章 2704: 94
"Kind of funny that the second shrine had a bigger crowd than the first," Naruto said as he looked over the plans for putting in a complete 'five shrine' setup on the flying island. Most of which involved figuring out how, or perhaps if, to include some of the underground aspects of the other shrines. "Despite being a new shrine built ahead of the enshrining."
"Yoko still put on a show," Ino pointed out.
"Well yes, that would be stupid to skip with an audience."
"Have you approved the requests for missions on the other continent?"
"Which one?"
Ino looked up at him. "What do you mean?"
"We've got outposts on or near three other continents now."
"...when did that happen?"
Hinata scoffed. "Before Yoko did the Land of Fire's shrine revitalization."
"Oh."
Naruto shrugged. "I've approved basic 'defend travelers' missions on two of them, pending approval from local governments to operate in the area anyway. It's the warring continent that I'm annoyed about. As far as the infiltration teams gathering information can tell there isn't a government there at all that doesn't want to continue on to world conquest. Any that might've been content with local concerns were wiped out years ago."
"Ugh. So if any of them win they become everyone else's possible problem?"
"Yep. There are proposals being worked on for various ways to handle things. Some think we should arrange for everyone to no longer have militaries, others that we should just take over, there was one mention of arranging travel for other countries here to conquer over there instead of duking things out here. The destruction of the moon apparently accelerated things too, each country assuming one of the others over there did it alongside the final shutdown of several superweapons that suddenly no longer had functional power sources."
The girls both grimaced, and he went back to focusing on flying island updates. There were requests to rent the thing for an exam and that put it at the top of his priority list for now.
Yoko sighed as she prepared for the third enshrinement trip. The first two had passed through the Land of Hot Water to reach the Land of Fire, the second then hitting Uzushio's old Amegakure territory to hit the Land of Earth. This one was going to start in the same place, at the mainland dock facility, but then go straight from Shrine Island to a Land of Wind dock. Work was already happening to get the set of mobile houses into position more reasonably than them just 'being there' on arrival, and without needing to unload them from the ship.
Getting more trained priestesses, and the first few priests, was going slower than she'd like it to though. Not because of a lack of enthusiasm, but because it wasn't an instant process with the standards she'd set. A shrine maiden or helper was essentially a genin. The priestesses were at least chunin level, though in some cases you could call them special jounin. She was currently the only one that was jounin or higher level in skills, but wasn't trying to hold the others to that standard.
As it was, the 'shrine maidens' making the trip to the Land of Wind with the mobile houses, using one to carry the packed-up others, had shown that they aren't pushovers by defeating six groups of bandits. Two of those groups had been hired to test the shrine maidens as well, thanks to groups with ties to the Land of Demons that felt that those working in shrines needed to have actual combat skills.
Uzushio teams had been deployed to show that it hadn't been appreciated, though whether the two groups that had hired the bandits realized what the problem was when they were looted to the ground was another question entirely. Not that they'd be in any position to retaliate at that point, and it was a useful training exercise for a couple of teams.
The preparations for this trip didn't include recordings though, which was nice. Nor did they include Daimyo going along for the entire trip. A single noble was joining them, one from the area that the shrine was being set up in, arguably to ensure that there were 'no tricks'. In reality his daughter had pushed for it, with the end result hopefully being a more relaxing journey than the previous two.
Assuming, of course, that the little girl's enthusiasm could be kept in check through 'lessons in proper shrine maiden behavior'. The girl had her own pink shrine maiden outfits and even a pair of fake fox ears.
"...what?" Naruto asked as he looked at Teni. She was one of the more...enthusiastic technology division members.
"We want to work with you to build a combat island," Teni repeated.
"Why?"
"So that we can fly it over the warring continent. Maybe head for the volcano near the far side? Do something there that seems like it was the only goal, then fly back. Attack anything that attacks us, but otherwise just travel through and back."
"That's a plan, but not an explanation."
"It should be obvious? The existence of something like that, essentially ignoring them unless provoked, should hopefully cause the entire continent to calm down on the 'world conquest' angle. That we'd then have it available in case it's needed for an actual war would be a bonus."
"You want to work with me to build a combat-grade flying island entirely so that we can fly it over a warzone, pretend to not care about the war part of that, and then leave. Presumably with a trail of destruction behind us where various groups attacked us and we retaliated."
"Yes."
"And presumably so that you can see me building things directly to see what you can learn from that."
