章 2625: 13
Anko-sensei had only taken a few days to obtain maid-styled uniforms, complete with frilly headbands, and had somehow found shinobi-grade brooms and feather dusters too. The brooms were closer to heavily reinforced bo staffs with a ninja-wire brush on the ends and the feather dusters could go from soft to a bundle of sharp edges with a small amount of chakra flowing through them. Kurenai-sensei had then contributed a collection of perfectly normal cleaning chemicals and a guide on how to use them for everything from irritants to poisons.
Hinata had talked to Natsu, the Hyuga maid that had been looking after Hanabi for years, and acquired two active chakra cleaners and manuals for them covering both cleaning and combat, plus some other jutsu that probably wouldn't be useful in combat but were useful for someone cleaning up in various ways. Tenten's contribution had been various weapon maintenance tools and chemicals, while Naruto had built new sealing tags to store it all in so that it would all be readily available without it looking like they were carrying a full complement of cleaning supplies. He was proud of the system that let the tags sit under fabric but still function through it, allowing them to have strips of seal tags down the sleeves, inside the gloves, and along the upper edge of the skirt that weren't obvious.
With that all arranged, they'd taken a dozen missions in a row outside of the village, using summoning to let Anko-sensei or Kurenai-sensei swap out mission scrolls instead of returning properly and leaving again. Their success in Wave had apparently given them more sway in claiming missions and all of the missions were set up to cross paths with other teams on their own generally unrelated missions.
The training goals for all of the missions were to use as many cleaning and maintenance jutsu as possible and to not be spotted by the teams they were working around, and for over half of the missions they'd also been told that they had to report on how the other teams were handling their missions. Without being told who the teams were or what their missions entailed ahead of time.
For some of these missions things went almost too easily. Clearing bandits that were likely to attack another team before the attack came was done four times over three days. Twice they left no trace of the bandit camp at all and twice they only took the two or three missing-nin that were worth bounties while leaving the rest of the remains there to be found by the other teams. One of each near the start of the missions, and one of each near the end. Things had gone well enough, though there had been a rough spot or two.
"Naruto," Hinata, Tenten, and Kurenai-sensei said in unison, all leaking varying levels of intent to harm him.
"That was fucking awesome," Anko-sensei declared, causing the other three to stop and blink. "A perfect distraction before the mending jutsu tied them up in their own clothing."
"He turned himself into a naked woman and acted flirty," Tenten complained. "That isn't awesome, that's degrading to kunoichi!"
"It's a standard Uzumaki distraction method," Naruto defended. "Figure out what appearance your enemy is likely to stop to drool at before hitting them. This group was obviously going to fall for a naked woman, but a group of kunoichi might be better hit by a naked man. Figuring out what body type your target will like is harder, and for particularly tough targets you might need a couple of clones to make out with, but it's more effective than you might expect."
"...I hate that he's right," Kurenai-sensei said, hanging her head.
"Dammit," Hinata said with a sigh. "We're going to have to practice that too, aren't we?"
"Normal genjutsu don't get the right kick with most enemies," Anko-sensei admitted. "But that solid disguise jutsu seems perfect for the trick. Though I do wonder how Naruto got so good at being believably flirty."
"There's a red light district in Konoha and I regularly send out clones to observe the village," Naruto answered. "Coupled with shapeshifting, which you know has gotten me into the female side of the hot springs multiple times thanks to dragging me in at least a dozen times personally?"
"And now I hate that Anko has justification for dragging the three of you into the wrong side of the hot springs being training," Kurenai-sensei groaned.
"It already was," Anko-sensei argued. "If they're used to naked bodies then this trick won't be as likely to work against them either. Though I'll admit that I was dragging him in more to keep him from needing to be alone without direct support in the guys' side of the hot springs and never even considered the training aspect before now." She then frowned. "They really shouldn't have dropped the seduction and counter-seduction classes from the academy. That decision has led to more prudes in the Konoha ranks than in any other hidden village...not that Naruto's trick wouldn't work on most shinobi in general. It has enough shock value to compensate."
