Capítulo 2727: 117
Hinata hadn't realized just how much paperwork Naruto was still handling until she found herself as 'acting Uzukage'. She knew that he'd delegated a lot, and wondered how bad things would be if he hadn't done so, but hadn't realized just how much was still passing over his desk. Worse, well over ninety percent of it she was reasonably certain had to pass over his desk and couldn't be delegated further right now.
Most of this was already two or three levels of 'delegated' deep already and only coming across his desk as summaries for sanity-checking. Unfortunately, the reports coming through her and Ino were the only ones that didn't seem to regularly have problems even with layers of other people looking at things first. He even had automatic tally sheets configured to pop up for reports from specific areas with repeated problems, when someone was last yelled at about them, and when he expected to be yelling at them again or finding replacement supervisors.
Her reaction to some of that was to decide that he was being far too gentle, and Ino agreed. The two of them had grabbed a dozen repeat offenders, told them exactly what had to be fixed with citing of both laws and internal regulations, and managed to only need to imprison two for outright insubordination. That unfortunately led to needing to replace two people, but the story had caused a bunch of other lesser offenders to suddenly start paying attention to what they'd been told previously.
Unfortunately, she wasn't able to see the most secure things, even with three others adding in their access codes. 'Uzukage eyes only' was not a suggestion, to the point where she couldn't actually see how many things were even there. On top of that, she had no clue how he was going to react to the changing political landscape that they had no good way to influence or stop at this point due to it all being based on his actual actions...
Sasuke wasn't sure what was going on with Naruto, beyond that it had nothing to do with Hinata and Ino deciding that they both wanted twins instead of a single child each. Granted, having multiple wives insisting on having kids together instead of something more sensible like alternating was a headache, but that wasn't 'put yourself into some kind of coma months before the births' level drama.
Of course, having Hinata and Ino in mild panic states while trying to help keep up with a Kage's paperwork, without any sign of anger at Naruto, was another detail. Something big and hopefully important had happened, but whatever it was it was something that most people weren't cleared to know details on. His personal best guess was that it was related to the attackers and examining their stuff, though what in that process could put Naruto in the hospital was another question entirely.
Karin obviously had some clue, but was professional enough to not gossip. Not even to Sakura, as far as he could tell, and he suspected that no mention of things had been made to Tsunade either.
Luckily for everyone else, things were unusually calm in a general sense. Uzushio defending the planet from an attack like that, and coming out as the victor in the fight, was obviously to blame there, though there was some grumbling starting up on the lack of information on the attackers being shared. It was only grumbling though, because the general attitude outside of Uzushio itself was a combination of assuming that nobody else had a chance of understanding things as it was and salvage being Uzushio's right as the ones that had actually defeated the ships.
Within Uzushio there were a lot of people looking at things that Naruto had shared from the examination of the ships, of course, though there was also grumbling from the seals division. They were very much offended that spaceships had attacked and seemingly did not have any seals in them at all to examine. Unfortunately for a number of people, himself included, this led to being asked to help 'distract' the seals division with 'interesting requests'. Of course, that wouldn't be too bad for him, if he hadn't been tapped to do an initial sanity check on requests.
Why people thought that the seals division would find endless minor variations on the already long list of variations of explosive tags to be 'interesting' was beyond him. The list of storage seal variants that were already available was another mystery. He had to at least give the childproofing requests the benefit of the doubt though, because as far as he could tell nobody had made those available yet and the seals division was still examining Naruto's work, but they already had seals that prevented already-intoxicated people from accessing alcohol.
Granted, there were a few interesting ones in the mix, at least in his opinion. Very few. A security station 'screen' that could highlight weapons through allowing you to see metals through other objects, though the technology division had something that could do something similar already. Options for tagging wildlife for scientific tracking that could safely auto-propagate to descendents to track movements and breeding patterns. An 'area of effect' seal for birth control to make drunken encounters in various places less likely to have long-term consequences...
