Capítulo 2708: 98
Overriding the navigation system to send the war island on its way had happened, though it had required some thought on how to do so. A software patch or two would also be needed, but he'd dropped that onto the technology division instead of trying to work it out himself. Or maybe he'd take care of it next week if they hadn't gotten to it while staring at all of the general flying island code that they'd not actually been provided with access to before now?
If not for the warning about assigning a bug report to a team without access to the code he'd not have realized that they couldn't see it yet, but that was fixed now for the base code. The war island specific stuff was still locked down as he saw that as far more sensitive, but any of the islands would've run into this problem if they'd been in the area. As would two dozen other projects that used similar navigational code, for that matter, and he'd flagged most of those on the report as well.
He wasn't even sure yet if the situation was accidental, altitude related weirdness, enemy action, or a freak accident of some kind. The code needed to handle it better no matter which it was.
With that taken care of, he'd then marked himself as on a mission and headed out in person to investigate more directly because he wanted to know which it was. There were a number of possibilities, and two of them were potentially delicate enough that he didn't trust anyone else to handle them.
Hinata had known that Naruto had a large amount of code that he'd not let anyone else see, mostly because there were a number of projects that he'd not let anyone else examine properly. What she hadn't expected was for him to grant access to some of it as a side effect of wanting someone else to fix a bug that had cropped up. Admittedly, he'd immediately left on a priority personal mission of some kind, explaining why he wasn't fixing the bug himself, but 'grant the technology division access to the code base' seemed like an afterthought.
They'd be griping more about it if it wasn't for the fact that this affected more than just his code. How it had come up at all wasn't explained in the bug report, but minimal testing proved that you could, conceivably, create massive problems for anyone relying on the Uzushio locator network with this. The flying island code was actually handling it better than most of the other tested systems, spotting the potential error and raising an alert instead of generating garbage data or crashing.
Then again, 'not crashing' was a very important safety feature for a flying island, regardless of the kind of crash you were referring to. Especially when a cascade failure could result in all of them happening in sequence.
"I hate how elegant the Uzukage's code is," Teni grumbled as she looked through the repository. "No comments, it tends to be more secure and efficient than anything anyone else produces, and it's downright beautiful."
"And if you're staring at it then something is wrong or you want to know how he managed something nobody else has been able to," Hinata said with a sigh. "At least he pointed us at the right functions?"
"Fat lot of good that's going to do us. Can you pretend to be him and document the functions involved?"
"...he's the one with the insane ability to pretend to be us to understand technology."
"And you're the closest to him in infiltration skills, so I figure you've got a decent shot at doing the inverse."
"You're one of the people that has concurred that it's Uzumaki-brand insanity that he can pull that off."
Teni looked up at her. "So? You married into the clan, and our insanity is contagious. There are studies that prove it."
A few others in the room had stopped to listen to the two of them, and the Uzumaki among them were nodding in agreement. Which annoyingly meant that they weren't going to drop it until she made the attempt.
Shion stared at the box of sorted omamori, all of her own creation, as she carried it to the front storage room where the shrine helpers kept the extra sale items. She'd tried something like this before, and it hadn't worked then. In fact, the last one in her family that had been able to manage something like this had been her grandfather, and his were only partially effective. But the Shrine Island training had allowed her to produce them now, with or without the inner bandit-repelling seals as a bonus effect. By all accounts the things worked for what the first level of wrapping had been prepared for too, meaning that association with Shrine Island in general and Yoko in particular had granted her additional blessings.
Being more physically fit than ever and more in-tune with her own inner energies were added bonuses. She was pushing herself hard, and had recently found out that she had enough chakra to make two paperwork clones. Those were created each morning to do chakra control exercises and practice the Rasengan so that she could do the proper 'healing blessing' later. She spent her days working on physical exercises or, as with this morning, items like making the omamori.
