Tome of the Orange Sky (Naruto/MGLN)
- Thread starter CmptrWz
- Start date
- Crossover
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- Tags
- mgln naruto naruto uzumaki complete
- Pronouns
- Mr
@Tangent: Naurto's Academy Years are the only years we really have information on, we only know that the previous years were an unspecified level of better.
Basicly throwaway commentary of how "Naurto's Academy experience really went to the dogs" by non-Inuzaka.
And even Zabuza's Mist Academy was obviously better, unfortunately for them Zabuza was a homcidal psychopath.
Basicly throwaway commentary of how "Naurto's Academy experience really went to the dogs" by non-Inuzaka.
And even Zabuza's Mist Academy was obviously better, unfortunately for them Zabuza was a homcidal psychopath.
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MWKillKenny84
Lurking from the Trauma Switch.
- Location
- Vado Ligure
In one of the fanfics of Lucillia, a time-travel based one in which Naruto is identifiable as an Uzumaki the Demon Brothers tried to pull a runner the instant they realized Naruto was an Uzumaki (the same one that had Zabusa inquiry if their contract had a Uzumaki Escape Clause).
And in one fanfiction she did exactly what you talked about (saw the idiot in first line as the biggest easy Academy Target and killed him with a kunai to the forehead).
KamenRaidaOOO3
(Verified Toku Nut)
- Location
- Wouldn't you like to know?
Could we get a link to that fic?
Just for that it sounds great.
IIRC, Zabuza never actually attended class. He just crashed the final exam and slaughtered everybody.
MWKillKenny84
Lurking from the Trauma Switch.
- Location
- Vado Ligure
Problem is I do not remember the title (for all I remember it could have been an Anime Addventure Thread where Naruto get a boost up from Toltiir and thus Sakura is forced to get out from her pre-timeskip mindset and attitude).
- Location
- england
...there are several Toltiir stories I know of.
On FFN, there's Spiral Dragon on Greyff/Nimode's page.
There are also the deleted-but-reposted stories Mischief Fragment Mjolnir and Mischief Fragment Phoenix.
Over on AO3, you can find his Fistful Of Omake including several Toltiir appearances.
I have no idea at this point which one is the Sakura-Kills-Gato one, though... sorry.
On FFN, there's Spiral Dragon on Greyff/Nimode's page.
There are also the deleted-but-reposted stories Mischief Fragment Mjolnir and Mischief Fragment Phoenix.
Over on AO3, you can find his Fistful Of Omake including several Toltiir appearances.
I have no idea at this point which one is the Sakura-Kills-Gato one, though... sorry.
MWKillKenny84
Lurking from the Trauma Switch.
- Location
- Vado Ligure
Nor I.
As I said, it has been so long that frankly I do not remember the title, only that Gato showed, did his boasting, and Sakura nailed him with a kunai because he was a target so open that for her he was screaming "Please hit me".
- Location
- Michigan
If I remember right Zabuza explaining the name of the Bloody Mist and his origin story. The mist village used to have their graduation exam pair students in a 1v1 death match where only the winner graduates(for hopefully obvious reasons) and Zabuza without having even been a student showed up at the test site and killed all prospective genin(I choose to believe that he just declared himself a graduate and the likely chunin instructors present were too scared shitless to object) and the even was apparently traumatic enough to the village that they permanently removed the deathmatches from the graduation requirements to avoid a repeat incident.
- Location
- Michigan
An idea for later, given that Anko is likely not going to be in charge of the second stage of the chunin exam in this story due to her role as a team sensei, that opens up room for a lot of changes to how that part of the exam could be handled and it is fairly likely Naruto's team will get a basic breakdown of how the exam is structured (written/information gathering in the first test, simulated missions in the second test, and the third being a display individual combat ability) I would find it fully believable for Naruto to send out clones to knock out and replace the second instructor to give his team an advantage in the second test(such as giving their team both scrolls from the start using the canon test as an example)
- Pronouns
- Mr
I'd imagine that with the Nara Head running the Exams, this will be planned for and the instructors will only get access to one of the scrolls and they will only be handed to said instructors while the examinees are enroute to the Forest of Death.
MWKillKenny84
Lurking from the Trauma Switch.
- Location
- Vado Ligure
Worse. The paired students? The 'buddy system' started at the beginning of their Academy Course.
If is a fanon argument that appears in many fanfictions (those that do not demonize Zabusa for EDGEEESSSSS' sake anyway) that, no matter how brutal was Zabusa's massacre of that graduating class, in the long term it saved even more lives because the death match practice was permanently suspended thanks to his killing spree.
- Location
- Earth, Sol System, Virgo Supercluster, Earth-1218
Nah, Naruto's solution is to knock out (or delay) a TEAM and receive their scroll in their place before the exam proper even starts. I imagine them showing up 5 minutes late saying they were locked in the bathroom or something and the instructor going "but… I just gave you your scroll".
If it's the wrong one he just has to find a friendly Konoha team and ask for a swap (via Clones) until he gets the one he needs.
- Location
- Treasure Island
Let's be honest that Naruto Canon is a somewhat contradictory mess. Wood Release is stated to be Earth+Water, however later on it's heavily implied that its a Kekkai Tota/Mora either from being an ostutsuki descendent or with a heavy Yang-Release component to give life to a mud Kekkei Genkai. Which actually makes sense, Yang Release = breathing life/vitality so influencing earth and water to become a plant.
Its futher convoluted that all the Kekkei Genkai that influence/calm down tailed beasts come from descendents of the senju or uchiha, with uzumaki being a senju branch. So its obvious that heavy yin or yang influenced bloodlines which is what the sharingan and mokuton are, chakra chains has a lot of mysteries, if its a form of yin it would make since (form from nothing) but it seems more like a simpler Yin/Yang release, considering its a physical form created by chakra with suppression capabilites.
So the uchiha have a yin-release bloodline, the senju a yang-release, and the uzumaki have a mixture of yang and yin with their vitality and chains.
And ironically Kekkai Tota is learned not genetic except for the chakra natures if one has Fire, Lightning, and Earth (Dust Release) than with training it can be performed, and Kurotsuchi has Fire & Earth so has Lava.
So it makes since that only body, and eye based techniques such as the Shikotsumakyu (kaguya bones) or Rinnegan (eye things) are actually genetic since chakra natures can be trained with enough time.
Its futher convoluted that all the Kekkei Genkai that influence/calm down tailed beasts come from descendents of the senju or uchiha, with uzumaki being a senju branch. So its obvious that heavy yin or yang influenced bloodlines which is what the sharingan and mokuton are, chakra chains has a lot of mysteries, if its a form of yin it would make since (form from nothing) but it seems more like a simpler Yin/Yang release, considering its a physical form created by chakra with suppression capabilites.
So the uchiha have a yin-release bloodline, the senju a yang-release, and the uzumaki have a mixture of yang and yin with their vitality and chains.
And ironically Kekkai Tota is learned not genetic except for the chakra natures if one has Fire, Lightning, and Earth (Dust Release) than with training it can be performed, and Kurotsuchi has Fire & Earth so has Lava.
So it makes since that only body, and eye based techniques such as the Shikotsumakyu (kaguya bones) or Rinnegan (eye things) are actually genetic since chakra natures can be trained with enough time.
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- Pronouns
- Mr
Well... essentially perfect mimicry is next to impossible to truly defend against, especially in the extremely short term.
You can only do so much and the Nara Head will insist on putting in his best effort to stop test rigging. Not only for not wanting to hand the other villages an excuse to insist Konoha invalidate their own results, but also his own sense of completionism.
You can only do so much and the Nara Head will insist on putting in his best effort to stop test rigging. Not only for not wanting to hand the other villages an excuse to insist Konoha invalidate their own results, but also his own sense of completionism.
