Chapter 2707: 97
Naruto had made a quick trip to the 'war island' to do some more scanning of the Tome, and had ended up being ranted at by those there about not telling them everything. He'd cited the mission paperwork that they'd been given, and apparently not read, and gotten his scanning done while they were fully reading said paperwork and feeling stupid. As if he'd treat mission paperwork as a 'mere formality' and not put actual details down. Or blindly trust obviously-alien technology that had repeatedly demonstrated that it was partially under the control of a hidden control layer directing it to do things that they couldn't identify.
After examining things, still not understanding far too much inside of the Tome, he'd started his new exam island. It was a bit of an experiment though, significantly upgraded in several ways but liable to explode before it was two-thirds completed if he was wrong about several details. If he completed it and everything worked then it would definitely be more impressive than the previous one, but the chances of exploding during construction necessitated full Knight Armor to even approach the construction area.
Even that wasn't enough to make him comfortable though, so he was also only approaching it with clones.
Then there were the preparations with Yoko for the rebuilding of the shrines in the Land of Demons and surrounding countries. None of the countries had a 'hidden village' and Shion was in charge of the entire set of countries with more political power than their leaders. Mostly because she was one of four people known to be able to do anything with several seals holding back various threats, which needed to be dealt with as part of rebuilding shrines because leaving them there was a problem.
Doing some more examination of the general area was probably also a good idea, because it felt wrong that they had a good dozen 'dark chakra' threats in the area and the only significant one elsewhere had been the 'zero tails'. It felt like there was a good chance that something in the area was gathering or generating dark chakra, unless there had just been a group of people experimenting and they kept losing hold on their experiments?
Of course, then there was the expansion of their overall 'outpost' network. The flying islands used triangulation tricks that required known locations in order to recalibrate transport pads on the fly and preparing more locations was a good idea. Especially if Yoko ended up sending her island in the general direction of another continent that had been half-planned already, so expanding the mid-ocean array of antennae was going to be needed...
Tenten took a deep breath, then focused on what she wanted. The bears had insisted that she learn the paperwork clone, and how to make 'elemental' versions of it, alongside all of her 'do not rely on anything but your own abilities' training. She'd found the latter to be incredibly annoying as a weapons specialist, being told that she wasn't a proper fighter unless she could defeat her trainers without additional weapons at all first, but had to admit that being capable when disarmed was important. The boosts to her strength from the training had also helped significantly when they let her use weapons again.
Unlike what Naruto had been doing for years, and Hinata and then Ino had gained the ability to do, she didn't have enough chakra to abuse clones for massive training boosts. She was up to being able to make half a dozen clones for combat without issue, and a dozen for other tasks if they didn't need to be combat-ready. More usefully, if she was only making one clone she'd figured out how to make it such that it dispelled into weapons.
She'd not needed to buy kunai, shuriken, or senbon since. One clone, strike it, clean up the pile of weapons, take a nap due to those clones taking far more chakra than normal paperwork clones. Presumably the extra chakra was because you ended up with real weapons, though normal elemental clones didn't seem to require nearly as much when they turned into their elements. Some esoteric chakra theory she'd never read, or if she had that she'd not understood, probably explained the difference.
Larger weapons, such as swords, had followed. Those generally came out as single items instead of a literal pile, but that was probably in part because that was how she thought of them. Throwing weapons came in groups and almost everything else came as singles or pairs depending on if you'd normally use one in each hand or not. The chakra-metal 'claws' she'd produced that way had come out as a full set of four though, two hand pieces and two foot pieces.
But now she wanted to try something new, and had surrounded herself with drawings, diagrams, and specifications for a single sword. Findings from examining all the Uzumaki-produced weapons she'd been given that contained features she liked, notes on how she thought functionality from other weapons might've been implemented, and even some bits from items the bears had. All to come together in an attempt to abuse something she didn't fully understand.
Bobo had been summoned to watch over her, just in case, and knew how to use the telephone in the next room to call for medics.
Going through the hand seals for the modified paperwork clone slowly, wanting the extra precision they granted for a task like this, she focused most of her attention on pushing all of the details into place. Coming to the end of the sequence, she pushed her chakra to form the clone, then grimaced as it started pulling hard on her chakra. Too hard, but it was already too late to abort...
Tsunade shook her head as she examined the unconscious kunoichi. "The only reason she didn't die of chakra exhaustion is because Naruto thought ahead and built an emergency function into the chakra booster. If it hadn't started pushing chakra back into her as a failsafe..."
