章 2634: 22
Naruto finally got to report back to Old Man Hokage two days after the removal of Shukaku and Matatabi. Before doing so he'd ensured that he could still hide his own non-human features, but he was having trouble keeping sand from flowing around him without concentrating. His paperwork clones were having better luck there, though seemingly due to a much smaller range on their ability to control sand. A check of the shrine had also been done to confirm that the masks for Shukaku and Matatabi had broken, and it turned out that there were already visible cracks in the masks for Isobu and Gyuki.
The old man had been...decidedly unhappy with the risks taken when he'd been told the full details, but had sighed and agreed that it definitely fit the original request. That it trivially provided additional incentive for others to not attack Konoha was a bonus, once things had been spun 'correctly'. Liaising with the Hyuga would be needed there, but the provisional plan was to announce that a group from Uzu had taken offense to unannounced jinchuriki in Konoha and gotten 'over-enthusiastic' about correcting the problem.
Having other villages think that Konoha could kill tailed beasts was bad in a 'dogpiled by everyone at once' sense. A hidden remnant of a destroyed village that nobody knew how to locate would apparently generate a more predictable and measured response. Naruto interpreted that as wanting to get everyone else to waste their time searching for something that didn't actually exist instead of preparing to crush Konoha.
Whatever the case there, he got an S-Rank mission completion with Hinata getting an A-Rank completion for her part in things. Neither would have details attached, but they'd get paid for them.
Tenten had reiterated that she was happy to not have a tail, even if it was obvious that she was jealous of the boost in their chakra. She wasn't jealous of the eradication of their chakra control though, and had decided that she didn't regret her decision when Hinata nearly cut her own tail off while running through a sword kata.
"Do I really need a bunch of formal outfits?" Naruto asked as the tailor measured him.
"Yes," one of the nicer Hyuga elders answered. One without an extra seal that the Tome was curious about, so they weren't getting double duty in examining that while all of this happened. Those seals only seemed to exist on the more annoying elders, which made examining them a bit harder as well. "The finals are going to bring you far more prominence than you had before and there will be nobles that wish to hire you just to have an excuse to get a good look at your changes."
"...but I'm still growing. How much is being spent on things that I might not get to wear before I outgrow them?"
"He does have a point," the tailor noted while wrapping a string around the base of Naruto's tail. "There's a reason most shinobi only start collecting mission-grade outfits once they reach their full size. For now it would be far better to stick with a minimal selection of items that wouldn't be worn except when interacting with nobles, though we can be clever and ensure that they work well when mixed and accessories can make an old outfit look like a new one."
Getting an entire new wardrobe that could work with his ears and tail was nice. Having it include things 'suitable for interacting with nobles' was...less so. By a significant degree. They'd already spent over half an hour discussing how and where to place the Uzumaki clan symbol on things, twenty minutes on how to place the Hyuga clan symbol such that it was prominent enough to show the affiliation but not prominent enough to 'overshadow' the Uzumaki clan symbol, and a relatively short ten minutes deciding not to put a 'Team Yurei' symbol anywhere. The latter would have been different if they had a symbol, but needing to create one had been an easy reason not to bother.
"It seems that their tails are positioned slightly differently," the tailor eventually noted. "Uzumaki's sits a little higher, beyond being significantly thicker at its base. I think that's because it comes out more directly, but I'm not an expert there."
"Is that important?" the elder asked.
"Only in that it's unlikely that the two will be able to share anything designed to wrap around the base of the tail, but I don't think they were planning to do so anyway. I also got a look at the young Yamanaka when tasked with helping figure out how to adjust her wardrobe and her tail is connected more as I would expect."
"So the tails obtained from granting the powers of a tailed beast don't function in the same way as a purely biological tail?"
"That seems likely, yes. I'm not sure either child here has their tail directly connected to their tailbone at all, actually."
"Curious."
That was slightly interesting, but not exceptionally so from Naruto's point of view. Knowing his own tail was more important than knowing the differences between all the various tails in the village at this point.
"I think that does it for my measurements," the tailor finally said. "Now we just need to figure out some of the specifics on the styling. Uzumaki, is it true that you've gone on missions in skirts, outside of the maid outfit you used as a psychological tool in the first two exam stages?"
