章 2726: 116
Naruto had worked with Yoko to restore normal power usage before checking with the other village leaders. Nobody thought that they needed to resume the exams, instead going through the final promotion motions for the now-jounin. All of those in the zombie fight, plus a few others, had earned their promotions and the announcements had been a little anticlimactic. Then he'd shifted to more dedicated work on collecting pieces of destroyed spaceships. Ren had been annoyed that one of the smaller eye-like drones had managed to avoid being blown up when clones had finally shown up to start recovery, and more annoyed that they'd captured the thing intact instead of destroying it.
He also had clones drop things on others. The Sunbeam collection spell shouldn't have been that inefficient, he wanted someone other than him coming up with weapon ideas in light of this battle, and they needed to come up with plans for earlier detection of threats like this that could be implemented a lot faster than his current barely-formed plans.
Teams also had to monitor to see if there was anything obvious that needed fixing after blotting out the Sun like that, smooth things over diplomatically, and who knew what else...while he and Yoko planned on using clones to finish dismantling and examining the spaceships themselves. Hopefully the sharingan and rinnegan would help there.
Sasori was happy to have his skills recognized, and felt better about things than he had years ago. He'd earned things through hard work and significant self-improvement this time. Granted, this came with a 'would like to not see a zombie for at least a decade', but anyone who had any inkling of what they'd gone through in that final fight would understand that.
Unfortunately, Uzushio used zombies for training everywhere.
Learning more about the attack that had happened during the finals was more concerning in several ways, though it wasn't too surprising that the 'communication satellites' were far more capable. He knew that there had been an assumption that they were spy satellites, but personally wouldn't have guessed that they were quite as capable as they turned out to be. It made war vanishingly unlikely though, as everyone else on the planet now knew that Uzushio would stomp every other nation with orbital bombardment.
That Uzushio had provided the proof that they could do that through using the satellite grid to protect the planet was likely the only reason there wasn't general panic among the other nations.
Now there was the larger problem of the universe being hostile, and Earth only survived because Naruto was insanely overprepared. This was changing amazingly little in day to day training, beyond students definitely being more attentive when he'd personally returned to teaching. The research teams capable of doing larger-scale work were likely very busy, but most people couldn't really do that kind of work right now and it would take time for training routines to be put together for anything new.
All of that said, he did think that puppets had a chance of being useful in space combat if you picked up the flight spell and there were potential enemies that had crewed ships for boarding actions. There had been a very conspicuous lack of corpses coming out of the sliced-up ones, implying that they'd been significantly automated at a minimum.
Wame had only had access to Naruto's more recent spells for a short time and had already spotted ways to improve things. Starting with her own telescope spell, which he'd modified for 'cast across a distributed network of spell processors'...and then just had the computers fix the overlaps not lining up properly as the spell processors moved in relation to each other. She'd instead put in an 'anchor to neighboring spell instance' element into the spells while decoupling the center from 'exactly on the spell processor'. There was now enough wiggle room for the satellites to move around a bit and still maintain a cohesive bubble, and anchoring to each other like that meant that everything just stitched together properly with a fraction of the computing time.
That was the precursor to 'used that as part of the basis for the Sunbeam collection spell' examination, and that suffered a similar problem. It had a similar problem, but in a different way, because internal elements of the collection system were cast by different spell processors. When they didn't line up perfectly you got what the system called 'conversion waste', but was actually a failure to collect everything. That wasn't able to be handled in the same way due to how the interactions worked, but having the 'central' processor cast an alignment key that everything else aligned to had worked and gotten the multiple spell processor collection efficiency up to over ninety-eight percent.
Scientists had pointed out that casting the collection spell closer to the Sun would be even better, and could possibly get 'full collection array at Earth' level output from a single satellite, which was being worked on in some fashion. But there were other holes in the way things worked, such as the delivery system. While it hadn't happened, all that the enemy ships would've needed to do was get behind the portal the spell was poking through to be incapable of being shot at. If the portal wasn't needed, or the spell had a way to shoot behind the portal, then that weakness would be avoided.
Naruto's solution for that was looking to be something like 'open multiple portals that can attack independently', but she thought that being able to deploy a single portal that could attack in all directions was the superior option and just needed to make it work. Even better, it would probably make the brute-force solution more effective, so it shouldn't even make either side be wasted effort.
Fu smiled as she looked at her new registration information. While she'd transferred to Konoha officially already, she'd held off on officially joining the Aburame clan until after testing for jounin. Now she was officially married to Shino and her registration read Fu Aburame, though that wasn't going to change much in the short term. They'd turned the little space inside of the hives into a proper apartment, and as much as she liked having a proper pair of Aburame glasses she'd unfortunately found that they limited her vision too much. Of course, she didn't have the induced light sensitivity from insects burrowing into her that most Aburame did either.