Honestly, that last one he was surprised hadn't come up before. Or perhaps it had and was just devilishly hard to manage?
Kurotsuchi shook her head as she looked at the map of countries that Uzushio claimed had decided to recognize Uzushio as the leaders of the planet. The Land of Fire and Uzushio themselves were two notable exceptions, with some seemingly minor countries in various places across the globe not having made the decision. Each country was also conveniently color-coded for their justifications, along with markers for military justifications compared to civilian ones.
Across both categories, the single most common justification was that Uzushio was already in a place to take over by force and just hadn't bothered to do so. Some minor variations on that were indicated, but didn't feel important. The next most common civilian government justification was a desire for access to Uzushio's science information with the next most common military justification being a desire for training access.
...and then there were the dozen countries who bypassed all of that and went straight to a religious 'Uzushio is led by Gods, and who are we to disagree with them?' justification. How in the world they'd come to that conclusion wasn't explained, but the only thing she could think of was that they didn't have chakra there and had made poor assumptions.
How exactly 'all major players across the planet have decided that Uzushio is now in charge' would work was an entirely different question. Not to mention if Naruto would agree after recovering from whatever 'incident' had taken him out of commission for the time being, for that matter, though if anyone could handle the likely paperwork involved it was the so-called 'God of Paperwork'.
Tsunade was a little annoyed at not being able to speak to Naruto or Yoko due to a medical issue that she also wasn't cleared to do much about. Karin had indicated that things were in good hands 'for a dojutsu issue', which just made it more annoying. Mostly because dojutsu issues at a medical level tended to be 'impossible bullshit nobody could do anything about without an equivalent dojutsu'.
Unfortunately, Naruto and Yoko didn't have any peers there with Nagato no longer having a rinnegan. Which probably meant waiting for the pair to recover on their own from whatever had happened.
As much as she was annoyed at the lack of details, she wasn't actually on record as their primary physician and didn't feel justified complaining there. No, the bigger annoyance for her was that nobody else seemed to know how to change access parameters and artificial gravity settings affecting some of the moon chambers. She wanted to step up some of her low-gravity testing on the assumption that 'attackers from space' meant that there was going to be a significantly increased chance of people being in low-gravity situations in the future, making a 'curiosity' project into a more important long-term health and safety one.
"I never realized how alike we are when our research is interrupted," Orochi commented as they sat down to dinner. "Though admittedly, I've mellowed out on the 'violence' side of things since settling into this body and you've been far more...moral about your research subjects."
"You never wanted to make the law work for you instead of ignoring it entirely," Tsunade corrected. "Though your choices of experiments left a lot to be desired as well, and I'm worried about what you're working on now without telling anyone."
"Very little, though I have notes on a few things I'd like to eventually look into. With most of the planet not having chakra, at least according to Uzushio's records, figuring out how to spread it without needing the rinnegan feels like a worthwhile project even without the deeper understanding of chakra and details of how it gets inherited that would come from it."
That...was honestly a very interesting-sounding project on its own, and the number of 'lodged in their chakra' conditions that could be more deeply examined with a proper understanding of things at that level...hmmm. "Are you hoping to figure out how to stop being part-chipmunk?"
"No, as I suspect the beginnings of sage training have connected me far too deeply for that. Which doesn't mean that there aren't some who have more serious problems with their features for one reason or another, on top of all the potential non-elemental bloodline traits that could be examined and eventually distributed further."
Ah, yes. Figuring out how some of the other bloodline tricks floating around worked to the point of being able to reproduce them did sound like something Orochi would want to do, even if she had calmed down quite a bit on the 'learn all the ways to use chakra' front. Though just having notes...ah. Right. "And you've not started because you'd ideally need access to people that weren't born with chakra. Not something you can just ask for some bandits to be captured for, given how it exists in basically everyone here."
"That is a limiting factor, yes."