Juggling the box and her key for the storage room was easy enough, though having a key was somewhat new. Previously her guards would've been around her at all times and they'd handled things like unlocking the doors for her. And far, far too many other things, honestly. Before approaching Yoko about improving the local shrines she'd not even been able to prepare a basic meal for herself.
Placing the box into the storage room only took a moment, and she ensured that the door was locked when she stepped out. Nodding, she moved towards the main entrance to do a couple of jogging laps around the complex. She'd been doing far better than the guards on that front, with them lagging behind her. A few days ago she'd even been ambushed by bandits and had held them off without injury until the guards caught up!
It was just after that when Taruho had questioned when the last time she'd had a vision of death, though he wasn't entirely aware that she saw her own death and not that of others, and it had taken some thought to realize that the last time was a few days before she'd met Yoko for the first time. Despite close calls on the way to dealing with Mōryō there apparently hadn't been a single instance where her life was actually in danger and no other threats had come up since.
...perhaps today she'd loop a little further out to check the clearings that bandits were known to use? The guards weren't expecting to do a sweep of them for another week, and she was reasonably certain that the bandits knew it...
Odoroki sighed as she double-checked the contents of her report on the whole trip to the other continent. They'd been filling things out as they went along and were reasonably certain that very little would be a surprise to Naruto. Matatabi wasn't sure what had happened to resolve the 'suddenly froze in place in the air over a mountain' problem though, as the systems had thrown a pile of errors but things had resolved themselves before they'd gotten to calling anyone.
"Naruto is off on a solo mission," Futo commented as he poked his head into the room.
"...you already submitted your paperwork?" Odoroki questioned, staring at the twenty pages or so she still had to double-check.
"I reviewed each set a couple of days after filling them out and didn't bother to do much more than ensure that all the sheets were in the right order."
The bastard. That was a great way to handle it and she'd missed him doing it. She frowned, then realized that he'd commented on Naruto having gone on a mission. "Wait, what kind of mission would he need to go on? Isn't everyone working at convincing him to not do everything himself, despite the insane things he keeps building?"
Futo shrugged. "There are probably a large number of things he's still the best choice for. I'm more surprised that he went out in person instead of just sending clones, which means he at least thinks it's important. Not sure who has access to the mission paperwork to check, and I'm not sure we should care unless he fails to check in regularly. He distracted Hinata with a pile of code and a bug report, Ino is still deep in some infiltration stuff, and we're very likely not cleared for anything he felt he had to go do in person."
"I hate that 'wait for him to come back' makes sense as the only viable option."
Ino looked in on Hinata, who appeared to be replacing part of the wall. A portion reserved for 'bash head against wall' activities, specially reinforced and rigged to be easily replaced. "What happened this time?"
Hinata sighed. "I pretended to be Naruto."
"...and someone spotted you immediately?"
"No."
"Someone who should've spotted you didn't?"
"No."
"I'm basically out of ideas here. What was head-bashing worthy about pretending to be Naruto?"
"I was able to understand his code and seals while doing so, but couldn't understand my own notes anymore."
"...wasn't that his Uzumaki insanity?"
"I'm assured that Uzumaki insanity is contagious and we've obviously been exposed to him for far too long to not catch it."
"Huh. I wonder if I'll ever start managing that? If you can do it then some of my theories might actually have merit."
Hinata turned to look at her. "You have actually theories as to how he managed it and didn't tell anyone?"
"Most of my theories fall apart on multiple fronts. Those with sufficient chakra think in part with their chakra and being able to observe that to a deep enough degree to fully duplicate someone else shouldn't be possible. But the byakugan allows seeing chakra and the physical body, so it might be possible for it to see enough to manage the trick. Then you'd just need a place to store the information. That's...admittedly where I can't figure out a solution."
"...so we're both storing an impossible amount of information about each other."
"And who knows how many others around you, yes. You should really see how many others you can duplicate like that, since I know Naruto regularly pretends to be entire teams of people these days."