Then there were things like emptying a corrupt businessman's safe before the other team escorting the man arrived with the latest collection of ill-gotten ryo, then emptying it again after the escorting team had left with an urgent request for an investigative team to be sent to figure out what had happened. Said team would likely find nothing pointing back to Konoha, even if they weren't told to find nothing intentionally. Especially with the safe's combination written on the back of a painting. No cipher or anything, just sitting there if you flipped the painting over, and Team Eighteen hadn't been the ones to put it there.
Team Ten had been on a glorified babysitting job, guarding and taking care of a toddler while her parents were being treated after others in their home village had tried to take them out. The original attack was partially because Konoha worked closely with the family and their competitors in the village had taken offense. Team Eighteen had gradually cleaned out the savings and inventory of all the competitors and kept the little girl's diaper changed for almost a week.
It took two days for their jounin-sensei to notice the lack of diaper changes, four for the genin, and six before they were in a position to notice that the diaper needed changing before Team Eighteen had been able to slip in to do so themselves. Despite the increasingly-paranoid layers of traps around the house, none of which so much as slowed down Hinata or Naruto thanks to the byakugan. They wouldn't have been nearly as successful had Hinata not gotten a diaper-changing jutsu set from Natsu that sped up the changing process significantly and Tenten had been able to skip out on that one due to not getting the scent-changing jutsu down well enough to work with Naruto to duplicate the toddler's scent in order to fool Shino's insects.
Shikamaru wasn't sure what had been going on, but whatever was causing Yuna's diaper to always be fresh had stopped happening a couple days ago. Shino hadn't been able to find any trace of an intruder, and had nearly concluded that the girl was changing her own diaper before throwing that idea out entirely. Tekuno-sensei's traps were very comprehensive and shouldn't have had holes large enough to let someone else slip in either.
But Rio had managed to catch Yuna using her diaper, and since then the mysterious force changing the diapers had seemed to give up or vanish.
Now if only they'd not spent days all assuming that someone else was changing the girl's diaper before noticing a problem. Being that unobservant, and paying so little attention to communication, did not bode well for future training sessions once they were back in the village. Not to mention the fact that after a week of looking they still had no hints as to how the diapers kept ending up changed.
Their only potential saving grace there was that it had taken Tekuno-sensei two days to spot the problem and he wasn't able to figure out how it had been happening either. But that was far more likely to mean that whatever training he arranged for was going to include him instead of being run by him.
Other missions had less direct interactions with other missions. A couple of small investigations while another team was doing something entirely unrelated nearby, sabotaging a warehouse without it looking like shinobi were involved at all when some chunin were staying in the same village for the night on their way back to Konoha, and a larger investigation of a casino whose games were more rigged in the house's favor than usual or legally permitted while three other teams passed through with clients.
The latter mission had also ended up with an added component when Tsunade of the Sannin had shown up. Anko-sensei had tasked the team with ensuring that the legendary sucker won as often as they could manage without being caught even as they collected evidence of all the ways the casino was cheating beyond the normal house advantage. That was easiest on the slot machines where a paperwork clone just slipped in looking like an insect and used a couple of tricks to block all but the jackpot combination on any machine she sat down at. After three single-pull wins on three different machines she'd gone to a card game and that had required far more effort to stack in her favor without being noticed.
Naruto had needed to join the table personally in disguise and cheat to lose, which was incredibly annoying because things kept lining up for him to win when he wasn't paying enough attention, but he pulled it off. Barely. Tsunade had vacated the casino in a panic, and to avoid suspicion he'd stayed at the table for three more hands and won back what he'd lost ten times over before bowing out 'to celebrate her good fortune before it turns on her again'.
A couple of the others at the table had been sad to see the pretty girl whose luck had turned around leave, but he managed to not have any of them try to join him. Anko-sensei had refused to explain why she'd been counting the other individuals and groups leaving town in a hurry for the rest of the day though. Surely Tsunade winning wasn't that big of a deal?