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Can anyone remind me where it's mentioned that Shikamaru's dad will be preparing the test that he's going to take? That seems like quite the conflict of interest to me, and the sort of plot-issue that CmptrWz is usually fairly good at avoiding…
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Think it came up when it was pointed out that Anko can't proctor the third part of the test as she is a joining sensei now.
Nah, he's a Nara. Nepotism would just be too much of a drag to even consider. He just needs to call things down the middle and nobody will be able to pester him about it.
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
People always assume being lazy means you do a half assed job of things. No, that's not actually true. If you're lazy, you make sure to do things right the first time. That way you don't have to keep redoing the work. Lazy people understand that doing a job right the first time takes less effort then it would take to do a half assed job.
- Location
- Earth, Sol System, Virgo Supercluster, Earth-1218
Being (smart and) lazy means instead of doing a half assed thing twice you can whole ass it once and be done with it.
- Location
- Michigan
Honestly, for me, the most amusing choice for second round proctor would be Ebisu.
Chapter 12 - New Insights, Loot, Battle for Wave
After two days of guarding Tazuna at the bridge, Team Eighteen had everything they were likely to get in regards to information on Gato. The man basically wanted a tax-free and law-free nation to run his shipping company out of and was planning on officially taking over as Wave's daimyo in the next six months. That had been relayed back to Konoha, which had relayed it to the Land of Fire's daimyo, who had added 'ensure that Gato dies for even considering such an underhanded thing' as a new aspect of the mission. Complete with payment for it on top of all other mission payments involved.
Daimyo may not always get along, but none of them wanted anyone to think that 'commoners' could get away with taking over any country like that. That would set precedent and they might be next, after all.
Anko-sensei had checked out the drug and contraband settlements and come up with a plan for them, Haku had started seeding the area around the bridge and Tazuna's house with small ice mirror fragments that could seemingly be used for monitoring but stuck out to the byakugan like sore thumbs, and Tenten had called bullshit on 'holding a magic book for a day allows use of all five elements' after she'd had trouble with any elemental jutsu before then.
At the same time, the Tome now had a far better understanding of the 'net'...and Naruto was positive that calling it a net was a horrible misrepresentation of what it actually was. It apparently came with thirteen 'primary groups' that connected in various ways, at least in Naruto. When the net was 'complete' each group connected to each other via sub-nodes in groups of two, three, and four, with some connections between compatible sub-groups as well. Chakra chains had seemingly been one of three 'extra groups' that most people didn't have any hint of at all though, and looked more 'constructed' than the others. Almost as though someone had found a way to add them on later.
From examining others, it appeared that chakra natures depended on which groups were fully intact and chakra nature kekkei genkai came about from having the interconnection nodes. Haku had a water and wind interconnection node and could thus use ice. He also had interconnections for water and wind individually with yin, yang, and both, plus the combined 'ice' node with yin, yang, and both. Really, yin and yang connected to almost all other nodes, individually and together, being one of the only near-constant things that the Tome had seen so far.
This meant that the Tome had, essentially, accidentally given Naruto every chakra nature kekkei genkai possible for his available groups by fixing the base elemental groups based on the obvious patterns in them and then filling in all the missing interconnection nodes based on the patterns created by the yin and yang groups. Followed by duplicating it to Hinata, and now to Tenten.
And for some reason his parents were now working on seals that could 'fix' the net without needing the Tome itself...or shatter it in various ways. From removing most of the elemental interconnects in order to obliterate chakra nature kekkei genkai all the way through to dismantling the entire thing to remove someone's ability to control chakra normally at all. While the 'fixing' seal sounded like an awesome idea, Naruto was less sold on the idea of having the 'shatter' variants available at all simply on the basis that they could be used against him.
Sakura grumbled a little as she limped a little on her walk through the village. She still wasn't sure what Kiba had been thinking before his stunt had knocked her off the roof they'd been working on. Even that wouldn't have been too big of a problem if she'd not needed to focus on both her landing and the stack of roofing tiles he'd knocked off the roof as well. The result had been landing wrong to avoid injury, but doing so in a way that let her dodge the rain of roofing tiles.
The medic-nin said that it was better to let the rest of the injury heal naturally and that she'd be fine in a couple of days. Which left her better off than Kiba after Asuma-sensei had gotten to the boy...and probably after his mother had beaten him into the ground during training. At the same time, she wasn't getting the personal training that she normally got from Asuma-sensei while Choji and Kiba were training with their clans today. So instead she was heading to the shrine that Sasuke had taken to visiting so often.
She lucked out in that the shrine was unusually empty, but she was also earlier than she could usually manage to visit. Only a couple of civilians were in the shrine area right now, and she marveled at the exceptionally-clean water that flowed from the honden as she purified herself before continuing further. Nobody had been able to provide a good explanation for where the water came from, beyond that it came from the honden itself so long as a suitable shrine maiden was looking after the shrine.
Some research into the village's history had revealed that Mito Uzumaki was the first one known to look after the shrine, though she'd stopped sometime after marrying Hashirama Senju. Kushina Uzumaki was the most recent shrine maiden, personally trained by Mito and also seemingly the only other previous shrine maiden. Deeper records were harder to find for a genin, but Sakura had idly wondered if Kushina was Naruto's aunt or something like that. It seemed unlikely that he'd be treated as a normal orphan if his mother had been a kunoichi.
Then there was Yoko, the current shrine maiden. Who looked enough like Kushina to possibly be the woman's daughter, at least based on the woman's shinobi registration photo, but wasn't claiming to be an Uzumaki. Was Sasuke attracted to the girl's long red hair? Her violet eyes? She was the only shrine maiden their age that Sakura knew about, so perhaps he liked shrine maidens?
It was a mystery, and Sakura did her best to not be noticed examining the shrine maiden as she went through the motions expected of a visitor to the shrine. That a civilian girl had captured Sasuke's interest when nobody else could was particularly vexing though, because you couldn't even issue a proper challenge to a civilian. Nor could a genin get away with questioning a civilian the way they wanted to. Which left observation and hoping that something jumped out at them.
On day three of guarding the bridge Naruto had a breakthrough in having his clones make it to Kiri in a day...by virtue of one of the foxes suggesting that Naruto summon a few of them on an island near the furthest his clones had been able to reach from Konoha. Then the foxes could hunker down for the night and summon him in the morning to make clones to continue on to Kiri. This had been implemented, and on day four he'd been pulled to the island to create clones to head onward before returning to Wave.
By lunchtime the clones had made it into Kiri, found the security lacking due to the civil war going on screwing over all the normal defenses, and made their way into the storage room where the original contract with Uzu and both copies of the receipt of reclamation had been left. Which was, for some stupid reason, also the vault in which the swords still in Kiri's possession were kept. Of course, the vault was itself a trap, seemingly left unlocked but rigged to seal itself if anyone touched the swords stored within, so perhaps putting everything there was simply bait. Nuibari and Shibuki were the only real swords there as well, with stone fakes covered by genjutsu sitting in the other five slots.
Disabling the trap had been trivial for the clones as the 'trigger lines' were sloppy enough to fake out and would only fire once an hour. One of the two receipts had been modified to specify Nuibari instead of Kubikiribocho, without affecting the 'confirmed' markings that had been made on the receipt by someone in Kiri, before both swords in the vault were taken via reverse summoning back to Konoha. The remaining clones had then carefully created stone fakes for the two empty holders, barely managed to apply a genjutsu to them without overloading it, and then went looking for anything else interesting enough to grab. Sadly, everything else that looked interesting was too well guarded.
They were there long enough for the missing swords to be noticed though, as apparently they'd shown up just in time to grab them before two new wielders were to attempt to take up the swords. Oddly, nobody seemed to consider that an Uzumaki had slipped in to grab Nuibari, the missing swords instead being blamed on the 'traitorous resistance' instead and assumed to have been gone for a couple of weeks. Which suited Naruto just fine when the memories from the clones reached him that evening.
