrived at the monitoring points.
The only good plan for 'things moving too fast' currently was unfortunately 'put monitoring further out to catch them before they get too close'. That had its own problems, mostly that building a shell around the system far enough out to matter was going to be more materials-prohibitive than the base satellite network he was sticking around the Sun. It wouldn't necessarily help with anything traveling fast enough either.
Hinata thought he was going overboard trying to account for threats that they didn't even know existed, yet also contributed ideas for how to improve things anyway. Ino had just shaken her head and declared it all to be beyond any scope she was willing to deal with currently.
Kurotsuchi found the decision of the two Iwa chunin to train on the moon to be interesting, but accepted their sent-back arguments that they'd found earth chakra to act a little weird up there and they wanted to be used to it. She personally thought that they'd mistaken 'acts weird in that particular chakra forest' for 'acts weird on the moon in general' though, and hopefully they'd report that later. It was also possible that they were hoping to get some training time with her grandfather up there, which she had no problems with.
The old man was probably not trying anything funny yet, thanks to establishing a reasonably self-sufficient settlement taking a significant amount of work, but the more distractions he had the better.
Meeting with councils to see who agreed with Uzushio's recommendations for promotions on the eliminated chunin front also needed to happen, though they hadn't yet indicated that they were all ready for those meetings. She was personally happy with the recommendations, but wasn't sure which side of things a couple of borderline cases should fall on and was hoping that there was a decisive answer there from the councils.
For now she had to go through the annoying process of arranging a meeting with the Kazekage to discuss some of their interactions in the buffer countries between the Land of Earth and the Land of Wind. She was annoyed that she'd been unable to avoid the formal meeting process through simply 'running into' him at the jounin exams, but couldn't blame him for not being present when none of his chunin had made it through the stage and the Wind Daimyo had wanted him to be present for an investigation.
Kankuro wasn't sure if he should be worried that Sasori seemed to have no problems finding things in his workshop or happy that his layout was obviously sensible enough to be understandable to the man. The grumbling about 'substandard materials' was annoying, even if it almost immediately got followed by apologizing for grumbling because he didn't have access to some of what Uzushio could produce.
The design aspects at least had almost entirely positive reactions.
"You're definitely approaching things differently than I do," Sasori finally said. "But that's to be expected and it shows that you're not just copying my work."
"No comments about my work being woefully inadequate compared to what comes out of Uzushio?" Kankuro questioned.
"The Uzukage built a moon. Comparing your work to what Uzushio can produce is meaningless, but aside from your material issues you're doing better than most of my students. I'd actually like you to look over some of the lesson plan, because I suspect that I'm not covering something well enough due to it being 'too obvious' to me."
"You want me to help you improve the puppeteering lessons you're giving in Uzushio?"
"I want to improve both sides because I'm positive that some things aren't being covered here. And I got you a voucher for bloodline island, since you should really pick up lava release so that you can use it to make more durable rubber for your joints."
Okay, it was still weird having a helpful Sasori, though seeing what the Uzukage could do had seemingly made most high-level shinobi a lot more willing to 'play nice' in a general sense even with the tailed beasts no longer being a thing.
Kisame found the gradually-calming continent to be increasingly boring. The few jobs he'd gotten lately hadn't really involved fighting. Sure, there had been some that would possibly pit him up against strong opponents...but he wasn't stupid enough to take anything that would directly provoke Konoha or Uzushio and wasn't in the mood to put himself on Kiri's bad side since he currently owned a house in the Land of Water. This largely left those hiring him to go after softer targets or minor villages.
Well, there had been the offer to send him to do some damage against Sunagakure, but he wasn't crazy enough to wander into a desert without backup that would be less affected by the lack of water. Granted, reports were that there were far more oasis-type places out there, but not enough to make him comfortable with the general idea, and taking the transport pads was advertising that he'd arrived. Those felt better-used as an escape option.
He'd kind of hoped that blatantly robbing a bank would get shinobi to at least try to go after him, but he'd missed that the noble that hired him to do so had used him as a tool to expose corruption in the bank's owners. That annoyingly led to shinobi investigating the owners and not caring that he'd run off with half the vault's contents. Doubly so when the noble took the jewelry and other easily-identified valuables and started returning it all to the rightful owners to curry favor with them.
Really, it would've been nice to know that the bank was run by corrupt fuckers because then he'd have done the robbery differently. Maybe a bit more grandstanding to give someone time to show up to fight him in the place? But that was partially on him for not asking questions about why the bank had been chosen and why an obvious robbery in particular.
For now he was wandering between towns looking for his next potential job...or perhaps a list of bounties available. Hunting down a couple of those could be fun...if there were any. The last three times he'd found listings the pickings had been slim, and he was kind of offended that bounties on him had been dropped. But not enough to go slaughter people for the sake of doing so, because he'd found that being 'reliable' paid better.
Shino frowned as he evaluated options for protecting his hives from lightning chakra. It wasn't the first time he'd looked for options, and he had some minor things he could do already, but nothing that he thought would hold up against a direct attack against his puppet. Ideally he'd be able to wrap it in wind chakra, but only when needed as he didn't need to risk someone throwing fire chakra at it and cooking the hive instead. To protect against that he'd ideally be able to swap in water chakra, but that was secondary right now as he was expecting to go up against Sazen in the first round or two of fighting.
Currently he was looking at seals that could be added to the puppet, assuming he could find someone able to place them for him as he didn't trust his own skills in that area. Not for anything as intricate as the seals he was finding, anyway.
He also had thoughts on how to add a wire mesh to the puppet as well, connected to a deployable spike system in the feet to ground it. With any luck the mesh and what he needed for the spike system would be ready in a couple of days so he could start working on the modifications. Done right the spikes should also add to the ability for the puppet to hold itself in place or climb surfaces.
Hinata shook her head as she sat at one of the more secure terminals looking over Naruto's plans. She thought that he was going a bit overboard with protecting against unproven threats, but was never going to tell someone trying to set up sensible precautions to stop. Especially as her view was that he was only going too fast instead of spreading the work out over a few decades.
Of course, she'd not seen all of what was already in place before now, not having dug into those details too deeply before. He had weapon options that she hadn't even considered, based on a combination of a dozen different spells, though hadn't tested them at the scales he'd implemented them at. She'd not considered that the satellite network could function as a single giant spell platform either, allowing for scanning the planet to absurd degrees on top of other things.
Ino might be annoyed to find out that they now didn't need to infiltrate hidden villages to copy their paperwork. The satellite network could not only do so, but the spells could actually see through most of the security seals in use throughout the Elemental Nations. Uzushio and Konoha were the two exceptions, and she suspected that some of the sealing documentation she didn't understand properly was Naruto figuring out how to improve things there.
Despite herself, Hinata was finding herself taking notes on ways to improve some of Naruto's weapon insanity. Both the smaller ones that she wasn't sure if he'd considered certain tactics with and the stupidly overpowered untested system seemed like it could be tweaked to increase its effectiveness.
Fu felt bad about not helping Shino train, but they might end up fighting each other and shouldn't be too familiar with each other's preparations. He was also going to be far more focused on his insects than she was though. They helped her track and communicate, but in combat she much preferred to keep them in their hive and use a combination of physical and area-of-effect attacks instead. Putting her little friends intentionally in harm's way just felt wrong, and she couldn't carry enough insects to make most Aburame tricks usable on her own.
That didn't mean that she didn't have insect-related tricks of her own though. She'd gotten better at making webs and nets, and had even learned to set them on fire. A sticky ball of webbing with a fire core could get stuck on someone before it set itself alight while refusing to come loose. Then there was her new trick with the scale powder, going from merely being able to blind to adding some wind chakra to make the powder slice targets to ribbons as well.
Luckily there were large training areas that she could work in and varying levels of zombies to practice everything against.
Yoko was annoyed because Naruto's clones had spotted that Davaa and his people had reported that the two of them were gods. She'd missed that distinction in their documentation and wasn't even sure how they'd come to that conclusion in the first place. It was probably too late to correct the misconceptions too, which was even more annoying.
Even worse, now that she was digging into some of their cultural expectations that she'd not properly understood on a first pass she could see some of the problems. Chakra itself practically made you a minor god under their definitions. Non-human features just added to that, and they didn't have a non-god definition of a higher level of religious oversight. They considered their greatest holy leaders gods as it was, that she had actual 'divine abilities' and sat above the local priests and priestesses made her a goddess outright.
It looked like they hadn't been sure about that at first, but details like being able to speak their language when her followers couldn't, honestly minor illusions that were especially effective against them due to their lack of chakra, and the very existence of some of the floating island bits on Shrine Island had been incredibly convincing to them. They didn't realize that the latter were the same basic trick as the flying islands, though they did assume that the flying shrine island was divinely powered.
Naruto's clones running around the entire planet and interacting every so often hadn't helped, and a merchant had made their way to the continent with pictures of her and Naruto back in Konoha. Those were after the 'siblings' revelation and as such they were labeled as such in the pictures. Having the obviously-divine brother of a Goddess replace the moon was just seen as a bigger example of their divinity...and annoyingly, it made the other continent more informed about their ability to shapeshift than most of the Elemental Nations themselves were because Naruto showed up without the tanuki features.
If all of this wasn't making them less likely to be idiots that attacked them for no good reason then she'd be far more annoyed about it all than she currently was, but it was still quite aggravating. Worse, she had meetings planned over there and didn't know if she should bring it up to claim it was a mistake or pretend she didn't know. Especially when using their own terminology for the organizational structure of the shrines would have that labeling her as a form of goddess all on its own.
Oh, and if that wasn't bad enough, they'd been broadcasting the jounin exams all over the planet and it was assumed to be 'fledgling war gods and goddesses aiming to prove themselves' on that continent.
She'd be half-tempted to use rinnegan tricks to just give Davaa and some of his people chakra if they wouldn't see that as more proof of her divinity. Blessing them with added power would be just another sign of the divine.
Baisho was honestly surprised that he'd made it to the finals after repeatedly failing to kill Sasori. He'd used all of his best tricks and traps throughout the week to absolutely no success, wasn't sure if Sasori had even noticed the attempts to kill him in his sleep, and had basically only made it through the stage because the infamous puppetmaster hadn't seen fit to retaliate as he would've been justified to do.
It painted an unfortunate picture of his own capabilities that wasn't pleasant and he was taking advantage of everything Uzushio made available on the moon to try to compensate for that. He didn't think it was going to work, and he suspected that none of what he'd come up with was likely to even inconvenience most of the other finalists.
Really, the only other saving grace of the entire second stage was that he wasn't one of the idiots that had needed to be saved from the trees. How those teams had made it that far was a bit a mystery. Anyone who had seen or participated in one of Uzushio's chunin exams, or had ever been in Konoha's Forest of Death, should've been ready to deal with the trees.
Luckily the training areas on the moon all seemed to have instant zombie options at varying levels of difficulty, allowing him to work his way through his various attack patterns.
Ino had decided that it was time to consider starting a family and had diverted some of her work onto others so that she could focus on that a bit. A couple weeks ago she'd checked with Karin about timing, dragging Hinata into a checkup to see how far off their cycles were from one another. This led to significant initial confusion because neither of them had paid enough attention to notice that they didn't seem to have proper cycles occurring.