Naruto blinked, not having really considered the outfits to be a full psychological tool. Which didn't mean that they weren't, he just hadn't thought of them that way. But he had gone on missions in skirts. "Yes."
"You are far too comfortable with your tail, unlike the young heiress who is obviously new to hers, so I'm assuming that it isn't entirely new to you. Have you found that you need to wear skirts that sit high enough for your tail, or is that kind of garment your general preference?"
"I, er, wanted the option of having room for my tail."
"...the option?"
A moment of focusing hid the fox/tanuki hybrid tail and ears, as well as the markings around his eyes. The tailor blinked a couple of times and waved their hand through where the tail had been. "Huh. That isn't a genjutsu, and would explain why there aren't rumors of you having a tail already circulating. You were less a decoy and more the first test subject for killing a tailed beast, weren't you? Not that I expect that I can be told either way. Probably a 'no' to preferring skirts though, which is good to know, but perhaps flaps would be a good idea as well. Should we be doing that for both of you?"
"Hinata will be able to do that soon, so probably."
The tailor nodded and made a quick note before dragging a book over. "Then let's go over specific styles and colors."
Jiraiya sat at the table in the bar, having noticed but not really caring about the half-dozen spies in the room hoping to learn something useful from him. Normally he'd be playing the game to learn things from them as well, but not today. No, today he just wanted to try to forget that the tailed beasts had been created by the fucking Sage of Six Paths, likely wanted peace in the world just as much as anyone else before people started capturing them to use as weapons, and until recently had been a direct cause of the decline of the world as they knew it.
That the 'final details' of what had happened needed to be told to him by sensei was just another reason to not bother holding back from drinking tonight. Presumably because the Great Toad Sage had seen that a night of drinking was going to be needed and wanted to ensure that sensitive topics couldn't come up. The geezer was far too wise for his own good some days.
"What's with the list?" one of the spies asked, gesturing to the list that had been plastered on the wall. This one was from...Amegakure, pretending to be a spy from Kusagakure that was doing a poor job of faking being from Tanigakure, all under a passable disguise of being a normal civilian. Stupid layered games that Jiraiya never personally used, but there were plenty in his network that did similar things.
His good spies were never made out as spies, of course, but if the bad spies weren't there to be found then far more effort would be put into finding the good ones. He constantly assumed that the same applied to every other village's good spies though, and was generally always on the lookout for them as a result. Five bad spies to keep you from noticing the one good one that didn't look like a spy was a fair trade.
"Names," Jiraiya said after a moment, failing to place the guy's name. Which meant he was getting close to drunk enough.
"Huh," the spy said. "Names of what?"
"The Sage named the tailed beasts when he made them. Apparently."
"...those are the tailed beasts? Seriously?"
"Yep. One to nine, Shukaku to Kurama. Knew the Great Toad Sage was old, but not 'personally mentored the Sage of Six Paths' old."
"Wow. And you're just finding out now?"
"It became relevant."
The spy stared at him. "Relevant how?"
Jiraiya snorted, and raised a cup of sake. "Someone wanted to use Shukaku and Matatabi against Konoha, and some group wearing Uzu Anbu masks took offense. Killed the two, dead and gone forever, never to return, but the Toad Sage wouldn't tell me how. Or where the hell a remnant of Uzu could possibly be hiding, but he never tells me where others are hiding. I'm lucky that the masks are distinctive enough to make it through his descriptions, even. Never identifies those he sees in his visions with names unless they're sitting in front of him."
The Ame spy going wide-eyed and booking it without even the pretense of an excuse felt like it should be notable, except that every other spy in the room had done the same. Plus two girls that Jiraiya hadn't thought were spies but almost certainly were given how quickly they also left, but he was unlikely to remember to follow up on them later. More useful was that at least half of the departing spies had thrown money at the staff without checking the amounts, saying to put the change on Jiraiya's tab.
Amateurs, but useful ones. They should be aiming to get more information out of him while he happened to be unlikely to remember anything. Instead they'd all rushed off to report things immediately. Oh well, they could get chewed out by their various handlers over that one, he had more alcohol to consume.