"So Gato has a large payment for illegal shipments coming in tonight," Anko-sensei mused via the communication jutsu shortly after they'd reached the bridge for their fifth day of guarding it. "And Zabuza doesn't think they're going to have a better plan than to attack in the morning?"
"That's what it seems like," Naruto agreed. He hadn't actually told his team of his 'unofficial mission' to Kiri yet, figuring that it would be best to reveal that back in Konoha. If only because saying anything about having three of Kiri's seven legendary swords around Tenten seemed like a horrible idea right now. "He's hoping that because we haven't given any signs of noticing the ice mirrors that Haku can use them to take us by surprise after a water dragon drops enough water on the bridge to form them with."
"Which isn't a horrible plan," Kurenai-sensei admitted. "Luckily we already know about the mirrors and that jutsu using them you spotted a scroll for, plus we haven't been revealing our Knight Armor trump card. But we'll want to move on Gato's holdings overnight to force him to play his own hand."
"Why aren't we just killing him in his sleep?" Anko-sensei asked.
"Because the people of Wave are more likely to finish tearing down his company if he dies in public. Otherwise one of his underlings will be more likely to take over. Plus the Daimyo wants it to be public to discourage people from trying to usurp another Daimyo like this."
"Oh, right. I'd forgotten about that in my fantasizing about the various ways to kill him in his sleep."
"Tonight Naruto needs to empty Gato's safes and the two storage rooms he found that other valuables are kept in. Anko and I will take care of the drug and contraband settlements before looting the primary shipping warehouse's safe, but we all need to make it look like either the thugs did it or Zabuza did. Nothing should be traceable back to us by Gato or his men, and tomorrow morning we'll all need to have Knight Armor protections up to serve as added protection against the surprise attack."
Most of the day was spent working out the specifics of things while keeping their routine going. Said routine had been enough to fool Zabuza, or so it appeared, which meant that it was almost guaranteed to have fooled Gato. That the team hadn't been seen anywhere else on the island beyond what was needed for guarding Tazuna should hopefully keep suspicion for the thefts and vandalism away from them. They'd have to contend with knee-jerk 'the shinobi had to have done it' accusations, of course, but with Zabuza around there was a more convenient scapegoat available.
Naruto had needed to ensure that the day's Yoko turned in early enough for him to get enough sleep before the evening's activities without her exhaustion screwing him up as well when she finally dispelled, but that hadn't been difficult. Once she had the message she'd merely faked a couple of yawns and the villagers had all but insisted that she head home early, though she'd had to insist on not being escorted home. His other clones in the village were mobile enough that nobody noticed that they literally vanished overnight, so having them do so early was easy enough.
The actual operation against Gato had started just after midnight, Naruto creating a large number of clones to send across the island. One of them had stopped at a predetermined point to summon Anko-sensei and Kurenai-sensei out of the house without them being seen. They'd arranged for it to be his guard rotation so that it wouldn't look out of place for him to be active, and he would wander around the outside of the house every twenty minutes or so despite knowing that there was nothing to worry about. Even Hinata made a point of wandering despite not hiding her byakugan.
Getting into Gato's safes had been trivial for Naruto's clones, mostly because they'd watched the man open them several times over the past week. He seemed to occasionally open the 'legal business' safe with visitors in the office, but the only ones permitted to be in the room with him when he opened the 'illegal business' safe were his personal bodyguards. Scrolls for both sides of the business dealings had been prepared, but the 'illegal business' safe had contained an added surprise. Some of the scrolls weren't records, but jutsu.
Those went into a different seal entirely, and it was a good thing that extras had been prepared just in case.
Sneaking into the storage rooms was slightly harder because they didn't have external windows to slip in through and the corridor they sat in was regularly patrolled by guards overnight. But Naruto's clones only needed thirty seconds at most to make it through the doors as he'd gotten a good enough look at Gato's master key to make duplicates of it. The real Naruto had one, his clones all had a copy thanks to him having it in his pocket when he'd made them, and two more real ones were going to be dropped in the room that Zabuza and Haku were currently staying in when they left to set up their ambush.
Anko-sensei insisted that a proper infiltration shinobi never ignored easy options for framing enemies like this and they'd already made the extra two keys before realizing that Gato wasn't stupid enough to have a single master key that worked in all of his buildings. Anko-sensei and Kurenai-sensei were going to just use normal lock picking techniques instead.
Getting back out of the office and storage rooms was far easier than getting in as the clones just held onto the storage scrolls they'd filled and reverse summoned themselves to Konoha. Naruto would collect the scrolls before they went to turn in the missions, leaving nothing in Wave to point at Team Eighteen having been involved at all.
The last thing done in the early morning was Naruto slipping inside 'to use the restroom' and summoning Anko-sensei and Kurenai-sensei back to the house. Another clone was made to take the scrolls they handed over to Konoha before Naruto actually used the restroom and headed back outside to finish his guard shift.
Morning routines had been completed, with one of the last clones out across the island from last night dispelling to let Naruto know that Gato had found the empty storage rooms shortly before being told of the destruction of the drug and contraband settlements. The man had then apparently stormed off to demand that Zabuza find those responsible, only to find the room empty except for the key copies. The clone that had planted those had looted the rest of the gear in the room to make it look like the duo was planning on or actually doing a runner. Said looting meant that Naruto had all three of Haku's ice jutsu scrolls back in Konoha now, which was being treated as a bonus by him even if he was disappointed that there were so few. Regardless, the discovery had led to Gato gathering every thug he could to storm across the island to the bridge, but that would take them time.
The man never even got around to checking his safes and thus had no clue that he was broke.
It took twenty minutes for Naruto to shake off the exhaustion from that clone before more clones were sent out to watch for Gato's approach. Others would gather most of the adult villagers for the final show when it came to that, also needing to time things so that the villagers weren't there too early.
Early clones aside, Team Eighteen had ensured that they had their Knight Armor spells active before escorting Tazuna to the bridge, or to just guard Tsunami and Inari in Tenten's case. She was annoyed about that, but had lost the coin toss with Hinata after they'd decided that they couldn't leave a clone to look over the house. The bridge group found that the early-arrived workers had been knocked out and stuck at the far end of the bridge in progress as bait, with the bridge already somewhat damp. Hinata stayed with Tazuna behind an illusion created by Hoshi while Naruto joined Anko-sensei and Kurenai-sensei in 'investigating'.
They intentionally didn't dodge the water dragon when it struck them, and thanks to the Knight Armor didn't even get wet. But they did jump apart as soon as the ice mirrors started forming since they didn't need to worry about the water dragon severely damaging the bridge surface anymore.
Instead of senbon, Haku had two katanas when he tried bouncing through the mirrors to quickly kill them. These did not make it through the Knight Armor protections, which took the young man by surprise and had him needing to dodge one of Anko-sensei's counter-attacks. Four Zabuzas then jumped up onto the bridge, each with an oversized broadsword and a katana. Three of them were water clones, and those three immediately engaged with Naruto, Anko-sensei, and Kurenai-sensei while the real Zabuza stayed back. Water clones required some concentration to control, so the real him staying back made sense there.
Hinata started launching lava balls at mirrors from the sidelines, each one shattering a mirror on hit. This obviously took Haku by surprise as well, but as the range of the attack was limited the young man just stopped making mirrors close enough to Hinata for her to reliably fire the lava balls.
Grinning, Naruto bounced off of one of the ice mirrors to get around the water clone attacking him, then slid under another to put it between him and the clone. "So you want to play with clones, huh? Let's see how well that works when you can't see."