Shizune nodded. "And even then it was close. He severely over-built the boosters, likely to potentially work on much more powerful individuals before the 'not worth it' drop-off numbers became apparent, and it must've been fully charged."
"Her experiment seems to have worked," the small brown summon bear that had called for aid noted. "Though determining whether it was completely successful or not will require testing."
"And what was she doing?" Tsunade asked, wondering what idiocy had prompted this.
"Trying to abuse a weapon-producing clone to create a personal legendary-grade weapon."
"Weapon-producing clone?"
"She has a clone variant that she's used to produce her throwing weapons, some swords, and even a set of proper metal claws compatible with her more human hands and feet. Those took a lot out of her though, so we were concerned when she came up with this plan."
"Who was the idiot that taught her that clone?"
"It's her own creation."
...of course it was. Trust the village's weapon nut to do something like that, and it sounded like it would have her fitting in over in Uzushio just fine if she ever wanted to make that jump. "Well, it's going to be several days before she's moving again. Where did the weapon produced end up?"
The bear held out a sealing tag. "I stuck it in here, on the assumption that others were going to want to keep her from trying to test it out before she'd finished recovering."
It was obvious that the summon had more sense than the kunoichi in this case. Taking the tag and putting it in a safe place until the girl was fully recovered. Maybe with the weapon as a 'hostage' she'd actually relax while recovering?
Orochimaru shook her head as she left Ruri to her 'experimentation' in the smaller medical lab set aside for her use. It was admittedly quite hard to find good test subjects for the girl, but having an idiot decide to grab 'the freak' for likely-sexual fun had provided her with one.
It would've been nice to find out through something other than discovering that the man had been paralyzed and strapped down to the table by Ruri when she'd objected to the attempt. The clone sent to review the security footage of the event agreed that it wasn't the girl making excuses though, and the idiot obviously wasn't worth keeping alive after that.
"Anything important I should review before you dispel?" she asked as she came to her office where a clone was working on paperwork.
"Couple of the civilian scientists we keep around are concerned about the moon," the clone replied. "Or rather, what the lack of moon might cause. Tides became a lot weaker when it 'imploded', and now it's even less there and obviously pushed to leave orbit."
"I have to admit that I hadn't considered that problem."
"One of their reports claims that there are very old records of a previous moon having been lost and evidence it was a bad thing overall. Uzushiogakure is the only group likely to have any hope of doing something about it though, and 'replace the moon to keep the beneficial effects' is possibly beyond even them."
Sighing, Orochimaru accepted the reports in question, dropped into the comfortable chair next to the telephone, and reviewed them. Sadly, she couldn't say that the scientists were obviously wrong, so she picked the phone up. She didn't need to look up Naruto's number, punching it in by memory and waiting for him to answer. It only took a couple of rings before he did.
"Good afternoon," Naruto greeted. "It's a week early for your normal call checking on the kids."
"Some scientists in my employ are concerned about the moon," she replied. "Specifically, that the diminished and soon to leave orbit moon is actually important ecologically."
"...how? It's less than a thousand years old. Ecologically it would've been more of a disaster than a boon in that short period of time."
"They claim that there's ample evidence that it's not the first moon to orbit the planet. Replacing the lost one was a good thing and may have stabilized the planet's rotation as well."
"Hmmm. I see. I'll obviously need to double-check their findings, but from what they've noted it does look credible."
"...are you reading copies of the reports now?"
"Yes. You should go stop Ruri from causing an explosion though, the seals she decided to play with are seriously malformed due to her inexperience with placing them on internal organs."
It took a moment to realize what had just been said, and worrying about Uzushio's spies being effective enough to tell Naruto what reports she was actively looking at could wait until Ruri was safe.
"What's wrong now?" Hinata asked, recognizing the look on Naruto's face. Some new project he'd not wanted had landed on him in some fashion.
"Yoko and I probably need to build a new moon," Naruto replied.
"...what?"
Ino actually nodded her agreement. "Heard about that from some of the infiltration reports. The moon stabilizes the planet's rotation and helps with tides, and there might've been a previous moon that 'left' before the current one was created. Oh, and there are already measurable changes in the planet's rotation since the implosion of the moon and the gravitational shifts from that."
It was rare that Hinata was the last to hear about this kind of thing, and she sighed. "So the moon needs to be replaced. How do you replace it?"