Unfortunately, being a jounin meant going on more missions away from the hives. She liked being in the middle of them, helping them grow stronger. But it also meant better access to information on seals that could be used to improve the hives, spreading her chakra out through them without needing to have all of the insects come to her directly and possibly holding a reserve of it for them for when she wasn't around.
But first she had an appointment with Tsunade to learn what Uzushio had figured out about having children when parts of a tailed beast were bound to you as a female.
Hinata didn't like being useless when it came to examining the spaceships, but she didn't have a sharingan to pick up minute details. Naruto and Yoko were doing a very good job of documenting their findings though, including a spell-like effect permeating the entire ships and the odd substance seemingly used for a number of purposes. That substance was apparently crystallized mana with structures incredibly similar to chakra, to the point where Naruto and Yoko had already slapped together a new chakra net node that could replicate the effects and let them form more of the substance on demand.
Pumping electricity in or drawing electricity from the substance was the easiest way to use it and allowed you to manipulate a field effect that appeared to adjust effective mass within the field. On the surface, that appeared to be how their faster than light propulsion worked. Wrap the ship in an effect field to lower the mass within the field to the point where you didn't need infinite acceleration to exceed lightspeed.
Even Naruto had immediately called bullshit on that, though if you couldn't see how mana interacted with spacetime then you'd probably assume that was the case. The almost brute-forced way the ships had exceeded the speed of light was at least interesting though, and reverse-engineering it to function far more efficiently was working out nicely. Without a pile of other side effects, and their use of the substance for propulsion...
...they weren't going to be using that. Ugh. The basics of the flight spell were far superior in basically every way, especially when you started scaling things up.
Baisho was honestly surprised that his trapping skills had been recognized, despite the failures to so much as inconvenience Sasori. Granted, he hadn't been promoted to jounin, but being advanced to special jounin was still a promotion. Not that he thought he'd earned any promotion, but finding out just how durable Sasori's puppets were supposed to be combined with them not being weak against lightning had made it harder to argue.
That didn't mean he hadn't been thrown into remedial training on a number of things though, given his dismal performance in other ways, including having already been sent on two assassination missions to prove that he could kill less-legendary people in their sleep. Both of those had gone off without a hitch, one a civilian and the other a shinobi. There were no signs that anyone other than Uzushio knew who handled either killing either, and nobody believed that they could hide what happened on the planet from Uzushio.
...or what happened off the planet, luckily. Saving the planet from what some of the scientists said was probably a 'kill everyone' level attack earned you a lot of respect.
Gaara read over the Daimyo's response to the plan if Uzushio became hostile. That said plan was 'surrender unconditionally' did not seem to have gone over well as an answer, but they'd fully expected that and had been working on a more comprehensive analysis since the request had been made. Having it not having gone over well with a polite apology for asking for 'obviously-ridiculous plans' instead of a strength analysis was a surprise though.
Luckily the analysis was basically a strength analysis, starting with 'only nation capable of defending the planet' making them untouchable politically even before getting into what that meant for their attack strength. There was zero evidence that the defense weapons couldn't be targeted at the ground instead of space, though Naruto could personally run over any country that caused trouble without needing the satellites.
That they were far more likely to, say, assassinate the Daimyo causing problems and negotiate with their successor was another matter entirely. As was Suna, in the event that the Daimyo was being obstinate, but it didn't seem like this was a precursor to wanting to attack Uzushio.
They'd also anticipated being asked about plans to, say, take over the satellite network for the good of the Land of Wind. Luckily, they knew that Naruto accessed the secure terminal used to control things via teleporting straight to it, making it impossible to know where it was. Add in their inability to do anything with the relatively low security terminals on the transport pads, combined with 'nobody could get past the security on unmonitored Uzumaki technology in the Land of Hot Water for decades'? Even if they could find the terminal, they were unlikely to be able to use it.
And of course, all of this was already on top of Naruto single-handedly holding his own against some of the most powerful fighters on the continent without any trouble at all, toying with them to make a point and put on a good show, since followed by recruiting a number of them for Uzushio.
You could sum up the entire analysis as being that nobody on the planet could stand up to Uzushio, and they'd better hope that continued to hold for off the planet because nobody expected the spaceships to not be followed up on by whoever they were associated with when they didn't return as scheduled.