Tsunade didn't know what was going on, but it was suddenly obvious that she was either doing something horribly wrong or heading in the entire wrong direction. As another indicator of her luck, Shizune hadn't even managed to get a hotel room for them before being found and dragged out of town the way they'd come in. They'd backtrack four towns and then stop to see if they'd gone far enough back the way they'd come to avoid whatever it was that had caused the winning streak to hit.
Checking in on several people would also be needed. Discreetly, of course, but this kind of lucky streak could also mean that someone she cared about had just died. Jiraiya would show up within a couple of days due to her doing such a sudden change in travel direction, but she'd need to actively check for news on Hiruzen to avoid a trip to Konoha and there were a few places that had people she was fond of that would need a quick visit as well.
To round things out they'd done a final mission dropping their other restrictions and swapping them for a 'fake being Iwa shinobi failing to steal from a business' profile instead. The owner of the business had recently canceled the maintenance contract on security seals and as part of things the three genin had to be heard complaining that they'd been told he didn't have them anymore as they made their escape. But only after burning a giant hole through the security seal set that would make a future attempt easier, if someone were to try.
It was a lesson for the business owner that if you were going to cancel a maintenance contract then you should at least keep quiet about it. They could only pull the stunt without it looking contrived because he'd been bragging about how much money he was going to be saving not paying for the seals. The team was back in Konoha half an hour later, only to be sent all the way back a few days afterwards because Naruto was the only one available with the skills to reapply the damaged seals on an 'emergency basis'.
The hardest part had been faking it being their first visit to town, made easier by it actually being Hoshi's as he'd skipped the mission to break the seals in the first place.
"So," Kurenai-sensei said. "There are a few things to cover today."
"The first is that you three are insane when it comes to training," Anko-sensei said. "You've beat all of our expectations for how quickly you adapted to using different jutsu sets and techniques."
"Taking out bandits without being seen while only using cleaning jutsu was impressive to watch. Makes me wish that we'll be able to see all your larger battles in the chunin exams."
"That leads us into the next thing nicely." A set of papers was produced and handed to the three. "We're clearing you for said exams. But to reduce confusion with a visiting Team Eighteen we've had to update the team designation. You're no longer Team Eighteen on paper."
Kurenai-sensei grinned. "Normally the procedure in this kind of situation is to use your jounin-sensei's name as your team name, as is happening with Team Gai. But since you have two sensei we were given the option of going a different route, adopting an unofficial name that the team picked up recently. Our recent run of missions without being noticed at all led to some of the jounin calling us 'Team Yurei', so we decided to make it official."
"Which shouldn't be giving anything about your skills away because everyone we know of using the name knows that you were the ones doing the missions anyway. Speaking of people knowing about your skills though..." Anko-sensei produced three scrolls and threw one to each of them. "I picked up the standard information packets for everyone potentially participating this time. Study them so you know the basics of the competition."
"...where did you get those?"
"Info desk."
"I didn't know you could pick that kind of thing up at the info desk. Are you sure we should be giving them copies?"
"They let civilians have copies for betting purposes."
"Is our information in here?" Tenten asked.
"Yes, so you'll know what the foreign shinobi might have a clue about. Which is...amazingly deceptive in your case, missing essentially everything important, so you should also be assuming that the same applies to anyone else. But the information does tend to cover known skills shown in the field, credible rumors, and marks down what's from the advertising packets from each village and what came from other sources."
Believing that the advertising packets for shinobi were anything more than roughly accurate guidelines did sound a bit foolish, but it was still far better than nothing.
"You have just over a week before you need to arrive as a team to participate," Kurenai-sensei said. "And per tradition that time is yours to do with as you see fit."
"But if you make us look bad by not being ready then you won't enjoy the training afterwards," Anko-sensei added.
"Oh, and one more thing." Kurenai-sensei produced another sheet of paper and a forehead protector. "Hoshi's nin-fox paperwork finally went through, so you won't have to send him away during the exams."