"Six Paths stuff made the original," Naruto replied. "If I go that route then you could possibly help due to Hamura's chakra, but it's unlikely that we'll need you to do so. The thing is, the original moon was heavily modified after the fact and doing that 'right' from the start might be the better option? Math says we have at least five years before things start getting too out of sorts, but it's hard to be certain because most of the observations were before pushing the remains away and that's going to change things in the coming months. Throwing a quick and easy moon into place might be the best option as a result."
That 'a quick and easy moon' was even an option was a little mind-boggling. Sure, Naruto had been constructing flying islands, but those were orders of magnitude smaller than a proper moon. Though she frowned after a moment. "Where would you get the materials? Pulling them from the planet seems like it would cause who knows how many problems."
"I'd probably have to use some of the 'open a portal between two locations' tricks to allow funneling large amounts of matter from some of the other dimensions. Not sure if I'd go with Hamura's seal-anchored version or the more general one that his was based on, but I've not practiced much with either yet as the teleportation spell is safer and uses less energy overall for single trips. Warping spacetime to connect two distant points just feels wrong too."
"That isn't what the Hiraishin does to enable the instant connection over basically any distance?"
"No? You still travel between the points. There's just a time component involved so that you travel back in time to the time you departed from as well. That's what actually results in the 'time to prepare' sensation when you manage it without a seal triggering it for you, and summoning is doing basically the same thing with a different kind of endpoint anchoring."
This was very quickly veering deep into 'asked too many questions that should never have been asked' territory.
Matatabi had figured out that their less-than-direct path had been chosen specifically to put them in range of multiple 'superweapons', allowing the island to react to each of them being used against it and obliterate them in retaliation. It was a wonderful bit of prior planning that might even be in some of the paperwork for the mission, but felt like it really should've been obvious when the 'at least three groups should be able to hit the shields' comment had been made.
Three superweapons had now been used against the island, and all three had been destroyed.
But now they'd reached their 'destination', an uninhabited mountain that was more of a dormant volcano based on the heat underground. It sat on a country border, each country having a power station in place and mildly panicking over whether those stations were going to survive. Except that as the island 'scanned' the area it ignored the power stations, adjusting to fire a beam of energy at the top of the mountain. Rock was blown away, and then suddenly the energy stopped being 'destructive' and started being absorbed. The entire top of the mountain started to vibrate, chunks of rock falling away and creating landslides that might cause minor damage to the power stations, to reveal that there was a metal ship hidden in the mountain.
One that obviously powered up, lifted off as the energy transfer adjusted to hit the receiving point on it, and moved up onto the top of the island. It landed there, before various connection points established a full connection between it and the island itself, and then the 'cradle' it had been sitting in on the mountain was targeted and destroyed by the island. Because apparently Naruto felt that showing up to collect the top of a dormant volcano made sense as an excuse for why they were there at all.
...unless, of course, he'd not built this and they were actually collecting it before the locals found it. But even if that was the case, it was far more likely that he'd have taken the original and left a fake behind just in case.
A ping from the island's systems brought up three potential 'exit routes' to pick from. One was heading back the way they came, another had them heading for the pole instead, and the third appeared to be continuing on to the ocean on the far side of the continent. The latter was the 'we want to be done with this' route, now that all primary objectives were met. Heading back the way they came would allow observation of reactions to the island 'returning', and heading for the pole would directly expose the island to two more countries.
Exposing more of the continent to the island felt like the best option overall, so the route for heading to the pole was selected. Three minutes later the island started that way, with a warning that in three hours there would be a potential stopping point for the manifested trio to head down and violently deal with idiots.
Yoko was impressed with how much effort Shion was putting into her training, though a pass through seals to improve her chakra net had been needed to allow her to use something other than light chakra. Local construction groups were working on initial construction of basic honden in the same styles as the shrines themselves, which would be swapped out in secret before Amaterasu or Suijin was 'enshrined' in each of them. A deeper examination of the shrines, and the demons they contained for all but the 'primary' shrine that had formerly held Mōryō's spirit, had also been done and it didn't look like any of the demons were likely to cause problems.
Searching for 'why does this region get all the dark chakra demons' items was so far inconclusive. There were several points other than the shrines with high concentrations of dark chakra, but nothing stood out right now. It was possible that this was a side effect of the God Tree that was no longer in play, or that the last group causing the problems had been killed off in the process of spawning a 'demon'. Whatever the case, seeding the area with a pile of light chakra shrines to clear out the dark chakra was likely to help.
Unfortunately, not having a good single-source location for Amaterasu and Suijin other than Shrine Island meant another trip from there. Luckily it was reasonably easy to reach a point nearby with a ship instead of needing to travel a significant distance over land. Shion wouldn't join them, instead focusing on finishing preparations for their arrival, but unfortunately a couple of local nobles wanted to see things so they couldn't skip most of the show before arrival.
