Naruto hadn't expected the foxes to give him a graduation gift, but they had. A scroll containing three stones tied to the fox contract, specifically. It was their solution to 'return to Konoha without sending a fox'. If you attempted to summon one of the stones then you'd instead be reverse-summoned to the stone. He was also shown one in the fox's territory, allowing him to essentially come and go as he pleased without needing to bother one of the foxes to shift him back and forth. It was apparently a cooperative work with the toads, who also had one in their territory.
Visiting the toads would need to wait until Jiraiya got around to having Naruto sign their contract though.
The three gifted stones were two different sizes. The largest of the three was placed in the Uzumaki compound. Sunk into the ground in a corner with the use of the earth release movement jutsu to keep it hidden from sight. It just needed to be right-side up and have open space somewhere in the three feet above it, so two inches of dirt was fine. It then got tested, and Naruto was able to bounce back and forth between the fox realm and the compound on his own without problem. Even better, his paperwork clones could jump straight to the stone too, meaning that he could replace Yoko regularly when outside of the village if he wanted to.
As for the two smaller stones, they were intended for temporary use. Drop one in your campsite while on a mission to be able to return to it at will, for example. Naruto made a two-bucket storage tag for them to make carrying them on missions easier.
Hinata had asked how difficult it would be to make a large stone tied to a new summoning contract, arguing that the village could use something like that to allow shinobi to return quickly from the field. The foxes had apologized and said that they weren't sure how to make that work. The stones had to be created by a sage on the contract, so a contract with just a stone might be impossible.
Other than that, Naruto and Hinata didn't have much to do in the way of collecting supplies, though he did end up doing some normal grocery shopping and found out from Hana that their former classmates were assuming that the two of them had been pulled from the program for some reason. Nobody had come to either of them for details though, apparently basing everything on the two of them no longer being in class. Though he didn't actually know if anyone other than Hinata from their class knew where he lived.
Hana's response to finding out that they'd graduated was to hand over a scroll with sixty books in it, referring to it as his 'self-study' medic-nin course now that he had to contend with having a team.
Dinner on the 'day off' was with the Hyuga, where they found out that Neji's team had passed by not giving up in combat with their sensei. Not a test of skill, which he felt was the purpose of the academy graduation, but a test of determination. He'd been dismissive when Hinata had described their test, seemingly assuming that it was little more than retesting the academy graduation requirements. They'd not bothered to elaborate to correct his poor assumptions.
"So we're here for a few days to a week," Kurenai said. "Assuming that Tenten wants to try this shapeshifting seal, and if it works on her then I'm likely to go for it as well as it seems far too useful."
"I'm going to have to pass," Anko continued. "Seals placed on me don't..."
"Here," Naruto said, holding out a seal tag to the woman before she could get any further.
Blinking, she took the tag and stared at it. "What the fuck is this?"
"Uzumaki hickey remover. Apply near the hickey, activate, and then burn with prejudice after it finishes removing the hickey."
There was a moment of silence before she snorted. "Right. You've obviously got no clue what you're talking about."
Naruto shrugged, because she was technically correct. His parents hadn't told him, just had him ink the tag. "Will it hurt to try?"
"You might as well show them," Kurenai said.
Anko scowled, but nodded and took her high-collared jacket off and showed them a three-tomoe marking on her neck. "This is the 'hickey', a cursed seal that was placed on me by my former sensei." Then, obviously dismissive of the tag, she slapped it over the markings and pulsed chakra into it to activate it. "No normal tag has..." She trailed off, shivering as the tag shifted to directly over the seal, and a minute later the design of the cursed seal appeared on the seal tag.
"What did that just do?" Naruto asked his parents inside of the Tome.
"Synchronized to her chakra and tricked the seal into thinking that it was a layer of regrown skin over it," his mother replied. "That led to the surface of the seal migrating to the tag, and once it was connected enough the tag pulled the rest of it out of her and isolated it. Someone has to burn the tag in the next hour or there might be problems though."