"...no? We've given up on figuring out the interactions with seals due to a lack of seal expertise in our ranks and that's the only part of things we don't understand when it comes to what you do with technology. Usually you're just taking what we've already done and compressing it down a hundred fold with seals, but you don't actually change the way the technology itself works when you do. There's definitely some 'see if the full-scale weapons work' desires though."
Naruto sighed. "Going this route is probably too likely to create a broader arms race."
Teni blinked. "Yes? That's kind of part of the goal."
"...what?"
"I guess nobody mentioned that?"
"No, they didn't. Why do we apparently want to create an arms race?"
"Because we already know of at least three groups from other planets or dimensions that have interacted with Earth, one of which aimed to wipe us out for their own benefit. Keeping everyone assuming that they have to work their way towards better weapons, defenses, self-sufficiency, and so on will hopefully mean that the next time a hostile group finds the planet we'll have a better chance at protecting it. Counterbalancing that would be Yoko's 'Land of Shrines' to promote not needlessly wiping out others."
It was very annoying that the idea of keeping everyone in a low-grade 'true peace is impossible' state was possibly the best option for long-term survival in the face of known off-planet threats.
Hiashi looked down at the report he was holding, then up to Hanabi and Himeki. "You two hospitalized your teammate."
"He got caught in a training exercise," Hanabi defended, obviously annoyed. "When he was supposed to be with Haini-sensei working on his kunai throwing."
"What kind of 'training exercise' removes three limbs when someone 'gets caught in it'?"
"Only his left arm was caused by his interruption," Himeki offered, with a more respectful tone. "And that was due to the experimental kunai launcher in Hanabi's puppet failing and overpowering the last two kunai it fired as it tore itself out of the puppet. His right arm and leg were caused by him detonating his own explosive tags in his flailing from the loss of his arm."
That...sounded reasonable enough, actually. Hanabi had been having problems with reliability on his new kunai launchers and there was an ongoing argument in the chunin and jounin ranks regarding if they should deny all shinobi access to explosive tags without passing safety exams. "I suppose I can't fault you for that, if the full report concurs. But a request has been made to split your team up because of this."
Hanabi snorted. "I filed one, Haini-sensei said she filed one, and the only reason Himeki didn't file one was because she countersigned mine. I think Dohide even wanted to file one, but couldn't write well enough with his left leg. We aren't sure how he graduated with how stupid and reckless he's been acting and Tsunade-sama thinks it'll be a few months before he recovers without Uzushio's aid, unless someone convinces Yoko to heal him when she gets back anyway."
That was an interesting detail. He'd not spoken to Tsunade to find out if she'd asked for aid and been rebuffed due to the boy's idiocy or opted not to ask for the aid to give the boy a reason to care about his training. "As it stands, I've still been asked to look at the request for a team change in my capacity of clan head for both of you. A temporary member while he recovers in the hospital is different from a permanent shift."
"Is there a problem with the requests or are you just trying to figure out why we made them?"
"On paper, I'm supposed to be ensuring that no...inappropriate actions were taken to lead to the request. I highly doubt that you'd have left him as intact as he was if that was the case, but I still needed to speak with you about it. Unfortunately, I'm likely to not have much say in potential replacement team members due to how few options there likely are."
"Rizo is in need of a new team and was planning on putting in a request to work with us," Himeki replied with a small smile.
"I don't recall any incidents with their team?"
Hanabi sighed. "His sensei and teammates were the latest to attempt to grab a canister of the beast man formula for another nation to examine. They weren't injured by the release of the formula due to prior exposure, but he claimed that the Anbu were...less than gentle with the three after he reported the attempt in progress."
Ah. One of the few good ways to not be caught up in the punishment when your teammates were being idiots was to report them while they were in the middle of things. "I'll need to check on that, but it sounds like it may be acceptable. Though I am curious what you're doing with your kunai launchers to have them tear apart your puppets while removing limbs from bystanders."
He watched as his daughter-turned-son winced. "I'm trying to use a couple of seals to reset the spring. One setting it to the 'cocked' shape with no pressure, the other to then change it back to the 'ready to fire' shape once it hooks on the release lever. But if I screw up and activate both at the same time it suddenly wants to curl up into a small spiral and doesn't care what's in the way."
It was somewhat interesting how much trouble his children had with seals when they were excellent with technology...but then again, Naruto seemed to be the opposite. Perhaps they required ways of thinking that were too unique for a single person to manage both well? "Maybe you should let someone else review those before you try using them again?"
Hanabi nodded, obviously embarrassed at needing help with something he probably saw as 'simple'.