A minute later the darkness creation genjutsu was covering the entire bridge, followed by four paperwork clones being created. Two took over maintaining the darkness creation jutsu while the other two worked to ensure that all free water on the bridge surface was pulled into a hiding in mist jutsu on top of the darkness creation genjutsu. This left Naruto essentially unimpaired, Hinata slightly impaired because she couldn't see through his chakra as well as he could, and both Anko-sensei and Kurenai-sensei running on likely-muted chakra-sensing.
As far as they knew, Zabuza and Haku couldn't sense chakra, leaving them entirely blind. And effectively deaf to movement because Team Eighteen ran the jutsu to cancel out sounds of movement constantly. But despite their obvious handicap, they were still putting up a fight, at least once the water clones had been quickly taken care of and the real Zabuza entered the fray.
Using water chakra flow on swords and kunai was a lot less effective than using wind would be for cutting, but right now they were mostly in a delaying action while Gato and the villagers slowly made their way to the bridge.
Tenten was bored and annoyed that she'd not been able to go to the bridge. Sure, she knew that she was probably the worst choice for the battle as Naruto and Hinata had both done better with blind-fighting than she had, but guarding the house was boring. The six pairs of thugs that had come to try to grab Tsunami and Inari hadn't even put up a hint of an actual fight. Hell, they'd gone down so easily that Tsunami might not even be aware that there had been a dozen people sent to grab her and her son so far.
It was honestly pathetic, but ambushing the thugs without being seen was made easier by Tazuna's house being a little bit isolated. At the same time, the thugs were making no attempt to be stealthy on approach, though at least the last two pairs had been wary because of how many others had been sent and hadn't returned. They were still mostly assuming that it was a problem of their targets having a clever hiding place that was flummoxing the previous groups though, instead of thinking that the shinobi guards might have left someone behind to guard the house. Or maybe they actually thought that a pair of thugs was a match for a shinobi?
Some people were idiots, and it felt like that was almost a requirement to be working for Gato...
Oh well. At least Naruto's magic book had made manipulating earth a lot easier. An unmarked grave in the trees was probably more than most of these thugs deserved after she'd stripped them of their equipment and money, but burning them would draw too much attention and corpses had an annoying tendency to eventually float in water. No need to have the civilians find them washed up on shore.
Sadly, their weapons were going to be sold as scrap when they made it back to Konoha. There hadn't been a decent blade yet.
Gato's approach was decidedly less than subtle, with the villager-gathering clones at least keeping the noise from that group down a little. But both groups arrived at the bridge at basically the same time, which was the signal for Team Eighteen to stop delaying. Naruto switched to channeling wind through his tantos to slice right through the swords being used by Zabuza and Haku, taking both of them by surprise as the mist and darkness were lifted. The clones remained using the transparency jutsu though, two moving into position for taking out the thugs while the other two prepared senbon with a container of knockout drugs that had been collected from the real Naruto in the middle of the fight.
Getting the real jar to the clones was worth the added effort, because having cloned drugs vanish from an enemy's system would be less than ideal for those you intended to deliver to T and I shortly.
"ZABUZA!" the little pipsqueak known as Gato screamed.
"I'M WORKING ON IT!" Zabuza yelled as he threw aside the worthless handles from the swords he'd been using and dug out a scroll. Haku appeared to be doing the same.
Neither expected an invisible clone to silently body-flicker behind them and fill their backs with senbon, though both were aware enough to attempt to dodge. Neither succeeded and the knockout drugs quickly went to work on them. More than was safe for either of them, but crippled enemies were perfectly fine. It was allies and bystanders that you needed to be careful with.
"I really need to work on my stamina," Kurenai-sensei said as she caught her breath.
Gato stood there staring at the unconscious forms of Zabuza and Haku for a minute, blinking, before scowling and pointing his cane at the group. "KILL THEM ALL!"
Naruto bounced to the front of the group, trying to look far too happy about having a bunch of thugs coming to try to kill him. Something that he thought he'd gotten correct if the concerned looks on some of the faces of the thugs were any indication. Looking over the thugs, he let his smile turn to a frown. "But you don't have any shinobi!"
"Shinobi are overpriced frauds," Gato claimed.
"Oh well." A wave of water under the control of the two invisible clones suddenly flowed up from the ocean, surrounding Gato and the thugs before contracting in and catching them all in a whirlpool-like action. Technically this was a jutsu intended for preparing drinks, but it worked reasonably well if you scaled it up properly too. The mostly-clear ocean water quickly shifted to red as the blender jutsu tore apart everyone inside of it, more solid objects falling and flying out of it as it spun. That included swords, knives, keys, and larger bones stripped of flesh.
Two of the thugs had enough chakra for the minimal force the jutsu generated to not cause them more than a few deeper cuts due to unconsciously resisting the chakra in the jutsu with their own, which was one reason why this wasn't usually that good in a battle. Shinobi just tended to find it annoying because even when scaled up it was D-rank at best. Naruto's clones let those two fall out with the rest of the remaining debris as they directed things off into the ocean. The two survivors looked around at the pile of bones, weapons, and other surviving items before turning and running, ignoring that they were half naked now.
"You let two escape," Anko-sensei complained, though with a tone of 'what the hell did I just watch?' included.
"They had more potential than the others," Naruto replied, glad for the techniques that Inoichi had taught them to keep his internal disgust off of his face.
"What the hell was that?" Kurenai-sensei asked.
"Blender jutsu, for making mixed drinks. Scaled up a little. A bit of a specialty of Uzumaki bartenders."
"...what?"
The full cleanup took a day, including surreptitiously sealing up Zabuza and Haku and sending a clone with them to T&I as well as applying the minimal needed healing to the knocked-out bridge workers. Then the party started, along with more workers than ever helping to build the bridge...plus a guard house and toll booth station for the Konoha side of the bridge, per agreements with Tazuna for the village to use when collecting tolls.
Technically no guard house had been asked for or agreed to, but Wave had a new appreciation for shinobi and didn't want to be on their bad side.
Team Eighteen was able to get some proper training in as well, with the chakra weights that Naruto had picked up being used by him, Hinata, and Tenten. Anko-sensei and Kurenai-sensei had declined to wear them for now, but had taken a set each and promised that he'd be reimbursed for the whole stack. Of course, this led to a new discovery a little over a week later after the bridge had been completed and the team had returned to the Uzumaki compound.
Specifically, they'd started to debrief before heading to turn things in, and Naruto had commented about possibly needing to turn his belt and weights off to help carry everything if they weren't bringing it sealed.
"What do you mean you've got your belt active?" Tenten asked. "I can't wear the weights at the same time that the belt is active and still move my arms."
"It took a day but I got used to it," Naruto replied.
"He has more chakra in his weights than we do," Hinata added, only to blush when Tenten gave her a look that screamed 'what are you talking about'.
"Naruto heals faster than he has any right to," Anko-sensei said. "So he can probably build up muscles faster than most, since half the time spent doing so is waiting for them to heal stronger. Or so I'm led to believe. I think he's had his resistance seals up higher than the rest of us too, given that with them off he was easily faster than me."
"I actually rebuilt the seals on my belt when I maxed out the original version," Naruto admitted. "But I also keep pumping medical chakra into my muscles to overcome the changes faster too."
"We're all doing that. But you're a chakra monster." There was a moment of silence before Anko-sensei turned to stare at him. "Wait. Medical chakra, specifically?"
"Yeah. Supercharge the healing without making it easier on me by boosting my strength."
"...I don't know if that's genius or not."
Hinata frowned. "If you don't get the balance right you probably cause your muscles to explode with a tenth of the chakra that boosting your strength needs."
"You back off when you start feeling pain from the chakra," Naruto added.
"The scrolls Hana gave you say that if you start feeling pain from medical chakra then you've already used three times too much."