Luckily, inducing ovulation worked just fine for both of them and it was assumed to be a side effect of being bound to the remains of a tailed beast. Especially when things had seemingly reabsorbed when they'd taken precautions for a few days as they weren't quite ready.
After that she'd put herself in charge of figuring out things like how to build out rooms in the house for kids, childproofing the place to the best of their ability, and other such items. This wasn't difficult, and having her own clones do most of the work meant that she knew it was done as right as she could make it. Hinata was checking regularly as well, and Naruto occasionally just dropped better tools or instructions on her. The only thing he did directly was child proofing seals, which she appreciated. Both in that those were done right and that he was trusting her to handle the rest.
It seemed that bringing that up caused Karin and Sakura to start looking to begin their own family with Sasuke, but in their case they'd had to start with 'move to a larger place' as the three had opted for a smaller apartment. This wasn't difficult for them, and had the benefit of being able to remodel before moving in, with Naruto being easily convinced to help with child proofing seals there as well. Really, it was one clone for at most an hour in each home, at least before the seals division had found out and wanted copies of everything.
The current plan was to have a bit of a pre-celebration before the exam finals. Naruto claimed that the 'big' portions of his projects would be done by then, with just ongoing expansion to worry about afterwards. Said expansion was apparently possibly never going to be truly complete either, which turned it into more of a background thing.
Unfortunately, none of them could say what their kids would inherit. Beast man formula changes didn't normally pass down, but the kids of jinchuriki had minor physical features from the tailed beasts. Who knew how much would pass down from being bound to the remains of a tailed beast, and she had no clue if her dog features would pass down or not as they'd started as beast man related but had picked up some similar qualities to the features Naruto and Hinata had once she'd picked up her own tailed beast bits. Presumably to provide physical elements to bind things to, but she wasn't entirely certain.
If their kids picked up features from Naruto as well then who knew what combination of things might manifest.
Slightly annoyingly, Yoko had once again declined to participate even without needing to be directly intimate with Naruto. Hinata agreed that they should embrace both parts of the duo, but it seemed that all of the desire for physical intimacy had ended up on Naruto's end of things.
A had been making trips to the moon every few days to check on the four chunin training up there, though he didn't think that they knew he'd been making trips that frequently. Existing jounin were staying there to monitor as well, and provide assistance if needed, and he generally checked with them instead. Three of the chunin might even earn their promotions, Baisho being the unfortunate exception.
Why the young man thought that he'd been orphaned by Sasori was a bit of a mystery. Yes, he'd been pulled out of the remains of a village in the Land of Rivers years ago and eventually made his way to Kumo, but Suna hadn't been involved in that battle at all. Honestly, the 'spy' that 'rescued' the then-child had probably done the deed themselves after seeing that the boy had strong chakra. It would fit the actions that got them executed for being a traitor, at least.
As for the other three, he honestly liked that they claimed to have stayed on the moon for the experience of being in long stretches of abnormal conditions. Well, at least compared to being on Earth. You could trivially spend weeks inside of a cave to avoid sunlight. It was a bit harder to do so and still experience adverse weather, and that did nothing for experiencing constant daylight.
The only place on Earth that most knew about where you could experience constant 'day' was Shrine Island with its Amaterasu shrine's 'Sun'. That said, for years scientists had theorized that going far enough north or south would bring you to points where the Sun would rise and set on a multiple-month cycle, but with the downside of it being far too cold to do much. Over the past twenty years there had been dozens of requests for missions like that, but none of them had been accepted and the only scientists to make attempts had never returned.
So of course he'd gotten curious and asked one of the Uzushio people about that, since they had incredible maps and tricks nobody else did. They'd freely shared pictures of the small building at one pole and provided an explanation that the other pole had no ground under it before allowing him a chance to go through transport pads to see both. It was no surprise that the 'small building' was the top of a large complex filled with scientists, ones that were currently not wanting to advertise the existence of the place and be forced to share as they learned about the area.
Supposedly that facility hadn't existed a month ago, and he felt that tracked with how Uzushio seemed to do things. One of the scientists working more closely with them had probably asked loudly enough for Naruto to hear and the crazy kid had just popped out to the poles to take a look. A few hours to a couple of days later an entire facility had likely been thrown up at one pole and a small floating island had been set up at the other to hold the transport pad.
Hiashi had been surprised when Hinata had swung through to inform him that she was likely to be pregnant within a few weeks. He was happy that Himeki wasn't likely to carry his first grandchild in several years like some had predicted. It seemed that Naruto had been waiting for his wives to decide that they were ready for children and none of the three had realized that they needed to take extra steps to make it happen until a trip to the hospital had revealed things.
Needing to ensure that news, and the scrolls describing suitable items, was passed along to Fu had been slightly more annoying. Mostly because Tsunade wasn't in the village at the moment and the hospital administrators had been slightly obstructionist until he'd threatened to call her back from the moon to handle it. Fu had thanked him just this morning, and he'd ensured that she knew all the details passed along just in case.
Hanabi and Himeki should be done with their mission before the jounin exam finals as well, as teams had been dispatched to take care of the combat portion of things last week, so a family dinner should hopefully be able to be arranged to spread the news among the clan. Children bearing a byakugan under the Uzumaki clan name would cement an old form of alliance between the clans, though it was yet to be seen if that would happen. Especially with Naruto also having the sharingan and rinnegan on top of the byakugan. Even without that, the chance for the bloodline to reassert itself in grandchildren or great-grandchildren was always present as well.
Wame had been on a quick mission when word of an Uzushio civilian's daughter being abducted had been relayed. The mission desk did not want to alarm Naruto, and she had been closest to where things had happened. She'd made quick work of things thanks to the tracking spell she'd asked for the mission to test in the first place, and found the kid in the middle of a bandit camp...guarded by four shinobi, and with five other kids tied up as well.
They'd also cut one of the girl's hands off, in case she had enough training to perform hand seals to escape, and supposedly had said hand preserved in a scroll. That was listed on the signs posted around the camp, which also stated that if any shinobi attacked then they'd kill all five kids.
This was not a good way to impress an Uzushio shinobi, and definitely wasn't a good way to impress someone who had been learning everything they could about casting spells. She'd even gotten teleportation spells working, though preparing and holding six so that they'd trigger simultaneously was harder and required two paperwork clones to bring it down to two spells each. Luckily her teammates for the mission were able to watch her back while she and her clones were focused on that.
Having all six kids appear with them outside of the camp was a vindication on its own, even the effort caused her clones to dispel, though the alarm was sounded inside of the camp almost immediately. Wame directed the others to protect the kids while she personally showed her displeasure with the bandits. She made sure her Knight Armor was up before grabbing her sword and heading out of the trees.
"What the fuck?" one of the bandits yelled, looking between her and the shinobi that had just yelled about the kids vanishing.
"Abducting anyone from Uzushio isn't something we tolerate," Wame called. "You're lucky that nobody wanted to bother the Uzukage."
"Only in that it meant that you got here first," a familiar voice called as suddenly the entire camp was surrounded by Naruto's clones. "Good job getting the kids out, but an...example needs to be set. One that won't be likely to be forgotten anytime soon. Still, you look rightfully pissed off, so I'll let you pick one of the shinobi to deal with personally."
"I think I'll take the big one. Being beaten by someone so much shorter than him will probably be extra-insulting."
The various clones looked at her, then grinned. A moment later they all transformed into what looked like toddlers, which was entirely unfair. Especially as she knew that wasn't a spell.
On the other hand, 'toddler-sized Uzukage clones' was still a collection of Uzukage clones, so probably not as humiliating as the death of small cuts that she gave the largest of the shinobi.
Himeki had claimed Hanabi's lap as a seat, in part because she was disturbed by the fact that a group of shinobi-led bandits had been grabbing the kids of important civilians from various countries to use as 'bargaining chips'. That they'd successfully grabbed someone from Uzushio had led to their very quick undoing, and she personally found Uzushio's very graphic demonstration of why you don't do that to be reassuring.
Civilians probably thought it was gruesome, admittedly.
She was also enjoying being able to be herself after far too long transformed on their latest mission. Hanabi seemed to be enjoying that part of things himself, though kept grinning as he looked at her collar. Not that she was surprised, as they'd exchanged new collars that morning. Her collar had his name on the back of the tag and his collar had her name in the same place. It wasn't quite a formal declaration, but they weren't old enough for one of those yet.
"I'm surprised you went as far as you did with those bandits," Hiashi-sama said to Naruto, who was sitting between Hinata and Ino.
"There have been plans for what to do with the first idiot to abduct a non-shinobi Uzushio citizen for years now," Naruto replied. "I actually toned things back a little due to the team on site having already extracted the kids, though regrowing a hand and ensuring that all six would be able to learn to be shinobi was a little annoying."
"That's something that I'm curious about. Supposedly at least four had previously been tested and found to be lacking in chakra."
"And the Sage of Six Paths had the ability to grant others the ability to use chakra, above and beyond what seals can do. It required bringing in Yoko to help to get right, but we were able to use that to grant them all quite strong chakra networks. The five from outside of Uzushio will be joining the next class we start up, and two of them are moving to Uzushio as the bandits foolishly killed their parents. Hard to extort money when you've got an orphan that the rest of the extended family probably wants to vanish so that they can inherit."
"So this wasn't an attempt to provide a warning against someone grabbing your own soon-to-come children?" Satomi-sama questioned.
"Oh no," Hinata said, shaking her head. "Naruto has promised not to go after anyone that stupid unless Ino and I are both unavailable."
"We think he'd be too nice," Ino added, with a grin that spoke volumes on its own and sent shivers down most of their spines.
"And I think they just haven't seen me properly angry," Naruto added. "So I have to keep my plans secret and hope that if it ever comes up that they aren't immediately available to step in."
Himeki thought that Naruto's grin made Ino's look tame, though she blinked after looking away. "Wait, soon-to-come?"
"Sakura confirmed that Ino and I are pregnant yesterday," Hinata said with a happy smile, placing a hand on her stomach. "It'll be months before it's obvious, and we don't know how our tailed beast aspects will affect the length of the pregnancy, but we're both carrying twins."
"Maybe more," Naruto added. "If any of them split into identical twins instead of fraternal twins."
"Karin claimed that was unlikely, but did acknowledge that it was a possibility. She seemed to think it more likely if bloodlines were fighting though, causing a split with each twin getting different bloodline traits."
"We'll just need to wait and see what happens."
Himeki pouted at that, which Hanabi noticed. He poked her side. "What's got you pouting?"
She blushed. "I won't be their aunt until after they're born."
Getting snickers and giggles at that just had her pouting more.
Admittedly, the 'around the Sun' monitoring was barely there and low-quality right now due to an insufficient number of satellites, but it existed. Being blindsided to a threat because it appeared on the other side of the local star felt like something to be avoided.
Unfortunately, while he was continuing expanding the computer and satellite arrays, he didn't think he had any good options for advance warning of something arriving from another dimension he wasn't monitoring or through a teleportation spell. Then there was the fact that the science-types seemed to think that there might be ways for things to approach or exceed the speed of light and all of the monitoring required light to reach something. Communication back to processing systems happened near-instantly, but only once the light arrived at the monitoring points.