Perhaps the Uzumaki insanity hadn't infected Hinata as much as she thought, given that she looked annoyed at the idea instead of just accepting it. Mentally shrugging, Ino left her to it and went off to see if she could manage to understand seals or technology well enough through making clones of her spouses.
Karin was preparing to head to lunch, and hopefully have some fun time with Sakura since Sasuke was out of the village, when her computer beeped. She grimaced, because it was the tone that indicated that it was an actual important notification, so she sat back down to see what was going on. Finding a priority request for a medic team to be summoned wasn't on her list of expectations
Now, technically this was informational on her part and others in the hospital could handle it. Really, it would be more 'anyone who wanted to volunteer' right now. Opening the details, more out of curiosity than anything else, had her blinking. Thirty-plus patients with possible heavy metal poisoning that needed taking care of? Where the hell was this? Hitting the button for that provided nothing of use, unfortunately. 'Remote location' was barely worth having the button.
More interesting was that this was a direct request from Naruto, and the summon time was in two hours. Enough time to grab lunch and prep field kits to see what the hell he'd done or found now in person. Oh, and it was marked as safe enough for trainees, and it was hard to find good demonstration patients for heavy metal poisoning.
She was pulled out of her mental thoughts by the phone ringing. She grabbed it without looking at the caller information. "Karin."
Tsunade's voice came across the line. "You see the alert from Naruto?"
"I was just looking at it now, actually, but I didn't expect it to hit both villages."
"Anything flagged as more than ten patients crosses over automatically, though he specifically set this one to hit both sides."
"Summon-arrival ones don't because hitting both sides when the person isn't cleared to summon from both isn't ideal, but I see the markings now. Just hadn't paid attention to them. Going to round up some trainees on your end to make the trip?"
"Of course. Downright generous of him to provide so much lead time. Do you have any clue where the hell he is though?"
"Not a clue."
"Well, I suppose that's another reason to go myself. Find out what he found or did to break the universe this time."
"Funny, I was basically thinking the same."
Ashina frowned as some of the energy readings fluctuated. Being on late-night watch duty was annoying, but the defenses were scanning something. Nobody was supposed to be out of the complex, so it wasn't someone returning, but the defenses also weren't reacting. Which made it most likely that some animals had crossed the border lines. Nothing obviously attacking, unlike whenever either of the two military assholes tried to force their way through. Based on how much things were fluctuating they might be testing something with driving a herd across the border this time though, except that doing so in the dark would be quite odd.
At least it wasn't the spike of a transmission line or power converter failing, but getting a team ready to go take a look just in case there was about to be a follow-up night raid might not be a bad idea. Just another reminder that they'd been morons when they'd let that team play with the volcano on the first island they'd tried settling onto, and getting lost at sea for a while hadn't helped afterwards. A nice unclaimed island with no need to worry about nosy and pushy neighbors had been a dream compared to what they'd ended up with here.
Losing the bulk of the sealing experts to the volcano incident definitely hadn't helped. No reinforcement seals on the guardians and no illusion dome to hide them from others...
...but seals wouldn't necessarily help with the outermost cameras suddenly swinging around to show a group walking down the main path. Obviously humans, though the details on the infrared cameras weren't great. There was no way humans should be able to approach without the defenses going off, and this was obviously a large group of them. He followed his first instinct to slam his fist down on the alarm button in front of him, but he did so too hard and put his fist through the button. Swearing about shoddy materials followed, as seals were their old method of refinement and they'd not figured out better yet, he moved over to one of the other alarm buttons in the room and more gently pushed it.
Now that the alarms were starting to sound he moved back to the monitors to pay closer attention as the group came closer, spotting what looked like animal ears and tails on some of them. Perhaps the defenses had decided that these weren't humans because of that, somehow? But the one in front pulled out what looked like a rock from a pocket and...pushed a button on it?