The little guy was obviously quite happy about that as Kurenai-sensei tied the forehead protector around his neck.
Over the following couple of days the visiting shinobi for the exams started to show up, and Naruto had stepped up his paperwork clone monitoring network. He was keeping an eye on all of the potential competition, from the locals to those from the well-known villages to the unknowns. Konoha had the largest number of potential participants, which made sense, totalling eighty-seven shinobi. Except that a check of the village records showed that two teams were made of chunin despite their public information saying they weren't worth considering as contenders. Which...technically made the public information correct, given that they were obviously plants.
Suna was next with thirty participants, including a jinchuriki. Not that any of the paperwork said that Gaara, one of the Kazekage's children, was one, but Naruto and the Tome could tell. Kurama claimed that the boy held the one-tail, named Shukaku, and that he'd been suffering from a form of severe insanity before the Tome had found Naruto. The rest of the Suna teams were far less interesting. Ame had sent twenty-one participants and was the last 'significant' participating village.
Kumo, Kusa, and Taki had all sent six participants, with Kumo's participation being the first time they'd participated in a Konoha or Suna exam in decades. Notably, Kumo and Taki had sent undeclared jinchuriki as well, though Kumo had done so with a jounin-sensei so perhaps it was known and just not in the paperwork Naruto had gotten access to. Her name was Yugito Nii and held the two-tails, Matatabi, and Kurama claimed that the woman had a horrible childhood and didn't work properly with the tailed beast. The seven-tails, Chomei, was inside of Fu, one of Taki's genin. Kurama admitted that he had no clue if they were actually happy or if the fact that the seven-tails could feel positive emotions kept them perpetually chipper, compared to when he was stuck feeling only negative emotions without being able to turn it off like Naruto could.
Despite three jinchuriki in the village, Naruto's focus was on the Kusa teams. One of them, Karin, had no family name listed, but looked and felt like an Uzumaki. But she was constantly kept from interacting with others by her team, so confronting her was proving to be difficult to do. But he could tell that she really wasn't treated well and had checked with Old Man Hokage about options. They had a plan, but it needed to wait.
The last six participating shinobi were split between Kiri, who tended to send probing teams to all exams, and a new village named Oto. The former team was very much interested in everything Uzumaki, possibly looking for the Kubikiribocho. Which now lived inside of one of Naruto's armbands. Hinata had Nuibari in a bracelet that was Naruto's current best attempt at reproducing the armbands, but Tenten hadn't gotten her strength up enough to properly wield Shibuki yet.
All of the focus on the visiting shinobi wasn't enough for Naruto's clones, and thus Naruto himself, to miss that one of Konoha's genin was acting incredibly suspiciously. Kabuto Yakushi had a habit of vanishing into hidden tunnels to slip out of the village unnoticed to meet with others, slipping into record rooms to look at things genin weren't cleared for, and multiple times demonstrated that they weren't anywhere close to merely being a genin. His two teammates were also suspicious, but nowhere near as obviously skilled and didn't seem to be fully trusted by Kabuto despite seeming to fully trust him. Their jounin-sensei was harder to tell with due to not currently interacting with them much.
While normal training was happening, the newly christened Team Yurei was largely of the opinion that a last-minute training push was mostly an invitation to cause themselves injury that would disqualify them from participating in the chunin exams. Naruto was thus doing the most training with piles of paperwork clones, but he did that when in the village anyway so it wasn't really any different from his normal routine.
The actual Naruto had just ensured that his emergency ramen, cinnamon roll, and sesame dumpling seals were filled up when one of his clones used the communication jutsu to tell him that the Hokage's grandson had just pissed off the Kazekage's son. The puppeteer, Kankuro, instead of the jinchuriki, but it was still a problem and the kid had no Anbu guard for some stupid reason. Or non-Anbu guards, for that matter. And it wasn't like he'd just slipped away from them either.