The only good plan for 'things moving too fast' currently was unfortunately 'put monitoring further out to catch them before they get too close'. That had its own problems, mostly that building a shell around the system far enough out to matter was going to be more materials-prohibitive than the base satellite network he was sticking around the Sun. It wouldn't necessarily help with anything traveling fast enough either.
Hinata thought he was going overboard trying to account for threats that they didn't even know existed, yet also contributed ideas for how to improve things anyway. Ino had just shaken her head and declared it all to be beyond any scope she was willing to deal with currently.
Kurotsuchi found the decision of the two Iwa chunin to train on the moon to be interesting, but accepted their sent-back arguments that they'd found earth chakra to act a little weird up there and they wanted to be used to it. She personally thought that they'd mistaken 'acts weird in that particular chakra forest' for 'acts weird on the moon in general' though, and hopefully they'd report that later. It was also possible that they were hoping to get some training time with her grandfather up there, which she had no problems with.
The old man was probably not trying anything funny yet, thanks to establishing a reasonably self-sufficient settlement taking a significant amount of work, but the more distractions he had the better.
Meeting with councils to see who agreed with Uzushio's recommendations for promotions on the eliminated chunin front also needed to happen, though they hadn't yet indicated that they were all ready for those meetings. She was personally happy with the recommendations, but wasn't sure which side of things a couple of borderline cases should fall on and was hoping that there was a decisive answer there from the councils.
For now she had to go through the annoying process of arranging a meeting with the Kazekage to discuss some of their interactions in the buffer countries between the Land of Earth and the Land of Wind. She was annoyed that she'd been unable to avoid the formal meeting process through simply 'running into' him at the jounin exams, but couldn't blame him for not being present when none of his chunin had made it through the stage and the Wind Daimyo had wanted him to be present for an investigation.
Kankuro wasn't sure if he should be worried that Sasori seemed to have no problems finding things in his workshop or happy that his layout was obviously sensible enough to be understandable to the man. The grumbling about 'substandard materials' was annoying, even if it almost immediately got followed by apologizing for grumbling because he didn't have access to some of what Uzushio could produce.
The design aspects at least had almost entirely positive reactions.
"You're definitely approaching things differently than I do," Sasori finally said. "But that's to be expected and it shows that you're not just copying my work."
"No comments about my work being woefully inadequate compared to what comes out of Uzushio?" Kankuro questioned.
"The Uzukage built a moon. Comparing your work to what Uzushio can produce is meaningless, but aside from your material issues you're doing better than most of my students. I'd actually like you to look over some of the lesson plan, because I suspect that I'm not covering something well enough due to it being 'too obvious' to me."
"You want me to help you improve the puppeteering lessons you're giving in Uzushio?"
"I want to improve both sides because I'm positive that some things aren't being covered here. And I got you a voucher for bloodline island, since you should really pick up lava release so that you can use it to make more durable rubber for your joints."
Okay, it was still weird having a helpful Sasori, though seeing what the Uzukage could do had seemingly made most high-level shinobi a lot more willing to 'play nice' in a general sense even with the tailed beasts no longer being a thing.
Kisame found the gradually-calming continent to be increasingly boring. The few jobs he'd gotten lately hadn't really involved fighting. Sure, there had been some that would possibly pit him up against strong opponents...but he wasn't stupid enough to take anything that would directly provoke Konoha or Uzushio and wasn't in the mood to put himself on Kiri's bad side since he currently owned a house in the Land of Water. This largely left those hiring him to go after softer targets or minor villages.
Well, there had been the offer to send him to do some damage against Sunagakure, but he wasn't crazy enough to wander into a desert without backup that would be less affected by the lack of water. Granted, reports were that there were far more oasis-type places out there, but not enough to make him comfortable with the general idea, and taking the transport pads was advertising that he'd arrived. Those felt better-used as an escape option.
He'd kind of hoped that blatantly robbing a bank would get shinobi to at least try to go after him, but he'd missed that the noble that hired him to do so had used him as a tool to expose corruption in the bank's owners. That annoyingly led to shinobi investigating the owners and not caring that he'd run off with half the vault's contents. Doubly so when the noble took the jewelry and other easily-identified valuables and started returning it all to the rightful owners to curry favor with them.
Really, it would've been nice to know that the bank was run by corrupt fuckers because then he'd have done the robbery differently. Maybe a bit more grandstanding to give someone time to show up to fight him in the place? But that was partially on him for not asking questions about why the bank had been chosen and why an obvious robbery in particular.
For now he was wandering between towns looking for his next potential job...or perhaps a list of bounties available. Hunting down a couple of those could be fun...if there were any. The last three times he'd found listings the pickings had been slim, and he was kind of offended that bounties on him had been dropped. But not enough to go slaughter people for the sake of doing so, because he'd found that being 'reliable' paid better.
Shino frowned as he evaluated options for protecting his hives from lightning chakra. It wasn't the first time he'd looked for options, and he had some minor things he could do already, but nothing that he thought would hold up against a direct attack against his puppet. Ideally he'd be able to wrap it in wind chakra, but only when needed as he didn't need to risk someone throwing fire chakra at it and cooking the hive instead. To protect against that he'd ideally be able to swap in water chakra, but that was secondary right now as he was expecting to go up against Sazen in the first round or two of fighting.
Currently he was looking at seals that could be added to the puppet, assuming he could find someone able to place them for him as he didn't trust his own skills in that area. Not for anything as intricate as the seals he was finding, anyway.
He also had thoughts on how to add a wire mesh to the puppet as well, connected to a deployable spike system in the feet to ground it. With any luck the mesh and what he needed for the spike system would be ready in a couple of days so he could start working on the modifications. Done right the spikes should also add to the ability for the puppet to hold itself in place or climb surfaces.
Hinata shook her head as she sat at one of the more secure terminals looking over Naruto's plans. She thought that he was going a bit overboard with protecting against unproven threats, but was never going to tell someone trying to set up sensible precautions to stop. Especially as her view was that he was only going too fast instead of spreading the work out over a few decades.
Of course, she'd not seen all of what was already in place before now, not having dug into those details too deeply before. He had weapon options that she hadn't even considered, based on a combination of a dozen different spells, though hadn't tested them at the scales he'd implemented them at. She'd not considered that the satellite network could function as a single giant spell platform either, allowing for scanning the planet to absurd degrees on top of other things.
Ino might be annoyed to find out that they now didn't need to infiltrate hidden villages to copy their paperwork. The satellite network could not only do so, but the spells could actually see through most of the security seals in use throughout the Elemental Nations. Uzushio and Konoha were the two exceptions, and she suspected that some of the sealing documentation she didn't understand properly was Naruto figuring out how to improve things there.
Despite herself, Hinata was finding herself taking notes on ways to improve some of Naruto's weapon insanity. Both the smaller ones that she wasn't sure if he'd considered certain tactics with and the stupidly overpowered untested system seemed like it could be tweaked to increase its effectiveness.
Fu felt bad about not helping Shino train, but they might end up fighting each other and shouldn't be too familiar with each other's preparations. He was also going to be far more focused on his insects than she was though. They helped her track and communicate, but in combat she much preferred to keep them in their hive and use a combination of physical and area-of-effect attacks instead. Putting her little friends intentionally in harm's way just felt wrong, and she couldn't carry enough insects to make most Aburame tricks usable on her own.
That didn't mean that she didn't have insect-related tricks of her own though. She'd gotten better at making webs and nets, and had even learned to set them on fire. A sticky ball of webbing with a fire core could get stuck on someone before it set itself alight while refusing to come loose. Then there was her new trick with the scale powder, going from merely being able to blind to adding some wind chakra to make the powder slice targets to ribbons as well.
Luckily there were large training areas that she could work in and varying levels of zombies to practice everything against.
Yoko was annoyed because Naruto's clones had spotted that Davaa and his people had reported that the two of them were gods. She'd missed that distinction in their documentation and wasn't even sure how they'd come to that conclusion in the first place. It was probably too late to correct the misconceptions too, which was even more annoying.
Even worse, now that she was digging into some of their cultural expectations that she'd not properly understood on a first pass she could see some of the problems. Chakra itself practically made you a minor god under their definitions. Non-human features just added to that, and they didn't have a non-god definition of a higher level of religious oversight. They considered their greatest holy leaders gods as it was, that she had actual 'divine abilities' and sat above the local priests and priestesses made her a goddess outright.
It looked like they hadn't been sure about that at first, but details like being able to speak their language when her followers couldn't, honestly minor illusions that were especially effective against them due to their lack of chakra, and the very existence of some of the floating island bits on Shrine Island had been incredibly convincing to them. They didn't realize that the latter were the same basic trick as the flying islands, though they did assume that the flying shrine island was divinely powered.
Naruto's clones running around the entire planet and interacting every so often hadn't helped, and a merchant had made their way to the continent with pictures of her and Naruto back in Konoha. Those were after the 'siblings' revelation and as such they were labeled as such in the pictures. Having the obviously-divine brother of a Goddess replace the moon was just seen as a bigger example of their divinity...and annoyingly, it made the other continent more informed about their ability to shapeshift than most of the Elemental Nations themselves were because Naruto showed up without the tanuki features.
If all of this wasn't making them less likely to be idiots that attacked them for no good reason then she'd be far more annoyed about it all than she currently was, but it was still quite aggravating. Worse, she had meetings planned over there and didn't know if she should bring it up to claim it was a mistake or pretend she didn't know. Especially when using their own terminology for the organizational structure of the shrines would have that labeling her as a form of goddess all on its own.
Oh, and if that wasn't bad enough, they'd been broadcasting the jounin exams all over the planet and it was assumed to be 'fledgling war gods and goddesses aiming to prove themselves' on that continent.
She'd be half-tempted to use rinnegan tricks to just give Davaa and some of his people chakra if they wouldn't see that as more proof of her divinity. Blessing them with added power would be just another sign of the divine.
Baisho was honestly surprised that he'd made it to the finals after repeatedly failing to kill Sasori. He'd used all of his best tricks and traps throughout the week to absolutely no success, wasn't sure if Sasori had even noticed the attempts to kill him in his sleep, and had basically only made it through the stage because the infamous puppetmaster hadn't seen fit to retaliate as he would've been justified to do.
It painted an unfortunate picture of his own capabilities that wasn't pleasant and he was taking advantage of everything Uzushio made available on the moon to try to compensate for that. He didn't think it was going to work, and he suspected that none of what he'd come up with was likely to even inconvenience most of the other finalists.
Really, the only other saving grace of the entire second stage was that he wasn't one of the idiots that had needed to be saved from the trees. How those teams had made it that far was a bit a mystery. Anyone who had seen or participated in one of Uzushio's chunin exams, or had ever been in Konoha's Forest of Death, should've been ready to deal with the trees.
Luckily the training areas on the moon all seemed to have instant zombie options at varying levels of difficulty, allowing him to work his way through his various attack patterns.
Ino had decided that it was time to consider starting a family and had diverted some of her work onto others so that she could focus on that a bit. A couple weeks ago she'd checked with Karin about timing, dragging Hinata into a checkup to see how far off their cycles were from one another. This led to significant initial confusion because neither of them had paid enough attention to notice that they didn't seem to have proper cycles occurring.