Despite the technology division's assurances, Naruto had decided to personally investigate the capabilities of the various groups on the warring continent before agreeing to building a new flying island. He wanted zero chance of it not being able to appear as an unstoppable, indestructible force on its flight across the continent. If there was a possibility of some weapon causing significant damage then the entire plan was going to be discarded.
In the process of doing this he expanded the bunker network already present, located every facility that seemed to be building or designing weapons, and evaluated capabilities. He found that the vast majority of things present weren't designed to hit anything flying, and in fact the continent had nothing that could fly. One nation had records of using stones as a power source for super soldiers that read like the stones generated a form of chakra, or perhaps pure mana, but those had all stopped working at the same time.
At the same time, not being designed to hit something flying didn't mean incapable of it, and you didn't necessarily need accuracy when your target was an island. Building copies of some of their larger and more powerful cannons was done to see just how dangerous they were at the ranges they'd likely be able to hit the island at, followed by improving the designs repeatedly. Both for eventual possible inclusion on the island and to hopefully figure out the next few years of development to be well beyond the current versions for future-proofing.
By the time Yoko was done with her trip he'd determined that they could indeed easily build a flying island that nothing on the warring continent, or on any other they had access to, was likely to be able to touch before adding in magic shielding. Magic-based weapons added to chakra-based weaponry and the various weapons that needed neither should make the island incredibly powerful and very likely make it the kind of thing that could take over entire continents if they wanted to.
He'd also figured out where the target of the island's trip would be and the approach vector for it to cause hopefully equal devastation across all the warring countries on the continent instead of taking out significant abilities of only a couple that could then be overrun by the others. At least if their borders didn't change significantly in the next few months while the flying island was built, anyway. And of course, he also had to ensure that there was something believable for the island to collect, which would be an entirely different construction project...
Odoroki looked over the 'construction area' for the new island, slightly annoyed that she'd essentially been kicked out of shrine maiden training by Yoko. It made sense that not having the light chakra node was a problem, and they didn't know how to safely add nodes to any of them connected to the Tome, but it was still annoying. Not quite a personal insult, exactly, mostly because it implied that Yoko had taken things to a new level which was a 'parental pride' bonus, but it had left little to do on the personal projects front.
Relocating the Tome to the construction area for the new flying island at least helped solve the lack of things to do, and she really shouldn't have been quite so vocally annoyed at boys being included in the training program anyway.
"It seems wrong that we're not even starting with dirt and rock," she finally said. "Eventually for the surface, but making an 'island' that's mostly support structures in the bottom two thirds feels wrong."
"Naruto already did that for the exam island," Futo pointed out.
"And it feels wrong there too. I understand why, and how not doing so would increase the energy requirements of keeping it together in the air significantly, but it still feels wrong."
"So focus on the other things, like the seals for the various seal-based effects."
"That's why we're here. These things combine everything. Chakra, magic, technology, horticulture..."
"Naruto said something about having figured out a way to not need a forest on this one."
"...he did?"
"The explanation was far beyond my understanding and I think he had to be pretending to be six members of the technology division to understand it himself."
"Oh."
Onoki looked over the latest version of the updated chunin exam treaty paperwork, wanting to ensure that nothing unexpected had slipped in. This was the culmination of far too much time and effort by a group formed from all the major and many of the minor countries. Naruto had provided what he thought should be the final goal in private to Uzushio's allies though, and this was startlingly close to that despite the original proposals being wildly different.
Unlike the previous treaty, this one included language to explain the reasoning behind each item right in the treaty itself. That would help with later interpretation, as nobody knew why some of the first treaty's conditions had been added. For example, promotion was for individuals, so genin would enter as individuals instead of being sent as teams. This would also remove concerns about partial teams from a member being promoted in previous exams and similar items.
Not that teamwork was skipped over. A requirement to test teams, and team formation, was included. This was part of overall skill tests listed though, and cited that it was a rare shinobi that spent their entire post-genin career working solo. There was even a recommendation to have those teams be intentionally cross-village to encourage working with those you might not normally have needed to instead of those that you already had experience with.
Uzushio's definition of chunin wasn't quite defined in the new treaty, but many elements of it basically were in the lists of things to test. The pre-test for genin level was also specified outright here, justified as being intended to reduce serious injury and death in the chunin testing, including an actual requirement that if the pre-test was run then shinobi of participating villages had to be allowed to pass through it for evaluation purposes. Allowing non-shinobi to make the attempt was mentioned as permitted, but not required, but more in the context of specifically denying those not registered for the exams to continue into the chunin testing stages.
