章 2720: 110
Naruto looked over the gathered chunin, roughly gathered in groups by village, along with various village leaders and jounin that were going to be running through the testing to evaluate it. The groups blended where alliances existed, but literally every active hidden village was represented. Predictions were that they'd lose most of the minor villages before beginning the jounin-level testing though.
"Welcome to the moon," he finally said. "You are here because you wish to prove that you are worthy of promotion to the rank of jounin, but before we subject you to those tests we need to know that you are solidly worthy of the rank of chunin. To those watching from elsewhere and hoping to prove themselves worthy of 'honorary chunin' status, I must apologize because the testing is too dangerous to allow just anyone to participate. Each participating village instead received five vouchers for non-chunin to participate so that they can evaluate the testing."
There were likely a lot of people that had been waiting for the signal to book it to a transport pad that were incredibly disappointed at that declaration. To be fair to them, there hadn't been an official announcement about the 'anyone can join genin testing' before the day of exams when they'd done that, but chunin testing required more combat skills than a random non-shinobi should be expected to have. Mifune had been offered some vouchers for the Land of Iron's samurai though. They'd been turned down, but the offer had been made.
"Unlike when we've tested for genin skills," Naruto continued, "this will go beyond the minimal skills needed for chunin rank. To be here you need to have taken your skills beyond the minimums." He paused for a moment to let that sink in. "That said, the testing is going to work very similarly to what you should know of genin testing in many respects. You will find a testing center, prove that you have sufficient chakra, take a knowledge test, and then be put through a series of basic skill tests."
The screens around them lit up with maps, and he gestured to them. "Here are your initial maps. You have two minutes before they turn off."
With that the testing was on, and he headed off to resume work on the automated threat detection system. It kept firing off for things that weren't actually threats because he'd likely bungled the code in a couple hundred places...
Gaara felt that if he didn't manage to pass this testing then he'd probably be ousted from the Kazekage position, though he'd ensured that two of his strongest detractors in the village had been given vouchers to prove themselves as well. Glancing at the maps after a quick genjutsu dispel, just in case there was trickery, had been enough to mentally map out routes to all four testing stations. He chose one and started on his way, but noted that most of Suna's shinobi participating were heading elsewhere.
He gave this a few seconds of thought, then decided that there was a good chance that Uzushio had the ability to show each individual their own maps. A good way to both split everyone up and ensure that you couldn't just follow others if you had to show up at one of the testing stations you were shown.
Reaching the testing station he'd chosen, he found that there were only a couple of shinobi ahead of him. There were plenty of chakra level testers though, so he was able to pass that basically immediately before being sent to a room for the knowledge test. Unlike the genin testing, the hallways had pain-generating seals here. They were also very obviously set higher than the genin testing seals had been.
A much lower-level pain-generating seal seemed to be present in the actual testing room, serving as a constant distraction from the knowledge test. It was also a fluctuating seal, the pain level shifting a bit as though from an injury you might be jostling a bit. This made for a great test of being able to think while injured without actually inducing injuries, though the test itself was also reasonably difficult. By no means unfair though, just covering things that you really should know about politics, chakra, and training before even considering seeking promotion.
Shino blamed his relationship with Fu for not having gotten a promotion to jounin before now, but felt that said relationship made him very much qualified for the promotion. He'd just not had enough mission time to earn the promotion yet, something he was reasonably certain was essentially shared with many of the other Konoha chunin participating. Fu was also aiming for promotion at this point, but had been sent to a different initial testing area.
The knowledge test, with constant pain in the background, had been easy enough to handle. He'd then been sent to a much further-away location for the skill tests, though it was still a very obvious and well-marked path. You had to be able to move faster than a civilian to traverse it though, and it was littered with zombies that would attack you with what he felt was genin-level combat skills.
He was finding it easier to zig-zag between the zombies, but suspected that Fu had just flown over them on whatever copy of the path she'd been sent down. She was far more comfortable in the air than he was and the flight spell consumed more of his energy than the running did, a problem she didn't have to worry about.
Reaching the end of the path, he found himself directed up and over a wall. It resisted basic surface-sticking, but not to the point of being impossible. Just more difficult, requiring more control than you might normally need for the task. It was obviously beyond the zombies, if they could use surface-sticking at all.
Hanabi was annoyed at not being able to test for jounin, but deep down knew he wasn't ready. Besides, he and Himeki were in the middle of a longer infiltration mission. He thought that they were lucky that they had access to the televisions broadcasting the exam as they worked in the casino wanting to root out a gang of cheaters.