Yoko found it annoying that the protective field the spaceships used, when they powered it back on for testing, actually resisted the approach of truth-seeking balls. Not that they'd attempted to hand any to clones given that they're annoying if a clone in control of one dispels. Using them at any serious space-level distance was impossible otherwise as well because at some point they just kind of snapped back to you. She supposed that there might've been an option of sending clones out with them, getting the clones to the far sides of the enemies, and then dispelling them to cause the 'snap back' to go through the ships...but then you'd have to ensure that it wouldn't go through the moon or planet too.
Finding out that they'd not fully 'killed' the ships was another matter. They'd taken out most of the control and power distribution, but each of the three ships had a section where the spell-like effects permeating everything hadn't started to fade. If anything, they'd grown in strength, coming from a 'core' that seemed to be the actual control center of the ships. It seemingly had the largest reserves of the crystallized mana substance and appeared to be the primary source of the shipwide generated fields, but hadn't looked to be as active as some of the other systems that they'd targeted. In some ways it was obviously intentionally less likely to be targeted if you didn't know about it.
Unfortunately, paranoia had been proven correct regarding the spell-like effect permeating those sections. Seals and mana-based technology interacted with the effect oddly, but exposed organic intelligences were more seriously affected. They'd proven that through bringing a couple of captured bandits in and monitoring how their thought processes changed, and it was scarily quickly. Repeating that with a couple of particularly-problematic missing-nin had been significantly slower though, chakra apparently providing a natural protection from the effect. One of those two had eventually located and attempted to deploy some kind of nanite system to subvert clones, only for Knight Armor to protect the clones. The nanites themselves were incredibly interesting, though not yet passed along to the technology division because they hadn't fully deciphered the access control elements, but just another reason to only send clones in for examination right now.
When they'd attached isolated computer equipment to basically anything the other side of the connection had obviously actively worked to assist in establishing a connection, with that going the fastest in the ship sections with the intact cores. Once the connections were established there appeared to be a lot of information, but in reality it was mostly junk being generated to draw interest as attempts at deploying malicious payloads started up. Isolated systems made that less of a hassle, not that anything had seemed to make it past the initial defense of not trusting anything from the enemy computer systems.
Unfortunately, despite all evidence that doing so was a bad idea, Naruto was still currently working on plans to visit the site in person instead of through clones. Worse, they couldn't argue against the attempt and other attempts to use the rinnegan through clones had failed. With any luck they could spot and mitigate any influence on his mind that made it through the Knight Armor protections.
Davaa entered the lecture area, almost immediately coming to a halt as he started to recognize those in the audience. None of them were wearing their official attire, but he could see a number of important local and foreign leaders split between spiritual and governmental.
He had not expected to be asked to give a lesson to a group like this and wasn't sure he was prepared for the realities of trying to discuss things in front of all of them.
"Be calm," Altan said, prodding him to continue forward. "They are here as students and you are their instructor."
Gulping, Davaa nodded and continued forward. He might be told that he was no longer allowed to teach some of what he covered today, but only after at least three passings of the holy day, and none of those present would be likely to disrespect the art of instruction through ordering him harmed over his teachings.
He was going to have to try to pretend he was dealing with fresh students and not leaders and hope for the best. Once in position he took a deep breath and focused on his notes.
"Welcome," he greeted. "Today I will be covering what has been pieced together about the history of a continent on the other side of the planet from us. My sources include written histories provided by Yoko of Shrine Island as well as information gathered from well-traveled merchants that have interacted with the far side of our continent. I do not have detailed information for most of it, and this is only going to be an overview as there are too many holes in my knowledge to trust going into most of the details."
Seeing notes being taken comforted him, as well as the lack of scowls so far, and he continued. "The history begins several thousand years ago, when a 'God Tree' was planted there by Kaguya, who would eventually be known as the Rabbit Goddess. It is my belief that she was either a minor goddess or a demon looking to elevate herself and used the God Tree to start absorbing the divine powers of the planet's Gods. The tree matured over a thousand or more years, and then after another thousand years it bore a fruit with the absorbed divine power of the Gods. Kaguya consumed that fruit and ascended into a major Goddess with the power, claiming dominion over the land. During her rule, she had two sons that would eventually rebel against her, stripping her of her power and sealing her in the moon. Instead of claiming the power for themselves, the power was eventually split into powerful divine beasts that roamed the continent for hundreds of years."