Kiyori nodded as she finished checking one of the smaller shrines that the shrine maidens in training had been working on earlier. Whether by intent or divine intervention, there were always a few of the 'roadside' style shrines in need of attention when those in training needed to practice maintaining them. Of course, she'd personally come to the conclusion that Yoko-sama's computer routines were a form of divine intervention all of their own, given how they seemed to manage things that shouldn't be possible to have programmed in ahead of time.
The technology even liked some of them and obviously disliked others. Trainees not doing their share of work, or doing their work wrong, had the automated puppets 'malfunction' around them. Frequently revealing the problems with their work and creating more for them at that. In the other direction, those who went beyond their duties seemed to get preferential treatment in the form of the automated puppets taking care of 'lesser' duties for them before they could reach them. None of that was present in the known programming for the puppets, at least not without someone manually going in to add specific people to the 'help or hinder' lists, yet it happened all on its own anyway.
At one point they thought that Yoko-sama was being clever, manually updating the lists long enough for things to occur and clearing them when she was done, but she'd been knocked out by something and hadn't been on the island at all. Yet it all still happened, shifting to take into account changing circumstances automatically.
With all of this, and the events from the attack, most of the priestesses across the continent had come to the conclusion that making everything 'obviously faked' was itself a test...though they also agreed that Yoko-sama almost certainly didn't realize that doing the work of the Gods had gotten her personal divine approval...and almost certainly a level of personal divinity as well. Shion was particularly vocal on the latter, insisting that Yoko-sama had been 'secretly elevated' to being at least a minor Goddess and the ability to give out divine power was a direct sign of that.
Of course, that brought up...interesting questions. Naruto-sama, Hinata-sama, and Ino-sama could also give out divine power. Hinata-sama and Ino-sama had even done so in Yoko-sama's unexpected absence, and Naruto-sama was known to have worked with Yoko-sama on all the large Land of Shrines building projects. If Yoko-sama had been elevated unknowingly, then had the other three as well?
Ino had considered that she was the least likely of their family to be 'stupidly over-prepared' while thinking about how Naruto had pre-programmed systems to allow others to take over as acting Uzukage when he was placed into medical leave by Karin. Based on that, she'd gone digging and hadn't been incredibly surprised when she found plans for various levels of 'others want to hand control of things to Uzushio'. Individual countries, continents, the entire planet, and a rough layout for if they ran into any of several theoretical multiple-planet governments.
She was now reviewing them all and creating checklists for each country, continent, and the entire planet in order to be as complete as possible with things. The plans even anticipated the Land of Fire not agreeing until relevant individuals could speak to Naruto about things, on top of all of the various reasons smaller countries in various places hadn't jumped in yet themselves. It was actually quite impressive, given that the reasons she could tell from her teams gathering information were generally in the top ten most likely reasons to not want to join the rest of the planet in recognizing Uzushio as being in charge.
Even more impressive, he had basic outlines of plans to convince them otherwise sitting there. She started sending those off to teams to start working on, though would have to handle a few herself as most of the infiltration teams didn't pick up languages easily enough.
That was annoying because she or Hinata would need to visit the other continent soon to make an appearance at the shrine there in order to explain Yoko's continued absence.
Mei found the silence from Uzushio regarding what had happened to Naruto to be worrying, but very little had obviously stopped in the meantime. To be honest, her biggest concern was whether or not anyone else could turn on the weapon that had been needed to defeat the attacking spaceships in the event that more showed up. She got the feeling that the answer was 'no' and didn't know what would happen if Naruto couldn't do so himself.
Otherwise, she was spending a lot of time working with Yagura on figuring out how to smooth out integrating into a possible global Uzushio. The Daimyo was on board with the idea, and was even pushing for it under the surface excuse of 'the planet needs to stand united in the face of threats from the stars'. Which was admittedly not a bad argument for the civilians, but they both knew that the reality was that the rest of the planet could join forces against Uzushio and not expect to win at this point.