A minute later the clone had summoned Naruto in before dismissing itself to let him review memories directly. That took only a moment due to getting lots of practice with clones dispelling, though the clone wasn't sure what Konohamaru had said to Sakura to get her chasing him before the entire incident had started, and an instant later Naruto had body-flickered behind the puppeteer. In the process he released Kubikiribocho from his armband and placed its edge against the older boy's neck while using his own chakra strings to sever the ones connecting to the puppet in the bundle the boy was carrying.
"Please put the Hokage's grandson down before I have to kill you to defend him," Naruto said in a calm but emotionless voice. "While it would look far worse for Suna internationally, the entire situation of having to kill the Kazekage's son to protect the Hokage's grandson would cause problems for the diplomatic ties between our villages."
There was a moment of silence before Kankuro scoffed. "I can tell that you're bluffing. There's no intent to harm me at all."
"A true shinobi should be able to strike without any warning at all, but if you insist on me not suppressing my intent as proof?"
Anko-sensei had stressed that there were far too many shinobi that could 'read' killing intent and trained them to be able to suppress it at all times. But she'd also admitted that being able to put the fear of a higher power into an enemy that you had reasons not to kill was useful...if you could generate proper killing intent at all. Not everyone could. Tenten could barely manage an intent to cause harm unless she actually wanted to cause harm. Kurenai-sensei was more likely to make you feel like she wanted to render you unable to have children in the most painful way possible, though it was only properly effective on males. Anko-sensei and Hinata had proper killing intents, though they felt very different and Hinata had trouble maintaining it most of the time unless she started in a foul mood to begin with.
They all agreed that Naruto didn't have a proper killing intent, calling it more of a 'paperwork intent' than anything else. One with a lethal pranking undertone of sorts. But in many ways the weirdness of it made it more effective as enemies wouldn't be expecting it, and as he released the full force of it on the Kazekage's son it was obvious that it had worked. The boy froze up, his eyes went wide, and his hand almost involuntarily released Konohamaru as though cramping from filling out far too many forms.
Thanks to Anko-sensei stressing control during that training, only Kankuro was hit by the intent. No need to advertise your position by broadcasting your killing intent to everyone in an area, after all. And once Konohamaru was at a safe distance Naruto both cut out the killing intent and returned Kubikiribocho to the armband. "Thank you for not requiring me to fill out the paperwork for a significant diplomatic incident."
Mission accomplished, Naruto body-flickered away again before anyone else could react to his presence.
Kankuro's heart was going to take a good twenty minutes to recover from the absolute horror that the mystery shinobi with the far too large sword had inflicted upon him. A sandstorm of paperwork had surrounded him...with a certainty that there were explosive tags hidden in the stacks waiting for an unwary individual to find them.
It was the most frightening thing he'd ever experienced, and he was on a team with Gaara. In fact, feeling Gaara's killing intent wash over him, tinged with obvious annoyance over the entire incident, was calming by comparison. Kankuro knew that killing intent, knew how to deal with it, what the tones and undercurrents meant. It was horrible and scary but familiar and comparatively safe because he understood it.
With any luck the mystery shinobi was in Konoha's Anbu and Kankuro would never have to interact with them ever again.
"Who was that?" Temari finally asked. Obviously not having felt the flood of paperwork, which implied incredible control on mystery shinobi's part.
"I think that was Naruto," a...pink-haired girl replied. With no obvious root coloring and perfectly matched eyebrows. She obviously either had the least useful kekkei genkai on the planet to get pink hair or it was a side effect of something far more devastating. "I haven't really seen him since he graduated a year early."
And based on the girl's age, oddly-positioned forehead protector, and general stance? Kankuro was screwed because this 'Naruto' was probably a genin. One that was almost certainly going to be in the exams and likely to end up far too close for comfort when the invasion started in a little over a month.
Fuck.