There were looks of shock at that, and he waited for those taking notes to finish again before continuing. "The two brothers had given divine gifts to others, and had families of their own, eventually passing away. These gifts and their families continued on, and eventually saw the divine beasts as a source of power to be controlled for war. That led to the beasts being captured and used for their power, until an unknown force started to break the ties that allowed them to hold the stolen divine power. The divine power has now bound itself to nine or ten individuals, elevating them from the minor Gods and Goddesses they were into major ones."
Now he turned on the basic projection system so that he could show pictures, and he placed the first set down. "I do not have pictures of all of them, but we have obtained pictures and information for five of them. First we have Yagura Karatachi, a God of water and defense that protects the waters around his island home. You can see him using his divine powers to protect a ship from pirates here." After a moment he switched to the next one. "This is Fu, who was seen fighting in their tournament and is rumored to be the only one of the ten with wings. I believe that she is a Goddess of the air and insects." Another pause was provided before moving on. "This is Ino Uzumaki, born Ino Yamanaka. She does not seem to act as a Goddess of canines, but from stories told she likely acts within the domains of tracking and stealth."
There were...concerned looks there, and he didn't blame them. Once they had settled again he moved on. "This is Hinata Uzumaki, born Hinata Hyuga. Again, she does not seem to act as a Goddess of felines. Instead, it is said that she is a Goddess of technology." There were wide-eyed looks at that, because such a thing was unheard of, but no complaints. After notes were taken he moved on. "These...are Naruto Uzumaki, husband of the previous two, and his sister Yoko Uzumaki. Naruto appears to have ascended to become the God of the physical realm, encompassing everything from those below him, while Yoko did the same to become the Goddess of the spiritual realm. He is the one who built the moon and ensured that the planet was protected from the attackers that came, while she instead has been working to revitalize older Gods that survived the theft of their power by the God Tree and protects people in more spiritual fashions. Fitting her role, she appears to be celibate while he is not."
That definitely had some concerned looks, but also a number of contemplative ones. He pushed on though. "Most importantly, despite their achievements, all indications are that they do not see themselves as Gods. My assumption is that this is in part because they were born and raised seeing minor Gods as not being divine at all, but all reports say that they attribute their accomplishments to hard work and personal training instead of divine power."
It was obvious that the bulk of those present didn't know what to think about that, and he wasn't sure he knew what to think about it either, but once things had settled a little more he switched to an image of a map. "With that said, I have a little more information on the other continent, though they supposedly fight as much as we have so I cannot promise accuracy..."
Naruto looked over the checklist. He had full Knight Armor up, none of his or Yoko's clones were doing anything critical, Yoko herself was on standby being monitored, Ino and Hinata were ready to send in clones if needed, nothing major was sitting on any of his todo lists...
It looked like he was ready, as annoying as it was to have reached this point.
"What is your plan?" Hinata asked as he dismissed the checklist from the computer screen.
"There isn't much of one," Naruto admitted. "Go in, pick a core, and see if I can get information out of it."
"How? Nothing we've tried has gotten anything that we feel we can trust."
"The larger biological 'bodies' were essentially puppets, but the cores appear to have souls."
"...what?"
"So I'm going to see if I can absorb one of the three and learn everything it knows."
She obviously wasn't sure what to think about that, but they'd honestly run out of other options for figuring out what the ships had come here to do. With any luck he'd also learn other things about them, like how many more might show up later.
A few minutes later he'd made it to the remains of the ships, rinnegan already active and Yoko now keeping Hinata and Ino more directly informed of what was happening. He examined each of the three cores from a distance, then picked the one that felt...oldest, perhaps? Or most knowledgeable, maybe. Either way, he went to that one and circled it, before shrugging and reaching out and placing his right hand on the surface of the core, pushing chakra in to try and pull the soul out of it.
Unlike the previous times he'd done this, the soul did not want to budge. Whether that was due to the core being able to resist it, the way the soul was anchored to the core, or something else entirely was hard to tell. Perhaps not being able to directly grab the insides where the soul actually sat? Though he hadn't had that problem with hitting Jashin through a stone coffin...
He pushed more chakra into things to pull harder, and didn't feel like that was helping much. Adding his left hand gave him another conduit for chakra to flow through, and after a few minutes he realized that he could feel the spell-like effects on the surroundings receding. Perhaps the soul wasn't budging yet because it was spread out and he had to pull it back in before he could remove it?
Twenty minutes later the last of the feeling of the spell-like effects were pulling back into the core, and when the last bit of that was enveloped by his chakra the resistance just vanished...
"That's not good," Ino said as Yoko fell over and on the cameras Naruto looked like he was trying to emulate the Sun.
"How is it worse than when he hit Jashin?" Hinata questioned with a frown.
"...more souls?"