The satellite grid alone ensured that, before adding in the moon and their likely ability to slice the planet itself up if they really wanted to. Of course, that was making an assumption that they'd need any of that to guarantee victory, given how absurd their forces were before even getting into their top-tier fighters. Like Naruto himself, who she honestly believed could blitz the combined forces of everywhere else solo and still come out on top.
Luckily for her, there was a solid combination of fully-justified fear and respect for the Uzumaki in general in the Land of Water. Something that had existed before the chakra-destroying squirrel rush and had just been cemented significantly further since. The insanity of continuing an exam match while the planet was under attack and only pausing things because your untested superweapon needed more power were merely the last in a stupidly long line of recent reaffirmations that you didn't mess with Uzumaki, honestly.
What she and Yagura didn't understand was why most of the students and genin seemed more concerned with whether or not they'd get access to animal features...and if those features would include more aquatic species than had been observed from the villages that primarily dealt with land-based missions.
Ruri found escorting nobles through the Land of Fire to be boring. Things were supposedly 'very peaceful' right now, but surely someone wanted to attack the group to steal things? They also moved far too slow, and even having her scout ahead didn't really help. She could do five loops at a significant distance out without even starting to feel tired and all she'd found was a small group of possible-bandits that weren't actually preparing to attack anyone.
Having Uzushio defend the planet from spaceships had broken things and she didn't think she liked it. Finding test subjects for ideas she had was going to be a lot harder if nobody was breaking the law and making them acceptable targets.
Unfortunately, nobles were doing a lot of moving around for meetings. It seemed like most of them from the Land of Fire had been summoned to meet with the Daimyo, though at least this was the 'going home' leg of things. Once they saw the nobles safely home they could summon themselves back to Konoha and hopefully be done with slow, boring missions for a while.
Jiraiya frowned. "So you think Naruto will be out for another week."
"No," Fukasaku. "The Great Honorable Geezer thinks that and I'm just relaying the message."
"That was more of a 'the toads' you than an individual you."
"Don't think that changes anything."
"Have visions provided any additional context for the ships themselves?"
"No. Anything from outside of the planet's orbit is iffy at best there. Something from outside of the star system is basically invisible. That's part of how we think the God Tree managed to continually cause problems for visions, through being linked to things too far away to see properly."
"That makes an unfortunate amount of sense. Adding in something entirely new would take time for the planet's energies to adjust to before visions could start being reliable again."
Fukasaku nodded, then collected a scroll. "That said, we've been busy."
"With what?"
"Gathering records of support or rejection of Uzushio's rule of the planet from the summoning clans. Or at least we asked everyone about both, having Naruto and his wives directly involved in the final death of the God Tree and the successful defense of the planet from what would likely have been a complete obliteration of life were enough to convince basically all of them to throw their support behind things."
Jiraiya took the scroll and opened it for a quick look, eyes going wide at entry after entry of summoning clans. Some of them he'd barely even heard of, others were more familiar. "Wow. Not sure why you'd go to the effort though."
"Defending the planet from a likely scouting force doesn't mean that it can be defended from a proper army. When Naruto awakens he had better start on a plan to rectify that beyond what he's already done and we don't want him using the summon clans as an excuse for not agreeing to take over leadership to prepare the planet."
Well, it was at least a good argument.
Kusu looked over her small-scale prototype 'railgun', knowing that it wasn't likely to work as well as the original. But it was safer to build small-scale first, and she needed to start small to ensure that she understood the principles behind things anyway. The Uzukage could take any successes and handle the large-scale side of things in places that wouldn't mind if you fired possibly planet-cracking rounds at test targets.
She'd visited bloodline island for the new ability to make this variant on the ones that the ships had used. Instead of externally-applied manipulation of forces in the slug, this was designed to fire slugs that did their own manipulation. While being accelerated down the electromagnetic rails the slug would reduce its apparent mass to allow far greater acceleration, and then a moment after the rails disengaged it would then reverse the effect and increase the apparent mass while already at speed.
If it worked and didn't just explode violently then it should create a much more powerful impact.
Unfortunately, she wasn't going to be able to test it today as safety rules said that two others had to look for obvious problems in the designs of the gun and round before they even considered firing it. Then it would need to be rigged for remote loading and firing so that nobody needed to be near it while it was powered and dangerous, then when it was time to test there would need to be a dozen other safeties included. A clone or two would probably still be present, of course, because they could hopefully react faster than remote viewers to problems.
With any luck the design would work and could be scaled up or used as a basis for others to come up with their own improvements.
Waking up with a splitting headache was annoying, doubly so when you knew that most painkillers didn't really work properly on you. Naruto felt it was triply so when you knew that painkillers wouldn't have any hope of helping with the headache even if they did normally work for you, because coming off of 'processing millions of souls' probably shouldn't be survivable without going insane.
Luckily for him, he'd ditched sanity years ago.
More importantly, that particular rinnegan trick stripped away mind control from those being processed, so instead of millions of souls made to think that they were doing the right thing he'd gotten millions of souls that wanted him to be able to get revenge. He'd likely gotten far more useful information out of them as a result, though it was amazingly limited in how much could be immediately acted upon by him. Mostly because of said rinnegan, annoyingly.
Being awake had obviously set off alerts, as Hinata and Ino appeared in the hospital room before he'd finished getting his bearings well enough to recognize the hospital room itself. Yoko was also waking up at the same time, of course, and had her own headache to match his.
"So," he said. "Good news is that we probably don't have to worry about an attack for the next, oh, century. Bad news is that if we don't seem to be 'tripping the trap' then that's probably when we face down an armada."
Hinata sighed. "And when are you going to run off to sabotage them ahead of time?"
"...never, but sending teams off to 'be stupid' and make it look like we fell for things might be needed."
She blinked at that. "What?"
He pulled himself up and accepted a glass of water from Ino, taking a sip before continuing. "Yoko and I are stuck here, and dealing with this threat is going to be a much longer-term problem. If we do things right then we can delay things further and make them think they've won against us, but our people will need to be careful. And I'm going to be doing an insane amount of copying things down for that side of the situation."
"How much of an 'armada'?" Ino asked.
"Tens of thousands of ships larger and more powerful than the three that attacked and probably a hundred thousand like those three."
The two gave him very worried looks at that, but their newly-discovered enemy didn't know how many of their secrets had been revealed and would hopefully be able to be blindsided in due time. But more immediate concerns included catching up on what had been missed in the past few...weeks? Ugh, at least. And writing up a proper summary of things, because he didn't want to have to explain a bunch of it too many times. Except that said summary would need repeated translations.
He somewhat-reflexively tried to make a few clones to go start looking at things, only to flinch when they immediately dispelled. Apparently his headache was still too severe, and Hinata all but sat down on him and started running a mystic palm over him while Ino popped out of the room. Likely to fetch others that were nominally on the hospital staff.
Karin found Naruto's biology to be fascinating and frustrating, because it was obviously human while decidedly inhuman at the same time. Yoko, Hinata, Ino, and Fu were all the same, and she had to assume that the other five 'bound to the remains of a tailed beast' individuals had similar weirdness. Then you added in the rinnegan, which took sharingan weirdness to new levels, and his connection to Yoko...
It made figuring out what was wrong and what should just be accepted a lot more difficult than it should be.
Today it was at least trivial to say that something was still wrong, given that he and Yoko couldn't make clones that lasted more than three seconds right now. That was admittedly up from one second a few hours ago, and the change indicated that they were healing. Going against everything she thought was rational, she'd had him activate his rinnegan and that seemed to speed things up. Only when fully at rinnegan though, sharingan stages doing nothing, telling her that the problem was at least partially things not parsing through the dojutsu fast enough without it being activated.
The extra-strong pull on his chakra compared to what she'd previously observed in an 'idle' rinnegan was just another sign, of course.
"You won't be cleared tonight," she finally said. "At a minimum, you and Yoko need to be able to make clones that last an hour before I'm willing to say that you've recovered enough to be doing work. And don't you try to claim that things are time-sensitive, because I know you cited a minimum of decades before we expect our newest problems to resurface. You can handle another day or two here before I clear you."
"Can I at least get a basic access terminal to start writing up a statement?" Naruto asked.
"We both know that until I clear you the computers won't let you do normal work."
"Don't need to access anything sensitive as I'd just be drafting a message and possibly getting started on translating it untold times."
"...I think that's acceptable. We have terminals for use on low-sensitivity items that should be fine."
"I know. I made them."
"And probably hid a dozen additional security items in them while you were at it."
"Well, yes, but I don't need the bulk of them either."
"You're lucky that I want to know more and that your statement is one of the best ways to find out."
Getting stations for him and Yoko hadn't taken long as there were plenty kept in storage rooms nearby. She noted that both of them did in fact bypass the normal security restrictions, but seemingly only to be able to save their work to a more secure location and collaborate with one another instead of trying to do work she wouldn't approve of.
Yoko sighed as Sakura examined her, but didn't argue the point as Karin was examining Naruto. Provisions in the computer systems would actually work to lock them out of normal functions until they were medically cleared unless they enacted annoying overrides that would lock Karin out instead. This had meant sticking around for longer while being examined and the blatantly obvious migraine-level headaches subsided a little.
They couldn't argue it too much, given that it was only after another night's sleep and two more meals that they were able to make paperwork clones that didn't immediately dispel due to the pain.
That didn't mean that the two of them hadn't been working on things, of course. Remote terminals had been fetched that allowed them to do some initial work, though mostly in the preparing statements department as until Karin cleared them they were locked out of 'catching up'. Clones would handle the bulk transcription of information when they were in a position to drop them into rooms full of terminals.
"You're obviously recovering quickly," Sakura finally said. "So I don't see needing to keep you for more than a couple more hours, and most of that is probably going to be Karin finishing up with Naruto and the two of us ensuring that we concur for your records."
"Understood," Yoko said as she pulled the terminal back to her.
"I do hope that whatever you found out was important enough for the stunt pulled to cause this."
"More than important enough."
"Good."
To the People of Earth,
Even those of you living under literal rocks should be aware that the planet was recently attacked by a trio of spaceships. These were 'scout' grade ships, looking for signs of the 'trees' that had destroyed several other planets that had been expected to have thriving civilizations on them. Instead, as our tree was already destroyed and we have made significant technological progress recently, they found a civilization that was far more advanced than expected given that they had only just finished removing advanced civilizations from the galaxy in the past thirty years.
When their attack failed, they instead hoped that their corpses would serve as a trap. Their goal was for our scientists and leaders to be exposed to the mind-altering effects of the ships over the next couple of decades. That would then push us down a path where we would hobble our technological development and eventually willingly give ourselves up to them when they returned for another pass of removing civilizations from the galaxy.
Instead, we have dismantled that trap, but are not ready to fight them at their strongest. Time is needed to build up and hopefully sabotage the broader trap that they set up for space faring civilizations across the galaxy. A more detailed description of their plans, strategies, and technology will be distributed in the near future, but as they were able to get a report about us back to the rest of their fleet we will need to look like we have fallen for their trap until we are ready to turn it on them.
This will mean assembling groups to begin to explore with what appear to be lesser versions of their technology. By no means do I intend for anything we send out to be anywhere near that restricted in reality, and we have the means to ensure that the true strength of these ships we send out is unknowable to them until needed.
We have the added benefit of a natural 'lack' of some of the materials that would normally be needed, restricted to what we could theoretically harvest from their corpses instead until we locate other sources. More details on that will be included in the information on their technology, but it means that we can justify sending very few ships out until we find resources and not arouse suspicion that their trap failed.
When the additional information is provided, I hope that you agree with the need to act carefully while we prepare to solve a much larger problem.
Naruto Uzumaki
Uzukage
Status de energia semanal
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