The new treaty also codified some details that were previously done as a courtesy, such as trying to keep a village's genin from fighting each other in preliminary elimination matches if it was possible to do so and definitely keeping teammates from fighting each other in such a situation.
Running through to the end, he found that it was as expected. Going through and signing each page followed, after which he'd go to the Daimyo and have him repeat that. They both wanted the new rules to be in place before they ran exams on the rented flying island in a couple of months.
Yoko looked over the construction area for a new flying island, figuring that it was a good distraction from Hoshi and Suzu working with their kits back in Konoha. Even that was only an issue due to the number of people that were visiting the shrine just to see the kits. Of course, she also wanted to avoid being sought out by those looking to see the Head Priestess of Shrine Island.
She and Naruto were the only ones that knew that the 'joint project' island was one of four planned. Her addition to the plans was a flying shrine island and he was building a combat island without the aid of others to see how his plans stacked up against the plan from the combination of seal and technology division members. Right now the assumption was that his version would be far more capable because he wasn't trying to compromise on understanding between multiple groups. Then he'd decided that the 'target' on the other continent should be able to lift off and return, which was going to need to be built in place.
Her island was going to be one of the smaller ones. Pentagonal for the five primary deities enshrined on Shrine Island. The center of the surface of the island would be a 'common area' with the outer ring holding the five shrines. Travel to and from the island would happen through transport devices and by going down into the lower areas of the island, and the whole thing would lack offensive abilities. Defensive, but not offensive.
"Guess I should start with the basic framework," she said to herself as she created a bunch of clones.
Wame had been 'stubborn' and asked to learn 'spells' through books instead of through the 'spell tablets'. This was partially out of a desire to learn to create her own Knight Armor templates as instant outfits for infiltration, but also out of a curiosity of how 'magic' worked compared to chakra. The Uzukage had been kind enough to grant her request, and she'd figured out how to cast the Knight Armor spell without the crutch of the spell tablet. She'd followed that with the flight spells, marveling at how similar the three variants really were in the background, and then quickly picked up on spell bullets.
She loved spell bullets.
While instructions for the teleportation spell would be nice, she'd been told that for security reasons she had to wait on that one. It made sense though, so she was fine with that, and instead had started to play with things. She'd quickly figured out that chakra was just pre-modified mana, made easier to use but losing flexibility in the process.
Carefully focusing, she worked on pushing fire chakra into a spell bullet. It required a little manipulation of the bullet to let it hold the fire chakra, and her previous attempts at doing that had failed. This time it didn't explode in her face, and she found herself with a glowing red ball of her magic. Grinning, she directed the ball to impact the target stone in the training area. Slowly, admittedly, but she wanted to make sure she didn't miss anything. When it finally hit it blew a chunk of stone off and created a fireball.
"Awesome," she whispered, even as she wondered what else she could do through mixing chakra with the spells. Then she blinked and remembered the notebook sitting next to her, quickly grabbing it to update her notes on how she'd managed to get fire chakra into the bullet.
Hopefully the other elemental chakra variations would work similarly, but if she needed to figure things out per element then she wanted to ensure that she'd taken proper notes.
"It's going to be annoying working on this while you're in Iwa," Miho commented as they assembled a cannon. "You'll be all distracted with the exams instead of helping us assemble things."
"This is honestly taking far longer than I expected it to," Naruto admitted.
"You can't just slap together a combat island."
He grinned, which caused her to worry. "Mine has been finished for over a month."
Several others in the area stopped what they were working on to turn to stare at him, even as she blinked. "You...made another island?"
"Yoko made one too, but hers is more of a flying shrine than anything else."
"And you didn't tell anyone?"
"Nobody asked and we've not had a good reason to pull them out yet."
It took an hour to gather basically everyone working on the nowhere-near-complete island to convince Naruto to show them the completed one. He merely sighed and brought them all over. A brief overview of things was followed by everyone spreading out to examine specific elements they were curious about, and of course Miho ended up looking at seals.
...but the seals here were deeply integrated into everything else and difficult to examine directly. She was certain that he'd incorporated magic into several things directly and was using both technology and seals to integrate with the magic in different ways. Power flowed through a dozen different mechanisms as well, seemingly using whatever method was best for the destination, and she nearly had to be dismissed and reformed by the Tome when her headache from trying to understand it all peaked.