Their client, the casino's owner, was the only one who knew that they were shinobi...and didn't know their actual identities or that they had access to the byakugan. This gave them a much better picture of what was going on than likely expected, and it seemed that the owner's son was working heavily with the cheaters. Helping them rig some things in their favor, pre-marking cards in subtle ways, and attempting to swap out chip denominations without being caught.
They sucked at the latter, but were apparently enough of a bumbling fool while working that nobody had called them out on it being intentional. It helped that they only ever went one denomination up from the chips they were supposed to be grabbing, coupled with supposedly being partially colorblind after an incident with bandits attacking him years ago. The latter was a long con fake though, helped by wearing dark glasses with tinting that intentionally messed with his color vision.
All of this had been passed along to the owner already, and they were now in 'collect enough information to bury the entire group' mode. Complete with additional hidden cameras collecting evidence and hidden recorders storing conversations. The only big thing left to do was probably identifying the full membership of the gang involved, and they were reasonably certain they had all but the likely-shinobi leadership pinned down solidly.
Bringing in a proper combat team to clean everything up would happen if there wasn't a suitable opportunity to take out said leadership covertly in the next two weeks.
Fu had flown over the zombies and wall, only to be directed to a field with tougher zombies that she had to defeat. She could not just wipe them all out though, as some had armbands and had to be captured 'alive'. As if it wasn't already 'too late' for that when dealing with zombies, but it was a reasonable test because you sometimes needed the leaders of groups to interrogate and the relevant symbols on the armbands weren't easily visible from a distance.
They were also, unfortunately, not really good for identifying with insects.
Despite that, as she moved through the zombies she found it far easier than several missions she'd been on that required capturing specific people in a group. She killed the ones that weren't marked to be captured, dropped insects on those that needed to be kept alive, and generally found their skill lacking. The zombies also weren't intelligent enough to try to run away when it was obvious that you'd intentionally left some of them alive, making it trivial to do three passes on the group to ensure that all the ones that should be killed were killed before starting on tying up the rest in webs.
All of the zombies dissolved as soon as she'd isolated the last one, and the proctor waved her over to send her to the next test.
A found the chunin testing to be annoying, mostly because it was obviously scaled a little higher than they were pushing their own forces to. Not that he expected Kumo's candidates to have much problem with it despite that as it was also very obviously below even special jounin level. Assuming they made it past the stricter than expected chakra meter at the start of things, anyway.
There were also obviously subtle tests of your judgment and preparedness involved. How much time did you waste killing zombies while moving along the paths with weak zombies attacking you, if you have ways to restrain people that you've captured, or the test he just came out of where ostensibly it was to see if you could apply the most basic field dressings to wounds but also tested if you had or could improvise at least a minimal medical kit.
It was also obvious that the tests weren't in a fixed order as he'd spotted someone coming out of the 'fight zombies' test that had been in the field dressing test when he'd reached it.
Now he'd hit a movement test, reminiscent of some of the flag-swapping from the genin testing. Except that unlike the genin testing, there were no provided direct paths to the platform holding a transport device. Over a dozen other platforms that you could use to get there in various ways, but no direct path. You had to travel through the air in some fashion to make the transition to the target platform.
Worse, the most direct jumping path was a trap with platforms that were strangely solidly in the air, but able to rotate in any direction when you put pressure on them. He'd caught the tail end of one settling from someone else likely bouncing off of it and had carefully tested each platform in various ways to see which ones were trustworthy and which ones were liable to spin and dump you.
Having satisfied his curiosity there, he bounced around the problematic platforms, launched himself into the air, and completely missed the platform with the transport pad on it. Blinking as he landed, he looked up and saw that he was now directly under the platform he'd tried to drop straight down onto. Which either meant that there was some kind of space-warping trickery or the damned platform had moved.
Repeating the move, and paying much closer attention, he determined that it was a combination of not falling straight and the platform shifting. He could also feel the effects of gravity shifting around him when paying attention to the effect, which was honestly a clever trick.
Nodding, he bounced off of several other platforms for a more direct, but trickier to time, trip to the platform, grabbing the edge of it and swinging up onto it instead. He then triggered the transport pad and appeared in a room with a dozen arrival pads, a line of desks with proctors behind them, and a few others that had made it through and hadn't been sent to their next tests yet.