"...oh. Guess it's a good thing that I heal quickly?"
"Utter madness that only works because Naruto is an insane Uzumaki," Anko-sensei decided. "Right. Normal shinobi won't be pulling that trick anytime soon, but it means that you're going to take anyone not expecting you to be stronger than you look by surprise. And either way you don't have to drag the big-ass sword in. Er, actually, anything you took other than the money, records, and contents of Gato's store rooms is probably yours to keep."
Naruto nodded, as that made some sense. Anything they'd grabbed that wasn't specifically listed as part of the mission was fair game to keep on most missions. But there was one thing that he thought was in questionable territory. "What about the jutsu scrolls that were in Gato's safe?"
"The what?" the four kunoichi asked, and even Hoshi was looking curious.
It took a couple of minutes to fetch and unseal the scrolls, and Anko-sensei looked over them. Before laughing. "These are...well, they'd generally be considered useless, and he had them in one of his safes? But the combination could be hilarious."
"What are they?" Kurenai-sensei asked.
"Cleaning jutsu. Soapy water and scrubbing, steam cleaning for fabrics, a little dirt tornado thing intended for cleaning floors, a more general drying jutsu that covers an area, clothing mending...and the last one appears to be a general 'clean yourself and your clothing to look pristine at any time' jutsu. The end result essentially seems perfect for a maid though, and makes me think that these three should learn them all."
"Why should they learn them all?"
"Because Naruto turned a bartending jutsu into a bloodbath and I can think of several ways some of these could work in combat. Imagine these three going through the chunin exams in full maid uniforms and using cleaning jutsu to make a mockery of their opponents? At least for the first two stages. I'll even pay for the uniforms."
Naruto had to admit that it sounded like it would be a hilarious prank of sorts to play on the others in the exams, and ten minutes later they'd agreed to give it a shot. Followed by gathering everything needed to report to Old Man Hokage about the missions. Which went well, but was followed by Tenten insisting on getting her hands on a legendary sword.
Sadly for their ears, Naruto made the mistake of revealing that he had three legendary swords now, and had to explain how he'd gotten the other two once they'd recovered from and repaired eardrums damaged by Tenten's squeals of joy. Kurenai-sensei had been annoyed that he'd done something that she saw as reckless, balanced out by Anko-sensei thinking that it was the most awesome thing she'd ever heard of.
Tenten had then been horrified when told that they needed to keep the extra two swords secret for now, dismayed when she couldn't even pick up Kubikiribocho properly yet, and finally decided that Naruto was going to be able to use the giant sword in the next couple of months even if she had to personally run him through kenjutsu drills daily. Her goals also seemed to include getting Hinata able to handle Nuibari and getting herself able to handle Shibuki. Presumably partially because Shibuki weighed less than Kubikiribocho did but mostly because she wanted to play with the explosive tags.
Hiruzen looked over the reports from Team Eighteen's mission, not having expected anything too important in them. Three reports each from Anko and Kurenai, the 'standard' reports for the two missions and the 'sensitive enough to be kept separate' information.
Finding mention that Naruto had a book that granted access to every chakra nature and all chakra-nature kekkei genkai was not what he'd expected to read.
That pretty much guaranteed that there was some old Uzushio sealmaster teaching the boy, because only such an individual could have come up with something that insane. And if there was one there may be more, which brought up the question of how destroyed Uzushio was compared to 'moved to somewhere better hidden to rebuild'. Reaching out to Konoha through Naruto, perhaps? Or maybe just an old master looking to ensure that the Uzumaki family survived...
Daimyo may not always get along, but none of them wanted anyone to think that 'commoners' could get away with taking over any country like that. That would set precedent and they might be next, after all.
Anko-sensei had checked out the drug and contraband settlements and come up with a plan for them, Haku had started seeding the area around the bridge and Tazuna's house with small ice mirror fragments that could seemingly be used for monitoring but stuck out to the byakugan like sore thumbs, and Tenten had called bullshit on 'holding a magic book for a day allows use of all five elements' after she'd had trouble with any elemental jutsu before then.
At the same time, the Tome now had a far better understanding of the 'net'...and Naruto was positive that calling it a net was a horrible misrepresentation of what it actually was. It apparently came with thirteen 'primary groups' that connected in various ways, at least in Naruto. When the net was 'complete' each group connected to each other via sub-nodes in groups of two, three, and four, with some connections between compatible sub-groups as well. Chakra chains had seemingly been one of three 'extra groups' that most people didn't have any hint of at all though, and looked more 'constructed' than the others. Almost as though someone had found a way to add them on later.
From examining others, it appeared that chakra natures depended on which groups were fully intact and chakra nature kekkei genkai came about from having the interconnection nodes. Haku had a water and wind interconnection node and could thus use ice. He also had interconnections for water and wind individually with yin, yang, and both, plus the combined 'ice' node with yin, yang, and both. Really, yin and yang connected to almost all other nodes, individually and together, being one of the only near-constant things that the Tome had seen so far.
This meant that the Tome had, essentially, accidentally given Naruto every chakra nature kekkei genkai possible for his available groups by fixing the base elemental groups based on the obvious patterns in them and then filling in all the missing interconnection nodes based on the patterns created by the yin and yang groups. Followed by duplicating it to Hinata, and now to Tenten.
And for some reason his parents were now working on seals that could 'fix' the net without needing the Tome itself...or shatter it in various ways. From removing most of the elemental interconnects in order to obliterate chakra nature kekkei genkai all the way through to dismantling the entire thing to remove someone's ability to control chakra normally at all. While the 'fixing' seal sounded like an awesome idea, Naruto was less sold on the idea of having the 'shatter' variants available at all simply on the basis that they could be used against him.
Sakura grumbled a little as she limped a little on her walk through the village. She still wasn't sure what Kiba had been thinking before his stunt had knocked her off the roof they'd been working on. Even that wouldn't have been too big of a problem if she'd not needed to focus on both her landing and the stack of roofing tiles he'd knocked off the roof as well. The result had been landing wrong to avoid injury, but doing so in a way that let her dodge the rain of roofing tiles.
The medic-nin said that it was better to let the rest of the injury heal naturally and that she'd be fine in a couple of days. Which left her better off than Kiba after Asuma-sensei had gotten to the boy...and probably after his mother had beaten him into the ground during training. At the same time, she wasn't getting the personal training that she normally got from Asuma-sensei while Choji and Kiba were training with their clans today. So instead she was heading to the shrine that Sasuke had taken to visiting so often.
She lucked out in that the shrine was unusually empty, but she was also earlier than she could usually manage to visit. Only a couple of civilians were in the shrine area right now, and she marveled at the exceptionally-clean water that flowed from the honden as she purified herself before continuing further. Nobody had been able to provide a good explanation for where the water came from, beyond that it came from the honden itself so long as a suitable shrine maiden was looking after the shrine.
Some research into the village's history had revealed that Mito Uzumaki was the first one known to look after the shrine, though she'd stopped sometime after marrying Hashirama Senju. Kushina Uzumaki was the most recent shrine maiden, personally trained by Mito and also seemingly the only other previous shrine maiden. Deeper records were harder to find for a genin, but Sakura had idly wondered if Kushina was Naruto's aunt or something like that. It seemed unlikely that he'd be treated as a normal orphan if his mother had been a kunoichi.
Then there was Yoko, the current shrine maiden. Who looked enough like Kushina to possibly be the woman's daughter, at least based on the woman's shinobi registration photo, but wasn't claiming to be an Uzumaki. Was Sasuke attracted to the girl's long red hair? Her violet eyes? She was the only shrine maiden their age that Sakura knew about, so perhaps he liked shrine maidens?