Old Man Hokage had found Naruto the next day and thanked him for saving Konohamaru, bought ramen from Ichiraku's for him as additional thanks, and then discussed a couple of things. One of those was a suggestion that the chunin exams would be a good time to reveal his fox features, including a variation on the situation that had led to Team Seven ending up with animal features of their own as a cover story for his features. The 'experimental serum' they'd been exposed to on a mission had left Ino with floppy blond dog ears and a matching tail, Sasuke with more pointed black wolf ears and a reddish tail, and Ami with pig ears and tail. Most people would probably miss the latter's tail as it was the only one of the three that easily fit under clothing.
Naruto had no clue what the hell they'd been doing to be exposed to such a serum, only that they all regularly blamed their sensei Shito for it and had seemingly developed a distaste for laboratories. Well, that and apparently their current state was a significant improvement over their original states even if the medic-nin needed more time to finish coming up with a full solution.
As for the idea of attending with his fox features showing, Naruto wasn't entirely sure. He spoke with his parents, who thought that it was unlikely that a better time to reveal them was going to come up soon. Then he spoke with his team, who were more cautious. Anko-sensei in particular seemed torn about the idea, Hinata pointed out that so far he'd not had many issues with previous reveals, and Kurenai-sensei admitted that she'd expect that a less controlled reveal would create more problems.
Tenten was the one that pointed out the major problem with attending the start of the exams with his features showing, and that was the fact that he'd not been wandering around with them already this week. If he was going to do anything along those lines it should be during the third phase, if they made it that far, where running into something during the month of training could explain the sudden change. Even Old Man Hokage had agreed that the argument made sense when Naruto had visited him the following day.
As an added argument, the maid uniforms they'd already planned on wearing for the start of the exams weren't designed with a tail or fox ears in mind either.
Ino grumbled as she worked to make the tail-related modifications to another pair of shorts so that she'd have more spares before going into the chunin exams. The medic-nin had been able to fix her hands and feet, get rid of the fur all over her body, and make her nose look normal. But her eyesight was still slightly wrong, her sense of smell was confusing, everything sounded wrong due to her stupid floppy ears, and they'd not removed the tail. They claimed it was because it would make for a 'safer test of future antidotes', and had added in that for her and Sasuke their sense of balance had been adjusted to include their tails. However the hell that worked, but the serum had also made them able to handle if not fully understand the changes to their sense of smell and caused them to be more comfortable than expected moving around on hands and feet.
They'd discovered the real reason when Ami had just cut her little pig tail off and slapped a bandage on the cut. The thing had grown back over the course of three days due to the enhanced healing the serum granted them. Which meant that all three of them had to modify their clothing to handle having tails until the medic-nin could come up with a more permanent solution.
She was lucky that she was used to wearing her forehead protector as a belt instead of on her forehead. Ami was having trouble figuring out a solution she was comfortable with there, and Sasuke's wolf ears weren't floppy enough to be a problem. The stupid rules about fresh genin wearing their forehead protectors unless given permission to do otherwise by their sensei for specific missions throughout their first nine to eighteen months were annoying. Not that they didn't make sense, being well justified in several places, but some people worked better if they could more quickly blend into crowds even before freaky serums gave them non-human features.
The only other silver lining of sorts was that Ami had been the one to get the pig features. Ino would've been stuck with 'Ino-pig' as a nickname for the rest of her life had she gotten those, especially with the medic-nin warning that there was a decent chance that the antidote wouldn't be fully effective. Their changes went deep enough that getting all of them back out could be impossible with the primary goal that the medic-nin were working on being to get them looking normal. They may never see or smell the same again, but it was likely that their hearing would go back to normal once they had human-looking ears again.
If they ever had human-looking ears again. Ino wasn't sure if she should hold out hope or not, but the medic-nin had supposedly learned something useful when Sasuke's sharingan had fully reversed the effects of the serum on his eyes upon being awakened on their 'ensure they can handle the changes before entering the chunin exams' mission. Except that it could just mean that they had a lead on fixing her and Ami's eyesight instead of anything more generally useful and it might not work to help them at all if it was just a quirk of the sharingan.
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