Eventually the various groups came back together in the 'command center', which appeared to be designed to run the entire island from the one room if you wanted to and had a place to set the Tome in for some reason.
"This is nearly twice the volume we're aiming for with the other island," Akira noted. "And is much more densely-packed with things. A quarter of the access hallways, probably because the Uzukage cares not for the abilities of normal people to access things."
"Nah," Naruto replied. "I just assumed that people would be willing to open hatches and crawl so that I could fit more things in. Well, that and I didn't need the larger interconnect areas you're all putting into the other island where seals and technology interact."
"Not because you can simply transform into a smaller, more-compact form?"
"Crawling is needed, not transforming. Anyone over two meters tall might have issues in some places, but that's about it."
Hotose sighed and shook her head as she gestured at the screens around them. "I find myself thinking that if we continue the other project it will be more of a 'testing ground' for our various projects. This is the island that should be used to intimidate the warring continent. Everything is far more integrated and some of the items installed here seem to be improvements on our own designs."
"And included a dozen different things that I don't even recognize," Hinata added, giving Naruto a look. "Like the four systems with what appear to be dedicated mana generators apparently hooked up to them."
"Those are for power transfers," Naruto answered. "To bootstrap another island when needed."
"...why would that be needed?"
"So that I can leave the other island powered down and less noticeable to the locals."
"...what other island?"
"The plan involves fetching something from the warring continent. I figured another flying island would be ideal there."
"Naruto, did you build a flying island on that continent?"
"Converted the top of a mountain into one, but yes."
"I think that might qualify as excessive showing off."
Miho was reasonably certain that she agreed with the look Naruto was giving that seemed to scream that the flying island itself qualified as that. Building a second one for the first one to leave with wasn't really that much worse. She coughed to get attention though. "That aside, who do you expect to operate this as it travels across the continent?"
Naruto gestured to where the spot to place the Tome sat. "I was thinking Matatabi might like to take a crack at it, though you and the others would obviously get dragged along for the ride in that case."
...he'd built a giant flying war island designed to be operated by the Tome?
Naruto somewhat enjoyed showing up at the flying exam island without needing to run anything, but had clones slip away to prepare a few things anyway.
"I'm unusually annoyed that you didn't include instructions for the chairs," Onoki said after initial greetings. "Your manuals covered basically everything else we cared about, but not the chairs."
"Not sure that there's anything to do with them," Naruto replied. "Though I was pleasantly surprised to not have you calling repeatedly with questions as you set things up."
"Even with three months to examine them, and four teams taking a look, we couldn't figure out how to get the chairs to show village symbols."
"Again, not sure that there's anything to do with them. Getting things under them is tricky, but the chairs themselves not so much."
"Bah. Not worth the effort of pushing you far enough to reach 'village secret' claims. I see you skipped having a bodyguard?"
"Would anyone believe that I needed one?"
"I doubt it. Still, there are a couple of things I'm hoping you can take a look at before the rest of the village leaders show up, specifically regarding the arena. We seem to have gotten the controls stuck this morning. I suspect that the night shift was playing with things and left something in the wrong configuration. We'd likely spot it if we had a few hours to dig through things..."
"But you don't have a few hours to go over the manuals."
"Right."
"That shouldn't take long. Probably just a mismatch in the priority selectors."
"I'd nod along if I had any clue what you were talking about."
As it turned out, they'd not only gotten the priority selectors wrong but had also drained the chakra batteries. Onoki was visibly awed at how much chakra Naruto was able to pump into those to recharge them for the day, instead of relying on the much slower recharge from the forest. A quick check of the system logs showed that someone had spent several hours flipping through the different arenas until there wasn't enough energy left to manifest another arena. Then they'd started trying to change settings to try to fix it, instead of realizing that the battery meters showed that the batteries were dead.
Onoki was very annoyed at that aspect of things and had gone off to yell at idiots before he'd need to welcome the other village leaders as they arrived for the day. Naruto had checked on some of the merchants that were set up semi-permanently on the island at this point and on the shrine maidens before heading back to the arena itself. By then his clones had reinitialized the chakra signature list for the chairs and started populating it, and would continue to do so as village leaders arrived.
Unlike the war island, in this case you did need to be able to transform to reach the seal in question though. It was a mystery that he wanted to stay a mystery for the time being. Onoki would likely realize at least the basics of what had happened to cause the chairs to start showing village symbols, but probably wouldn't call it out. At least not in public, anyway. In private after the day's fights, or possibly after the finals were over entirely, but not in public.
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