"Enough to overwhelm him and Yoko?"
Ino shrugged in response, because she had no clue. She supposed it could just be a very old soul with a lot of memories as well, but there wasn't much they could do until the rinnegan deactivated. "We're stuck waiting, I think. What about the analysis of everything else he and Yoko have dropped on people? Is any of that going well?"
"Most of it is more him handing complete write-ups of how things work over, along with 'built my own test' prototypes of many things, though we're still struggling with details of the nanotech. It would be incredibly useful if we can deploy it more widely, but the form found in the ships is too focused on animating corpses for some reason."
"Didn't they try to deploy it against what they thought were living people?"
"In which case the first step would've been killing the target."
"Oh."
"It's been three days," Karin said after Hinata answered the phone instead of Naruto. "And he isn't marked as being on vacation."
"He's in the middle of a high-security self-appointed mission," Hinata replied. "We just can't mark him down appropriately due to how things happened."
"...and I'm allowed to request more proof of that on medical grounds alone."
There were noises from the other end of the call. "You'll be under 'treason to reveal it to anyone unauthorized' restrictions until such a time as Naruto decides otherwise."
"Practically standard practice."
"And you only noticed he wasn't available due to simply wanting his help with a medical procedure. Are you sure you want to know more?"
"Something happened to prevent Naruto from filling out all the relevant paperwork. He's the God of Paperwork and didn't fill out all the paperwork?"
"...I suppose you have a point, but you're going to have to be summoned to a secure location to learn more."
"Give me five minutes to warn people."
Ten minutes later she was staring at a screen, blinking, and trying to figure out how to process things.
"We don't know how long this is going to take," Ino explained. "But Nagato indicated that there's no safe way to stop the process now that it started and Naruto is giving off something like radiation in high enough doses to force-dispel chakra constructs."
"Though we also think it's taking longer because the other two ship cores seemed to reach out somehow and have been drawn in as well," Hinata added. "My clones observed them doing that, without understanding how or why, only for the energy levels of the other two cores to start dropping quickly. All secondary effects ceased yesterday, but the rate of energy drop has fluctuated a lot. At the slowest we're looking at two years, the fastest it could be another hour, but on average we're hoping for no more than four more days."
"Why would he do this?"
"To find out why the ships attacked," Hinata replied. "Because nothing else returned anything we'd consider to be reliable."
"Huh."
"But yeah. Until this finishes and he recovers from the process he isn't going to be available for anything."
"I have enough access to flag him as on a mission that will require forced medical leave when he returns, so I'll do that to reduce the number of others questioning things."
"Thank you."
Shisui frowned as he sat down in the Uzushio meeting room. "Where's Naruto?"
"In the hospital," Hinata replied. "We just got him there this morning."
"...I've not spoken to him or Yoko for over a week."
"Nobody has, and we expect him to be another two to three days before either of them wakes up."
"They're both in the hospital?"
"Yes."
That was obviously something big, and possibly something he didn't want to touch. "I see. How badly is this affecting your intelligence division?"
"Barely at all," Ino replied. "At least on this continent. I'm not as familiar with some of the others he was doing primary monitoring on and am still picking up a few languages."
"Is your intelligence division aware that there's a movement to declare him Emperor?"
She flinched. "Yes, and not just here. Two other continents are considering similar actions, one of them in hopes that getting him to recognize being in charge of them would immediately bring improvements to help with a local crisis or six. That his subtle interventions there suddenly stopped caused things to go worse than he predicted as well."
"I'll have to take your word on it, but if someone doesn't step in to stop things then he might wake up to being declared at least ruler of the Elemental Nations. Even the Land of Iron is getting in on the idea."
"We can't argue the justifications," Hinata said with a sigh. "He defended the planet in a way that makes it obvious to anyone paying attention that Uzushio already won and everyone else is just allowed to squabble amongst each other. That the revelation came in the form of protecting the planet has the situation being seen as a good thing, both that Uzushio was ready for it and that we hadn't already used our unstoppable superweapons to take out the opposition."
"Naruto isn't going to like the added paperwork," Ino continued. "But we think that he's not necessarily going to argue being put in charge, if only because it provides more options for preparing for any future attacks."
That...was worrisome. "Do you honestly think that there will be future attacks?"
"That's what he was hoping to find out," Hinata replied. "With any luck we'll have a better answer when he wakes up."
Well, that was one way to likely keep Naruto from doing everything he could to dodge being declared ruler of the planet in some fashion. Hopefully he had the sense to just institute reforms and leave local leaders still nominally in charge of their countries while focusing on more military matters.
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