Having the alarms suddenly turn off with the 'false alarm' tone shouldn't be possible. They had no remote controls both because they were too wary of the locals and because all of their materials that could be used to make the things went into robot defenders. Eyes narrowing, he moved over to the security log terminal and brought up the last ten events. Approaching Uzumaki escorting non-Uzumaki was there, followed by the alarm being triggered, and a remote override with a verified authorization code. He quickly traced the latter, finding that it dated back to before the fall of Uzushiogakure.
Because of course they'd never cleared out the old security entries when restoring everything from backups. He couldn't clear that out now though, and it would take half an hour for the system to reset unless the remote had an alarm activation button as well. Having that code was actually a pretty good way of verifying their legitimacy too, for that matter, coupled with the defenses accepting them, though it didn't explain the apparent animal features.
"What the hell is going on?" Kumin called as he barrelled into the room.
"Visitors," Ashina said, gesturing at the screen. "With an alarm shutdown remote, and it looks like the defenses recognize at least one of them as an Uzumaki playing escort. No clue about the animal features on them though."
"...what? We're reasonably certain that we ended up nowhere near the Elemental Nations. How the hell did they find us?"
"We are broadcasting locator signals for the robots." Looking over at the monitor, he blinked. "Oh. Some of them are wearing special forces masks, complete with the cameras picking up on the 'being worn by an Uzumaki' identifiers."
Kumin turned and looked as well, the green 'verified' boxes around the masks highlighting them nicely for him. "What? Shit, they are. Where the hell would they have gotten..."
"I think we can be reasonably certain why the defenses let them in."
"...do you think they brought food that doesn't taste like shit?"
Honestly, that was probably one of the best ways to look at this right now. If the guards could even partially live up to those masks then any one of them could probably take on the entire facility right now. Especially as their best fighters were all sick at the same time, but they were all getting on in years at this point.
Naruto stopped where the path passed by what appeared to be a boulder buried in the ground, then knocked on the middle of the boulder where the hidden door to the underground facility was. He knew three ways to open it, but was trying to be polite. Reasonably. He'd needed to be a little rude through turning off the defenses when they'd been put into a mode that would attack non-Uzumaki even when they were being escorted by Uzumaki, but having the non-Uzumaki medics being attacked by the defenses was unacceptable.
He didn't even need the byakugan to tell that people were moving around, given that there were no privacy seals preventing detection of chakra and nobody in the underground facility was making any attempt at all to disguise or suppress their chakra. Eventually three old men came up the stairs and one of them triggered the internal mechanism to open the hidden door. One of them looked a bit sleepy, though it was the middle of the night here and he was reasonably certain at least one of the other two had also been woken up.
"Hello there," Naruto greeted. "I'm Naruto Uzumaki, current leader of Uzushiogakure. Your settlement's reuse of the Uzushiogakure locator beacon code turned out to be a navigational hazard for flying islands, and while investigating that I noticed that two of your farms have started pulling heavy metals out of the soil." He gestured behind him. "I brought medics to help flush those out of you, in addition to looking at some of your other issues."
The three blinked, and the one in the middle looked behind him at the other two before turning back to Naruto. "Er. Yes, I'm Kumin, the current leader of this settlement. Did you say flying islands?"
"Yes."
"I'm reasonably certain that we dragged all the insane researchers that would've approached anything remotely like that out with us."
"Are some of them the ones that screwed up working with the volcano?"
Kumin nodded. "You could say that, yes. We had to abandon that settlement after they got themselves killed."
"Ah. Then I guess I can't tell them off for not ensuring that their volcano-controlling seals could handle the heat of a volcano. I fixed that after an incident triggered the intruder alerts and Uzushio picked up on the signal." Naruto looked behind him, then back at the three men. "Now then, I'm reasonably certain that a few of the more...determined medics behind me are getting impatient. As you happen to have a few people in your infirmary suffering from a combination of things, perhaps we should start by letting the medics loose there? Then we can discuss a bit more leader-to-leader while they work, at least until they reach the point of wanting to check and clear things out of the rest of you."