They had time before the construction work was done and the nobles could make the journey to the departure point though. Despite not really needing shrine maidens for the shrines they were planning on providing some anyway as well, which would provide actual local monitoring of things that had been left up to 'occasional checks' before now.
And, of course, by the time this was done they were looking like they might have another priestess and their first two priests ready to set up in new shrines elsewhere...
Indra shook his head as he watched the team attempting to pull people out of the reincarnation system for the tenth day straight. Apparently those bodies were generally-compatible ones that accepted basically anyone for reincarnation and were primarily used when working on things in case of accidents or when someone had kicked it and their chosen reincarnation host wasn't as compatible as they'd hoped. In the latter case, another member would eventually come in and pull them out with specialized tools...or if nobody checked in for long enough then this team of seemingly-brainwashed techs would come in and blindly start trying to pull people out.
With nobody to pull out, all they were doing was putting more and more strain on the system. And killing off the bodies.
"If they pull hard enough they might get us," Asura noted.
"I doubt it," Indra replied. "I've not felt so much as a mild tug at this point and I grabbed at where one of their connections had been in hopes it would be a workaround. That obviously didn't work. Maybe if we had our old 'not quite right' connections then this equipment would allow us to be pulled through, but those couldn't be reformed here. On top of us possibly not being compatible with the bodies they're using."
"Didn't notice you trying that. If we don't get pulled out then we're likely to be trapped until they collapse the whole thing though."
"Which is probably a good thing if we're right about what the net failing would do to the existing trees, and it means we won't be trapped here for centuries able to do nothing but watch."
"It also means that we don't know what other failsafes they have waiting to trigger though, or what else this group is programmed to do when this fails."
"Knowing who or what the Karasuki they're searching for is would be nice too."
"Probably a 'what', since they're searching storage locations, but they seem confused that the little device intended to locate it isn't pointing them anywhere useful. They also don't seem to know why it's important though, just that if they manage to revive someone then it will 'be needed' for whatever reason."
Sadly, there was precious little to do other than watch for now, and a few hours later the group killed off the last body present. That had them standing there for nearly half an hour before one of the searchers came back and reported that they'd run out of places to look for Karasuki.
"Someone has already gone back," the one 'in charge' said, turning to one of the control panels they'd been avoiding. "Initiating asset denial."
The next six hours would have the group doing everything wrong intentionally, essentially turning the entire net and all trees still connected to it into bombs. All of the planets the clan had been operating on as they'd been picked off were obliterated by the trees, the destruction continuing inward from the outer edges of the net back to the center. Most of the planets no longer had trees though, so remained untouched as the net burned away. Including at least one being used to store 'seeds', unfortunately.
"Do you think it was worth it?" Indra asked.
"...dooming the worlds they were operating on to prevent any other worlds from being destroyed?" Asura asked.
"Yeah."
"I don't know. Maybe we can find some of the inhabitants of those worlds in the afterlife once we're released from here. See what they think of the unintended sacrifice."
"You think that there's enough of us left to 'pass on' properly?"
"I'm hoping, and we've got about twenty minutes before we either find out there is or it ceases to be a concern."
Hayate looked over the weapon that had been sealed away and kept out of Tenten's hands while she recovered. The notes left behind indicated that she'd been trying to make the thing do far too many things. A clever little mechanism for deploying explosive tags, chakra flow along the blade that could also extend its reach, a chain in the middle that could be released to physically extend reach, the ability to self-repair with chakra or absorbing materials mid-combat...
She'd gone nuts.
"The straight and serrated edges aren't bad," Yugao said as she examined the thing. "Expands options, even if I'd prefer one or the other. It's far too large for most people, but she's got the strength to handle it, which also makes the weight being a bit high not as much of an issue. I can feel that it's probably too chakra-hungry for her right now though, and if that isn't just because it's currently 'empty' then she's got a wonderful display piece that very few people will ever be able to use."
"Her notes predicted that it would be impossible to use until it had been fed chakra for a few weeks or a powerhouse charged it up for her," he pointed out. "So I'm going to assume it's due to being 'empty' more than a problem until we find out otherwise. I'm more annoyed at how impractical the entire thing seems."
"A trend most 'legendary' weapons share these days. I think we have to hope that this is intended for intimidation and she's going to use more normal options day to day, but if she wants it to be a famous weapon then she's going to have to use it."