"We'd rather not go into what the seal it just removed actually is," his father continued. "Just that it's bad news. Luckily your mother knew of an old Uzumaki seal array for tricking such seals to migrate."
"Well, that and she doesn't use the thing. If it was regularly activated then it would've dug deeper into her chakra network by now and become much harder to remove."
"What the fuck just happened," Anko finally said as the seal tag fell off, revealing that her neck was no longer marked.
"The 'hickey remover' removed your hickey," Kurenai said with a tone of disbelief, pointing at the tag that had landed on the ground and now had the three-tomoe mark on it.
"...what?"
"Naruto, where did you get that tag from?"
"An old Uzumaki sealmaster that tutors me occasionally," Naruto replied, since his parents had expected this question but weren't ready to have him spread knowledge of their existence further yet. That got him incredulous looks from both of the sensei. "They want to remain anonymous beyond that because if their enemies knew they were active at all then it would create problems for me."
Anko had pulled her forehead protector off to use as a makeshift mirror to check her neck during this and appeared to be in a state of shock, at least until she looked back down at the seal tag. Then her expression hardened and she started performing hand seals. The rest of them jumped back when she let loose a torrent of fire into the seal tag, and there was a pulse of something unpleasant as the thing was destroyed.
"Well," Kurenai said. "I suppose he did say to burn it."
"So kids," Anko said, suddenly next to Naruto. "Change of plans. I'm trying out the fancy super-infiltration seal first. If it doesn't kill me then Buns can give it a shot."
"Anko..."
"This is probably the first seal I've ever wanted on me, after seeing what Naruto and White-eyes can do, and I'm going for it before I change my mind."
It had only ended up taking a couple of hours to have the shapeshifting seal on all three, and then came a few days of seemingly-random unintentional changes. Anko tended to bounce between looking like a seven year old or a non-descript teenager, Tenten kept turning into weapons, and Kurenai's changes tended to be to a twelve-ish body with varying eye colors.
Training over the several days it took for the three to get control over their shapeshifting was focused on communication and adapting to different forms. The former was primarily the basics of the hand signs used most commonly in Konoha, some common code words and phrases that the genin should be aware of, and ways to identify themselves to each other when disguised. Once the shapeshifting had settled they then went over summoning. Anko was all for the strategic benefits alone, and finding out about the stone in the compound cemented it for Kurenai as well. Nine new contract pairs were signed between them, even if Hinata and Tenten were still not quite up to summoning others yet, and some practice was done.
It turned out that Naruto and Anko were the only ones able to reliably summon the others, though Hinata had been able to summon Tenten once and Kurenai could summon Hinata and Tenten with minimal issue. Anko blamed this on lack of chakra reserves in the others, but also admitted that summoning Naruto was like trying to summon some of the larger snakes that she had trouble with.
"Okay," Kurenai said as they ate lunch. "We're probably a little behind on picking up missions, but I can't argue with the results. Sadly, very little in our early missions will take our capabilities into account, but we should probably discuss mission versus training balance." She focused on Hinata to start with. "Normally when there are genin with a clan to fall back on they do most of their training with their clan, leaving team training time to teamwork exercises. But your father told me that you've been spending more time training with Naruto than your clan?"
"Um, yes," Hinata said, pushing her fingers together.
"It's understandable that White-eyes would do so," Anko said. "Given what Naruto can pull off. Probably not so good for her Gentle Fist though."
"I've probably studied more of their scrolls than they have," Naruto admitted. "I'm...not quite a family member in their eyes, but they let me into the main branch scroll archive."
Hinata nodded her agreement. "He's started learning the written down Gentle Fist techniques using clones and then teaching me. It doesn't help me with the ones that aren't written down, but I don't know if I was ever going to be taught them anyway."
"And I've watched some of the elders performing some of the ones not written down. I don't know how they train them, but others are just improvements on what is written down and a couple of the more unique ones look straightforward enough in principle." He paused. "Neji was watching some of those and looked thoughtful about them too, actually, so I wouldn't be surprised if he's working on figuring them out too."
Kurenai sighed. "How in the world did you convince them to let you have that much access?"
"He gave father a stack of summoning contracts so that Hanabi and I couldn't be easily abducted," Hinata answered.
"Well," Anko said after a moment of silence. "If anything was going to pull it off, that would be it."
The first two weeks of D-rank missions had been boring as hell. Old Man Hokage had given them their first mission of repairing a fence. One that surrounded training ground forty-four, was heavily damaged, and had a whole lot of weak points.. But nothing dangerous normally approached the fence, so it had been mostly 'find problem, fetch supplies, fix problem, repeat' work. After that they'd had three different babysitting jobs, farming, cleaning up the same training ground four times, seven different 'shop for someone sick/injured' runs, four deliveries across the village that were just large enough for the civilian mail carriers to have problems with, and cleaning up after one of Naruto's pranks.
Knowing exactly what the paint used in said prank was made from had made that trivial, and they had no clue if anyone involved in assigning the mission knew that he'd pulled the prank in the first place. He wasn't really known to play pranks in general, after all.
They'd been politely asked to leave some D-ranks for others after someone realized that they'd done twenty-one in fourteen days, with two days taken off for training in the middle. It would take a couple more days to find out that this was a combination of a lull in D-ranks and Team Nine having done over thirty in the same time period.
Their 'during or between missions' training had been split three basic ways. Anko-sensei, Kurenai-sensei, and Tenten were trying to get spell-bullets working as well as build up their chakra more. Naruto was working on learning snake-style taijutsu from Anko-sensei, or more specifically one of her paperwork clones. And they were all working on 'out of village mission' disguises for missions that they didn't want to be seen accomplishing. Compared to the ones that you wanted to be seen doing for the good of the village. Anko-sensei had promised a more detailed explanation later.
Naruto and Hinata had added 'working with senbon' to their non-team training and Hoshi was still working on 'understanding looking human enough to be useful'.
"You want me to do what?" Naruto asked, blinking. He'd been asked to attend an 'unofficial meeting of clan heads'...but not as a clan head himself. Technically. And it was only some of the clan heads, not all of them. Specifically, the Akimichi, Inuzuka, Nara, Uchiha, and Yamanaka.
"We're fairly confident that you're either one of the mysterious pranksters or all of them," Tsume replied. "And we've all got a kid in what used to be your academy class."
"The new rules pushed through means they're trying a little harder," Inoichi said. "My daughter has stopped dieting, at least. But they're still a little too complacent."
"Or just have an ego," Itachi added. "My brother is improving, but slowly."
"Kiba isn't much better," Tsume admitted.
"We came up with the idea of encouraging them to do better," Shikaku said. "And, well, one idea we came up with was pranking them every week or two to challenge their skills."
"Your targets have been...largely unobjectionable," Choza added. "I don't think Hiashi even minded when you hit his clan's elders, even if he never admitted what you did to them."
"The only catch is that we can't pay you directly," Itachi said. "We don't want this to be a mission, exactly. Instead, we've gathered a collection of knowledge that we think you might like." He produced a scroll. "For example, a personal creation of mine, exploding shadow clones."
"I've got a book on how the Inuzuka developed collaboration techniques with our ninken," Tsume said.
"How to train up chakra sensing," Inoichi added. "Which is a requirement for that communication jutsu the barrier team gave you, by the way. I don't think they realized that you'd need the training."
"A...partial copy of our medicinal archives," Shikaku contributed. "Generally the most useful entries that aren't themselves clan secrets."
"And a copy of our field cooking manual," Choza finished.
"So what do you say?" Tsume asked. "Are you willing to prank the crap out of our academy-age heirs to kick them into gear?"
Naruto frowned. "If I target just them then they're going to start asking questions. Like why Shino isn't being included as the only other clan member in their class."
"He has a point," Shikaku admitted. "But the solution is simple and probably helps the village as a whole."
"Just target the academy at large?" Inoichi guessed.
"Or at least the 'final year' classes in general."
Naruto had to admit that targeting all the hopefully-soon-to-graduate students made sense.
"Hey old man," Naruto said, ignoring the Anbu guards as he slipped into Old Man Hokage's office. His mother had asked him to take care of something if at all possible, but arranging to be officially allowed to instead of sneaking out to do so was proving more difficult than expected. It was a good thing that they were taking a break from team training today, because he'd been at this for two hours now.
Admittedly, it probably made for an excellent alibi as he had some paperwork clones coat seats in the academy with glue that morning. Body heat and the pressure of sitting on it should activate it and he'd tried to make it look like it was just a long-needed coat of paint.
"Well hello Naruto," the old man replied. "What brings you around?"
"The mission desk said I'd need to ask you about hiring my team for a mission."
"Genin are discouraged from doing so in general, but it isn't unheard of to hire one's own team for helping out with tasks. If only to pad out numbers or help out less privileged members."
Naruto scratched the back of his head. "Well, you see, I think by the rules it has to be at least a C-rank? And after running around from place to place I was basically told that you'd have to approve it personally."
Old Man Hokage raised an eyebrow. "Really now. You have me curious, what could you possibly have for a C-rank mission?" In response, Naruto pulled a scroll out of a pocket and placed it on the desk. It was quickly picked up and unrolled, the old man reading over it and frowning as he did so. "I see. Just beyond the ranges permitted for a near-village D-rank, bumping it up to C-rank by default. Low-C, admittedly, but still C. In theory, you could hire your team for this, but in practice I can't allow you to."
"Oh."
"The village has known about the temple for decades, and yet it likely sits in near ruins in defiance of our eternal alliance with the Uzumaki. Cleaning out anything that belongs to your clan from it that has survived potential looters should have happened years ago. I won't have you paying out of your own pocket for it as a result, even if it does make sense that you need to be involved in retrieving your family's heirlooms. I may even send a second team to watch over the area to help keep you from being disturbed while you work."
Naruto nodded, not sure what to say. Or think, for that matter, because being told that the village would pay for the mission was beyond his expectations.
"I'll check with a few people and your sensei to arrange things," the old man said. "You'll probably end up heading out in three to four days."
"Thank you," Naruto finally said.
True to Old Man Hokage's word, they headed out through the village gates on their first C-rank mission three days later. Anko-sensei had convinced the old man that they didn't need a second team, on the basis that two special jounin and however many paperwork clones Naruto made for securing the perimeter would be more than enough.
"So," Kurenai-sensei said. "We should all be able to tree-hop easily enough and be there within half an hour at the most." She paused, and looked at Naruto. "Well, so long as Naruto here carries Hoshi."
The little fox pouted, but didn't argue the point.
"We've got up to a week to clear everything out before we need to return," Anko-sensei said. "But Naruto's original mission request apparently specified four hours once reaching the place."
"I've got a list," Naruto admitted. "Thirty-six total items, only nine of which are hidden. Wanting four hours to accomplish things was in case the place is rubble."
"We're being paid to spend probably two hours outside of the village at most," Tenten said. "Aren't we?"
"Most likely," Kurenai-sensei agreed. "But short missions are less likely to go horribly wrong, so you should treasure them when they happen. Assuming, of course, that they stay short."
Kurenai-sensei took the lead, followed by Naruto. Hinata was in the middle, Tenten behind her, and Anko-sensei followed behind them. It was actually only twenty minutes before they reached the temple...and it was in horrible condition, but not to the point of being rubble. Yet.
"So," Naruto said. "As much as this is probably going to annoy everyone, the first thing I need to do is go in alone to open a seal up."
"How about we form a perimeter and you do your thing," Anko-sensei said. "White-eyes will probably do her best to keep an eye on you from out here anyway."
"She has a point," Kurenai-sensei admitted, gesturing for Naruto to go ahead. "You're also the only Uzumaki available, so if you have instructions then anyone else going in with you is probably making the risk worse."
Naruto nodded, and put Hoshi down on the ground. "Sorry, but you have to stay outside too."
"Yeah yeah," Hoshi grumbled. "You warned me."
A couple minutes later Naruto was inside the building. He had to dodge holes in the floor, points that would collapse if he put weight on them, and ensure that he didn't cause the roof to collapse on top of him. He stopped at a specific less-damaged pillar and applied some of his blood in a pattern his mother had walked him through, completing a hidden seal. Pushing chakra into it, he left it glowing as he moved to another pillar and repeated the process. The third point for this seal was spread across a section of floor, but while getting into position for it he noticed that there were only twenty-five of the expected twenty-seven masks hanging on the wall.
Completing the third seal caused three of the floorboards to lift up, each revealing a rack holding three scrolls. He collected all nine, then opened one of them. It described all twenty-seven expected masks.
"There it is," his mother said, the Tome having made a copy of the scroll already. "The two missing masks are shattered on the ground out of direct sight. One tied to the Shinigami, and one tied to Kurama."
"I have no clue when the hell your nutso ancestors figured out how to tie a mask to me," Kurama said. "But it's probably a good sign that I'm actually dead."
Naruto nodded. "This says that the Shinigami mask was connected to a contract?"
"Yes," his mother agreed. "Mito went on at length about that particular one with me. The...unexpected pulling of your father and part of Kurama's chakra out of the Shinigami's stomach probably broke the contract, and Konoha has a jutsu tied to it recorded. You'll need to inform Hiruzen that it needs to be marked as no longer usable."
"Which is a pity because it was one of the few ways to seal up a tailed beast on short notice," his father added.
"All of the masks are connected to something, and most of them are unpleasant in some fashion when worn. You could probably survive putting on any of the eight remaining masks tied to one of the tailed beasts, but for most that would be a death sentence and they don't do what was originally intended anyway. Not that the rest worked out all that well either, though I didn't get nearly as much information on them out of Mito."
Nodding again, Naruto scanned the list a second time to compare it to the wall of masks before rolling the scroll up and heading over to collect the masks themselves. He was able to see the remains of the two broken masks, but produced a larger scroll from a seal tag and opened it up first. There were twenty-eight seals on this one, a seal for each mask and one for the nine scrolls. He placed the nine scrolls down first, sealing them, and then started carefully collecting the masks and labeling the seals.
One each for the nine tailed beasts, including the shattered remains of Kurama's. The equally shattered remains of the Shinigami's mask. Seven for the five basic elements as well as yin and yang. Three tied in different ways to space and time. One supposedly tied to the Sun in some fashion. Another similarly tied to the stars. Two tied to humanity itself. One tied to dreams. Another tied to nature. And the last one tied to healing, and the only one with an outright warning in the list that 'healing' was not a good thing in this case.
Two of the other scrolls contained more details on what happened to those who wore the masks, but the goal was to get them out of an undefended and unsecured location in general. Well, and probably to see what had happened to the one linked to Kurama, with the discovery of the shattered Shinigami mask being an important addition.
Carefully rolling up the larger scroll with its more complicated seals that could handle being sealed in another seal, he put it away and double-checked that there was nothing else obviously in need of being collected. Seeing nothing, he sighed and moved back to the still-raised floor boards. A small amount of blood was placed on the outside of each of the three scroll racks before he made his way back out of the temple. As soon as he'd cleared the stairs out front the seals inside activated and tore the entire structure apart.
In theory, that was supposed to be a way to destroy the masks before someone could get their hands on them, but it worked nicely as a self-destruct now that the temple was empty too. Especially since the removal of the scrolls was going to trigger some 'safeties' in the next week, so it was better to just skip the possibility of someone being caught in it.
Less than a minute later the rest of his team had joined him, Hinata checking him for injuries while the others stared at the temple.
"I hope you got everything," Anko-sensei finally said. "Because otherwise that's going to be hell to dig out."
"No problems there," Naruto said. "And I triggered that anyway."
"Oh. And you didn't warn us you were going to?"
"I couldn't be certain that the seals were intact in the first place. Or that some other Uzumaki hadn't already come through and gathered things, for that matter. But I've got what we came for."
"Then we should probably head back to the village," Kurenai-sensei said, shaking her head. "Though it probably would have been nice if the temple hadn't needed to be destroyed."
"It was going to happen soon even if I didn't trigger it because I removed things from it. Better for it to happen when I knew it was empty."
All of them nodded their agreement with that.
Hiruzen looked over the Scroll of Seals. The Uzumaki jutsu for summoning the Shinigami had three forms, and one of them was merely a way of testing that the summoning was possible without needing to do the full summoning and sacrifice your life. He'd already confirmed that it didn't work, despite having previously confirmed that it did. Years ago, admittedly, before he'd given up the hat to Minato.
It was a shame, but it was entirely possible that sealing away the nine-tails had been the incident that had unknowingly broken the contract. The jutsu had never been used for something that extreme before and it was possible that the nine-tails couldn't be properly sealed the way Minato had attempted. It was likely that nobody had set foot in the temple holding the mask, or attempted to use the jutsu tied to it, between Minato's use and Naruto finding the shattered mask.
They'd likely never know for certain, but for now Hiruzen picked up the brush he would be using to carefully mark the jutsu as no longer usable. In a manner that would be reversible and that didn't damage the original text if that changed, even if he personally suspected that this was going to be permanent.
No questions had been asked about anything else that Naruto had collected from the temple, or where it was going to be stored, in part because what the village didn't officially know couldn't be leaked. Who knew what other secrets the temple had held for all these years, but it didn't seem like whatever was found was incredibly useful in its own right. The entire thing had felt more like an attempt to clean up things that had been left around than anything else.
As much as Naruto would've liked to leave the masks sealed, the entire reason they'd been stored on the wall of the temple was because they couldn't be safely sealed for more than a few days at a time. Which led to a wall in a reasonably secure storage area of the shrine having twenty-five masks hung on it. The three scrolls detailing them and the effects of wearing them were placed under the masks on the wall.
The other six scrolls were more generally interesting to him. Five of them detailed some of the history of the Uzumaki clan and Uzushio and the last contained both a set of Uzushio forehead protectors and their equivalent of Anbu masks. Blank ones in the latter case, but it was a 'hidden cache' of supplies for when an Uzushio shinobi needed replacements or someone from the village graduated from the Konoha academy and needed a forehead protector.
Unlike the Konoha Anbu masks, the Uzushio ones had no eye holes and exposed the mouth, presumably for jutsu that required spitting water or fire. Seals made them fully transparent to the wearer, which should allow them to be decorated in far more varied manners as you didn't need to keep the eyes clear. They also served as a breathing mask around the nose for up to half an hour at a time, if needed, but then you had to expose them to breathable air for fifteen to twenty minutes so that they could 'recharge'.
How to safely decorate them wasn't something that was documented in the scrolls though, nor had his parents ever known. Or, for that matter, ever really met a member of the group, so they didn't even know how they'd traditionally decorated the masks. The result was a stack of thirty dark blue masks that had no distinguishing features at all. Of course, that didn't mean that they weren't still useful. Just wearing one protected you in a few useful ways, and a quick test showed that they didn't seem to do anything to interfere with the byakugan.
All but one forehead protector and six masks were returned to the scroll they'd been stored in. His mother insisted that he was permitted to wear the forehead protector, instead of or in addition to his Konoha one, and it seemed stupid to leave protective masks that could be useful on missions sitting in a scroll instead of using them. Well, unless doing so while not actually being Uzushio Anbu or whatever their equivalent name had been would be a problem, and hopefully Anko-sensei or Kurenai-sensei would be able to find out because his parents honestly weren't sure. Or he could go to Old Man Hokage directly.
Had it been any other village's masks things would be far more clear, but a former-yet-eternal ally for which Naruto could be the closest thing to an official representative was an incredibly odd situation.