It was a mystery, and Sakura did her best to not be noticed examining the shrine maiden as she went through the motions expected of a visitor to the shrine. That a civilian girl had captured Sasuke's interest when nobody else could was particularly vexing though, because you couldn't even issue a proper challenge to a civilian. Nor could a genin get away with questioning a civilian the way they wanted to. Which left observation and hoping that something jumped out at them.
On day three of guarding the bridge Naruto had a breakthrough in having his clones make it to Kiri in a day...by virtue of one of the foxes suggesting that Naruto summon a few of them on an island near the furthest his clones had been able to reach from Konoha. Then the foxes could hunker down for the night and summon him in the morning to make clones to continue on to Kiri. This had been implemented, and on day four he'd been pulled to the island to create clones to head onward before returning to Wave.
By lunchtime the clones had made it into Kiri, found the security lacking due to the civil war going on screwing over all the normal defenses, and made their way into the storage room where the original contract with Uzu and both copies of the receipt of reclamation had been left. Which was, for some stupid reason, also the vault in which the swords still in Kiri's possession were kept. Of course, the vault was itself a trap, seemingly left unlocked but rigged to seal itself if anyone touched the swords stored within, so perhaps putting everything there was simply bait. Nuibari and Shibuki were the only real swords there as well, with stone fakes covered by genjutsu sitting in the other five slots.
Disabling the trap had been trivial for the clones as the 'trigger lines' were sloppy enough to fake out and would only fire once an hour. One of the two receipts had been modified to specify Nuibari instead of Kubikiribocho, without affecting the 'confirmed' markings that had been made on the receipt by someone in Kiri, before both swords in the vault were taken via reverse summoning back to Konoha. The remaining clones had then carefully created stone fakes for the two empty holders, barely managed to apply a genjutsu to them without overloading it, and then went looking for anything else interesting enough to grab. Sadly, everything else that looked interesting was too well guarded.
They were there long enough for the missing swords to be noticed though, as apparently they'd shown up just in time to grab them before two new wielders were to attempt to take up the swords. Oddly, nobody seemed to consider that an Uzumaki had slipped in to grab Nuibari, the missing swords instead being blamed on the 'traitorous resistance' instead and assumed to have been gone for a couple of weeks. Which suited Naruto just fine when the memories from the clones reached him that evening.
"So Gato has a large payment for illegal shipments coming in tonight," Anko-sensei mused via the communication jutsu shortly after they'd reached the bridge for their fifth day of guarding it. "And Zabuza doesn't think they're going to have a better plan than to attack in the morning?"
"That's what it seems like," Naruto agreed. He hadn't actually told his team of his 'unofficial mission' to Kiri yet, figuring that it would be best to reveal that back in Konoha. If only because saying anything about having three of Kiri's seven legendary swords around Tenten seemed like a horrible idea right now. "He's hoping that because we haven't given any signs of noticing the ice mirrors that Haku can use them to take us by surprise after a water dragon drops enough water on the bridge to form them with."
"Which isn't a horrible plan," Kurenai-sensei admitted. "Luckily we already know about the mirrors and that jutsu using them you spotted a scroll for, plus we haven't been revealing our Knight Armor trump card. But we'll want to move on Gato's holdings overnight to force him to play his own hand."
"Why aren't we just killing him in his sleep?" Anko-sensei asked.
"Because the people of Wave are more likely to finish tearing down his company if he dies in public. Otherwise one of his underlings will be more likely to take over. Plus the Daimyo wants it to be public to discourage people from trying to usurp another Daimyo like this."
"Oh, right. I'd forgotten about that in my fantasizing about the various ways to kill him in his sleep."
"Tonight Naruto needs to empty Gato's safes and the two storage rooms he found that other valuables are kept in. Anko and I will take care of the drug and contraband settlements before looting the primary shipping warehouse's safe, but we all need to make it look like either the thugs did it or Zabuza did. Nothing should be traceable back to us by Gato or his men, and tomorrow morning we'll all need to have Knight Armor protections up to serve as added protection against the surprise attack."
Most of the day was spent working out the specifics of things while keeping their routine going. Said routine had been enough to fool Zabuza, or so it appeared, which meant that it was almost guaranteed to have fooled Gato. That the team hadn't been seen anywhere else on the island beyond what was needed for guarding Tazuna should hopefully keep suspicion for the thefts and vandalism away from them. They'd have to contend with knee-jerk 'the shinobi had to have done it' accusations, of course, but with Zabuza around there was a more convenient scapegoat available.
Naruto had needed to ensure that the day's Yoko turned in early enough for him to get enough sleep before the evening's activities without her exhaustion screwing him up as well when she finally dispelled, but that hadn't been difficult. Once she had the message she'd merely faked a couple of yawns and the villagers had all but insisted that she head home early, though she'd had to insist on not being escorted home. His other clones in the village were mobile enough that nobody noticed that they literally vanished overnight, so having them do so early was easy enough.
The actual operation against Gato had started just after midnight, Naruto creating a large number of clones to send across the island. One of them had stopped at a predetermined point to summon Anko-sensei and Kurenai-sensei out of the house without them being seen. They'd arranged for it to be his guard rotation so that it wouldn't look out of place for him to be active, and he would wander around the outside of the house every twenty minutes or so despite knowing that there was nothing to worry about. Even Hinata made a point of wandering despite not hiding her byakugan.
Getting into Gato's safes had been trivial for Naruto's clones, mostly because they'd watched the man open them several times over the past week. He seemed to occasionally open the 'legal business' safe with visitors in the office, but the only ones permitted to be in the room with him when he opened the 'illegal business' safe were his personal bodyguards. Scrolls for both sides of the business dealings had been prepared, but the 'illegal business' safe had contained an added surprise. Some of the scrolls weren't records, but jutsu.
Those went into a different seal entirely, and it was a good thing that extras had been prepared just in case.
Sneaking into the storage rooms was slightly harder because they didn't have external windows to slip in through and the corridor they sat in was regularly patrolled by guards overnight. But Naruto's clones only needed thirty seconds at most to make it through the doors as he'd gotten a good enough look at Gato's master key to make duplicates of it. The real Naruto had one, his clones all had a copy thanks to him having it in his pocket when he'd made them, and two more real ones were going to be dropped in the room that Zabuza and Haku were currently staying in when they left to set up their ambush.
Anko-sensei insisted that a proper infiltration shinobi never ignored easy options for framing enemies like this and they'd already made the extra two keys before realizing that Gato wasn't stupid enough to have a single master key that worked in all of his buildings. Anko-sensei and Kurenai-sensei were going to just use normal lock picking techniques instead.
Getting back out of the office and storage rooms was far easier than getting in as the clones just held onto the storage scrolls they'd filled and reverse summoned themselves to Konoha. Naruto would collect the scrolls before they went to turn in the missions, leaving nothing in Wave to point at Team Eighteen having been involved at all.
The last thing done in the early morning was Naruto slipping inside 'to use the restroom' and summoning Anko-sensei and Kurenai-sensei back to the house. Another clone was made to take the scrolls they handed over to Konoha before Naruto actually used the restroom and headed back outside to finish his guard shift.
Morning routines had been completed, with one of the last clones out across the island from last night dispelling to let Naruto know that Gato had found the empty storage rooms shortly before being told of the destruction of the drug and contraband settlements. The man had then apparently stormed off to demand that Zabuza find those responsible, only to find the room empty except for the key copies. The clone that had planted those had looted the rest of the gear in the room to make it look like the duo was planning on or actually doing a runner. Said looting meant that Naruto had all three of Haku's ice jutsu scrolls back in Konoha now, which was being treated as a bonus by him even if he was disappointed that there were so few. Regardless, the discovery had led to Gato gathering every thug he could to storm across the island to the bridge, but that would take them time.
The man never even got around to checking his safes and thus had no clue that he was broke.