It took several days to get used to the new clothing and some of their new abilities, a couple of which were a bit of a shock the first time they triggered them. First, Hinata ended up coated with blue flames that didn't burn anything she didn't want to burn, but she quickly learned how to control the effect and found it was easiest to keep running on just her ears and tail if she wanted. Naruto's version came a day later while he was experimenting with how much sand he could control and he suddenly turned into sand. This included his clothing and equipment, the latter being able to reformed out of any part of his sand if he wanted to access it, but didn't include the Tome.
More annoyingly, it also didn't work well with Knight Armor, while Hinata's flames had no problem with the spell.
Unlike Hinata, Naruto took three days to get full control over the trick, and was just happy that it didn't happen to his clones. Well, except for the sand clones that he and his parents had adapted from the notes on that jutsu to make reforming mud clones, figuring out the actual mud version after the sand one, but they were supposed to be made out of sand so probably didn't count. They were also a great way to create more sand out of chakra, and sand that was already perfect for his chakra to control at that, not that he fully understood how that actually worked overall.
He'd idly asked his parents where the sand for the sand paperwork clones or the stone and water for those elemental paperwork clones came from, given that they were all formed out of pure chakra to start with, and they'd gone silent for half a day. In the end they'd not been able to provide an answer.
Slightly more annoying was that while Naruto now had what appeared to be a better range on controlling sand, likely due to having far greater chakra reserves, observing clones told them that Gaara still had the ability to control sand as well and hadn't lost his automatic defense. When Shukaku woke up in the Tome they'd discussed this, and the tailed beast hadn't been the one pulling the defense trick. Sand automatically working to plug up injuries? That was consistent across every host Shukaku had ever been in. Stopping them from getting hurt entirely? Not so much, hadn't happened before Gaara.
Changing into sand was a new one for Shukaku though, and after two days of back and forth theorizing they came to the conclusion that it was because Shukaku was sand. More than even being a tanuki, and being wet simply made things harder to work with instead of impossible. Matatabi's contribution was to point out that it had a solid 'core' that had been constantly 'burning', which kept it from being killed by water and left both tailed beasts merely very annoyed by being soaked.
Some discussion when Naruto's chakra control had reached the point where the shapeshifting seal could be reapplied to Hinata revealed that both of them were less fond of water in general, though not to the point where either was avoiding bathing or anything like that. They were probably less likely to visit the hot springs to relax now though.
An oddity from the shapeshifting seal was that Naruto now had more special abilities, so applying the seal also granted Hinata some sand control. Her range was barely enough to cover a small room, and they'd only noticed when he wasn't near her and overpowering her chakra subconsciously.
"What do you need me to do?" Naruto asked his parents and the three tailed beasts. Attempting to add clones to the mix so that the other two could manifest had done...something that had flown over his head in the explanations. The end result was that he could pull any one, two, or three of the five out now, with Kurama and Matatabi both preferring to be left alone.
Shukaku had always been good with seals, was proud of it, and claimed to be responsible for a number of bloodline traits existing to the modern day thanks to seal work done with what would eventually become the Uzumaki. At the same time, the markings on its body lent themselves more to defense and confinement than most other uses, and being 'part seal' had resulted in being able to be sealed too easily. And never completely, for that matter.
His handful of jinchuriki were supposedly regularly not believed to be jinchuriki because this nature caused things to manifest differently, at least until they fell asleep and got taken over.
Naruto didn't gain the seal markings when he turned into sand, so they were assuming that he wasn't part seal like Shukaku had been. Luckily.
"I think this is a modified prisoner seal from way back," Shukaku said. "My memory is a little fuzzy, but if I'm right then one of the changes is the warden sequence. I helped ensure that it would be incredibly difficult to figure out the sequence from the prisoner side because the 'test subject' was an asshole. Based on you stopping weapon-girl from activating her seal that would've summoned the weapons into her stomach, I think you got my 'instinctively understand seals' trick. Which means you should go spy on the elders that likely have the warden seal and see if you can figure out what the sequence is, since the Tome hasn't been able to figure it out."
That resulted in some blinking from Naruto. "...it's a what seal?"
"Modified prisoner seal. Likely a complete fluke that it renders the eyes unusable on death too, since I think that someone just broke the 'temporarily blind prisoner' punishment mode and caused that to happen instead. But they haven't broken the release command, and they were smart enough to leave that still behind the warden sequence. Bit of a clever hack, misplacing three strokes to allow most of the other commands to work without the warden seal..."
Naruto stared at Shukaku, then dug out the scroll they'd put a larger version of the seal on to look it over. Spotting some of the flow redirections that allowed sections to trigger without passing through others was easy enough, but he suspected that it had been more 'lucky accident' than 'clever' on the part of the person who'd done it. "So what would I be looking for in the warden seal side, assuming that's what those elders have?"
Shukaku grabbed some ink and a fresh scroll, laying out a new seal on it. The middle was left blank, five sets of slots sitting in it. "This is the key-maker seal. The outer ring of slots takes numbers, the inner ring chakra elements. Luckily the Uchiha had a copy for another seal that uses the same system or it would've taken a few months to recreate." Another instance of this seal was made next to the first, but this time with things filled in. "The standard demonstration is the five basic elements in order, with zero through four on the numbers. Each ring is sadly independent and order only matters as you circle the ring, instead of requiring that the elements and numbers line up properly, so you can start the numbers anywhere in the element sequence and so long as they're in the same order as you circle the ring you get the same key."
The finished seal was activated, and Naruto frowned at the result. Two vastly different seal arrangements, one larger than the other, but he could see where the smaller one would be slotted into the prisoner seal. He could also almost see the elements and thought he might be able to see the numbers in the larger seal. Wanting something to compare it to, he sketched out the same thing, but with one through five instead of zero through four. Activating that seal generated two more...and he blinked as he stared at the smaller one.
"Oh come on," his father said, apparently having spotted the same thing. "The only thing they changed from the demonstration was to swap out zero for five?"
"Yes," Shukaku said, frowning. "Which probably means that whoever came up with this was intending it to be a demonstration as well, and someone else ran with it."
"Interesting," Hinata's grandfather said, Hiashi having collected his father to discuss the revelation. Naruto didn't actually know the man's name though. "But the real question is if you can place the seal with a different key on others."
"Why would Naruto want to do that?" Hinata asked, obviously confused. Doubly so with how her tail was reacting.
"Indeed," Hiashi agreed. "The goal is to remove the seal, not replace it."
The elder smirked. "Because I can think of no better punishment than for those who have held the clan hostage to be branded themselves."
Naruto found himself liking that idea, at first anyway. Some of the other things they knew about the current version of the seal made him less happy with the idea. "You do realize that anyone with sensory abilities can trigger the punishment modes on the seal, right?" The three Hyuga looked at him, shocked. "What? I'm sure that being able to see chakra makes it easier, but anyone with sensor training could probably learn to trigger all the 'main branch' functions of the seal in a couple of days."
Hiashi growled. "And only pure luck has kept an enemy from figuring that out."
"No," the elder said. "Luck is that the enemies that have figured it out haven't lasted long, overconfident in their ability to take out our members and thus easy pickings for a main branch member. This explains far, far too much about several enemies we've dealt with and tells me that we should have dealt with this long ago. But can the punishment modes be made to require the 'warden seal' to be in place?"
"Not bypassing that check would be easy," Naruto confirmed. And felt stupid for not assuming they'd want to do that to start with, actually.
"And you could place the updated seal on others?"
"...I could, yes."
"Then it's time to use plans I never thought I'd get to use, but the timing needs to be carefully considered. We're already recalling the branch family members from the field in preparation for...er..."
"The potential bonus event for the finals?"
That had the elder chuckling. "An interesting way of putting it, but yes. The entire branch family should be in the village by the day before the finals, and there's a meeting that evening that would be trivial to spike the drinks for...and I even have a bottle of celebratory sake that the taste won't be known for that I can bring out to commemorate the next day's humiliation of Kumo. It would be an insult to check for poisons or drugs if I serve it personally, and I don't mind drugging myself to ensure that the others are easily caught."
Hiashi started to nod, then frowned. "Will you need help resealing the bottle so that they don't suspect anything?"
"No, the bottle was specially prepared when I purchased it, hoping that Jiraiya's attempt at solving the problem a few years ago would be successful and we'd merely need to keep the other elders out of the way while it was implemented."
"You purchased a bottle of sake pre-drugged in case we needed to keep the other elders out of the way for a bit?"
"I purchased three and left a warning note for you as to which one is poisoned instead of merely drugged in case I passed away before I could use them. I'm getting on in years and didn't see a reason to keep my previous full dozen bottles as the older ones aged to the point of no longer being safe to use."
Naruto had no clue if it was normal for shinobi families to have plans to drug and/or poison each other and would've expected the sake to have been purchased for 'honorable visitors we want to rob and/or kill discreetly' instead. It also made him happy that he was incredibly hard to poison...and made him wonder if they should re-test Hinata's tolerances there, actually.
The morning after planning things for the Hyuga clan, Naruto found himself approached by Gai and Lee.
"Lee's flames of youth burn brighter than ever," Gai said, though it felt odd that he was speaking normally instead of yelling. "But after some...consultation with others, we have come up with what we hope is a suitable repayment."
"Gai-sensei said that your body type is unsuited to the Strong Fist," Lee continued, also oddly not yelling. Though he was looking around nervously for some reason. "But we worked to adapt things to not require it."
"Worked to adapt what?" Naruto asked, curious.
Gai looked like he was about to start yelling, before he froze for a moment and looked around quickly. Sighing in relief, he resumed the normal speaking voice he'd been using. "I think you can handle opening the gates as well as, if not better than, Lee. But the method we use is tied closely to the Strong Fist, so documenting how to do so with another style was needed."
"But we also needed to document all the risks," Lee continued, looking sheepish now. "I...had not considered several of them myself until we were ensuring they were properly written down."
"Nor had I considered some of the problems you brought up. I also cannot provide instructions for all eight gates, but the first four should be safe enough for you to work towards on your own. If you wish to proceed past that point, or if you have any problems with the written instructions, then seek me out and I shall endeavor to provide whatever assistance you require."
Before Naruto could ask about the lack of written instructions, Gai produced a scroll from a pouch and held it out. Taking the scroll, Naruto wondered if he could point out that from his point of view Lee had repaid him already by being the test subject for the seal in the first place. It only took a moment to decide that they weren't likely to accept that answer, so he mentally shrugged and slipped the scroll into his own pouch. "Thank you. Er, out of curiosity, why are you two so...subdued today?"
Both of the green-clad shinobi shivered and looked around fearfully at that, and after a moment Lee answered. "A most...unyouthful woman took offense to us disturbing her lunch."
Gai nodded. "She had the ferociousness of Mitarashi, your sensei, but I did not recognize the woman and as a likely visitor to the village we cannot engage with her properly. I'm hoping that she leaves with the next outgoing merchant caravan, but she pops up every time we yell too loudly."
Ah. That explained Anko-sensei's shapeshifted paperwork clone following the two of them, at least.
Karin had been told some things when she officially moved out, having decided that she liked the roommate she'd been staying with. But she'd also started teaching Naruto how to use her chakra sensing technique that was tied to one of the extra nodes in her net. It was...quite annoying, honestly, because opening your mind's eye didn't seem to work if your actual eyes were open. Or if a byakugan was active, for that matter. At the same time, there was a gradual...awareness, perhaps, of chakra near him as he adapted to having the node, and he found it interesting how she honestly did feel like family purely from a chakra standpoint. They'd added that node to Hinata as a test, and she found that the other Hyuga felt like family instead, so it was probably actually able to tell that you were related to someone.
"So your chakra is oddly-colored because you have bits of tailed beast bound to you," Karin said after the full explanation of what had happened to Naruto and Hinata was given. "That's...weird. And isn't tailed beast chakra red?"
"Supposedly," Hinata agreed. "We aren't sure why Naruto's is now yellow and mine green, instead of being shades of purple."
"His was green before adding bits of Shukaku, so presumably yellow is the next step down the line."
"It was?"