Luckily, inducing ovulation worked just fine for both of them and it was assumed to be a side effect of being bound to the remains of a tailed beast. Especially when things had seemingly reabsorbed when they'd taken precautions for a few days as they weren't quite ready.
After that she'd put herself in charge of figuring out things like how to build out rooms in the house for kids, childproofing the place to the best of their ability, and other such items. This wasn't difficult, and having her own clones do most of the work meant that she knew it was done as right as she could make it. Hinata was checking regularly as well, and Naruto occasionally just dropped better tools or instructions on her. The only thing he did directly was child proofing seals, which she appreciated. Both in that those were done right and that he was trusting her to handle the rest.
It seemed that bringing that up caused Karin and Sakura to start looking to begin their own family with Sasuke, but in their case they'd had to start with 'move to a larger place' as the three had opted for a smaller apartment. This wasn't difficult for them, and had the benefit of being able to remodel before moving in, with Naruto being easily convinced to help with child proofing seals there as well. Really, it was one clone for at most an hour in each home, at least before the seals division had found out and wanted copies of everything.
The current plan was to have a bit of a pre-celebration before the exam finals. Naruto claimed that the 'big' portions of his projects would be done by then, with just ongoing expansion to worry about afterwards. Said expansion was apparently possibly never going to be truly complete either, which turned it into more of a background thing.
Unfortunately, none of them could say what their kids would inherit. Beast man formula changes didn't normally pass down, but the kids of jinchuriki had minor physical features from the tailed beasts. Who knew how much would pass down from being bound to the remains of a tailed beast, and she had no clue if her dog features would pass down or not as they'd started as beast man related but had picked up some similar qualities to the features Naruto and Hinata had once she'd picked up her own tailed beast bits. Presumably to provide physical elements to bind things to, but she wasn't entirely certain.
If their kids picked up features from Naruto as well then who knew what combination of things might manifest.
Slightly annoyingly, Yoko had once again declined to participate even without needing to be directly intimate with Naruto. Hinata agreed that they should embrace both parts of the duo, but it seemed that all of the desire for physical intimacy had ended up on Naruto's end of things.
A had been making trips to the moon every few days to check on the four chunin training up there, though he didn't think that they knew he'd been making trips that frequently. Existing jounin were staying there to monitor as well, and provide assistance if needed, and he generally checked with them instead. Three of the chunin might even earn their promotions, Baisho being the unfortunate exception.
Why the young man thought that he'd been orphaned by Sasori was a bit of a mystery. Yes, he'd been pulled out of the remains of a village in the Land of Rivers years ago and eventually made his way to Kumo, but Suna hadn't been involved in that battle at all. Honestly, the 'spy' that 'rescued' the then-child had probably done the deed themselves after seeing that the boy had strong chakra. It would fit the actions that got them executed for being a traitor, at least.
As for the other three, he honestly liked that they claimed to have stayed on the moon for the experience of being in long stretches of abnormal conditions. Well, at least compared to being on Earth. You could trivially spend weeks inside of a cave to avoid sunlight. It was a bit harder to do so and still experience adverse weather, and that did nothing for experiencing constant daylight.
The only place on Earth that most knew about where you could experience constant 'day' was Shrine Island with its Amaterasu shrine's 'Sun'. That said, for years scientists had theorized that going far enough north or south would bring you to points where the Sun would rise and set on a multiple-month cycle, but with the downside of it being far too cold to do much. Over the past twenty years there had been dozens of requests for missions like that, but none of them had been accepted and the only scientists to make attempts had never returned.
So of course he'd gotten curious and asked one of the Uzushio people about that, since they had incredible maps and tricks nobody else did. They'd freely shared pictures of the small building at one pole and provided an explanation that the other pole had no ground under it before allowing him a chance to go through transport pads to see both. It was no surprise that the 'small building' was the top of a large complex filled with scientists, ones that were currently not wanting to advertise the existence of the place and be forced to share as they learned about the area.
Supposedly that facility hadn't existed a month ago, and he felt that tracked with how Uzushio seemed to do things. One of the scientists working more closely with them had probably asked loudly enough for Naruto to hear and the crazy kid had just popped out to the poles to take a look. A few hours to a couple of days later an entire facility had likely been thrown up at one pole and a small floating island had been set up at the other to hold the transport pad.
Hiashi had been surprised when Hinata had swung through to inform him that she was likely to be pregnant within a few weeks. He was happy that Himeki wasn't likely to carry his first grandchild in several years like some had predicted. It seemed that Naruto had been waiting for his wives to decide that they were ready for children and none of the three had realized that they needed to take extra steps to make it happen until a trip to the hospital had revealed things.
Needing to ensure that news, and the scrolls describing suitable items, was passed along to Fu had been slightly more annoying. Mostly because Tsunade wasn't in the village at the moment and the hospital administrators had been slightly obstructionist until he'd threatened to call her back from the moon to handle it. Fu had thanked him just this morning, and he'd ensured that she knew all the details passed along just in case.
Hanabi and Himeki should be done with their mission before the jounin exam finals as well, as teams had been dispatched to take care of the combat portion of things last week, so a family dinner should hopefully be able to be arranged to spread the news among the clan. Children bearing a byakugan under the Uzumaki clan name would cement an old form of alliance between the clans, though it was yet to be seen if that would happen. Especially with Naruto also having the sharingan and rinnegan on top of the byakugan. Even without that, the chance for the bloodline to reassert itself in grandchildren or great-grandchildren was always present as well.
Wame had been on a quick mission when word of an Uzushio civilian's daughter being abducted had been relayed. The mission desk did not want to alarm Naruto, and she had been closest to where things had happened. She'd made quick work of things thanks to the tracking spell she'd asked for the mission to test in the first place, and found the kid in the middle of a bandit camp...guarded by four shinobi, and with five other kids tied up as well.
They'd also cut one of the girl's hands off, in case she had enough training to perform hand seals to escape, and supposedly had said hand preserved in a scroll. That was listed on the signs posted around the camp, which also stated that if any shinobi attacked then they'd kill all five kids.
This was not a good way to impress an Uzushio shinobi, and definitely wasn't a good way to impress someone who had been learning everything they could about casting spells. She'd even gotten teleportation spells working, though preparing and holding six so that they'd trigger simultaneously was harder and required two paperwork clones to bring it down to two spells each. Luckily her teammates for the mission were able to watch her back while she and her clones were focused on that.
Having all six kids appear with them outside of the camp was a vindication on its own, even the effort caused her clones to dispel, though the alarm was sounded inside of the camp almost immediately. Wame directed the others to protect the kids while she personally showed her displeasure with the bandits. She made sure her Knight Armor was up before grabbing her sword and heading out of the trees.
"What the fuck?" one of the bandits yelled, looking between her and the shinobi that had just yelled about the kids vanishing.
"Abducting anyone from Uzushio isn't something we tolerate," Wame called. "You're lucky that nobody wanted to bother the Uzukage."
"Only in that it meant that you got here first," a familiar voice called as suddenly the entire camp was surrounded by Naruto's clones. "Good job getting the kids out, but an...example needs to be set. One that won't be likely to be forgotten anytime soon. Still, you look rightfully pissed off, so I'll let you pick one of the shinobi to deal with personally."
"I think I'll take the big one. Being beaten by someone so much shorter than him will probably be extra-insulting."
The various clones looked at her, then grinned. A moment later they all transformed into what looked like toddlers, which was entirely unfair. Especially as she knew that wasn't a spell.
On the other hand, 'toddler-sized Uzukage clones' was still a collection of Uzukage clones, so probably not as humiliating as the death of small cuts that she gave the largest of the shinobi.
Himeki had claimed Hanabi's lap as a seat, in part because she was disturbed by the fact that a group of shinobi-led bandits had been grabbing the kids of important civilians from various countries to use as 'bargaining chips'. That they'd successfully grabbed someone from Uzushio had led to their very quick undoing, and she personally found Uzushio's very graphic demonstration of why you don't do that to be reassuring.
Civilians probably thought it was gruesome, admittedly.
She was also enjoying being able to be herself after far too long transformed on their latest mission. Hanabi seemed to be enjoying that part of things himself, though kept grinning as he looked at her collar. Not that she was surprised, as they'd exchanged new collars that morning. Her collar had his name on the back of the tag and his collar had her name in the same place. It wasn't quite a formal declaration, but they weren't old enough for one of those yet.
"I'm surprised you went as far as you did with those bandits," Hiashi-sama said to Naruto, who was sitting between Hinata and Ino.
"There have been plans for what to do with the first idiot to abduct a non-shinobi Uzushio citizen for years now," Naruto replied. "I actually toned things back a little due to the team on site having already extracted the kids, though regrowing a hand and ensuring that all six would be able to learn to be shinobi was a little annoying."
"That's something that I'm curious about. Supposedly at least four had previously been tested and found to be lacking in chakra."
"And the Sage of Six Paths had the ability to grant others the ability to use chakra, above and beyond what seals can do. It required bringing in Yoko to help to get right, but we were able to use that to grant them all quite strong chakra networks. The five from outside of Uzushio will be joining the next class we start up, and two of them are moving to Uzushio as the bandits foolishly killed their parents. Hard to extort money when you've got an orphan that the rest of the extended family probably wants to vanish so that they can inherit."
"So this wasn't an attempt to provide a warning against someone grabbing your own soon-to-come children?" Satomi-sama questioned.
"Oh no," Hinata said, shaking her head. "Naruto has promised not to go after anyone that stupid unless Ino and I are both unavailable."
"We think he'd be too nice," Ino added, with a grin that spoke volumes on its own and sent shivers down most of their spines.
"And I think they just haven't seen me properly angry," Naruto added. "So I have to keep my plans secret and hope that if it ever comes up that they aren't immediately available to step in."
Himeki thought that Naruto's grin made Ino's look tame, though she blinked after looking away. "Wait, soon-to-come?"
"Sakura confirmed that Ino and I are pregnant yesterday," Hinata said with a happy smile, placing a hand on her stomach. "It'll be months before it's obvious, and we don't know how our tailed beast aspects will affect the length of the pregnancy, but we're both carrying twins."
"Maybe more," Naruto added. "If any of them split into identical twins instead of fraternal twins."
"Karin claimed that was unlikely, but did acknowledge that it was a possibility. She seemed to think it more likely if bloodlines were fighting though, causing a split with each twin getting different bloodline traits."
"We'll just need to wait and see what happens."
Himeki pouted at that, which Hanabi noticed. He poked her side. "What's got you pouting?"
She blushed. "I won't be their aunt until after they're born."
Getting snickers and giggles at that just had her pouting more.
- Location
- Michigan, USA
We all know what CmptrWz does to expectations.
Shoots em in the..
Anyways thanks for the chappie, quite enjoyed it, till next time.
Shoots em in the..
Anyways thanks for the chappie, quite enjoyed it, till next time.
Shinobi!bandit thoughts:
"Hey, you know those shinobi who made a new moon, scare the piss out of every other village, and all the other things they do?"
"Yeah?"
"Let's grab some of their people and piss them off."
"Awesome plan! Nothing will possibly happen to us after a genius move like that!"