It took twenty minutes for Naruto to shake off the exhaustion from that clone before more clones were sent out to watch for Gato's approach. Others would gather most of the adult villagers for the final show when it came to that, also needing to time things so that the villagers weren't there too early.
Early clones aside, Team Eighteen had ensured that they had their Knight Armor spells active before escorting Tazuna to the bridge, or to just guard Tsunami and Inari in Tenten's case. She was annoyed about that, but had lost the coin toss with Hinata after they'd decided that they couldn't leave a clone to look over the house. The bridge group found that the early-arrived workers had been knocked out and stuck at the far end of the bridge in progress as bait, with the bridge already somewhat damp. Hinata stayed with Tazuna behind an illusion created by Hoshi while Naruto joined Anko-sensei and Kurenai-sensei in 'investigating'.
They intentionally didn't dodge the water dragon when it struck them, and thanks to the Knight Armor didn't even get wet. But they did jump apart as soon as the ice mirrors started forming since they didn't need to worry about the water dragon severely damaging the bridge surface anymore.
Instead of senbon, Haku had two katanas when he tried bouncing through the mirrors to quickly kill them. These did not make it through the Knight Armor protections, which took the young man by surprise and had him needing to dodge one of Anko-sensei's counter-attacks. Four Zabuzas then jumped up onto the bridge, each with an oversized broadsword and a katana. Three of them were water clones, and those three immediately engaged with Naruto, Anko-sensei, and Kurenai-sensei while the real Zabuza stayed back. Water clones required some concentration to control, so the real him staying back made sense there.
Hinata started launching lava balls at mirrors from the sidelines, each one shattering a mirror on hit. This obviously took Haku by surprise as well, but as the range of the attack was limited the young man just stopped making mirrors close enough to Hinata for her to reliably fire the lava balls.
Grinning, Naruto bounced off of one of the ice mirrors to get around the water clone attacking him, then slid under another to put it between him and the clone. "So you want to play with clones, huh? Let's see how well that works when you can't see."
A minute later the darkness creation genjutsu was covering the entire bridge, followed by four paperwork clones being created. Two took over maintaining the darkness creation jutsu while the other two worked to ensure that all free water on the bridge surface was pulled into a hiding in mist jutsu on top of the darkness creation genjutsu. This left Naruto essentially unimpaired, Hinata slightly impaired because she couldn't see through his chakra as well as he could, and both Anko-sensei and Kurenai-sensei running on likely-muted chakra-sensing.
As far as they knew, Zabuza and Haku couldn't sense chakra, leaving them entirely blind. And effectively deaf to movement because Team Eighteen ran the jutsu to cancel out sounds of movement constantly. But despite their obvious handicap, they were still putting up a fight, at least once the water clones had been quickly taken care of and the real Zabuza entered the fray.
Using water chakra flow on swords and kunai was a lot less effective than using wind would be for cutting, but right now they were mostly in a delaying action while Gato and the villagers slowly made their way to the bridge.
Tenten was bored and annoyed that she'd not been able to go to the bridge. Sure, she knew that she was probably the worst choice for the battle as Naruto and Hinata had both done better with blind-fighting than she had, but guarding the house was boring. The six pairs of thugs that had come to try to grab Tsunami and Inari hadn't even put up a hint of an actual fight. Hell, they'd gone down so easily that Tsunami might not even be aware that there had been a dozen people sent to grab her and her son so far.
It was honestly pathetic, but ambushing the thugs without being seen was made easier by Tazuna's house being a little bit isolated. At the same time, the thugs were making no attempt to be stealthy on approach, though at least the last two pairs had been wary because of how many others had been sent and hadn't returned. They were still mostly assuming that it was a problem of their targets having a clever hiding place that was flummoxing the previous groups though, instead of thinking that the shinobi guards might have left someone behind to guard the house. Or maybe they actually thought that a pair of thugs was a match for a shinobi?
Some people were idiots, and it felt like that was almost a requirement to be working for Gato...
Oh well. At least Naruto's magic book had made manipulating earth a lot easier. An unmarked grave in the trees was probably more than most of these thugs deserved after she'd stripped them of their equipment and money, but burning them would draw too much attention and corpses had an annoying tendency to eventually float in water. No need to have the civilians find them washed up on shore.
Sadly, their weapons were going to be sold as scrap when they made it back to Konoha. There hadn't been a decent blade yet.
Gato's approach was decidedly less than subtle, with the villager-gathering clones at least keeping the noise from that group down a little. But both groups arrived at the bridge at basically the same time, which was the signal for Team Eighteen to stop delaying. Naruto switched to channeling wind through his tantos to slice right through the swords being used by Zabuza and Haku, taking both of them by surprise as the mist and darkness were lifted. The clones remained using the transparency jutsu though, two moving into position for taking out the thugs while the other two prepared senbon with a container of knockout drugs that had been collected from the real Naruto in the middle of the fight.
Getting the real jar to the clones was worth the added effort, because having cloned drugs vanish from an enemy's system would be less than ideal for those you intended to deliver to T and I shortly.
"ZABUZA!" the little pipsqueak known as Gato screamed.
"I'M WORKING ON IT!" Zabuza yelled as he threw aside the worthless handles from the swords he'd been using and dug out a scroll. Haku appeared to be doing the same.
Neither expected an invisible clone to silently body-flicker behind them and fill their backs with senbon, though both were aware enough to attempt to dodge. Neither succeeded and the knockout drugs quickly went to work on them. More than was safe for either of them, but crippled enemies were perfectly fine. It was allies and bystanders that you needed to be careful with.
"I really need to work on my stamina," Kurenai-sensei said as she caught her breath.
Gato stood there staring at the unconscious forms of Zabuza and Haku for a minute, blinking, before scowling and pointing his cane at the group. "KILL THEM ALL!"
Naruto bounced to the front of the group, trying to look far too happy about having a bunch of thugs coming to try to kill him. Something that he thought he'd gotten correct if the concerned looks on some of the faces of the thugs were any indication. Looking over the thugs, he let his smile turn to a frown. "But you don't have any shinobi!"
"Shinobi are overpriced frauds," Gato claimed.
"Oh well." A wave of water under the control of the two invisible clones suddenly flowed up from the ocean, surrounding Gato and the thugs before contracting in and catching them all in a whirlpool-like action. Technically this was a jutsu intended for preparing drinks, but it worked reasonably well if you scaled it up properly too. The mostly-clear ocean water quickly shifted to red as the blender jutsu tore apart everyone inside of it, more solid objects falling and flying out of it as it spun. That included swords, knives, keys, and larger bones stripped of flesh.
Two of the thugs had enough chakra for the minimal force the jutsu generated to not cause them more than a few deeper cuts due to unconsciously resisting the chakra in the jutsu with their own, which was one reason why this wasn't usually that good in a battle. Shinobi just tended to find it annoying because even when scaled up it was D-rank at best. Naruto's clones let those two fall out with the rest of the remaining debris as they directed things off into the ocean. The two survivors looked around at the pile of bones, weapons, and other surviving items before turning and running, ignoring that they were half naked now.
"You let two escape," Anko-sensei complained, though with a tone of 'what the hell did I just watch?' included.
"They had more potential than the others," Naruto replied, glad for the techniques that Inoichi had taught them to keep his internal disgust off of his face.
"What the hell was that?" Kurenai-sensei asked.
"Blender jutsu, for making mixed drinks. Scaled up a little. A bit of a specialty of Uzumaki bartenders."
"...what?"
The full cleanup took a day, including surreptitiously sealing up Zabuza and Haku and sending a clone with them to T&I as well as applying the minimal needed healing to the knocked-out bridge workers. Then the party started, along with more workers than ever helping to build the bridge...plus a guard house and toll booth station for the Konoha side of the bridge, per agreements with Tazuna for the village to use when collecting tolls.