"Early stages of heavy metal poisoning," Tsunade said as she checked over the man, not liking some of what she was seeing. A non-Uzumaki would likely already be dead twice over, but he'd pull through on most of his current issues in a week or two at the most. The heavy metal poisoning was the biggest problem as a result, but Naruto had correctly identified that and ensured that they were ready for it. The trainees would be working with those that didn't have the rest of this man's problems as getting things wrong with him would compound things though. "Minor case of food poisoning, and a bout of a likely-local infection of some kind. Any medics who haven't gotten a healing factor will need to be careful and get checked over by others before we head back, myself included."
"There's some residual lung damage unrelated to any of that in this one," Karin added from the other end of the small infirmary. "I'm betting asbestos exposure is a potential hazard as well."
"That's probably from the mine they've got nearby," one of the Uzushio Anbu commented. Likely one of Naruto's clones, assuming that he'd let anyone else wear the masks at all yet.
"Most likely," Tsunade agreed. "Especially if it's limited to a few of them that were exposed there instead of having been used more directly, but it does mean that we're adding lung scans to those without healing factors and spot-checks to everyone else just in case."
Being called out to deal with medical issues on an Uzushiogakure remnant a good way across the planet, based on the relative time of day differences, had not really been what she'd expected when the call for medics had gone out. Not that she was about to fault Naruto for that. She and Karin would've screamed at him for days if he'd decided to just handle all of this himself, doubly so if he'd done so as a mysterious fixer in the night. Once they eventually found out, anyway, likely from him actually filling out paperwork and filing it properly in the Uzushio hospital records.
If he wasn't extending an offer to bring the whole lot of them back to the Elemental Nations in general then she was going to yell at him anyway, of course. It was obvious that their farmland wasn't suitable for farming based on the signs of improper nutrition she was spotting while starting to correct things.
Kumin had spent the better part of the last week talking with the Uzukage. It was kind of a slap in the face that there was an Uzukage, but the Konoha branch of the family had moved in and rebuilt the island as a 'hidden village'. Using a 'transport pad' to teleport back to take a look at things had been a bit jarring too, and then having the temporary one set up by the Uzukage used to bring in teams to examine their technology, farming, and a pile of other things had just served to show how far they'd fallen.
...and how much Uzushiogakure had flourished. The timeline provided for things on that end made no sense though and had to be deliberate misinformation.
Even worse in some ways was that basically everyone other than some of the medics had very obviously been trying to be helpful and non-insulting. To be fair, the medics in question were also being helpful...but layered quite a few insults to their collective intelligence for some of the stupid stuff they'd been doing that had been negatively affecting their health. This had resulted in a collection of plans that could be implemented to rebuild the settlement into one that could safely sustain itself...if they didn't opt to go back to the Elemental Nations.
He got the feeling that the settlement was being rebuilt either way at this point, but possibly as more of a 'monitor the warring idiots in this part of the continent' base instead. Though someone had mentioned that it could be a good place for a shrine complex for some reason, and he had no clue why that would even come up.
For now, he had around two-thirds of their people in the meeting hall, having personally checked with the other third, but still didn't know which way things were going to go.
"As you all know," Kumin started.
"We already decided we want to go back to Uzushiogakure," Sanshi interrupted from where she was standing in the back. "Admittedly, for most of us it's to figure out what the hell they've been doing with technology, but my visit a couple days ago was also my first hot spring visit since we had to abandon the volcanic island."
"And that setup sucked," Kusu added from her set next to Sanshi. "Besides, their medics already cleared out all of my chronic aches and pains. No way I want to give up access to that."
Kumin sighed. "Is anyone here not already packed and ready to go?"
Ashina raised his hand, getting incredulous looks from most of the room. He shrugged. "I'm still on overnight watch duty and woke up specifically for this meeting. Probably an hour of work to pack up the rest of my stuff."
"I'm not sure why I even bothered to schedule the meeting."
"Our minimal laws require it," Sanshi answered. "Call the stupid vote, we'll all vote to go back to Uzushiogakure under its current laws and leadership, and we can start vacating this hellhole. Besides, until we're properly registered in their systems I can't grill Teni about a dozen things she mentioned in passing when I visited."
...this should really be more surprising, but by their own standards they'd barely been pulling through before finding out about the heavy metal issues.
Yoko looked over the area. "We've only got a week before I need to start doing the stupid trip for the Land of Demons."
"So we can only screw up and start over twice," Naruto replied. "You focus on figuring out how you want things to work."
"Denying me the fun of dismantling things?"
"More like the horror of seeing what they thought was adequate."
"Point. What we already know about is pretty bad, and I do want to see how stable that mountain is. Very few places we're putting shrines in back home allow for proper stairs leading up to a shrine and it might work out as a good spot for one."
She let him make his clones to start on dismantling while she made her clones, sending most to swarm the area to examine things but leaving a group to start making proper maps and start on the construction planning itself. With that done, she personally moved to examine some of the caves and tunnels in the mountain that might need to be closed up or reinforced depending on final design choices.
Exploration of the mountain hadn't happened yet because it hadn't been important, so she was pleasantly surprised to find that the bulk of the mining had been restricted to a single shaft. There had obviously been some effort to grab easily-reached materials from the caves, but otherwise things were largely untouched. A single very old cave-in was also blocking one path, and moving through that with a couple of techniques had her finding that it had sealed off a large cavern with a natural island in the middle of reasonably clean water.
Perhaps there would also be a shrine built inside the mountain.
The cave system also connected to another point further around the mountain that had been blocked off by a landslide in the past, but was starting to open up on its own. Clearing that out properly wouldn't be difficult and would add another route through, though building a structure there to disguise the opening might also be a good idea. If it wasn't an obvious 'shrine' building, patterned more after some of the buildings used by the locals, then it would likely be seen as unrelated.
By the end of the day she'd determined that the mountain was stable enough to work with, even if certain areas were in need of reinforcement. Naruto had figured out that the plan was to focus on the mountain and was mostly done removing all signs of the former settlement's existence, including the paths used to reach it. The mine shaft would need to be filled in as well, and new paths to the shrine to be built would be put in. With any luck the locals would be very much confused on that front.
There were still some things to figure out though, such as how to interact with the locals. Naruto's explorations indicated that worship on this continent didn't work the same way it did back in the Elemental Nations, so they weren't as likely to even recognize a shrine. Ensuring that it was seen as a sacred place was thus going to be harder, especially as the local worship really didn't seem to be compatible with a shrine system.
Sanshi stared at Teni. "Why do you think that anyone can 'build a moon' at all, let alone that the Uzukage is?"
Rolling her eyes, Teni brought up a couple of screens on her computer. Far better than the old models, but still recognizable as having come from the same development processes. "Because of some of the new code projects in progress. 'Project Moon' encompasses two dozen different things that make far too much sense for such a thing, such as calculating targeting data for transport pads based on orbital mechanics and modifications to atmospheric shielding to operate safely on much larger scales. He only unlocked it for general access when he ran into a problem with the planned support structures relating to the orbital station-keeping drive design and wanted to see what others came up with. We're recommending that he split it up into twenty or so individual drives that work alongside each other instead."
"...a moon. He's actually planning on building a moon. Why?"
"Ah, right, you won't have seen the reports on what not having a moon might cause for problems, and the one that imploded no longer has enough mass to provide the full strength effects."
They'd not actually seen any of the 'flying islands' in person because the 'exam island' was being rebuilt and the 'war island' was apparently now docked somewhere and not currently flying, but even they sounded impossible. Building a moon should be far worse, and sounded like a decades-long project. Except that a quick skim of the 'Project Moon' files indicated timeframes of six months to two years.
The Konoha branch of the family was supposed to be the punch-happy powerhouse group, not the make the laws of physics cry and hide in the corner group. How in the world was the Uzukage pulling any of this off? Unless his father's family was some kind of insane research lineage?
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