"Hey, you know those shinobi who made a new moon, scare the piss out of every other village, and all the other things they do?"
"Yeah?"
"Let's grab some of their people and piss them off."
"Awesome plan! Nothing will possibly happen to us after a genius move like that!"
Breadnaugt
Even in Death, I'm still Tasty
- Location
- Britland
Naruto: "I know we made plans in case of someone abducting our civilians like this, but after a certain point, I began to doubt it was a real concern."
Hinata: "I know it's hard to believe anyone could be this stupid, but..."
Ino: "The world will always make a better idiot."
Jordisk
<Unverified N00B>
- Location
- Blind Eternities
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
We are likely coming up on the end, for similar reasons as Hybrid Hive ended. A few final projects, the babies being born, and then probably an epilogue to show what the kids are like. Perhaps an immortal Naruto, Ino, and Hinata leaving the Shinobi World, either for other dimensions or other planets like Hybrid Hive had the Taylor's that split off.
I may only see a pattern that doesn't exist, but what world is going to cross over with Naruto in your next story?
Chapter 114 - Moon Exam: Finals Interrupted
Naruto stood up and looked over the sixteen chunin standing in the large arena, this one large enough to put four complete 'chunin exam' size arenas inside of it with their surrounding stadiums. The chunin noticed him standing up first and came to attention, and the crowd quickly quieted down. His clones confirmed that most of the areas he was monitoring had also calmed down, so he nodded. "Congratulations on reaching this point, and for making it through the past month without serious injury. I won't lie, today some of you are merely confirming that you're ready for promotion while others among you have not proven that you're ready yet."
There were worried looks from a couple of the chunin, A in particular nodding behind him, but he just waited a moment before continuing. "That said, today we will be starting with matches that we know at least some of you prepared for. You proved that you could work with someone forced upon you in the previous stage, some more willingly than others. Today your first match will be against the one that you had been partnered with, and you will be fighting in order of when you first acquired the full set of tokens you needed."
Even the other leaders seemed to be shocked at that declaration, Mei looking at the back of his head like he was crazy. He ignored that. "To be absolutely clear, you are to treat all of today's battles against each other as incapacitate and capture missions, as though your opponents need to be interrogated about what intelligence they hold or have already sent on to others. Any death can be considered to be a high-level mission failure and will be a black mark on your records. Chunin can afford to prioritize combat victory and survival over their mission, but jounin need to have the control needed to pull their punches when necessary. Do not make the proctors step in."
He waved for the team of proctors to take over, the arena too large to leave to one for monitoring, and sat down.
"You partnered them in 'worst case scenario' pairings for the previous stage," Kurotsuchi said once the little 'one or more cameras are focused on the box' light went out. "And now you're pitting them against each other?"
"Of course," Naruto replied. "They had to play nice, now they get to vent frustrations after having a month to 'calm down'. That it happens to itself be close to a worst-case scenario just makes it a better test. This is basically putting them in an 'ally you worked with recently has gone traitor to your team/village' situation. Both sides know some of each other's skills and preferred tactics, but not to the level of a teammate you've worked with for years going traitor."
"I don't like how much sense that makes," Mei admitted. "But it does, and is something that jounin need to be able to deal with. Anyone making it through to their own village or allies thereof afterwards is getting the effect ramped up a bit."
"Yep."
Hinata watched the energy levels as the arena shifted from 'semi-grassy field' to 'mountain valley' for the first match. It was the choice of arena for the Kumo chunin that was worse-placed for promotion in the first match, with the Uzushio chunin's preference having been forest. Enough energy to fully charge a chunin exam stadium's environment-changing seals had been consumed for the changeover, but you could do that twenty times in a row here before things ran dry.
The system was also already charging back up, drawing on the massive energy reservoirs available. It would take maybe twenty minutes to recover from the change, though that could be sped up significantly. When at less than a quarter charge it would request a higher priority from the energy distribution network, which in most cases would get it up to full charge in at most thirty minutes total so long as nothing else major was drawing on things.
She'd not checked the overall priority list, but knew that the atmospheric and protective shield systems were high priority items, with the motive systems for keeping the moon in orbit below them. The lights across the moon would turn off before those would be shut down, though she wasn't sure where the transport pads and several other evacuation systems Naruto had in place sat. Of course, shinobi using the pads could power them anyway, so they only had to worry about pads moving civilians or where most trips were with the one activating them not on the pad.
Shaking her head, she switched to the moon's overall energy report. On there the increase in draw from the arena recharging wasn't even registering.
"Don't suppose you have any clue what the 'standby' level is rated for on the protections," Kumin asked from where he was poking through things. "Because all I've been able to figure out is that it's quarter-power."
"I honestly don't know," Hinata admitted. "Naruto said something about rating things based on high-velocity rogue planets, but I have no idea if that was a joke or not. If it wasn't a joke, I don't know if that was simulated or if he actually found a way to test things. By the time he got to that point I'd also lost track of whether that was the full-strength protections, the standby ones, or even if he was talking about the moon or the planet itself."
"Extending the protective bubble to cover the planet would be insane."
Oops, right, he didn't know about the satellite grid's other functionality. Though thinking about it, she wouldn't be surprised if Naruto had planned for that, or for the satellite grid to expand what it projected to cover the moon. "For anyone other than Naruto? Perhaps."
"I suppose. Not sure why the moon needs large-scale protections at all though."
"Because there were signs that the old one took semi-regular hits from things moving around the star system and having one of those strike a population center would be horrible."
"Oh. You know, that would explain why the old one had so many craters, wouldn't it?"
...there were times that she thought that some of their divisions spent too much time focused on their specialty stuff and not enough time on general science knowledge.
Fu had been surprised that she and Doyuki had been the third pair of the eight that passed to get their four tokens, and more surprised that she was obviously favored to progress based on his preferred terrain coming up. Her preference was 'basically impossible to function in unless you can fly' though, because if she was going to have an advantage then she wanted a proper advantage.
His preference was a mixed-environment setup that provided plenty of places for him to hide and take advantage of his stealth tricks. She'd planned ahead and stuck four different insects on him to aid in keeping track of him.
They'd been started at opposite ends of the arena, instead of being in striking range as was common in chunin exams. In fact, at the time the match started they hadn't been able to see each other at all, which he tried to take advantage of. But she was familiar enough with his chakra to pick him out anyway, even without the insects she'd gotten on him while watching the first two matches.
It was also obvious that he had no clue how to take the fight to her while she was in the air, on top of not expecting her to go straight for him despite using every one of his stealth tricks.
Annoyingly, the bulk of what she'd practiced in the past month was too likely to cause significant harm or death, so she couldn't use any of it. But she could drop down from the sky to knock Doyuki out of the ground before trying to hit him with capture nets, which almost worked twice. He changed his tactics a little though, to make it so that when she did that she'd have less time to hit him before he could get away.
Grumbling, she decided it was time to reveal one of her new tricks and formed a cross with the fingers of her hands. Eighteen paperwork clones appeared around her, which she thought was pretty good for only wanting two. They split into two groups, nine preparing sticky web nets and the other nine getting ready to slam the ground and force Doyuki to the surface. He seemed to realize that something was wrong as the clones were approaching him though, which just made things easier as he'd partially surfaced to take a proper look up.
One of the clones got him in the face with sticky webbing before the 'knock him out of the ground' clones even reached him.
A minute later she had a fully trussed-up opponent.
Davaa shook his head as he watched the matches being broadcast from the moon. The people participating were obviously far superior combatants to anything in the armies of this continent, at least since the weird blue crystals stopped aiding one group. It felt like those might've come from where these fighters did, but he couldn't be certain. Several people around him were assuming this was some kind of staged film though, but they'd never met the fox-featured priestess.
Right now, his assumption was that there was a continent with a number of fighters descended from the gods in some way. It would certainly explain the abilities they seemed to have, especially how so many of them obviously defied the laws of physics. Add in that several of them so far had non-human features, the latest being the girl with insect features including wings, and the biggest question became 'why there and not here?'
He wasn't sure anyone would have an answer for that though. The gods had obviously preferred where these fighters came from. Why probably didn't matter, if he was being honest with himself, and was probably ancient history by now. If they were all family then spending most of their time together would also make sense for why they hadn't spread, and there were dozens of other possibilities. Some kind of special food that grew there, a holy place that made it easier to come and go, pure chance that they picked that part of the planet...or even that there were gods all over the planet, but the local ones died off or left while the ones there had descendants.
Whatever it was, watching them proving themselves in combat inside of an arena that could become whatever environment was desired for the next fight was fascinating and terrifying in equal measures. The flying island reportedly had a small group of fighters that could do impossible things, originally attributed to intentionally falsified information or hallucinations when it had stopped a couple of times. The three fights so far had shown that what was reported was barely even scratching the surface of what these fighters could do, lending a lot more legitimacy to the reports themselves.
Baisho was worried as he entered the arena, because he was almost positive that he still had no way to seriously inconvenience Sasori. Being honest with himself, he'd hoped to have the man lose out to someone else in this round, or for things to be set up so that they'd only fight their partners from the previous stage in the finals if both sides made it that far. To have the entire first round of fights be going up against their previous partners intentionally hadn't been in his predictions at all.
Sadly, if he had predicted it then he probably still wouldn't have changed his training. He had no good ideas for getting around the skills Sasori had shown, and the Raikage was unlikely to be impressed by his impending crushing defeat.
The signal to start was given, and he slapped an illusion of a solid wall on one cave mouth before darting into another. He worked best in confined areas and had come up with a few new traps while trying to get his direct combat skills up over the month. Getting to a more advantageous position would be needed before he started laying traps out though, and he was somewhat hoping that Sasori would cross the arena outside of the caves before starting to search the caves themselves.
He got lucky and found a solidly-defendable cave structure before being found and started laying lines of traps while plotting his own sight lines for attacking puppets as they approached. Along the ground or through the air, maybe even crawling along the ceiling? Didn't matter. One line of traps went at the far end of things, manually-triggered where he hoped Sasori would end up standing while directing his puppets.
Unfortunately, the first puppets showed up before he was halfway done with the traps, not having even started on his thoughts on collapsing part of the ceiling. Worse, it was a trio coming in with no obvious sign of Sasori. That was...worrisome, and one of the three stayed back while the other two headed his way. It was acting like it was the puppeteer, instead of needing Sasori to be around. The first line of traps was tripped by the other two puppets though, and one ended up entangled in reinforced wire. That wasn't enough to stop the other one though, which ignored his direct attacks as it tore through two more lines of traps while the entangled puppet was freed by the one that had stayed back.
Another group of three puppets showed up while the fourth line of traps was being tested, and he tried triggering a couple of the manual-activation traps to take them out before they could join in on trying to reach him. That didn't work, but he got a good shot in on the first group's 'leader' puppet in the distraction. The puppet's head came off, and the two puppets it had come in with had fallen over at the same time.
It didn't take long for the new group's 'leader' to reach out to and start controlling the two puppets, bringing it up to four it was apparently controlling. That wasn't enough of a hindrance for it to provide any new opening though, and he was quickly overwhelmed and captured by the puppets...without Sasori making an appearance at all. One of the puppets gathered up the damaged one as they dragged him out of the cave, Sasori coming out of a different one as they emerged.
The fucker had figured out how to make his puppets work without even needing to be near them...though in hindsight, the Uzukage seemed to treat puppets that way too. Having others in Uzushio's forces be able to do the same thing really shouldn't be a surprise, and wanting access to that secret was possibly one of the best ways to convince Sasori to join up.
A shook his head. "That was honestly a better performance than I expected from Baisho."
"He obviously didn't expect Sasori to be able to split up on his own," Shisui noted. "But if that hadn't been shown before then that's understandable."
"Managing to disable one puppet with how tough they are is no easy feat," Naruto noted. "Especially as they aren't weak to lightning and Baisho is particularly strong there, but it seems that he didn't really look for ways around the failures to harm Sasori previously."
"I saw the footage," A said with a frown. "And I don't know how I'd handle Sasori with only a month to prepare either. That wasn't enough time to build up proper muscles to crush the puppets."
"Good luck with that unless you find weak points to exploit like Baisho lucked out with."
"You know that I'm very strong."
"Sasori is using wood release wood with reinforcement seals making it stronger these days."
That...would make crushing the puppets incredibly difficult. That Baisho managed to damage one at all was far more impressive knowing that.
Sazen scowled as he took to the trees. His area-of-effect lightning was obviously putting him as the expected winner of this fight, which meant that he had to deal with the Aburame working best in a forest environment. That he'd worked on making it even better at frying insects over the past month probably hadn't helped the evaluations, and he'd already taken care of several that had landed on him before they'd even been called down.
For now he had a constant flow of lightning chakra over his body to prevent others from landing, and when he started seeing scouting insects he resisted the urge to start hitting them. His opponent knowing where he was would likely be to his own advantage anyway, as the more insects that swarmed the faster he could kill them.
The puppet was the first thing to make an appearance. Oh how he'd wanted to fry that thing a month ago, and now he had his chance. A massive blast of lightning chakra was sent out, one that should bounce around inside of the confined space of the puppet between any bits of metal inside of it. No attempt to dodge happened, and the attack hit the puppet head-on...only to seemingly sputter out. A moment later the puppet started moving again too, though it seemed to leave a couple of holes in the ground?
Fuck. The thing had grounding spikes.
Well, he wasn't only good with lightning, and had some practice at manipulating earth to stop it conducting. Dropping out of the trees, he channeled a wave of earth chakra under the puppet to harden it into stone before sending another lightning attack at the puppet. This time the grounding spikes failed to even penetrate the stone, pushing the puppet up a little before retracting again, and the lightning...still sputtered out?
What the hell?
Realizing that a number of insects had gathered around him, he generated an expanding orb of insect-frying lightning chakra to clear the area while he decided how to handle the puppet. For some reason the puppet wasn't approaching him now, so he might've caused enough damage to it despite the last attack not seeming to be...
"Ouch," Shisui said he watched Sazen fall over after being struck from behind. "Getting him overly-focused on the puppet was obviously a good plan."
"He didn't notice that there was an airborne knockout drug around him either," Naruto said. "I believe that one has the effect of dulling chakra senses in lower concentrations, which seems like it was the actual goal."
"Ah, that one. I hadn't realized he'd gotten his hands on some of it."
"Now I'm annoyed," Kurotsuchi said, shaking her head. "Because that sounds like an incredibly useful drug and it'll take us a few years to get our hands on a sample to start working with."
Mentioning that it was actually a side effect of trying to come up with improved training methods was probably a bad idea. Training chakra sensing under the influence of it resulted in far better skills when it wasn't present, though you also built up resistance to the drug in general. After three months of training you were immune to the drug in its entirety and had to hope that you got enough training improvement out of it to make it worth it.
Still, Shino had used excellent tactics against an enemy that should have had him on the back foot for the fight and had come out as the first one that had been favored to lose to manage a victory instead.
They'd taken a break for lunch before bringing the eight chunin back in, and Naruto was personally amazed that they'd made it through the first eight fights in such a short period of time. Nobody had bothered playing with their opponents, all treating things seriously, which was appreciated. He looked over the group. "So, you've all proven yourselves in a round of combat. That is required, but the treaty allows the village leaders of remaining participants to unanimously agree that additional single-round bouts aren't needed once down under ten remaining shinobi. I checked with the others here, and even the Tsuchikage agreed despite having had both of her shinobi eliminated in their fights."
Several of the chunin looked pleased, as though they were done. As if.
"As such," he continued as the ground started to rumble under the feet of the chunin. "We're going to see how long you can survive a zombie apocalypse."
The first zombies started to crawl out of the ground around the chunin, which they very obviously weren't ready for, and the fight was on. Despite the surprise, they still handled the first zombies well and then started to move mostly as a group towards the center of the arena. Hopefully that was because they'd noticed that there were more zombies spawning around the outer edge of the arena to make it very much not a good place to hunker down.
Fu was the major exception, having taken to the air and started hitting further-out zombies with wider-scale attacks.
Sasori had fifty puppets out under his direct control and another twenty being controlled by paperwork puppeteer clones. This, combined with Fu's work in the air, had been enough to give the others time to set up more static defenses. Luckily Uzushio pushed for all basic elements, providing them with the ability to get walls up, and the Kiri group was pretty good at making moats that stopped the zombies.
Or at least, stopped the zombies before they started showing up with floatation devices, anyway. The ones with balloons letting them float impossibly were being handled by Fu without much trouble right now, though how buckets were providing so much protection to the zombies with them on their heads was unknown. So far it was all 'civilian' zombies as well, which was...concerning, though they were coming in large enough numbers to make that not too much of a hindrance on their effectiveness.
He didn't want to know if a zombie assault of this size could be managed with combat-grade zombies, but suspected that by the end of the day he'd know and not like the answer.
A kunai bouncing off of one of his puppets told him that he probably shouldn't have been thinking those thoughts though, because that signaled the beginning of the more effective zombies. One out of ten of the zombies approaching his outer ring of puppets now looked to have forehead protectors, all with a picture of a brain on them. He estimated that they were, at least currently, genin level in skill. Moving faster and employing basic tactics, as well as being the first zombies to not be heading for them in a straight line. No, they dodged and weaved around the other zombies.
"The shinobi zombies can water-walk and use surface-sticking," one of the others yelled, after having swore. Probably because one of those zombies had just bypassed the moat and walls.
Then, as if to mock him, he spotted puppeteer zombies with zombie puppets. Because of course Naruto would figure out how to make zombies that could control puppets.
Shino was annoyed at how useless he felt against the waves of zombies. He was good at closer-in defense, and managing quite well there, but didn't have enough range or chakra capacity to handle wider-area actions. This left him watching for zombies slipping through the ranks, and occasionally pulling a pile of chakra from Fu to then have his hives push into some of the others.
She'd not so much as run low on chakra, basically ever, so it wasn't doing much to her effectiveness.
He was also going around in circles checking the state of the moat and walls, pointing out where they needed reinforcement, and was using some of his own minor earth chakra to reinforce the ground and walls as he did so. None of them wanted zombies to start appearing in their midst.
"The zombies have a catapult," Fu suddenly yelled, causing him to pause to consider that. It didn't take long to realize that a catapult could likely launch zombies clear over the moat and walls, and he shifted to starting to make spikes while getting his puppet out of the middle of their protected area. Both actions proved useful when the first group of three zombies landed near him, and he tore through them without much trouble. The next group seemed to have been taken out mid-flight, and he had no problems taking out the following two groups that made it in.
Sasori gave him a nod after the last of those groups, while Fu was reporting that she'd taken out the first catapult. Shifting from 'feeling somewhat useless' to 'being the one in charge of protecting the rear from sudden invasions' at least made him feel better about things.
Mei shook her head as she watched the group of chunin fighting against constant waves of zombies. "This is insane. Every time they get complacent another surprise shows up."
"They've not even hit the first 'boss zombie'," Naruto pointed out. "Though they're getting there."
"Boss zombies?" A questioned. "What counts as a boss zombie?"
"Well, the first ones are just larger, but they're easily jounin-level in strength on their own."
"Really."
"Yep. Should be spawning any time now. Ah, there's one off to the left."
She looked over and saw a zombie pulling itself out of the ground behind a boulder. It was at least twice as tall as the other zombies, significantly muscled, and picked up the boulder to carry with it. The chunin saw it coming, as if they could miss it, but it got close enough to launch the boulder at their makeshift fort.
The boulder went clear through one of the walls, nearly took out the Aburame in the middle, and did heavy damage to the far wall.
"That's 'just larger'," Mei said, thinking about it. "What are the ones that are more than 'just larger' like?"
Naruto grinned. "They're going to have fun when the stealth zombies start showing up."
She gave him a look, as did at least Shisui. Uzushio's definition of proper stealth was horrific enough without being able to use it with their zombie-creating seals.
"I do hope Naruto got the giant robot system working," Orochi commented as she watched the prospective jounin fight off waves of zombies.
"Giant robot?" Ruri asked.
"He already has smaller robots, but having a zombie piloting a robot seemed like a fitting way to have a proper 'boss fight'. Or at least that's the terminology used in most of the video games for that kind of thing."
"They're going to have to fight a zombie piloting a giant robot?"
"If they last that long anyway, but I don't think that they're going to have issues. They just took down their third boulder-throwing zombie."
Ruri looked doubtful, but that was okay. Orochi had found working with Naruto on ideas for weird zombies to be a nice distraction, though she had no clue how he'd made several of them work. The balloons and water floatation devices felt like they should be beyond what the seals could manage. Not that any of those were in play anymore, with the 'basic' zombie now being the shinobi zombie that could walk across water and up over the walls.
Ino was honestly impressed that none of the eight chunin had taken any serious injuries. Some of that was luck, most of it was honestly skill. Shino and Fu working together to keep everyone's chakra levels topped up was also obviously doing wonders, even if he'd lost his puppet to one of the boulders.
Looking over at the 'wave timer' screen, she grinned. The computer was powering up the first robot that Naruto had slapped together. Unlike everything else, that wasn't seal-generated so the chunin would have at most eight of them to go through. Assuming, of course, that they managed to survive the first one. It appeared that the randomizer had picked the robot that other zombies could feed onto the conveyor belt at the back to be launched forward as well, which was going to put extra strain on everyone.
Her screens showed that the 'boss zombie' with an extra-big brain had generated and was climbing into the robot. Once it was settled the robot vanished in a flash of light to appear at one of the transport pads hidden under the arena, and then the robot started to claw its way up.
A beep had her blinking and focusing on another screen entirely, one that had just shifted to what looked like a Moonscope feed. Three things she wasn't sure about had just been highlighted, causing her to frown even as she felt energy starting to redirect itself.
Yoko jumped up as she felt the protective bubble on the planet start powering up, several of her clones joining Naruto's to see what was going on. It was quickly obvious that unknown space-traveling ships had appeared far out in the system, started moving like they were going to circle the planets, and then stopped before turning towards Earth. All indications were that they were able to move far too fast as well, making them difficult to track. The way they appeared indicated that they possibly had faster than light tricks that weren't teleporting.
Naruto's clones had the war island powering up to deploy, but the ships didn't wait to be intercepted or seemingly broadcast any messages. Instead, they'd obviously launched an attack, one that was barely visible before the projectiles struck due to how fast they'd traveled. Luckily, protections were already active and shifting to full power, so the first strike seemingly trying to hit the chunin exam island just slammed into the planetary shield. The second strike looked to have targeted Shrine Island and similarly failed, both obviously high-speed physical objects based on how many broken bits of material were left in orbit. It was only the third shot that targeted the moon, striking nearly opposite the stadium being used for the exams.
The satellite grid started charging up retaliatory shots of its own under the direction of clones, and she jumped to the Tome. Grabbing it and placing it on a specially-designed pedestal was easy enough before pushing her awareness into the Tome's world, Matatabi realizing what was going on fast enough to connect her to the war island's control systems directly instead of using some of the slower control methods.
There were worried looks from a couple of the chunin, A in particular nodding behind him, but he just waited a moment before continuing. "That said, today we will be starting with matches that we know at least some of you prepared for. You proved that you could work with someone forced upon you in the previous stage, some more willingly than others. Today your first match will be against the one that you had been partnered with, and you will be fighting in order of when you first acquired the full set of tokens you needed."
Even the other leaders seemed to be shocked at that declaration, Mei looking at the back of his head like he was crazy. He ignored that. "To be absolutely clear, you are to treat all of today's battles against each other as incapacitate and capture missions, as though your opponents need to be interrogated about what intelligence they hold or have already sent on to others. Any death can be considered to be a high-level mission failure and will be a black mark on your records. Chunin can afford to prioritize combat victory and survival over their mission, but jounin need to have the control needed to pull their punches when necessary. Do not make the proctors step in."
He waved for the team of proctors to take over, the arena too large to leave to one for monitoring, and sat down.
"You partnered them in 'worst case scenario' pairings for the previous stage," Kurotsuchi said once the little 'one or more cameras are focused on the box' light went out. "And now you're pitting them against each other?"
"Of course," Naruto replied. "They had to play nice, now they get to vent frustrations after having a month to 'calm down'. That it happens to itself be close to a worst-case scenario just makes it a better test. This is basically putting them in an 'ally you worked with recently has gone traitor to your team/village' situation. Both sides know some of each other's skills and preferred tactics, but not to the level of a teammate you've worked with for years going traitor."
"I don't like how much sense that makes," Mei admitted. "But it does, and is something that jounin need to be able to deal with. Anyone making it through to their own village or allies thereof afterwards is getting the effect ramped up a bit."
"Yep."
Hinata watched the energy levels as the arena shifted from 'semi-grassy field' to 'mountain valley' for the first match. It was the choice of arena for the Kumo chunin that was worse-placed for promotion in the first match, with the Uzushio chunin's preference having been forest. Enough energy to fully charge a chunin exam stadium's environment-changing seals had been consumed for the changeover, but you could do that twenty times in a row here before things ran dry.
The system was also already charging back up, drawing on the massive energy reservoirs available. It would take maybe twenty minutes to recover from the change, though that could be sped up significantly. When at less than a quarter charge it would request a higher priority from the energy distribution network, which in most cases would get it up to full charge in at most thirty minutes total so long as nothing else major was drawing on things.
She'd not checked the overall priority list, but knew that the atmospheric and protective shield systems were high priority items, with the motive systems for keeping the moon in orbit below them. The lights across the moon would turn off before those would be shut down, though she wasn't sure where the transport pads and several other evacuation systems Naruto had in place sat. Of course, shinobi using the pads could power them anyway, so they only had to worry about pads moving civilians or where most trips were with the one activating them not on the pad.
Shaking her head, she switched to the moon's overall energy report. On there the increase in draw from the arena recharging wasn't even registering.
"Don't suppose you have any clue what the 'standby' level is rated for on the protections," Kumin asked from where he was poking through things. "Because all I've been able to figure out is that it's quarter-power."
"I honestly don't know," Hinata admitted. "Naruto said something about rating things based on high-velocity rogue planets, but I have no idea if that was a joke or not. If it wasn't a joke, I don't know if that was simulated or if he actually found a way to test things. By the time he got to that point I'd also lost track of whether that was the full-strength protections, the standby ones, or even if he was talking about the moon or the planet itself."
"Extending the protective bubble to cover the planet would be insane."
Oops, right, he didn't know about the satellite grid's other functionality. Though thinking about it, she wouldn't be surprised if Naruto had planned for that, or for the satellite grid to expand what it projected to cover the moon. "For anyone other than Naruto? Perhaps."
"I suppose. Not sure why the moon needs large-scale protections at all though."
"Because there were signs that the old one took semi-regular hits from things moving around the star system and having one of those strike a population center would be horrible."
"Oh. You know, that would explain why the old one had so many craters, wouldn't it?"
...there were times that she thought that some of their divisions spent too much time focused on their specialty stuff and not enough time on general science knowledge.
Fu had been surprised that she and Doyuki had been the third pair of the eight that passed to get their four tokens, and more surprised that she was obviously favored to progress based on his preferred terrain coming up. Her preference was 'basically impossible to function in unless you can fly' though, because if she was going to have an advantage then she wanted a proper advantage.
His preference was a mixed-environment setup that provided plenty of places for him to hide and take advantage of his stealth tricks. She'd planned ahead and stuck four different insects on him to aid in keeping track of him.
They'd been started at opposite ends of the arena, instead of being in striking range as was common in chunin exams. In fact, at the time the match started they hadn't been able to see each other at all, which he tried to take advantage of. But she was familiar enough with his chakra to pick him out anyway, even without the insects she'd gotten on him while watching the first two matches.
It was also obvious that he had no clue how to take the fight to her while she was in the air, on top of not expecting her to go straight for him despite using every one of his stealth tricks.
Annoyingly, the bulk of what she'd practiced in the past month was too likely to cause significant harm or death, so she couldn't use any of it. But she could drop down from the sky to knock Doyuki out of the ground before trying to hit him with capture nets, which almost worked twice. He changed his tactics a little though, to make it so that when she did that she'd have less time to hit him before he could get away.
Grumbling, she decided it was time to reveal one of her new tricks and formed a cross with the fingers of her hands. Eighteen paperwork clones appeared around her, which she thought was pretty good for only wanting two. They split into two groups, nine preparing sticky web nets and the other nine getting ready to slam the ground and force Doyuki to the surface. He seemed to realize that something was wrong as the clones were approaching him though, which just made things easier as he'd partially surfaced to take a proper look up.
One of the clones got him in the face with sticky webbing before the 'knock him out of the ground' clones even reached him.
A minute later she had a fully trussed-up opponent.
Davaa shook his head as he watched the matches being broadcast from the moon. The people participating were obviously far superior combatants to anything in the armies of this continent, at least since the weird blue crystals stopped aiding one group. It felt like those might've come from where these fighters did, but he couldn't be certain. Several people around him were assuming this was some kind of staged film though, but they'd never met the fox-featured priestess.
Right now, his assumption was that there was a continent with a number of fighters descended from the gods in some way. It would certainly explain the abilities they seemed to have, especially how so many of them obviously defied the laws of physics. Add in that several of them so far had non-human features, the latest being the girl with insect features including wings, and the biggest question became 'why there and not here?'
He wasn't sure anyone would have an answer for that though. The gods had obviously preferred where these fighters came from. Why probably didn't matter, if he was being honest with himself, and was probably ancient history by now. If they were all family then spending most of their time together would also make sense for why they hadn't spread, and there were dozens of other possibilities. Some kind of special food that grew there, a holy place that made it easier to come and go, pure chance that they picked that part of the planet...or even that there were gods all over the planet, but the local ones died off or left while the ones there had descendants.
Whatever it was, watching them proving themselves in combat inside of an arena that could become whatever environment was desired for the next fight was fascinating and terrifying in equal measures. The flying island reportedly had a small group of fighters that could do impossible things, originally attributed to intentionally falsified information or hallucinations when it had stopped a couple of times. The three fights so far had shown that what was reported was barely even scratching the surface of what these fighters could do, lending a lot more legitimacy to the reports themselves.
Baisho was worried as he entered the arena, because he was almost positive that he still had no way to seriously inconvenience Sasori. Being honest with himself, he'd hoped to have the man lose out to someone else in this round, or for things to be set up so that they'd only fight their partners from the previous stage in the finals if both sides made it that far. To have the entire first round of fights be going up against their previous partners intentionally hadn't been in his predictions at all.
Sadly, if he had predicted it then he probably still wouldn't have changed his training. He had no good ideas for getting around the skills Sasori had shown, and the Raikage was unlikely to be impressed by his impending crushing defeat.
The signal to start was given, and he slapped an illusion of a solid wall on one cave mouth before darting into another. He worked best in confined areas and had come up with a few new traps while trying to get his direct combat skills up over the month. Getting to a more advantageous position would be needed before he started laying traps out though, and he was somewhat hoping that Sasori would cross the arena outside of the caves before starting to search the caves themselves.
He got lucky and found a solidly-defendable cave structure before being found and started laying lines of traps while plotting his own sight lines for attacking puppets as they approached. Along the ground or through the air, maybe even crawling along the ceiling? Didn't matter. One line of traps went at the far end of things, manually-triggered where he hoped Sasori would end up standing while directing his puppets.
Unfortunately, the first puppets showed up before he was halfway done with the traps, not having even started on his thoughts on collapsing part of the ceiling. Worse, it was a trio coming in with no obvious sign of Sasori. That was...worrisome, and one of the three stayed back while the other two headed his way. It was acting like it was the puppeteer, instead of needing Sasori to be around. The first line of traps was tripped by the other two puppets though, and one ended up entangled in reinforced wire. That wasn't enough to stop the other one though, which ignored his direct attacks as it tore through two more lines of traps while the entangled puppet was freed by the one that had stayed back.
Another group of three puppets showed up while the fourth line of traps was being tested, and he tried triggering a couple of the manual-activation traps to take them out before they could join in on trying to reach him. That didn't work, but he got a good shot in on the first group's 'leader' puppet in the distraction. The puppet's head came off, and the two puppets it had come in with had fallen over at the same time.
It didn't take long for the new group's 'leader' to reach out to and start controlling the two puppets, bringing it up to four it was apparently controlling. That wasn't enough of a hindrance for it to provide any new opening though, and he was quickly overwhelmed and captured by the puppets...without Sasori making an appearance at all. One of the puppets gathered up the damaged one as they dragged him out of the cave, Sasori coming out of a different one as they emerged.
The fucker had figured out how to make his puppets work without even needing to be near them...though in hindsight, the Uzukage seemed to treat puppets that way too. Having others in Uzushio's forces be able to do the same thing really shouldn't be a surprise, and wanting access to that secret was possibly one of the best ways to convince Sasori to join up.
A shook his head. "That was honestly a better performance than I expected from Baisho."
"He obviously didn't expect Sasori to be able to split up on his own," Shisui noted. "But if that hadn't been shown before then that's understandable."
"Managing to disable one puppet with how tough they are is no easy feat," Naruto noted. "Especially as they aren't weak to lightning and Baisho is particularly strong there, but it seems that he didn't really look for ways around the failures to harm Sasori previously."
"I saw the footage," A said with a frown. "And I don't know how I'd handle Sasori with only a month to prepare either. That wasn't enough time to build up proper muscles to crush the puppets."