Technically no guard house had been asked for or agreed to, but Wave had a new appreciation for shinobi and didn't want to be on their bad side.
Team Eighteen was able to get some proper training in as well, with the chakra weights that Naruto had picked up being used by him, Hinata, and Tenten. Anko-sensei and Kurenai-sensei had declined to wear them for now, but had taken a set each and promised that he'd be reimbursed for the whole stack. Of course, this led to a new discovery a little over a week later after the bridge had been completed and the team had returned to the Uzumaki compound.
Specifically, they'd started to debrief before heading to turn things in, and Naruto had commented about possibly needing to turn his belt and weights off to help carry everything if they weren't bringing it sealed.
"What do you mean you've got your belt active?" Tenten asked. "I can't wear the weights at the same time that the belt is active and still move my arms."
"It took a day but I got used to it," Naruto replied.
"He has more chakra in his weights than we do," Hinata added, only to blush when Tenten gave her a look that screamed 'what are you talking about'.
"Naruto heals faster than he has any right to," Anko-sensei said. "So he can probably build up muscles faster than most, since half the time spent doing so is waiting for them to heal stronger. Or so I'm led to believe. I think he's had his resistance seals up higher than the rest of us too, given that with them off he was easily faster than me."
"I actually rebuilt the seals on my belt when I maxed out the original version," Naruto admitted. "But I also keep pumping medical chakra into my muscles to overcome the changes faster too."
"We're all doing that. But you're a chakra monster." There was a moment of silence before Anko-sensei turned to stare at him. "Wait. Medical chakra, specifically?"
"Yeah. Supercharge the healing without making it easier on me by boosting my strength."
"...I don't know if that's genius or not."
Hinata frowned. "If you don't get the balance right you probably cause your muscles to explode with a tenth of the chakra that boosting your strength needs."
"You back off when you start feeling pain from the chakra," Naruto added.
"The scrolls Hana gave you say that if you start feeling pain from medical chakra then you've already used three times too much."
"...oh. Guess it's a good thing that I heal quickly?"
"Utter madness that only works because Naruto is an insane Uzumaki," Anko-sensei decided. "Right. Normal shinobi won't be pulling that trick anytime soon, but it means that you're going to take anyone not expecting you to be stronger than you look by surprise. And either way you don't have to drag the big-ass sword in. Er, actually, anything you took other than the money, records, and contents of Gato's store rooms is probably yours to keep."
Naruto nodded, as that made some sense. Anything they'd grabbed that wasn't specifically listed as part of the mission was fair game to keep on most missions. But there was one thing that he thought was in questionable territory. "What about the jutsu scrolls that were in Gato's safe?"
"The what?" the four kunoichi asked, and even Hoshi was looking curious.
It took a couple of minutes to fetch and unseal the scrolls, and Anko-sensei looked over them. Before laughing. "These are...well, they'd generally be considered useless, and he had them in one of his safes? But the combination could be hilarious."
"What are they?" Kurenai-sensei asked.
"Cleaning jutsu. Soapy water and scrubbing, steam cleaning for fabrics, a little dirt tornado thing intended for cleaning floors, a more general drying jutsu that covers an area, clothing mending...and the last one appears to be a general 'clean yourself and your clothing to look pristine at any time' jutsu. The end result essentially seems perfect for a maid though, and makes me think that these three should learn them all."
"Why should they learn them all?"
"Because Naruto turned a bartending jutsu into a bloodbath and I can think of several ways some of these could work in combat. Imagine these three going through the chunin exams in full maid uniforms and using cleaning jutsu to make a mockery of their opponents? At least for the first two stages. I'll even pay for the uniforms."
Naruto had to admit that it sounded like it would be a hilarious prank of sorts to play on the others in the exams, and ten minutes later they'd agreed to give it a shot. Followed by gathering everything needed to report to Old Man Hokage about the missions. Which went well, but was followed by Tenten insisting on getting her hands on a legendary sword.
Sadly for their ears, Naruto made the mistake of revealing that he had three legendary swords now, and had to explain how he'd gotten the other two once they'd recovered from and repaired eardrums damaged by Tenten's squeals of joy. Kurenai-sensei had been annoyed that he'd done something that she saw as reckless, balanced out by Anko-sensei thinking that it was the most awesome thing she'd ever heard of.
Tenten had then been horrified when told that they needed to keep the extra two swords secret for now, dismayed when she couldn't even pick up Kubikiribocho properly yet, and finally decided that Naruto was going to be able to use the giant sword in the next couple of months even if she had to personally run him through kenjutsu drills daily. Her goals also seemed to include getting Hinata able to handle Nuibari and getting herself able to handle Shibuki. Presumably partially because Shibuki weighed less than Kubikiribocho did but mostly because she wanted to play with the explosive tags.
Hiruzen looked over the reports from Team Eighteen's mission, not having expected anything too important in them. Three reports each from Anko and Kurenai, the 'standard' reports for the two missions and the 'sensitive enough to be kept separate' information.
Finding mention that Naruto had a book that granted access to every chakra nature and all chakra-nature kekkei genkai was not what he'd expected to read.
That pretty much guaranteed that there was some old Uzushio sealmaster teaching the boy, because only such an individual could have come up with something that insane. And if there was one there may be more, which brought up the question of how destroyed Uzushio was compared to 'moved to somewhere better hidden to rebuild'. Reaching out to Konoha through Naruto, perhaps? Or maybe just an old master looking to ensure that the Uzumaki family survived...
Chapter 12 - Overloaded Genjutsu (CmptrWz)
The Naruto clones had carefully constructed the stone fakes for the swords, and now they just had to apply a genjutsu to make them look correct at a first glance. Luckily this was a 'physical overlay' type illusion and only needed to hold for at most a few weeks, if that. Naruto was reasonably good at that kind of genjutsu, though this was kind of small scale. But they'd used plenty of chakra already, so their reserves were low and that made it easier to do smaller-scale stuff.
Using hand seals for improved control, one of the clones carefully constructed the genjutsu for the fake Nuibari. The slim stone spike would require very little visual changes compared to the much larger Shibuki and seemed like the obvious starting point. But even with diminished reserves, using the hand seals, and putting as little chakra into the genjutsu as possible the clone still massively overpowered it.
The resulting pulse of energy shattered the fragile stone construction and obliterated the genjutsu on all the other false swords as well. It also wiped out the trigger lines for the trap in the vault and probably damaged the normal opening triggers on the door.
"Fuck," another clone said. "Well, hopefully they don't check down here too often?"
"We already spotted the log of twice daily checks," a third clone noted. "With the next one due somewhere in the next two hours."
"Oh. Right."
"And it looks like that set off an alarm too, or was just noticed, because a dozen shinobi are rushing down here."
The clones were able to dispel before anyone found them, but it wasn't the completely unnoticed getaway they were hoping for.
Using hand seals for improved control, one of the clones carefully constructed the genjutsu for the fake Nuibari. The slim stone spike would require very little visual changes compared to the much larger Shibuki and seemed like the obvious starting point. But even with diminished reserves, using the hand seals, and putting as little chakra into the genjutsu as possible the clone still massively overpowered it.
The resulting pulse of energy shattered the fragile stone construction and obliterated the genjutsu on all the other false swords as well. It also wiped out the trigger lines for the trap in the vault and probably damaged the normal opening triggers on the door.
"Fuck," another clone said. "Well, hopefully they don't check down here too often?"
"We already spotted the log of twice daily checks," a third clone noted. "With the next one due somewhere in the next two hours."
"Oh. Right."
"And it looks like that set off an alarm too, or was just noticed, because a dozen shinobi are rushing down here."
The clones were able to dispel before anyone found them, but it wasn't the completely unnoticed getaway they were hoping for.