Hinata had decided to run through the chunin testing herself to see how it worked as Naruto hadn't seen fit to have anyone from Uzushio test it for him. So far the tests appeared to be scaled appropriately, though she was a bit annoyed at several technology items that he'd figured out and not shared. Like the improved 'show different things to different people' system that didn't get fuzzy if two people were close enough together.
Right now she was in the middle of 'can you deal with someone using a weapon' testing. But Naruto hadn't been content with one weapon, instead setting things up so that you had to prove you could non-lethally disarm a high-genin level opponent wielding a number of weapons. Swords, axes, hammers, clubs, spears, knives, bows, and for bonus points he'd thrown in magical blades that you couldn't touch the blade and a contraption that spun a chain with blades on it around at high speed that had been touted as a good way to chop down trees.
Notably, it hadn't actually been put into use for that because genin practicing with wind chakra were cheap to hire, plentiful, and generally faster.
She'd waltzed through the armed zombies, dodging their attacks and disarming them with no problems at all. Doing so without using a weapon of her own was for added bonus points, though that wasn't required and she was confident that the difficulty for the required portions was scaled for use of your own sword or staff to catch or deflect weapons as you advanced on the zombies.
That said, she was seriously tempted to make up a personal version of the spinning chain tool to use as a weapon. She'd gained an appreciation for oddball weapons upon finding out that Nuibari was literally a sewing needle repurposed as a 'sword' and figured that there were worse ways to intimidate stupid enemies.
Ino had decided to trust Naruto's calibration of things and was working with the monitoring teams, on top of running some infiltrators through exercises. Some of those were targeting people on the moon, but most of it was targeting those distracted by the broadcasts planet-side. Some of her clones were currently raiding the archives of hidden villages while everyone was distracted with the chunin testing, complete with several important members of most villages being on the moon.
That many leaders in general were on the moon, because to not at least be present for the opening ceremonies would be giving up bragging rights, was definitely making it easier for teams to slip into the records areas of the country capitals to ensure that everything was up-to-date in Uzushio's records. Mostly things like daimyo records that were harder for teams to get access to without being spotted, generally speaking. The Land of Fire and the Land of Lightning were the only countries that actively maintained proper anti-shinobi security measures on their daimyo-only records, though there was that trick with the Land of Earth's records that wasn't really 'maintained' so much as protected through being kept secret.
They knew about it though, so it wasn't keeping them out anymore.
She was still figuring out just how bullshit Naruto's technology was though. He'd only unlocked access to some things a few days ago, meaning that she was adjusting to having real-time tracking of teams. Just bring up the global maps, pick a team, and watch their progress moving across the map...and if they weren't under cover she could generally grab pictures of them. The implications for monitoring basically everyone were insane, and she seriously suspected that this was just the beginning of what he'd managed to set up.
How he kept pulling these things off, to baffle the technology division, was the bigger mystery. At the same time, most of it was supposedly because he and Yoko were concerned about invaders of various kinds, including the possibility that those responsible for the God Tree had survived and would come back. Being able to spot that kind of problem long before it became an entrenched issue did sound like a good idea.
Sasori was hoping that he'd improved enough to earn jounin rank, especially after finally being able to make a couple of paperwork clones. They took less chakra when you were pushing them into puppets as well, which left him with more available after combat tests. He definitely appreciated that as he moved to other tests, such as combating basic elemental attacks and genjutsu. That he now had the ability to use all the base elements and lava release was an added bonus, of course, and definitely helped when lava release could counter things thrown at him.
...he was realizing that he needed to practice more with that though. He was excellent with the rubber techniques, but far less skilled with other uses that could've come in handy had he practiced them. Luckily he'd made sure that he had at least the basics in each single element as well, and the testing didn't require that you use chakra to counter things either. The intent was obviously to ensure that you couldn't be rendered useless by an opponent using a single element against you.
After that he'd been given a choice of tests, to demonstrate that he had more than general skills. They'd been sorted by his likelihood of passing them, as far as he could tell, with the hardest ones at the start of the list. Puppet control was second to last, and he wasn't sure if he should be insulted that it wasn't at the end or impressed with himself that teaching others was apparently the most likely for him to pass.
He'd still went with the puppet control option, because he wanted to prove he was combat-capable as a jounin. Chunin could obviously teach, but participating at all was more of a pride issue. This had brought him to a testing station that he wasn't sure anyone else had approached yet today, with a dozen puppets strewn about.
"Welcome," the proctor said, one of the automated ones that were essentially computer-controlled puppets themselves. "I see you've already got puppets out, but your goal here is to demonstrate that you can control four of the provided puppets. Your choice as to which four."
Sasori nodded, and moved through the puppets giving them quick examinations. This revealed that they were split into three main groups. There were some that needed chakra threads, some that only had the connection points for the paperwork puppeteer trick, and the remainder appeared to be rigged to function in both ways.
He dropped a clone into one of the paperwork puppeteer puppets and let it start working out movement, then reached out with chakra strings to three other puppets. Naruto was insane in how quickly he'd been able to pick up controlling someone else's puppets, but these were obviously not designed to be difficult to control and it wasn't long before he had the three under his control lined up with the one he'd dropped a clone into.
"Will that do?" he asked.
"That's stage one," the proctor said, gesturing to the clearing next to where the puppets were displayed. A dozen zombies dragged themselves out of the ground. "Stage two is taking them out with one or more of your choices."
Ah. Mildly annoying, but he'd picked a variety of forms and it didn't take long to use all four puppets to obliterate the dozen zombies.
Kurotsuchi had proven her ability with genjutsu, both in using and detecting it, before being sent into an obvious ambush. She'd correctly guessed that the ambush itself was the next test, given that there seemed to be literally no other route to the proctor she'd been told to go to next, and spotting it before setting it off hopefully counting for something. Identifying where she was going to be attacked from was easy enough, and she prepared defenses for the most likely attacks from each point.
Then she sent a smoke bomb into the mix, followed by ashes, before moving into the fray herself.
Her attackers didn't seem to be hindered by the smoke bomb, but her ashes were an entirely different story. Within a minute she had all of the attackers subdued, and the proctor she was on her way to clapped. "Good job handling the ambush, and keeping them alive so that you could interrogate them later."
"Thank you," she replied, idly noting that the 'attackers' had all dissolved. It was incredibly difficult to tell when something was a computer-controlled puppet or a seal-controlled zombie when Uzushio was involved. "Where is my next test?"
"You have to choose one first."
She was curious about that, and checked the list provided on one of the computer screens. She was a bit surprised to find that cooking with chakra was on the list, near the bottom, and decided to go with that just to see how they would test the skill.
Sanshi was a little annoyed at how much of the Uzukage's technology even Hinata wasn't privy to the inner workings of. She understood that it was for security reasons, and couldn't really argue that general concept, but it was still very annoying to know that the village could do things but not how those things were accomplished.
This was not entirely unusual though. They'd had similar things back before the fall of the original Uzushio, just generally across the technology and seals divide. Each side could do things the other couldn't and it drove both sides nuts. Now the Uzukage was integrating both with magic and making things that no one of the three could manage before.
They at least knew that he'd learned a number of things thanks to the Tome that had bound itself to him when he was a child, and having the remains of a tailed beast bound to you apparently gave you seemingly-impossible levels of retention. That let him learn far more than it appeared he should be able to, above and beyond what chakra alone normally accomplished. But he also had enough of a head start that others with similar conditions seemingly had no hope of catching up.
Today's 'unexpected revelation' was that he was aiming to track everything in the star system for signs of threats to the planet, natural or otherwise. He kept getting false positives though, because he didn't yet have an accurate enough solution to the n-body problem when compared to the ability to track everything. Making the predictions 'fuzzier' was currently their best solution, short of finding a perfect n-body formula and feeding it sufficiently-accurate information on the entire star system, but that he'd gotten this far before calling himself 'stumped' was insane.
The astronomers would be incredibly jealous if they ever found out as well, because this meant that he did have incredibly accurate maps of the entire star system. Far beyond what she knew they were working on assembling themselves with access to the 'Moonscope', possibly because he'd automated a sky-scanning routine and had one of the outputs running through it constantly.
Mei had chosen to be tested on her ability to handle her bloodline skills, and she found that the test was obviously tailored to her specific bloodlines. This was, in her opinion, reasonably impressive on its own. Proper tests of her ability to use earth, water, and fire chakra along with the combinations that led to boil and lava release had been well thought out and aptly allowed her to demonstrate that she had the basics down.
It was also incredibly annoying, as the testing implied that there were a dozen applications of each bloodline that she'd never so much as considered before. Some she realized that she'd heard of from others before, but most of them she only had names instead of proper descriptions. If not for the ones she did recognize, and the names sounding perfectly reasonable for what she knew of the bloodlines, she'd assume that they were intentional fakes in the list.
"This test was obviously customized for me specifically," she said as she waited to be told where to go next.
"Automatic systems detected what bloodlines you have and customized the testing based on that," the proctor agreed, except that wasn't what she'd been implying. "You at least knew all of your bloodlines. Two candidates so far have failed and needed to pick a replacement test due to having bloodlines they were unaware of."
"...you can identify bloodlines that the shinobi aren't aware of?"
"Of course. All known bloodlines leave various identifiers that can be detected with the correct equipment."
That was an entirely different level of flex on Uzushio's part, and she didn't know how to react to it. Being told where her next test was at least gave her something less concerning to focus on for the moment.
Shisui felt like he should be horrified that there was a mandatory paperwork test in the mix, but had to admit that ensuring that you could fill out a basic report was important. Needing to summarize the tests and his performance in them up to that point was basically writing up a mission report, but he idly wondered how many of the candidates were going to fail at this stage. Some shinobi never got to the point of being able to write decent reports.
The form he was tasked with filling out was just unfamiliar enough that he'd needed to double-check the instructions for it, but there were instructions on how to fill it out. It was obviously specifically designed for the exam, and included fields for exam-specific information. Very straightforward, well-designed, and honestly not a bad example of how a summary mission report form should look for those villages that had crap ones.
Once filled, he submitted it and waited for it to be reviewed. This took a few minutes, before the proctor device collected a printout to hand back to him. He looked down, frowning. "What's this?"
"You passed," the proctor replied. "But that's a review of your report, based on accuracy and penmanship criteria. You appear to have a tendency to downplay yourself and there were several points where things could have been mistaken for something else at a first glance due to being slightly sloppy."
He blinked a couple of times as he processed that, eyes flicking over the marked-up copy of the report he'd submitted. The downplaying when he didn't have accurate timings and other information from each test was more of an informational note, but he could see where being a little sloppy with his handwriting had led to possible 'quick glance says something entirely inaccurate' situations.
That he, the Hokage, had just had his handwriting critiqued by a machine was honestly a bit grating.
Eventually he sighed and looked back up at the proctor. "Okay, where's my next test?"
"As I said," the proctor replied. "You passed. The report on your testing is the end of the process."
"Oh." At least they'd saved the paperwork for last.
As the testing came to an end, Naruto found himself looking over the overall results. Entire villages had failed out at the chunin level, though most at least had their leaders and a couple of others that vouchers had been handed to pass. Only one village had failed completely, another had their leader fail spectacularly but voucher participants had passed, and there was a notable village that had a couple of chunin pass but their leader and other voucher-bearers all failed.
In some cases it was obvious that the failures had been due to not being able to properly gauge the passage of time. The Sun was almost stationary in the sky and the rotation of the Earth above them had been the best indicator of the larger passing of time. That was proving to be an interesting challenge for growing crops, and the farmers were annoyed with the approximate two weeks of day followed by two tweeks of night cycle, but it also made it trivial for those not paying attention to miss how much time had passed.
The constant sunlight also caused some problems with sunburns, another issue that had been identified in those who had moved up ahead of things. There they at least had medic-nin able to help deal with the issue and various options to mitigate the problem available for those paying attention to the shops and signage. Subtle spells ensured that there was enough atmospheric convection to not have the air be too hot, or the dark side of the moon too cold, but surface temperatures on the outsides of buildings varied considerably as the shift from day to night and back happened. There were burns on a number of hands due to not realizing that before they'd even shown up the Sun had been 'up' for days and a number of exposed surfaces were quite warm.
He noted that there were reports that a number of visitors had started noticing how many different 'keep things from reaching temperature extremes' measures the moon had for the surface. Basically every single outside door was inset and had an awning to keep the sun from affecting them too badly and provide ample little shade spots, with those areas also having subtle space heaters to keep them from being too cold when the Sun was down. Air filtration systems that seemed to be in case of fires and such were actually more there to monitor and adjust the temperature and water content of the air flowing through them to help where the larger-scale convection system wasn't as effective due to the buildings. All of the walking areas had heating and cooling systems just under the surface to help keep them comfortable. Those were all just the most noticeable measures, and the bulk of the reports were from those on the 'day' side of the moon.
Having your work noticed and appreciated was nice, though the 'sun lamps' for crops so that they wouldn't have problems with two weeks of darkness weren't deployed during the 'day' so they hadn't been noticed in this part of the moon.
In about ten hours they'd start the next phase, giving everyone involved time to rest and resupply. He'd call it 'in the morning', and it would be for the Elemental Nations, but sunset was still over a week away here on the moon.
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