"Good luck with that unless you find weak points to exploit like Baisho lucked out with."
"You know that I'm very strong."
"Sasori is using wood release wood with reinforcement seals making it stronger these days."
That...would make crushing the puppets incredibly difficult. That Baisho managed to damage one at all was far more impressive knowing that.
Sazen scowled as he took to the trees. His area-of-effect lightning was obviously putting him as the expected winner of this fight, which meant that he had to deal with the Aburame working best in a forest environment. That he'd worked on making it even better at frying insects over the past month probably hadn't helped the evaluations, and he'd already taken care of several that had landed on him before they'd even been called down.
For now he had a constant flow of lightning chakra over his body to prevent others from landing, and when he started seeing scouting insects he resisted the urge to start hitting them. His opponent knowing where he was would likely be to his own advantage anyway, as the more insects that swarmed the faster he could kill them.
The puppet was the first thing to make an appearance. Oh how he'd wanted to fry that thing a month ago, and now he had his chance. A massive blast of lightning chakra was sent out, one that should bounce around inside of the confined space of the puppet between any bits of metal inside of it. No attempt to dodge happened, and the attack hit the puppet head-on...only to seemingly sputter out. A moment later the puppet started moving again too, though it seemed to leave a couple of holes in the ground?
Fuck. The thing had grounding spikes.
Well, he wasn't only good with lightning, and had some practice at manipulating earth to stop it conducting. Dropping out of the trees, he channeled a wave of earth chakra under the puppet to harden it into stone before sending another lightning attack at the puppet. This time the grounding spikes failed to even penetrate the stone, pushing the puppet up a little before retracting again, and the lightning...still sputtered out?
What the hell?
Realizing that a number of insects had gathered around him, he generated an expanding orb of insect-frying lightning chakra to clear the area while he decided how to handle the puppet. For some reason the puppet wasn't approaching him now, so he might've caused enough damage to it despite the last attack not seeming to be...
"Ouch," Shisui said he watched Sazen fall over after being struck from behind. "Getting him overly-focused on the puppet was obviously a good plan."
"He didn't notice that there was an airborne knockout drug around him either," Naruto said. "I believe that one has the effect of dulling chakra senses in lower concentrations, which seems like it was the actual goal."
"Ah, that one. I hadn't realized he'd gotten his hands on some of it."
"Now I'm annoyed," Kurotsuchi said, shaking her head. "Because that sounds like an incredibly useful drug and it'll take us a few years to get our hands on a sample to start working with."
Mentioning that it was actually a side effect of trying to come up with improved training methods was probably a bad idea. Training chakra sensing under the influence of it resulted in far better skills when it wasn't present, though you also built up resistance to the drug in general. After three months of training you were immune to the drug in its entirety and had to hope that you got enough training improvement out of it to make it worth it.
Still, Shino had used excellent tactics against an enemy that should have had him on the back foot for the fight and had come out as the first one that had been favored to lose to manage a victory instead.
They'd taken a break for lunch before bringing the eight chunin back in, and Naruto was personally amazed that they'd made it through the first eight fights in such a short period of time. Nobody had bothered playing with their opponents, all treating things seriously, which was appreciated. He looked over the group. "So, you've all proven yourselves in a round of combat. That is required, but the treaty allows the village leaders of remaining participants to unanimously agree that additional single-round bouts aren't needed once down under ten remaining shinobi. I checked with the others here, and even the Tsuchikage agreed despite having had both of her shinobi eliminated in their fights."
Several of the chunin looked pleased, as though they were done. As if.
"As such," he continued as the ground started to rumble under the feet of the chunin. "We're going to see how long you can survive a zombie apocalypse."
The first zombies started to crawl out of the ground around the chunin, which they very obviously weren't ready for, and the fight was on. Despite the surprise, they still handled the first zombies well and then started to move mostly as a group towards the center of the arena. Hopefully that was because they'd noticed that there were more zombies spawning around the outer edge of the arena to make it very much not a good place to hunker down.
Fu was the major exception, having taken to the air and started hitting further-out zombies with wider-scale attacks.
Sasori had fifty puppets out under his direct control and another twenty being controlled by paperwork puppeteer clones. This, combined with Fu's work in the air, had been enough to give the others time to set up more static defenses. Luckily Uzushio pushed for all basic elements, providing them with the ability to get walls up, and the Kiri group was pretty good at making moats that stopped the zombies.
Or at least, stopped the zombies before they started showing up with floatation devices, anyway. The ones with balloons letting them float impossibly were being handled by Fu without much trouble right now, though how buckets were providing so much protection to the zombies with them on their heads was unknown. So far it was all 'civilian' zombies as well, which was...concerning, though they were coming in large enough numbers to make that not too much of a hindrance on their effectiveness.
He didn't want to know if a zombie assault of this size could be managed with combat-grade zombies, but suspected that by the end of the day he'd know and not like the answer.
A kunai bouncing off of one of his puppets told him that he probably shouldn't have been thinking those thoughts though, because that signaled the beginning of the more effective zombies. One out of ten of the zombies approaching his outer ring of puppets now looked to have forehead protectors, all with a picture of a brain on them. He estimated that they were, at least currently, genin level in skill. Moving faster and employing basic tactics, as well as being the first zombies to not be heading for them in a straight line. No, they dodged and weaved around the other zombies.
"The shinobi zombies can water-walk and use surface-sticking," one of the others yelled, after having swore. Probably because one of those zombies had just bypassed the moat and walls.
Then, as if to mock him, he spotted puppeteer zombies with zombie puppets. Because of course Naruto would figure out how to make zombies that could control puppets.
Shino was annoyed at how useless he felt against the waves of zombies. He was good at closer-in defense, and managing quite well there, but didn't have enough range or chakra capacity to handle wider-area actions. This left him watching for zombies slipping through the ranks, and occasionally pulling a pile of chakra from Fu to then have his hives push into some of the others.
She'd not so much as run low on chakra, basically ever, so it wasn't doing much to her effectiveness.
He was also going around in circles checking the state of the moat and walls, pointing out where they needed reinforcement, and was using some of his own minor earth chakra to reinforce the ground and walls as he did so. None of them wanted zombies to start appearing in their midst.
"The zombies have a catapult," Fu suddenly yelled, causing him to pause to consider that. It didn't take long to realize that a catapult could likely launch zombies clear over the moat and walls, and he shifted to starting to make spikes while getting his puppet out of the middle of their protected area. Both actions proved useful when the first group of three zombies landed near him, and he tore through them without much trouble. The next group seemed to have been taken out mid-flight, and he had no problems taking out the following two groups that made it in.
Sasori gave him a nod after the last of those groups, while Fu was reporting that she'd taken out the first catapult. Shifting from 'feeling somewhat useless' to 'being the one in charge of protecting the rear from sudden invasions' at least made him feel better about things.
Mei shook her head as she watched the group of chunin fighting against constant waves of zombies. "This is insane. Every time they get complacent another surprise shows up."
"They've not even hit the first 'boss zombie'," Naruto pointed out. "Though they're getting there."
"Boss zombies?" A questioned. "What counts as a boss zombie?"
"Well, the first ones are just larger, but they're easily jounin-level in strength on their own."
"Really."
"Yep. Should be spawning any time now. Ah, there's one off to the left."
She looked over and saw a zombie pulling itself out of the ground behind a boulder. It was at least twice as tall as the other zombies, significantly muscled, and picked up the boulder to carry with it. The chunin saw it coming, as if they could miss it, but it got close enough to launch the boulder at their makeshift fort.
The boulder went clear through one of the walls, nearly took out the Aburame in the middle, and did heavy damage to the far wall.
"That's 'just larger'," Mei said, thinking about it. "What are the ones that are more than 'just larger' like?"
Naruto grinned. "They're going to have fun when the stealth zombies start showing up."
She gave him a look, as did at least Shisui. Uzushio's definition of proper stealth was horrific enough without being able to use it with their zombie-creating seals.
"I do hope Naruto got the giant robot system working," Orochi commented as she watched the prospective jounin fight off waves of zombies.
"Giant robot?" Ruri asked.
"He already has smaller robots, but having a zombie piloting a robot seemed like a fitting way to have a proper 'boss fight'. Or at least that's the terminology used in most of the video games for that kind of thing."
"They're going to have to fight a zombie piloting a giant robot?"
"If they last that long anyway, but I don't think that they're going to have issues. They just took down their third boulder-throwing zombie."
Ruri looked doubtful, but that was okay. Orochi had found working with Naruto on ideas for weird zombies to be a nice distraction, though she had no clue how he'd made several of them work. The balloons and water floatation devices felt like they should be beyond what the seals could manage. Not that any of those were in play anymore, with the 'basic' zombie now being the shinobi zombie that could walk across water and up over the walls.
Ino was honestly impressed that none of the eight chunin had taken any serious injuries. Some of that was luck, most of it was honestly skill. Shino and Fu working together to keep everyone's chakra levels topped up was also obviously doing wonders, even if he'd lost his puppet to one of the boulders.
Looking over at the 'wave timer' screen, she grinned. The computer was powering up the first robot that Naruto had slapped together. Unlike everything else, that wasn't seal-generated so the chunin would have at most eight of them to go through. Assuming, of course, that they managed to survive the first one. It appeared that the randomizer had picked the robot that other zombies could feed onto the conveyor belt at the back to be launched forward as well, which was going to put extra strain on everyone.
Her screens showed that the 'boss zombie' with an extra-big brain had generated and was climbing into the robot. Once it was settled the robot vanished in a flash of light to appear at one of the transport pads hidden under the arena, and then the robot started to claw its way up.
A beep had her blinking and focusing on another screen entirely, one that had just shifted to what looked like a Moonscope feed. Three things she wasn't sure about had just been highlighted, causing her to frown even as she felt energy starting to redirect itself.
Yoko jumped up as she felt the protective bubble on the planet start powering up, several of her clones joining Naruto's to see what was going on. It was quickly obvious that unknown space-traveling ships had appeared far out in the system, started moving like they were going to circle the planets, and then stopped before turning towards Earth. All indications were that they were able to move far too fast as well, making them difficult to track. The way they appeared indicated that they possibly had faster than light tricks that weren't teleporting.
Naruto's clones had the war island powering up to deploy, but the ships didn't wait to be intercepted or seemingly broadcast any messages. Instead, they'd obviously launched an attack, one that was barely visible before the projectiles struck due to how fast they'd traveled. Luckily, protections were already active and shifting to full power, so the first strike seemingly trying to hit the chunin exam island just slammed into the planetary shield. The second strike looked to have targeted Shrine Island and similarly failed, both obviously high-speed physical objects based on how many broken bits of material were left in orbit. It was only the third shot that targeted the moon, striking nearly opposite the stadium being used for the exams.
The satellite grid started charging up retaliatory shots of its own under the direction of clones, and she jumped to the Tome. Grabbing it and placing it on a specially-designed pedestal was easy enough before pushing her awareness into the Tome's world, Matatabi realizing what was going on fast enough to connect her to the war island's control systems directly instead of using some of the slower control methods.
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It's probably not Batarians, but "Batarians gonna Batarian" still seems appropriate given those actions and weapons.
Well, that escalated quickly!