"Unfortunately, but I suppose all we can do is ensure that she trains with it properly before going out on missions with it."
"After Tsunade is done with administering the 'punishment duty' for doing something that risky without being an Uzumaki."
"It was less 'risky' and more 'do something that chakra intensive'."
"No, that's the justification given for the chakra-building exercises she's also doing."
"Oh. Must've missed the distinction. Then again, I was hearing the ranting from three blocks away."
A blinked and backed up to look through the door he'd just passed. Sure enough, B was sitting there with yarn and needles, and a book that was likely describing how to knit. "What are you doing?"
"Teaching myself to knit," B replied, frowning as he sighed and started undoing things. "I keep getting my counts wrong though."
"Why are you teaching yourself to knit?"
"Once I know how I can switch to controlling the needles with chakra, and maybe eventually skip the needles entirely."
That...okay, yes, it would probably be an effective chakra control exercise for him. "But why knitting?"
B looked up, then shrugged. "I wanted to make a band to wrap around the base of my tail, didn't like the way the stitched version felt, and figured that a knit one would be more uniform."
That at least made some sense. "And you'd rather be able to make it yourself than rely on others to make it for you?"
"Couldn't find anyone selling custom knit stuff at all. Or at least nobody was willing to admit to doing so, anyway."
"...nobody sells custom knit items? At all?"
"I found four stores selling knit anything, and three of them admitted that their limited stock was all they had from people who passed away. The last is in the Land of Hot Water and only sells potholders."
Huh. Might have to see about fixing that, because basic reinforced wire instead of string or yarn had worked out wonderfully for a reasonably quick protective layer in testing. Putting some inside of a braided run of yarn would even make it less obvious as anything other than a warmth or comfort layer.
Naruto felt that he was slacking a bit on his normal training now that he was working on both a replacement exam island and figuring out what to do about replacing the moon. The latter had included working with Yoko on an initial test...and finding out that the 'easy solution' wouldn't work without something powerful to seal away. It appeared that sealing technique's power was tied more to the power of the target than anything else, and they had no sufficiently-strong target to use the technique on. That meant that it wouldn't build a sufficiently-large moon. Or a moon at all, really, as the tests with rocks and a paperwork clone as the target all resulted in balls a meter across at most.
That left figuring out how to construct the thing in place as it would be too large to build elsewhere and move into place. Knight Armor and flight spells for clones should be able to handle the 'working in orbit' part of things, but doing so would probably leave him and Yoko needing to trade off sleeping for a week to get it done and keep problems from cropping up. Testing construction methods in low-gravity no-atmosphere areas was annoying, but resulting in various ways to manage things.
Determining what to put into the construction beyond a way for it to correct its orbit if it started to drift was another matter. Leaving it at that felt a little silly, but making it an obvious military installation would be inviting others to attack it and create problems down the road. Not making it obviously something had the same problem though, as it was going to be seen being constructed and needed a purpose beyond 'scientists from multiple countries all agree we need a moon'. Potential difficulties breathing would be another issue, unless running atmospheric containment shields. Hamura had indicated that the previous moon had something like that, and having sufficient chakra helped overcome the lack of air, but the information left in the Tome had been for something that was...very much not suitable for significant use. At least on the surface.
Probably fine for 'living inside of the moon', but not for putting anything obvious on the surface other than sealed domes.
He was interrupted from sketching out possible internal support systems for everything needed by the computer on his desk beeping with the urgent alert tone. Frowning, because very few things were currently configured to come to him directly, he moved over and unlocked the terminal. Then he needed to take a minute to remember how to check the alerts properly, authenticate to the alerts program for actual details, followed by frowning as he stared at the alert in question.
When programming the war island he'd expected it to occasionally run into things he couldn't predict. He'd put in nearly two thousand contingency plans for all kinds of situations, dropped the Tome and its inhabitants in place as a safety net in case things went wrong, and even ensured that there were hardware-level lockouts on the most dangerous weapons so that someone would have to personally go in to power them up if they were needed. The automated systems could tell the Tome how to do that, but not manage it directly.
Despite that, he'd expected there to possibly be problems, which is why it was programmed to alert him directly if anything he'd not predicted happened outside of what it should be prompting the Tome for instead on this run. But conflicting navigational data hadn't been in his list of possibilities, let alone seen as likely, given that he'd personally mapped out the entire set of possible routes.
Sighing, he sent a clone to grab the seal tag with the direct interface to the island's systems, essentially a remote terminal that thought it was sitting in the secure control room instead of the one the Tome sat in, so that he could take a look more directly.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone