章 2688: 78
Naruto was still getting used to Hinata and Ino having decided that they only needed to be using one bedroom for the three of them, but had put in a large enough bed anticipating it. Hinata was a little disappointed that Yoko didn't join them, but that probably stemmed from the original 'requirements' for having a shadow clone playing shrine maiden. No interest in relationships in particular, as a shadow clone entering a relationship was a bad thing, and that had generally held true even with Yoko ceasing to be a shadow clone.
Needing to use Hiraishin to get out from between them for a bathroom run in the morning just meant that he was also the first to claim the shower.
Today was going to be potentially annoying, because it was time to attempt to deal with the box. Before something like an actual request to go after the Land of the Sky could come in. Not that such a request was...improper for Uzushio to take, as all indications were that the 'zero tails' was an Uzumaki mistake. An attempt to make an artificial tailed beast, bound to a mask like the masks for the nine actual tailed beasts. This had seemingly worked...but then gone out of control not long afterwards.
That was way back before the founding of Konoha though, and records from that far back were sketchy. So they'd see what could be done about it when they had more reason to step in, because right now there wasn't even a good indication as to where the 'zero tails' was. Certainly not currently in the Land of the Sky.
No, today was an entirely different problem, one that the Tome was almost certainly going to have to help with.
Ibiki sighed as he dropped a folder of paper in front of Inoichi. "Your turn, I suppose. It's no fun interrogating someone willing to tell you everything without any intimidation at all. Zero contradictions I could spot on anything important across the entire week, everything that could be confirmed in any records Konoha and Uzushio have in records apparently came up correct, and the attempts to catch him with intentional lies on my part were spotted basically as soon as he had to think on his answers."
"Which means several of us get to deep dive him to see if we can spot signs of the control he was under in his memories," Inoichi replied.
"Yep. Good luck with that. He seemed appropriately horrified at thinking about what he did to the Fourth and others, incredibly angry upon realizing that the death of his crush and possibly his own original crippling were both set up by his 'savior', and somewhat suicidal on a regular basis as we went through things. Oh, and you're going to want to read through the things he volunteered that were able to be confirmed through other sources."
"Fun. Uchiha are always annoying to go through memories with, their sharingan doing weird things to their minds and memories. Suddenly having basically none we needed to do that with was nice."
"At least you've not needed to dive into Naruto or Yoko since they picked up their super eyes."
"Oh, they went on the 'impossible to dive' list after the first time we took a look. They partition things far too much. Hinata and Ino are probably getting to the same point if they haven't reached it already with as many clones as they currently run. But they're also unlikely to ever be in a 'betrayed the village' situation. Unlike Obito, who by all indications is a horrible mess mentally."
"Unfortunately for you and your team."
"Yeah."
Miho had swapped out with Ren for this, as Ren would be better if things turned into a fight. Futo and Odoroki were ready as well, but with any luck they wouldn't need to fight. The problem was that every known opening of the thing either involved the person who opened it being pulled in or a fight of some kind. If not both, though the only true 'proper opening' with it doing anything of use was back in the era of the Sage of Six Paths.
"That should do it," Naruto said as his clones backed away from the box. "The seal will collapse entirely in a minute, and the replacement is ready to snap into place if it's needed."
"What happens if it can move itself around?" Ino asked.
"We're reasonably certain that it can, but I've got four layers of seals to stop it from leaving the dimension."
"Seals that you're tied into but it isn't?"
"We're all tied into them," Hinata corrected. "In case we have to leave suddenly."
"Oh. Right."
They waited for the seal on the box to fail, and it was obvious when it did as the entire box glowed...for five or six seconds. And then nothing happened.
"It's monitoring everything now," Matatabi said from inside the Tome. "Probably out to a hundred kilometers? It might've been doing that less effectively before, actually, but it's very clearly doing it now."
Naruto nodded, then walked up to the box. "So, you willing to talk in some way, or do we just seal you up properly and banish you somewhere nobody will ever find you again?"
There was a moment where nothing happened, but then the box opened and three people stepped out. But while they looked normal they shared a secondary energy with the box itself.
"Most who get the box open attempt to request something from it," the one in the middle of the three said. "Not threaten to seal the box and banish it."
"We could tell that there were a pile of people in stasis in there," Ren said. "And we think that you're intended to stop the Ōtsutsuki, which is theoretically no longer a problem."
"All the local ones are gone," Naruto added. "With hopefully-effective action being taken against the rest of them."
"Any significant action taken against them tends to fail," the person on the left commented. "Not at first, but when the leaders realize that something was done and they use a time travel device they obtained at some point to go back and change the past."
"...are you immune to changes in the time stream?"
The one on the right shook their head. "Resistant due to being split in time in the past to try to counter that. This is the first timeline we've seen your Belkan Tome active in though."
"Really?"
"Yes."
"Huh."
"Do you know what happened during the second shinobi war?" Hinata asked.
"It turned into a time war," the center of the three replied. "An Ōtsutsuki showed up in the middle of the original conflict and attempted to manipulate it with a personal form of time travel. Others figured out how to travel through time from their example, and hundreds of timelines crossed over one another."
The one on the left nodded. "Fifty time clones of the box opened at one point to drive the Ōtsutsuki off, and they attempted to use their abilities to erase it from the time stream entirely."
"It proved to be stronger," the one on the right continued. "And they erased themselves instead. We don't know if only a dozen timelines survived or if we're just unaware of those where the box didn't continue to exist."
Naruto frowned as he considered things. "It sounds like even if our local Ōtsutsuki are potentially doomed that you're aware of timelines where that isn't the case."
"Indeed," the one in the middle said, shaking their head. "We don't know why time travel sometimes seems to erase what was there before, integrates as a stable loop at other times, or branches into a new timeline in yet others. Some of that may be our own limitations in perception through the box's instances in other timelines and locations, but that doesn't seem to explain all of the differences."
"Even the same method of traveling through time seems to do different things on different trips," the one on the left said. "It gives us a headache trying to figure it all out."
"So your purpose may be negated here but isn't negated elsewhere," Naruto said. "What does that mean for you?"
"We don't trust that our purpose is negated here," the one in the middle replied. "Other instances of the box in this timeline do concur that the Ōtsutsuki are...far less active, and seemingly dwindling in numbers, but that isn't enough evidence."
"Unless we take 'here' to be your planet," the one on the left added. "It's obvious that there are no more of the planet-killers here, nor any with sufficient Ōtsutsuki blood to be a concern."
"And the system they use to resurrect themselves when killed has been dismantled here," the one on the right continued. "Which at least indicates that the box is not needed here."
"The question is where to go instead," the one in the middle finished as the other two started back into the box. "Something we think has been determined for the time being as there are other boxes that have been...limited in their ability to function and we don't think we have any hope of adding any of you to the box's collection. At least one of you has been...troublesome in other timelines, and was far less capable there."
All of a sudden that one turned into a giant demon of some kind, jumping back on top of the box and grabbing it. A moment later it had taken to the sky with the box, removing it from the range of the extra seal Naruto had prepared. It wasn't long before it crossed the border of the seals preventing the use of dimensional foolery...and then they vanished in something that felt similar to the teleportation spell Futo had put together. Just consuming probably two orders of magnitude more mana.
"Kind of happy that we didn't have to fight that thing," Ino said.
"In a proper fight I think all of those already in the box would've come out," Ren commented. "And if they all get that transformation?"
"...really happy that we didn't have to fight it."
"I'm annoyed that I didn't consider that it could end up being moved by one of those inside of it that quickly," Naruto said with a frown. "Should've anchored it to the ground in addition to the other protections. Now I need to clean a bunch of stuff up here instead."
Shisui frowned as he looked over the initial reports from the Yamanaka team on Obito. "It's only been a couple of days, you've barely had your initial look, and yet you're positive he spent years under someone else's control?"
"The sharingan-enhanced memories actually let us see where he made decisions compared to the one controlling him overriding things," Inoichi replied. "Right down to what to eat in some cases. Obito was basically ordered to never touch his favorite foods and to prefer things he wasn't actually that fond of, possibly to help the deception of being Madara. The real question is how many of his crimes were done on his initiative compared to the one controlling him and that's going to take a lot more time to go through the memories for."
"It couldn't be simple. Capture and kill a traitor or enemy agent, move on. No, the actual enemy used mind control on a patsy."
"We still have the option of killing him for his crimes."
"There's a reason we at least interrogate every captured prisoner before killing them, even if we're fully certain that they're guilty."
"Ah, but Hashirama and Tobirama included a 'too much trouble to find out the truth' clause in the village laws. Obito has admitted to a pile of the crimes."
"...you're just bringing this up to annoy me, aren't you?"
"Mostly, though it doesn't make it any less true."
Shisui shook his head. "Only if he tries to escape or isn't cooperating. Neither of which is happening."
"...I hadn't considered that side of things."
"And I bet that Naruto did when concocting the plan. Amegakure is at least cooperating as well and has provided official copies of their own records, not that we're happy with those either. Did you know they were planning on undercutting the entire continent on shinobi services to weaken and shut down the hidden village system?"
Inoichi shrugged. "Not like they'd be the first ones. Samurai groups have made that attempt, smaller villages banded together, mercenary groups."
"Very few intended to then grab the tailed beasts to use as a means of starting and ending wars to further cement their control over military power."
"Which was a lie according to Obito's interrogation, with the actual plan he was attempting to run likely being a lie from Madara and Madara's plan possibly being a lie from the longer-term manipulation of the entire Uchiha clan. Generations of lies in an attempt to manage a plan that was probably going to be horrible for everyone."
This was a giant international mess...and it was unfortunately better that it got revealed this way than ending up in any kind of war.
Cleaning up after the box having decided to run off to who knew where had taken a couple of days, though with a couple of short delays due to questions about Naruto's latest work with technology. But it was done, and Naruto had started working on cleaning some more of the stuff in the dimensions that they'd been given information on. Unfortunately, it quickly became obvious that Kaguya's dimensions were actually unstable. Luckily he'd been given some ideas for how to safely dismantle them instead of letting them collapse whenever they got around to it.
Information on the broader problems Kaguya expected from the 'main family' had been found in a couple of castle-like structures in a couple of her dimensions. It seemed like she had a plan of building her own army, kind of like the box had been doing, but using people fed to the God Tree instead. That would've then been used to help defend against the 'main family' coming to claim the God Tree's power for themselves. Despite that, she also seemed to want to preserve the planet, though how much of that was 'to have people to rule' compared to actually caring about the natives was another question entirely.
One that was probably a moot point at this point, now that she was decidedly dead.
After a week of this Naruto had successfully collapsed a dimension of super-acid and another that seemed to primarily be designed to have lots of gravity and zero even surfaces. The rest were taking longer to search properly as mentions of other storage areas had been made but hadn't been found. There were also signs of older hidden structures under the sand in one dimension. And then there were the dimensions from the other Ōtsutsuki that had been intended to use Kaguya as a 'sacrifice to the seed'.
At least the other Ōtsutsuki's dimensions were more stable. There were only four instead of six there, but there were concerning details. Like one appearing to be designed as a giant coffin with a lid hidden above the clouds. The lid was starting to 'drift' though, only slightly but noticeably, presumably because the Ōtsutsuki was no longer able to maintain things.
Naruto looked over the information the older Uzumaki had provided him, as well as his own notes from having met with them. They were...generally unhappy with the need to be more militarized, but understanding of why that had been done, and at least pleased with 'doing it correctly'. Checks on the plans for jounin promotions had been done and commented on, the bloodline island had been looked over and approved of, but the lack of 'remote testing areas for dangerous techniques' had been criticized.
Well, that was easy enough to rectify. They had a bunker built by others to the far south, and that area had plenty of other uninhabited islands that could be built out a bit more to provide independent testing areas. Easy enough, though it would take a few weeks to a month to do properly. Most of that would be getting the computers and monitoring in place, but securing the islands to keep others from wandering in on ships would need to happen too. Maybe raise them a bit to make it harder to just arrive by ship?
But there were also requests to simplify civilians coming and going. Not just residents, but a way to have proper ship-based trading and possibly allow merchant caravans. Which was admittedly a problem, even if they were essentially self-sufficient and didn't need trade. Dedicated teleportation connections between a transport station just outside of the walls and the mainland dock facility would probably be enough for civilians coming and going, but building standard docks instead of just the secure ones and setting up for trading caravans was probably a good idea too.
...turning down the security on the defenses was probably going to need some assistance from Hinata on figuring out the proper settings, but having an actual trading hub for the island made sense and guarding it would serve as a decent ongoing mission to rotate teams through. Not needing to use their own ships for trading and allowing others to come to them would make the more mercantile civilians happier.
It was a pile of things that made sense in hindsight. None of it had been important when setting the village up to begin with, though he wasn't sure if any hidden village had designated 'do your dangerous stuff way over there' areas right now. Then there was the fact that the non-Uzumaki civilians were apparently afraid to ask for these things because they weren't used to being in a hidden village and Uzushio was set up differently than anything they were used to.
Then again, there was a reason why as the Uzukage he had multiple advisory groups. Shinobi, civilians, merchants, security, general issues, and the older Uzumaki that wanted to see the place thrive better than it ever had before. There just seemed to need to be a bit more emphasis put down on the little detail that if people didn't bring issues up then they couldn't be looked into, no matter how trivial they might seem to be.
"So how much of their meeting was tied to you doing impossible things?" Hinata asked as he put the last of the forms he'd been filling out into his outbox.
"Basically none of it," Naruto replied. "This was more general observations and concerns that they felt had been overlooked. Safe areas to test dangerous things in and easier access for civilian purposes, though the latter is probably going to be safest with shinobi handling the coming and going from the island parts."
"Because they'll be needed to activate the transport seals anyway?"
"Nah, those can be fully automated already. Most civilians just don't have enough chakra for proper security identification. But it does mean a lot of work for me building things out, and I'm going to need you to help me with the mainland dock facility's security settings."
"You already made it secure enough though?"
"Yeah, but you said that it was possible to make exclusion zones to allow people to come and go. Setting the roads in and out so that merchants can come and go would be needed to turn it into a trading hub, on top of needing to ensure that ships coming into the less secure docking area I need to build aren't kept away either."
"Oh. That makes sense."
"Do you think it would be going too far to put identifiers the computers could pick up on our ships? I can't shake the feeling that we live in the wrong part of the planet for doing that..."
"We already have more secure options there and anything that could be covered up by plants sticking to the hull seems like a bad idea anyway."
"True."
"But instead of just changing the settings, I'm going to teach you how to do it yourself."
Ugh. It would be easier for him to just convert the settings to seals and then tweak them that way, but she wasn't going to let him start doing that. No, she'd want him to do things properly with the normal interfaces that annoyed him.
Jiraiya looked over the mission request forms, then at the sealing scroll containing the payment. "Just neutralization of them as a threat, not complete eradication?"
"We thought they'd been completely eradicated before," Shisui pointed out. "And now they seem like they might be holding a grudge. Uzushio was supposedly permanently destroyed, but a pile of survivors have now returned to make it stronger than ever. Nine times out of ten a complete eradication misses someone that comes back to bite you later."
"...fair point."
"Tsunade convinced me and Orochimaru."
"Ah. So the goal is to ensure that they won't be launching surprise attacks from the air, can't get their flying city into the air again, and if Uzu can accomplish it, get them to stop being a general threat to everyone else without needing to kill them all?"
"Basically."
"I suppose that's probably better for long-term peace than trying to kill them all."
"That's the goal. I suspect that all of their technology will be documented and added to Uzushio's collection, but they're already the most technologically advanced village anyway."
"True."
Shisui gestured at the forms. "Do you see anything you think should be added or changed?"
"Well, I'm not entirely sure about full copies of reports going to Orochi, but that's more out of a general desire to keep Konoha dealings in Konoha than for any specific reason in this case. That she threw a pile of money into the pool for it means that she probably should get copies, really. I'm wishing that my intelligence network had picked up on their rebuilding down there, but it's just far enough out of the way to be outside of my network's reach."
"Almost certainly intentionally."
"Yeah. I don't see anything about destroying the flying city?"
"...to be honest, I'm curious if Naruto might manage to steal the city, improve it, and make it part of Uzushio's defenses."
Jiraiya blinked a couple of times as he processed that. "He might not even think of that. Have you considered putting it down in the forms outright? They do have a comments and suggestions area that you've left blank."
"The idea of anyone having such a thing also terrifies me, so I'm not sure if I want to encourage it."
"Ah, but if he can manage that then eventually Konoha may be able to get one. Imagine airships docking to the flying section of the village."
"...okay, yes, that would be awesome. A flying chunin exam stadium would also be quite impressive if done correctly."
"Oh, definitely. Could just have it appear to be a wide open drop out of the flying city to the terrain below before the environments were activated."
"Naruto is a bit more safety-conscious than that though."
"...true. That would be a potentially unacceptable risk."
"But your point isn't horrible. Give me those back and I'll add the idea in. Might not be viable to power the place anyway, given how much trouble they seem to be having with that part of things."
"Well," Naruto said as he looked over things. "I guess it's time to start properly investigating the Land of the Sky. It'll pay well enough, anyway."
"Complete eradication?" Ino asked.
"No, just neutralization as a threat. Shisui seems to have included a note about possibly taking, repurposing, and eventually duplicating their flying city too."
"That sounds interesting," Hinata said, moving over to look at the paperwork. "It would give the technology group a lot to work with at least."
"You want to see how it all works yourself."
"...maybe."
"I'll grab some of their flying machines from where they've left them to collect dust. They don't seem to have an actual inventory of the things, just 'these types are in this warehouse, those are in the other warehouse' notes. The actual flying city will be harder if we want to try to grab it, assuming that there's any way to power the thing."
Hinata looked like she'd been offended. "You could've grabbed flying machines at any time and didn't bother?"
"All indications are that the flight spell is far superior anyway, and they don't seem to use seals on the flying machines at all. That makes them boring."
"...to you, but not to those of us researching technology."
"We weren't being paid to interfere with them before now either. Stealing stuff from them just because it looked interesting when we had no reason to antagonize them would've been stupid and short-sighted."
That was obviously not the argument that Hinata was expecting, but she pouted and didn't argue it.
"Do you need me to help you with anything?" Ino asked.
"No, I don't think so," Naruto replied. "I think you're going to be more useful working with the new infiltration teams. I want the daimyo palace checks done right in particular, and you're one of the ones that keeps telling me to not do all of this kind of thing myself."
Ino sighed and nodded, having been pushing harder than Hinata to have him delegate things and get others trained to do a bunch of the intelligence gathering work.
Obito grumbled as he waited for the painkillers to kick in and help with his headache. Going through memory after memory with the Yamanaka was painful and they still had weeks of work to go through everything due to him only being able to handle so much in a day. He didn't think he'd ever be trusted enough to be an active mission-taking shinobi for any village again, but they might let him be a monitored teacher if he was proved to at least be mostly not responsible for his crimes.
Maybe.
He was honestly more interested if Itachi would permit him to be an official member of the Uchiha clan again. Being directly and indirectly responsible for the fall of the bulk of the clan, through the attack with the nine tailed fox that created distrust and then the meeting trying to find the fox again that had killed the bulk of the adults, was working against that. At the same time, being taken in by Madara was...unfortunately understandable, especially with all the manipulations.
Waiting on the final results of the examination of memories to assign 'him vs Madara' for responsibility for each crime sadly made too much sense, and left things hanging far too much.
"Evening," Kakashi said as he came in the window.
"...I was told that the windows were secured against coming and going," Obito said with a frown.
"Just because they keep you from coming and going doesn't mean that the seals are configured to keep everyone from doing so."
Okay, that was a fair point. And a blatantly obvious one. "I blame the headache."
"Good choice. I brought snacks."
"...you just want to question me some more."
"I'm reliably informed that your memories of the attack that killed Sensei were shown to be almost entirely pushed for by the seal that had been wrapped around your heart. That we're reasonably certain that none of the resurrection techniques Madara could have planned for work anymore just means that the actual perpetrator is dead."
"You still shouldn't be forgiving me this easily."
"...I'd never really internalized that you were the one attacking, so it's trivial to see you as more of a puppet being used by the actual Madara that everyone blamed to begin with. Same ultimate person responsible, just one step removed. Besides, I already put my fist through your heart. That you survived is beside the point."
That...was honestly in line with the way Kakashi had always thought, honestly. And in line with Sensei's teachings and what people seemed to think little Naruto had taken on as a philosophy regarding not holding grudges.
"Happy birthday," Naruto said to Hinata once his cooking breakfast had woken her up.
"Thank you," she replied. "But you didn't take the day off, did you?"
"...have we ever really taken a day off for birthdays?"
"Not really, no."
"Besides, I'm still having problems finding the zero tails. The Land of the Sky seems to know approximately where it is, but they don't have anything written down. There are also a couple of chambers in their city I've not managed to get through the blood seals on though, so one of them might be related."
"And if they aren't you don't want to give things away by breaking the seals and being unable to put them back."
"Yeah. They've got a de facto leader out there somewhere 'harvesting', but what that means isn't clear either. My assumption is that it's related to the zero tails, and I suspect he's the one that's tied to the two seals. He doesn't come back often though, and no messengers to visit him have been sent out recently. Or maybe ever? Honestly, he could probably be dead and nobody there would even notice right now."
"Probably pretending to be someone less harmful or worrisome while trying to prepare something to get their flying city into the air."
"Unfortunately."
"At least Ino is doing well with the infiltration teams. I ran a clone out to her and they're going to be in the next bunker by noon, so she'll come back for a bit then."
Hinata nodded, accepting a fresh cinnamon roll. After she'd finished that she looked over at him. "How are you doing with the trade hub and experimental islands?"
He rolled his eyes. "They keep telling me to add things to the islands, not that they're bad ideas. It just would've been nice if they'd come up with half of them before I started the build-outs. The trade hub has been done for most of the month but the civilian teams are still working out signage and what the procedures for use of it should be on their side so that the shinobi side can be worked out."
"You're just annoyed that everyone is insisting that you not do things yourself."
"I'm betting they end up very close to my original thoughts on all of it when they're done, but you and Ino wouldn't even let me share the plans with the groups to see what they thought of them."
"The village needs to be able to run without you handling everything, both for your workload and to make others feel that they're contributing to the running of things."
"So you keep telling me, not that I'm against others doing their parts. It's just horribly inefficient when I have to go over everything anyway, especially on security measures."
"Once things are better established it'll be less annoying and you'll have less paperwork to do as most of the problems never actually reach you."
"...I'm doubtful, so we'll have to see."
週次パワーステータス
-- 推薦
ランキング 
-- 推薦
チケット