Naruto sighed as the screens in the box started to shift focus, even as the moon's motive array started to move it out of its normal orbital path. "We appear to be under attack."
"What?" Shisui asked, looking at the screens.
"Spaceships of some kind were likely watching and gathering information on us for five to six hours before we had an opportunity for their light to reach us so that we could see them, after seemingly arriving in the system opposite our position around the Sun. They almost certainly knew about that delay themselves and appear to have timed their approach and attack to give us minimal warning after coming to a position where they could see past the Sun to see our light reaching them, though we don't know why they didn't continue their full-speed approach. Luckily I already had protective shields in place over Earth and the moon."
They actually had a few extra minutes of time to react because the first lucky detection had happened on the satellites orbiting the Sun, but he didn't think that was important enough here.
"...as in their attacks already hit those shields?" A questioned.
Naruto nodded. "Yes. They seem to feel that the chunin exam island, Shrine Island, and the moon itself are priority targets and tried to hit them hard enough to cause severe harm to everything in the impact hemispheres. I assume due to the exam island being in motion and an obvious large flying platform for it, plus Shrine Island's artificial Sun putting out energy. The moon could be any number of reasons, including a previous scan of the system showing it wasn't obviously inhabited or realizing that it shouldn't be able to hold an atmosphere. We're currently shifting the moon ahead in its orbit to sit between them and Earth, but they seem to be able to move faster than light so it might not be a useful protective measure. Uzushio's war island is deploying now as well and should be able to engage in the next couple of minutes."
"Hold up," Kurotsuchi said. "War island? Since when does Uzushio have a war island?"
"Since I was convinced to make a demonstration on another continent, but that isn't all that important. You probably weren't aware of the defense satellite network either, but have definitely benefited from it already. I don't think we need to interrupt the exams themselves yet though, as we aren't at the point of needing to evacuate anything."
"We're under attack by spaceships and you think we can continue the exams?" Mei asked. "Are you insane?"
"Their extreme-velocity projectiles couldn't make it through the standby-level protections. Everything is nearing full strength now, but we don't know what other options they have."
Hinata was mildly annoyed that she owed Naruto several apologies for assuming he was being overly paranoid. Having the defenses he'd built be needed due to an unexpected surprise attack was far beyond anything she'd expected, and his improvements to process more data accurately had been instrumental in spotting things before the initial strikes landed. That the ships hadn't continued their attack told her that they expected the initial strikes to be far more effective and had been likely going for a 'terror' reaction instead of retaliation.
If not for an incredibly paranoid outlook on the universe it might've even worked, and she was reasonably certain that half of Naruto's work was 'if we can do this then we need to be ready for someone else to try it against us' thinking.
Regardless of why he'd built the defenses, he had built them and they'd gotten full marks on their first test. The retaliatory aspect was less useful at the range the attackers had stopped at though, and she idly wondered if part of their slower approach once they could've seen those coming was caution in the face of the unknown. She wasn't sure why else they'd have come to a complete halt at this point, anyway, even if it was making getting the war island to them much easier.
For her part in things, she was splitting her focus between poring through information they had and working to backtrack the attackers. On the former, there were some interesting radio results as she looked at the data coming from the hours-old information finally reaching the planet. She suspected that it was communication between the ships, but had no idea how to interpret it. Why she'd even hoped that it would jump out at her as something obvious was honestly a bit of a mystery, and it was entirely possible that none of it was communication. You wouldn't pick anything like that up from any of Uzushio's use of Naruto's 'in two places at once' seals, after all.
The backtracking side of things was a little easier in some respects. A severely blue-shifted light echo was showing the attacking ships seemingly traveling backwards out of the system on the far side of the Sun, obviously heading for a specific somewhat-nearby star. Whether they started there or if that was just a stop on their journey was another question entirely.
Fu knew something had happened because there was far more energy in the sky than there had been before, and that had happened before the entire moon shook and the Earth started spinning differently where it was visible off to the side. That the day/night cycle seemed to accelerate at the same time couldn't be a coincidence.
At the same time, a large machine with a big-brained zombie at the controls had surfaced and was approaching, raising an arm to fire zombies at their defensive position every so often. Said machine looked like it would be trivial to take the zombie out in, as it looked to be open-topped, but three attempts to do so had failed due to something deflecting the attacks. Which led to damaging the machine itself being the only obvious option, on top of keeping the other zombies at bay.
Shino's hives were pulling chakra from her, but when they were done she'd throw another wide-area wind-enhanced scale attack out...after Sasori got his puppets out of the way, anyway. It wouldn't help with the zombies that they'd discovered were digging underground, but it would hopefully do something to the machine.
She idly wondered if the changes to the moon were an intentional distraction to throw them off compared to something actually happening that just didn't affect the testing.
Shisui was torn between watching the exams, which had gone further into 'ridiculous' with a zombie apparently driving a machine of some kind, and what little was able to be seen on the monitors of the attack. The ships doing the attacking looked...oddly organic, in a way, like multiple-legged insects with arms or tentacles? Uzushio's war island had made it to them and the feeds were now from it, and something like flying eyes firing beams of light had come out of the attacking ships. Most of the war island's attacks were being brushed off in various forms, though there were some initial scars across the spaceships.
Despite being named the 'war island', it was very obviously not designed for this kind of battle. Not against multiple opponents that could move into positions that the most powerful weapons couldn't shoot into, and where what 'spells' it had were woefully inadequate. In fairness, against probably anything other than Uzushio themselves on Earth it would be overkill, but it was in a very difficult position.
On the exams front, the group of chunin was holding up quite well, though the approaching machine was giving them some trouble. How that fit into a zombie apocalypse wasn't really clear, but it seemed to fit in quite nicely with the rest of the crazy zombies in its own way. Being honest with himself, he'd have expected most jounin to have had problems by now, even in a group of eight, but Shino's 'keep everyone in fighting condition through drawing chakra off of Fu' trick was working wonders. Those two were essentially guaranteed promotion at this point, barring doing something incredibly stupid at this stage, and the rest had also shown themselves to be beyond anything that would normally be required on a combat level.
Yoko was finding the group of ships to be incredibly annoying. Managing to get an area search cast into one of them had revealed a pile of potential weak points, but no standard crew. One amalgamation of biology and technology that made her sick, but that was about it. Nowhere to send clones to take over from at all, if she could get clones into the thing. Worse, every so often some of the code safeties on the war island's automated systems were tripping for some reason, as though just being near the attacking ships was causing code faults of some kind.
She suspected that the energy fields around the ships were to blame for that, as the layers of protective shields weren't fully effective against it.
At the same time, the ships obviously weren't prepared for the war island's capabilities. While she could barely damage their exteriors, due to a combination of a shielding effect and stupidly-strong outer armor, they had tried a dozen different ways to take out the war island to basically zero actual effect. Physical projectiles, solid and seemingly liquid, just splashed against the protective layers. Beam weapons were deflected or absorbed, except for the larger one from one of the ships that had unexpectedly retro-reflected off of the outer layers and straight back into its own emitter.
Right now she was assuming this was a battle of attrition, the power reserves of the war island against the power reserves of the three attackers. Luckily for her, the war island was tied into Uzushio's overall energy distribution network and was able to continuously draw power from other sources instead of relying exclusively on its internal reactors. In addition, she'd done a test and pulled a refueling into play without that seemingly being noticed at all.
On the flip side, she hadn't found any indication that the other ships were likely to run out of energy any time soon either, and she had no clue if reinforcements had already been called for. She didn't have much in the way of reinforcements for a battle at this scale, though was starting to wonder if sending clones in to attempt to force their way into the ships was needed. Sending anything that couldn't just pass through the outer armor like the area search had managed wasn't working, even with coordinates from the area search spheres, due to the way the fields around the ships seemed to manipulate space.
Sasori was kind of happy that after taking out the robot the zombies had semi-reset to weaker variants, though suspected it was partially to lull them into a false sense of security as some new kind of challenge approached. It was providing him time to replace his paperwork clones either way, as they could only go so long before running out of chakra. Additional wall reinforcement, and a couple of tricks to hopefully make the boulder-throwing zombies easier to deal with, were also being worked on by others.
He was kind of impressed with Fu and Shino though, as right now they were performing one hell of a 'collaboration attack'. She was carrying him while sending out that powder she could generate, coated with wind chakra, and he kept firing off small fireballs to turn it into an inferno of fire. Looping around their defenses in circles meant that only the zombies trying to move underground were a problem, though they already knew that this wouldn't be enough to stop some of the moderately-tough zombies they'd already faced.
It had no problem with the barely-mobile 'civilian' grade zombies currently swarming them, and would be devastating against large groups of enemies not ready for the tactic. Especially with backup to help handle those who were ready for it.
A bright flash of light drew his attention, and he looked up to see a fireball heading past the flying duo. That implied that either a flammable projectile had been launched and caught fire in their attack, or the zombies now had fire-wielding members. Six more fireballs coming from other directions implied the latter, water and earth balls joining in implying that it was far more than just fire-wielding.
This was likely an escalation of the shinobi zombies and was going to make things significantly harder.
Case in point, he suddenly needed to dodge as he realized that something was about to try to stab him. A zombie he'd not even noticed had snuck up on him, and he kicked it hard enough to partially-crater the wall it struck due to his surprise. Having the distraction of flashy element-wielding zombies distract from the 'sneak behind you to stab you in the back' zombies seemed to be annoyingly effective.
Ino ran through a test routine that had come up, a recreation of things that Naruto and Yoko could do in several ways but that hadn't been completely tested with the automated systems. Since they wanted to possibly use it against the attacking ships it needed to be tested immediately, and she was available to do so. She confirmed the initial targeting data and started the first test sequence, then waited for confirmation from her clones as to whether it had worked.
It didn't take long for two of her clones to confirm that everything appeared to be working for the first test. She marked it down as a success and moved to the next one. That had been a very short-range use, now it was time to see if it worked at larger ranges. Luckily for her, an entire section of the test list was already marked as completed...though she did wonder if the war island's deployment had been involved for some of them based on them being completed by Yoko today.
She had no clue what purpose things were going to serve though, instead just focusing on running through the tests without rushing them and possibly getting incorrect results. One of her clones was monitoring the zombie deployments for the exam while she focused on this, not that she'd needed to interfere with those at all yet anyway. Mostly she just had a 'the automated systems decided to go too fast, slow down' button as it was, beyond the 'end things now' side of things anyway.
It looked like she only needed to run through a third of the remaining tests as well, but would probably take care of all of them just to have this be entirely done...after reporting the success or failure on the third needed immediately. There wasn't much else she could do immediately to help with the attacking ships.
Kurotsuchi had decided that for the moment the apparent battle in space wasn't all that informative or interesting. It had very obviously hit a stalemate, and the enemy either felt that splitting up would result in the war island getting the upper hand or were idiots with no grasp of proper tactics. She was personally betting on the former, but didn't have enough knowledge of the battle to know if the lack of success against the group of ships was due to an inability to focus on them or just it being a horrible match-up.
There was only so much you could glean from a video feed, there was no commentary included, and she wasn't sure if anyone on the planet had the knowledge and experience to figure things out as it was. Whoever was controlling the war island probably had a pretty good picture of things, but they were probably the only ones unless they were reporting back mid-battle. She wouldn't put it past someone to be doing so, if only to try and get someone else to tell them what other things to attempt, but wasn't going to bet on it either.
Instead, for now she was keeping an eye on that and focusing on the chunin fighting off waves of zombies. She was just as interested in the capabilities of the zombies, if not more so, because anything that could be done here could likely be deployed anywhere else Uzushio had zombies...and they had zombies everywhere. It was practically their signature these days, and she couldn't argue that they weren't useful for any number of things.
Admittedly, she was also fairly certain that some of the insanity here was tied to the fact that they were in the 'illusion made real' arena, where the normal laws of physics didn't seem to need to apply. Only some of it though, because a lot of things were obviously just extensions of things that had been shown during the skill tests. Extreme examples of them, admittedly...and the biggest difference here compared to there for the zombies using extensions of the shown skill test abilities was when the 'smarter' zombies used proper tactics.
The question was if this was fully automated, or if someone in the background was providing some level of aid. She'd not spotted any bias or preferences in the zombies that weren't attributable to the conditions of the fight, such as very obviously preferring to shoot at the visible flying target. Asking Naruto wasn't likely to get a straight answer though, or at least not one that could be believed anyway.
Shino had needed to switch to keeping an alerting screen of insects out, so that the stealth-using zombies could be spotted before they successfully backstabbed anyone. This kept him from working with Fu to keep up the firebombing trick, and he personally suspected that was part of why the stealth zombies had shown up when they had. That those zombies seemed to only go for backstabs was useful knowledge, and very much subject to change at any moment because it was useful. They were treating it as a suggestion for now and planning for it to change when they least expected it. Like while dealing with the next major zombie revelation.
More annoyingly, they had no clue how to track the stealth zombies. They looked just like other 'shinobi' zombies, and possibly even had the ability to use elemental attacks up until they switched to 'stealth' mode, but had been caught following several other kinds of zombie to get into position. This included the 'traveling underground' zombies, but they didn't know if they didn't hitch a ride with the balloon zombies due to the balloons only being able to handle one zombie or if they simply couldn't reach them when they wanted to start 'following' them in.
Unfortunately, the more difficult shinobi zombies were definitely having an effect. The entire exercise obviously wasn't intended to be winnable and they would only last so long. Whether things ended when one of them was finally taken out by the zombies or if it would continue until one of them remained was a mystery, but in the latter case he suspected that Fu would be the last one 'standing' due to being in the air.
He paused in his thoughts as he spotted a zombie disrupting his insects, throwing a kunai into it. This was a rare one that turned into stone, and he worked to reshape it into a better plug for a hole a digging zombie had made a few minutes ago. He was getting far better at using earth chakra with all the necessary practice.
Yoko had finally made attempts at sending clones to force their way into the enemy ships, including some of Hinata's clones, but they hadn't had any luck with that tactic. A combination of things was making personal-sized Knight Armor protections woefully insufficient and the armor on the ships really required much more firepower. Going in person had a better chance of working, but not enough of a chance to make the risk worth it though.
At the same time, she was reasonably certain that critical components of each of the ships had been identified, and it was obvious that they were far more ready to resist kinetic energy despite having other options for attacking. Given the range and available larger weapons? That left a single option, and Ino was just finishing up the testing of the final deployment elements. Unfortunately, Naruto's security-mindedness meant that he couldn't actually deploy things alone. He had to operate one terminal while she operated another, in two very different locations, with within-a-second synchronization on several aspects.
This meant that she had to hand off control of the war island to someone else.
"Matatabi," she called out inside of the Tome. "Get Ren and anyone else who wants to help with the attack in here, because I have to go do a security dance."
"Ren wants to try to attack the ships in person," Matatabi replied.
"He'd be reforming inside of you within two minutes unless they decided to toy with him. Tell him that I've unlocked all the weapon systems for manual control."
Mei had come to realize that the battle in space had become repetitive, barring the attempted clone barrage. Neither side was getting the upper hand, and no new tactics were really being used. Both sides were in an 'outlast the other side' holding pattern that wasn't going to win the battle unless someone had to retreat due to insufficient power.
Compared to that, the zombies were throwing new things at the chunin, and the chunin kept stepping up to the challenge. It was honestly the more interesting show, with the eight of them having proven to her several times over that they were jounin material. If the observers didn't agree at this point then they were blind or had been too severely distracted by the attack from space.
Because the fight in the arena was more interesting, she'd been focusing on it when things just kind of...stopped. The zombies froze in place, even the floating balloons no longer moving, before they all just dissolved.
"My apologies," Naruto said, suddenly on the speaker system. "But on this scale the zombie system draws too much power to run it while preparing our next attempt at taking out the attacking spaceships. All non-critical high-draw systems are going to shut down or shift into standby mode in the next few minutes. Those inside of the arena need to get out of the arena before it fully powers down and becomes a very deep pit as even maintaining the environment at this size is too much of a power draw."
With his point said, the light telling them that they were being broadcast turned off and he turned to them. "For security reasons, I have to travel to a secure station for my part of authorizing the activation of things. You are welcome to watch from here, as the broadcast system doesn't draw enough to shut down given that we still need to keep our people informed of things. We can decide if we want to resume testing the chunin after the crisis is over."
He vanished in a flash of light, and she looked at the others. "I'm a bit concerned about what could possibly use enough power to require shutting down everything."
"Something impressive," A replied. "Unfortunately, I don't know if there's a better place to watch from or I'd be working on reaching it."
Now that was a good point, but he was right. They didn't know enough to know where the best vantage points were.
Kiyori had been marked as being too passive for being a priestess off of Shrine Island, but had enough skill to be an on-island priestess and trainer. She had become the Amaterasu shrine priestess and found that she enjoyed the work, not to mention the lack of combat that being off of the island could introduce. She'd also been found to be a decent leader and had proven herself quite good at working with the computers. A day with Ino-sama had even proven that she was trustworthy enough to have higher-level access than most of the priests and priestesses.
Getting a message from Yoko-sama that Shrine Island needed to power down the island had been a shock, but in light of the fact that there were spaceships that had tried to destroy the island it wasn't a true surprise. Reaching the appropriate control area, she punched in her personal code before entering the secondary code Yoko had included in the request. That allowed access to a number of things that she hadn't known could be shut down.
She started with the protective fog and water currents, and cameras let her see things immediately start to clear up around the island. Active scanning for local threats was split into three pieces and she powered each one down in sequence, but only got warning lights that scanning was disabled in response. The floating islands themselves were 'critical' due to the damage they'd cause if they stopped floating, but she started cutting power to the honden themselves. Nothing obvious happened with the Omoikane or Inari honden, but powering down the Susano honden caused the water from above to stop turning into clouds of rain. Then the Suijin honden stopped generating water, and lastly she turned off the Amaterasu honden.
The artificial sun that kept the island lit up dimmed, then brightened as the computer system suddenly started reporting a reverse power flow. First from the Amaterasu honden, then moving back down the tower from the Suijin, Susano, Inari, and Omoikane honden. All of them feeding power back into the system now, as though they were power batteries that could now be drawn from instead of consuming power to keep their effects going.
Nobody had ever said anything about that even being an option though, and she had no clue how the artificial Sun could glow brighter while turned off.
Naruto authenticated to the secure terminal with his access card, personal access code, secondary access code, chakra signature, three drops of blood, and scans of his normal, sharingan, mangekyo sharingan, and rinnegan eyes. Two additional unlock passwords, entered in concert with Yoko entering her counterparts in Konoha, were followed by a back-and-forth confirmation dance with her.
Once they were done, the control systems released dozens of software locks and several physical locks on functionality. The two of them then started entering target parameters for the spaceships, and with the first target confirmed the system started to gather energy. The chunin exam island had successfully landed in the ocean and largely powered down, adding its generation capability to the overall network, but he had to tick off the override for trying to force the same to happen with the war island. Yoko accepted that from her end at basically the same moment.
Entering the rest of the target parameters didn't take long, though the system was still in the warming-up phases and hadn't even gotten to alerting yet. He and Yoko would need to monitor from their stations though, since safety rules meant that leaving would count as an abort command on the technically-experimental weapon system.
Orochi had her computer terminal in front of her, next to a television with the video feed of the battle in space showing. There wasn't a lot she could do right now, but she'd ended up repeating 'please let Uzushio handle this without interruption' to the scientists wanting more information. Most of them were even listening, but the particularly-insistent ones were being added to a list of those who should be treated as lower-priority for future access to things in general.
The terminal beeping with an alert tone instead of a message tone drew her focus more readily, and she frowned as she read the alert.
Moonscope - Offline
Honestly, that wasn't all that surprising as the Moonscope had to draw a sizable amount of energy to run. The next tone had her eyes widening though.
Earthscope - Offline
Had Naruto actually applied that telescope spell to the planet? Possibly through the obviously not just 'communication' satellites, but how much more could it have been picking up without anyone knowing it existed? A third tone snapped her out of that, and she wondered just what they were about to see.
Sunbeam - Online
The sudden darkness outside of the window had her moving over to look, eyes widening as she realized that a solid dark disc of some kind was forming between the planet and the Sun. Looking back at the television, she saw that it now had an inset showing a 'light collection disc' growing near the planet, not far outside of the satellite grid orbit, with its diameter listed as it grew...out to approximately four times the diameter of the planet itself. Once it had stabilized, a little meter showed that the disc was collecting around two and a half exawatts of 'usable' light energy...while covering the planet in darkness and causing who knew what kinds of side effects from that. There was also a 'conversion ratio' that was somewhat atrocious...but probably didn't matter with that much input energy.
A moment later the screen snapped to a different view, and an odd hole in space near the war island appeared before a small dome popped out of it. That dome was obviously spinning, and didn't seem to be doing much if you ignored that there were lots of itty bitty flashes of light as it spun where the intense energy coming out of it was likely hitting miniscule particles in space. The camera view then switched again, to show one of the enemy ships with a cut line showing where the beam of energy was likely striking. It wasn't moving fast along the ship, but was instead mostly keeping up with the ship's movement as it tried to get out of the way...or possibly trying to target something specific inside of the ship? After twenty seconds or so of adjusted aim something exploded inside of the ship and it seemed to come to a halt, the beam visibly swinging across it to target another ship and leaving a massive slice in the first one. The process repeated there, though that ship and the third one both started to fire at the dome instead of just taking the attack. That didn't help, and the second ship went down after about five seconds of the beam trying to target whatever it was.
When the beam left the second ship it had fully cut it in half, and the third ship had seemingly decided to try to run away at that point. It failed to do so, the beam targeting even more accurately after two successes for likely calibration. The little dome didn't stop there though. With them motionless, it started cutting them up...though the additional explosions inside of the ships and other attacks sent through the gaping holes by the war island showed that other internal systems were being targeted. After probably fifteen minutes of chopping the ships up into reasonably-small pieces the computer fired off another alert and suddenly sunlight rapidly returned to outside.
Yoko frowned as she looked through the energy distribution logs, wondering where they'd gotten enough stable energy to keep the light collection spell going at four times the planet's diameter instead of the two times that had been predicted. What she found was that the overall shrine network had fed significantly more power back into the distribution systems than expected, as if all of the honden had become generators somehow based on the reports on energy flows.
That didn't make a lot of sense to her, but she supposed that a lot of latent energy would build up in the seal arrays. Turning off the output could easily feed that back into the system with how everything had been interconnected to have control over when effects were active. She couldn't shake the feeling that she was missing something...but it also wasn't critical right now.
There were the pieces of three chopped-up ships to collect and examine and the problem of how to deal with more if any showed up, especially as regularly blocking out the Sun was bad for the planet.