Naruto nodded. "Yeah, it was, but the lessons on pulling your chakra to visible never said it should be blue and we were only told to do them before bed in the academy due to how tiring it was supposed to be." His parents also hadn't ever said anything about it, but claimed that it was because the Tome 'saw' chakra differently than humans did and thus they hadn't realized that it was a different color. He thought it was more that they didn't want him to think that he wasn't human, but couldn't prove that either way.
"And the byakugan can't tell the difference," Hinata added. "It also can't see the other shades. All chakra other than the tailed beasts looks blue to it, even elemental chakra. Though you can usually spot the latter by how it moves if you're paying attention and there are elements that we usually describe as a color that can identify individuals."
"But you can both make your chakra look normal," Karin noted. "Well, mostly in Hinata's case."
"Naruto has more practice with that, but I'm working on it." And running a few paperwork clones trying to maintain different chakra signatures to do so, now that she had enough chakra to do that kind of thing.
"That must make chakra-based security horrible to implement properly."
"Relying on just one kind of security is silly anyway," Naruto stated with confidence. "I think the compound is actually using chakra and genetics instead of just chakra for all the really secure stuff, but mixing chakra and passcodes is another good option."
Karin and Hinata both nodded at that, the latter smirking slightly because she knew how little he felt most security measures actually secured things.
Training, planning, and figuring out which members of the Hyuga clan would be getting the new warden seal took up the rest of the month. Testing of abilities showed that Hinata turned out to have nearly the same tolerance for drugs and poisons that Naruto used to have, unless the compound in question was anything close to a 'fuel' for flames. Then she was essentially immune, but her tail and ears would light up on fire without her intending to do so as though literally burning the compounds away. Naruto was also tested, and the medic-nin had given up on upping doses after twice his previous level. He thought that his insides were temporarily shifting to sand whenever things got to a dangerous level, clearing the drugs and poisons out somehow in the process.
He and Hinata had learned other tricks as well. She found that her cat tail was able to be used to target chakra points and pushing her fire into her strikes could burn things from the inside. Doing that against chakra points had a high probability of causing permanent damage as well...if you weren't Naruto with his healing factor, anyway, which they'd discovered when she'd accidentally pushed fire into some of his chakra points during a spar. On his side, he'd found that if he had sand clones active nearby then he could turn into sand and then just take over a sand clone to reform instead of turning back where he had been. This meant that someone who'd figured out where the real him was could be proven 'wrong' so long as even a single sand clone existed.
They'd also tried using Hinata's blood to place a shapeshifting-style seal on him. This worked exactly as Hinata had hoped, making him fireproof even if his clothing didn't end up protected. She'd demonstrated that it worked by literally burning his clothes off of him once without causing him harm, but he'd discovered that he could protect everything by turning into sand. Anything that turned into sand with him joined all of the sand under his control in becoming fireproof, which was a significant improvement over the sand occasionally melting when Kakashi threw high-powered and very hot fire jutsu at it.
The glassmaker near Ichiraku's was the only one so far that didn't like the sand being fireproof, but also didn't know that Naruto was responsible for it. Luckily, paperwork clones didn't get the same range as Naruto himself, so they could generally stay just far enough away to not cause problems. All of the usually-in-the-village clones, but especially Yoko, needing to not have sand react around them was also a great control exercise, even if Shukaku had no clue how to not control sand in the area. It had never come up as something to do before, so not having an automatic sand shield defense was probably a good thing.
No progress had been attempted on opening the gates, though Naruto had checked with the Tome and they thought it was a good thing to learn eventually. It was also a last-resort or large fight move and would require several months to have ready to the four-gate level, so it hadn't been a priority compared to everything else being worked on. Doubly so once visitors for watching the exams started arriving in the village, though final plans for pre-possible-invasion prep needed to wait until the last evening to hopefully keep Orochimaru from realizing just how much had been prepared.
Little things, like finally removing him from the snake contract. That wouldn't stop him from trying to summon the snakes he had personal contracts with, but with any luck he was going to be in Konoha and thus subject to the summoning barriers instead of riding Manda to the village.
週次パワーステータス
-- 推薦
ランキング 
-- 推薦
チケット