Chương 2639: 29
Tsunade hadn't agreed to head back to Konoha immediately. She'd checked over Naruto first, figuring that he had to have done some damage to himself if he was opening gates, only to find nothing of note. While grumbling about that she'd noticed Ino standing off to the side with Kiba and Sasuke. Somehow missing Sasuke's animal features, Tsunade had immediately stormed over to check Ino's.
Hinata had used clones to finish the mission the genin hadn't completed and they'd lost the rest of that day and the entirety of the next to Tsunade examining Ino and, eventually, Sasuke. She was impressed with some of what the previous medic-nin had managed to fix, annoyed at the things they'd obviously botched, grumbly about what the later application and removal of a cursed seal had 'set in too deeply', and had managed to correct several minor things that did nothing for the appearance of the two genin.
Naruto had made the mistake of asking for details, having gained an appreciation and interest in healing himself.
"You?" Tsunade said, blinking. "Heal? With your chakra reserves?"
"I do a lot of control exercises," Naruto defended. "And I think I'm at least a decent field medic."
"I doubt you could heal a couple of scrapes, let alone anything serious."
"He's better than I am currently," Hinata pointed out. "But mostly because he regained his control already, which I'm still struggling with."
"You just need to put more clones into it," Naruto said.
"...I'm already putting fifty clones a day into it when we're in the village, and I swear you bumped up to a hundred or so after getting Shukaku's bits merged with you."
"Er...two hundred, actually, though that's partially because I throw fifty each at the foxes and toads so that the sages can put them through 'preparatory exercises' for later sage training in addition to the ones split up among other exercises."
"You make hundreds of clones for training and think you have any hope of not killing someone when you heal them?" Tsunade exclaimed.
"I can barely make forty shadow clones," Shizune said, hugging her pig a little more tightly as she looked at Naruto. "And I sometimes struggle to control my chakra!"
"Trouble normally really sets in when you can make eighty or so and you can't handle small amounts of chakra anymore. Anyone who can make hundreds has no hope of making it as a medic."
"I mostly just want to be a field medic," Naruto replied. "No interest in spending all my time in the hospital anyway."
"Even a field medic would have trouble at that point."
"Wanna bet? Because I think that Hinata and I make decent field medics, and Hoshi is working at being better at it himself."
Tsunade's right eye twitched for a moment. "You know what, brat? If you and your girlfriend here can pass even half of my field medic exam then I'll go back to Konoha with you."
Jiraiya and Shizune looked slightly panicked at that for some reason, but Naruto didn't care. With the improvements from Karin's net and all the control practice he'd been doing he was actually at a point where he was comfortable doing the stuff he used to rely on Hinata for, and she was underselling herself after getting the same improvements. Well, she hadn't been doing the same amount of control exercises, but he wasn't sure she needed to for medical chakra. "You're on, granny."
"Rest up, because you're going to need your energy tomorrow."
Orochimaru sighed as he finally finished cleaning up the last mess from being unable to keep an eye on his subordinates for so long. He was still annoyed at how much had gone wrong recently, and the people he'd sent to start looking for the reborn Uzushio were unlikely to succeed anytime soon. Perhaps he should work on his gift for Anko? She'd surprised him by taking advantage of Kabuto's untimely demise to take over the snake contract and kick him off, and he didn't think he was going to be finding or reclaiming Kusanagi anytime soon because it was probably stuck in a seal somewhere well-hidden.
Despite himself, he was honestly quite impressed and was planning on putting some extra effort into his gift. Both in usefulness to her and in testing her to see if she was worthy, the latter in part because she'd be expecting something anyway and who was he to disappoint her?
His options for gifts that she'd actually accept were sadly slim, and if she knew it was a 'gift' then she'd never accept it anyway, but he had that pair of chakra metal katar and a couple of disposable failures that could 'deliver' them. They'd attempt to kill her to prove themselves as being worthy to be promoted by him, but they wouldn't have a chance unless Anko had really been letting herself go on her training. After being worn out from three previous battles, drunk off her ass, and ambushed while sleeping. Even then he'd give her even odds of winning.
The pair he was thinking of also didn't know enough about his operations to be a problem if interrogated.
Of course, now the question was what to have them carrying beyond the two katar. Giving them a scroll with things to 'deliver to another base' when they were done, a base that wouldn't actually exist, would be easy enough. The problem was figuring out what to put in the scroll that Anko would appreciate or at least be able to get a decent amount of ryo for. While being believable, because idiot minions carrying a scroll filled to the brim with ryo would be too obviously a plant.
Tsunade seemed to be surprised when she got up in the morning and Team Yurei was already up. She hadn't seen the pile of clones already created and sent back to Konoha, or the selection wandering the village here, but she did see the handful working in groups with each genin.
"You two are looking to fail," Tsunade commented.
"We could've started last night without much issue," Hinata replied. "And we aren't leaving our genin with nothing to do while you test us."
"I would've grabbed a mission for them," Naruto added. "But there was nothing I considered suitable left."
"...right," Tsunade said. "There's a stream running alongside the village."
"You're starting with keeping fish alive out of water?"
She raised an eyebrow. "Yes."
"Does everyone use that test?"
"It's considered a staple of medic-nin training in the Land of Fire."
Tsunade had picked out a specific spot along the stream, one that looked like it might have been chosen as the worst possible environment to work in. But only if you hadn't scouted the rest of the area as it was honestly the best out of the way spot that wouldn't interfere with the villagers.
"So," she said. "You'll need to catch your fish and keep them alive for half an hour."
Naruto and Hinata both nodded, but started with forming stone benches with earth manipulation jutsu. Tsunade and Shizune had blinked a couple of times, both seeming impressed with the forethought. Though Tsunade's look seemed to be closer to 'grudgingly impressed' than anything else. Catching fish came next, and for some reason there was definitely shock when each of the two caught two fish each. All four fish were placed on the two benches, and green medical chakra formed without a single hand seal.
"What are you two doing?" Tsunade asked.
"Keeping a couple of fish alive," Naruto replied. "Though Hana always insisted that I hadn't mastered it until I could do so for at least an hour, so I figure you're going easy on us."
"...two fish each?" Shizune asked, sounding a little wary.
"Well, yeah, how are you supposed to handle minor injuries on two people at once in the field if you can't keep two fish alive for an hour?"
Keeping the four fish alive was easy enough for the two, and after half an hour Tsunade caught several more fish, piling them up next to a tree. She let them go for more than an hour with the four they'd caught before checking each and throwing them back into the stream.
"Okay then," she said after the last of the four was back in the stream. "I've got eight fish there. Grab a couple each and revive them."
There was no argument as they grabbed two fish each, and it only took a few minutes to have all four alive on their benches. Tsunade carefully checked each before returning them to the stream as well, then had Shizune cut the remaining four fish in half and had them put them back together. That admittedly took longer, but they still had four living fish again fairly quickly.
"So are we catching and cooking the next ones ourselves?" Hinata asked.
"Catching and cooking?" Jiraiya asked.
Naruto nodded. "Hana wouldn't let me treat burns until I could reverse the damage cooking did to fish."
"But..." Shizune started, sounding a bit weak.
"Yes," Tsunade interrupted. "Two each, I think."
Shizune was having trouble believing that Tsunade-sama was still believed to be the world's greatest medic-nin with these two and whoever taught them around. Keeping a single fish alive out of water for half an hour was incredibly difficult, let alone two at once for an entire hour, though reviving them and putting them back together after they'd been cut in half was at least more normal. But reviving cooked fish...
But she watched the two animal-featured chunin catch, cook, and then restore a total of four fish between them, with Tsunade-sama checking the fish once they'd been cooked. Followed by dealing with various ailments in villagers. Arthritis, incorrectly set broken bones, pneumonia and other lung issues including clearing out crud from smoking for years, a missing eye, all leading to the current show of watching the two each work on regrowing a different missing limb.
Even Tsunade-sama would balk at attempting to regrow a missing limb with chakra alone, but neither had asked for or sought out material to work with. Which meant that the chakra required was enormous, and usually this level of procedure was restricted to critical internal organs with a medium to use as raw materials available. It was also obvious that Naruto was far more practiced at this than Hinata was, but they had both apparently done something like this before. Possibly on a smaller scale, or at least in Hinata's case, but it was hard to say.
"Wow," Hinata said when they were done and Tsunade-sama was examining the arm that had just been regrown. "That's a lot harder than the couple of fox kits I helped with."
"Took you a lot less time," Naruto commented as he was finishing up the foot at the end of the leg he was working on. "But you'd not attempted anything like this since your chakra was boosted."
"True, and I can see why you need to start with tails when you don't have large enough chakra reserves."
"Yeah, it took a while to convince Hana that I really was ready for more. At some point I need to check in with her again, see if she's willing to part with more books. I think I might be able to get to proper medic-nin standards after some of what I picked up from Karin."
"Maybe you can convince her to teach both of us instead of passing the lessons on afterwards?"
...and then there were these details. These two were doing things that should be legendary and thought that they were still in the early phases of training.
Who the fuck was this Hana and where had she been hiding for the past twenty years to be an unknown?
"I hate being cheated," Tsunade grumbled. "But it's on me for making assumptions."
"If anyone was cheated then it was them," Jiraiya retorted. "Because I don't think the one teaching Naruto told him that he was good enough to be considered a medic-nin."
"Why the hell wouldn't he be told that?"
"Probably because he kept doing the impossible and she didn't want to hold him back."
"What are you two talking about?" Naruto asked.
"Um," Hinata said. "I think Hana might have had you figure out how to do things that even she couldn't do?"
"...but she demonstrated most of it, at least the basics? And insisted that I'd never get anywhere at the hospital..."
"Let me guess," Tsunade said. "She showed you keeping a single fish alive, reviving a lightly charred one, dealing with minor below the skin injuries, and regrowing tail segments on animals as the 'basics'."
"Yeah, mostly. She went into a lot more detail on lungs, eyes, and head injuries."
"And you took her lessons and the attempts to get you to fail by over-stretching yourself, a common method used with aspiring medic-nin to teach them that they can't save everyone, and repeatedly succeeded beyond her wildest hopes and dreams. So she kept pushing, and you kept pulling out the impossible. Despite having far too much chakra."
Naruto rubbed the back of his head. "I don't think she'd have done that. She definitely made sure that I knew that it was unheard of to be able to run a blood filtering and oxygenation jutsu for six hours..."
"She kept you from visiting the hospital and demonstrating so that you'd not be pulled out of the ranks and stuck healing patients all day, then. You two are definitely getting formal examinations and recognition of your skills when we get back to Konoha, and will be helping with the classes sensei apparently wants me to teach."
"...can I stick a seal in a room in the hospital and call it a day?"
Everyone present turned to look at Naruto, and it was likely that Hoshi and the genin would've done so as well had they been there. Jiraiya's eyes narrowed. "What kind of seal?"
"One that grants anyone in the middle of it improved control over medical chakra."
Tsunade blinked a couple of times. "You have a seal that can make anyone better with medical chakra."
Naruto nodded. "Yes." Granted, the Tome had figured it out, and it was technically untested. Mentioning that they had variants for every node, so long as someone had the node already, was...probably not the best idea right now. It was a stepping stone to a fully rebuilt improved net seal, if they ever managed that.
"...if you'd led with that then I'd have agreed to go back to Konoha just to see that in action."
"And if you do have such a thing then there's no way it's going in the hospital," Jiraiya added. "There's no way the hospital is secure enough for something that valuable."
"So long as I'm paid I'll stick copies anywhere they're wanted."
"...this isn't something you have access to, but something you can place at will?"
"The ground is solid enough in the clearing we were working with Kiba in today. I could stick a copy there to demonstrate, but I'd be surprised if it lasted more than a couple of uses before it degrades to the point that I have to rebuild it from scratch. Dirt isn't a good solid surface to place long-term seals on."
"We don't want it sticking around anyway."
Shibuki sighed as he looked over the results of over a month of going through the village's ranks. Most of the jounin and all of the chunin seemed to be perfectly fine with Fu's existence, but for some reason the bulk of the genin had been poisoned to the idea of jinchuriki in general. It seemed that the problem was that the few jounin that weren't okay with her were also the ones primarily taking genin currently. The hand-picked one he'd sent to run the team wasn't one of them, but the idiot genin had been led by one of the problem jounin before then.
Originally, he'd agreed to let Fu make the attempt at the exams because she'd done well in 'calming down', even if it seemed to be due to worry about something that had happened to Konoha's tailed beast. But not long after returning with her idiot teammates she'd spent a week panicking, claiming that two more of the tailed beasts were now 'gone'. Hearing the news from Konoha that the one-tail and two-tails had been killed served as confirmation to what she was stating, but he wasn't sure what to think about it.
Or, to be more specific, he wasn't sure what to think of the fact that even before that confirmation Fu had stated that the remaining six were now going to die. Which concerned both of them because they had no clue what that would mean for her if the seven-tails was still sealed within her when that happened. At the same time, it wasn't happening immediately because the three- and eight-tails were apparently going first, so monitoring what happened in Kiri and Kumo had become somewhat of a priority.
If only they had any way of keeping track of things going on in either foreign village.
Shizune had served as the initial test subject for the seal, then Tsunade had volunteered to give it a shot while Jiraiya examined it. Or perhaps it would be better to say that Jiraiya was only permitted enough time to set up to examine it by virtue of Naruto insisting on double-checking things so as to not blow out Tsunade's chakra network after the first use of the seal.
The three genin were clueless about what had gone on, but both Shizune and Tsunade were shocked at how easily chakra scalpels and the mystic palm technique came to them now. They'd even caught fish of their own and managed to keep a couple alive each without any problem. Despite that, neither thought that they'd be even considering regrowing limbs without a support medium available anytime soon just due to the chakra cost.
"You're definitely setting up a longer-term version of that in Konoha," Tsunade said. "And everyone currently acting as or training to be a medic-nin needs to use it."
"And to think that I thought the backup plan was going to be needed," Jiraiya said, having finally gotten over scowling about not being able to understand the seal. Yet.
"...backup plan?"
"Sensei claimed that Naruto here would be able to subdue you, stick you in a prisoner scroll, and drop you off in his office if you didn't agree to come along peacefully. I think the idea was that he could convince you to stick around once you were already there?"
Tsunade snorted at that. "Yeah, right, the kid isn't that good."
"Granny," Naruto said. "You aren't exactly a jinchuriki."
"...oh, you're not getting away with that. There's no way you could force me into a prisoner transport scroll, and even less chance of keeping me in it long enough to get me back to Konoha."
"Wanna bet?"
"Since I'd like to laugh in your face when you fail? Sure." She slipped a finger under the necklace she was wearing. "To get you properly motivated, if you pull it off then you can claim my grandfather's necklace too."
"Why would I want your necklace?"
"That thing was made by the first Hokage and is worth several fortunes," Jiraiya answered. "You could buy mountains full of gold mines with the profits you could make from selling it."
Naruto was about to scoff, because if it was worth that much then there was no way to sell it, when the Tome pinged him.
"There's something about the necklace that's odd," Kurama said. "Not only was it able to be used to help Hashirama capture and control my siblings and I, but it's both familiar and unique in other ways to the Tome's sensors."
"We wanna examine it," Shukaku added. "So you better win it."
Suppressing a flinch, Naruto nodded. "Okay then. Do you want to rest up first?"
"You're the one that's been using chakra all day," Tsunade replied. "I thought you'd want to push things off till morning."
"No time like the present." He then let loose with chakra chains flowing underground from his feet. She seemed to think that something was wrong, and he could tell that she was reinforcing the ground around her, but his chains went under and beyond her reinforcement.
"WHAT?" she yelled when chains burst from the ground in a circle around her, quickly connecting to each other and forming an interconnected dome around her. Except that it was a sphere, not that she could tell that.
A moment later branches shot up to grow around the chains, the branches and chains glowing as they started suppressing and absorbing her chakra. She attempted several jutsu, but didn't get anything properly piercing fired off before she was stumbling due to the effects of the sphere. It took only a couple of minutes to knock her out entirely, but just in case she was faking somehow he kept things going. This appeared to be a good thing, because the seal on her forehead activated a moment later, flooding her with chakra and waking her back up.
She managed to punch through the branches with that flood of chakra, but didn't pull off breaking the chains. He added another layer of both, just in case, and ten minutes later she was knocked unconscious again...and looked much more her actual age.
He pocketed the necklace before sticking her into the prisoner transport scroll, then made a clone to bring it back to Konoha. It vanished with the scroll a moment later, while he focused on cleaning up the mess he'd made of the clearing.
"Um," Shizune said, obviously unsure of what she should be doing.
"Go settle your tab and collect your stuff," Jiraiya said. "Then you can either voluntarily be put into a scroll long enough to get back to Konoha the fast way or sign a personal summoning contract with Naruto here so that he can get you back that way."
"Unless you'd prefer that Hinata be the one you sign with," Naruto added.
"Or that, yeah. By the way, you do know that if she had been expecting the chains then you'd have had a harder time grabbing her?"
"There's a reason I sent them underground first."
Hiruzen thought that he was done for the day, finishing up the last paperwork from a meeting, when Naruto ran into the office. Sighing, he looked at the boy, who...pulled out a scroll? A moment later the obvious clone was gone and Tsunade was unconscious on the floor of the office.
Snorting, Hiruzen sealed the office before he stepped around the desk and gently woke his student. She groaned as she woke, then looked around in a panic. "What happened?"
"I believe that you were probably knocked out by Naruto," Hiruzen replied. "Then stuck in a prisoner transport scroll and brought here in the past ten minutes or so."
"...he actually pulled it off?"
"And drained that seal you use to keep yourself looking young. You don't feel any stronger than a civilian right now, even."
"But...he...chains and wood?"
"He's got a magic book that's given him a lot of useful tricks. You're no jinchuriki and he was able to shut down two of them in one night."
"...I'd be more pissed if he hadn't already convinced me to come back."
"Now that's a story I want to hear. I'm sure they'll be along in a couple of hours as well, but I think I want to hear it from your side first. And you probably want some time to recover enough chakra to throw up your vanity transformation."
"My..." she started, only to produce a mirror from a pocket. "How dare he!"
"I imagine he drained you and your seal to keep you unconscious more than anything deliberate."
Returning to the village had included allowing Shizune to come and go from the Uzumaki compound so that she and Tsunade could stay there for a couple of days. At least until the Senju compound was livable again, anyway. Tsunade shouldn't need to be allowed in as she was an Uzumaki by blood. Unless Mito had excluded her kids or grandkids for some reason, anyway?
Whatever the situation there, Naruto had used paperwork clones to finish all the mission paperwork he had to worry about, leaving Jiraiya to handle his portion, and then swung through Ichiraku's for dinner. Hinata had used her own paperwork clones to help with the paperwork and joined him, though relayed that her father wanted them both to join the family for dinner the next day.
As for their genin, they all went home and collapsed after their day of brutal training.
"We're definitely going to end up at least sending clones to the hospital," Hinata commented after they'd left Ichiraku's.
"I know," Naruto said. "Just like I knew that we were doing better than a normal field medic needed to be, but hadn't actually looked into how much better because the foxes were delighted."
"We both suspected that and didn't bother to go too much deeper because there's a lot of paperwork involved in becoming an actual medic-nin and we were perfectly happy with being unofficial field medics."
"Plus skills that aren't in our files are skills that are harder for enemies to plan around."
"...of course."
"Having a team of our own will hopefully make it harder for her to pull us into working in the hospital for any serious length of time as well...except for the next few weeks while she's working on two of our genin."
"Ugh, I hadn't considered that. We won't be able to take anything out of the village, will we?"
"Probably not."
Not only did they lose two of their genin to examinations, they lost Kiba to him filling in for Ami on Tekuno's team on a mission out of the village. Team Gai was also stuck in the village due to Kin being examined with a couple of the other volunteers that had been subjected to the 'beast-man' formula after the invasion.
This did not mean that they had nothing to do beyond training. It only took a day for Naruto to be paid to build the first of three initial seal arrays for 'making awesome medics' as the Anbu commander put it. Then after two days of anyone even remotely considering themselves decent at seals failing to understand them he was paid to put three more in place just in case. There had been a little bit of confusion when the seal had failed to trigger for Karin, but explaining that it was partially based on things learned from examining her had helped there.
Luckily for everyone involved, it didn't include the 'bite to heal' bits, because most people didn't have enough chakra for that to be safe.
Outside of that, Tsunade hadn't just taken over medic-nin training, but the hospital itself. Naruto and Hinata were put through official medic-nin certification, barely passed the book exam and more than aced the practical to make up for it, and then been put to work helping out with actual medic-nin work and un-fucking the paperwork. Part of this seemed to be because she was still working through her fear of blood and part of it was just that the paperwork was horrid.
"How are there records from three different decades in most of these boxes?" Naruto wondered as his clones worked with Hinata's to make sense of things.
"I don't know," Hinata replied. "But the more we see the more I want to prank the pants off of those responsible for it. Have your clones found a properly-labeled box of paperwork yet?"
"One."
"...they found one? Where?"
"In the back corner they found a single box of Senju family medical records with a barely-functioning security seal holding it shut."
"Is that 'actually barely functional' or 'you call it barely functional because it was trivial to bypass'?"
"...those are the same thing, but this one shorted out when the clone's chakra hit it in general."
"Huh. Odd that nothing else in here has had security seals. Remnants of them, but nothing active. Then again, none of the newer boxes have them, so maybe they stopped using them?"
"Could be."
Yagura swore as he worked his way through trying to fix what the masked man had made him do to his village. Isobu starting to fall apart inside of him had caused the controlling genjutsu to shatter, though the other effects were...odd. He was definitely starting to grow a tail, and he thought that the weirdness in his back was the beginnings of a shell. As though parts of Isobu were breaking off and connecting to him instead of vanishing or something.
Regardless of that, completely stopping the stupid civil war that never should've happened was a priority. He'd recognized the sharingan for what it was, especially after having it floating around in the back of his head for years, and deduced that part of the plan was to get rid of those who could use techniques that it couldn't copy. Or at least that was the only justification that made sense for trying to wipe out bloodline traits. After the fall of Uzushio, The Land of Water had the highest concentration of varied bloodline traits in general and made an ideal target for that kind of manipulation as a result, beyond how isolated it was.
A loyal Uchiha doing that didn't make a lot of sense as Konoha wasn't actively recruiting bloodline users. Which meant one or more holders of the bloodline that weren't loyal to Konoha, at least, either due to being a splinter branch or being missing-nin. That Konoha had a description of the same mask in a recent bounty book, with a high bounty, made the latter sound quite likely. Taking out most of the clan 'in retaliation' sounded just like something that a scorned clan member would do too.
As for Kiri itself, convincing anyone that he actually wanted to reverse course was a different matter entirely. The 'loyal' shinobi thought it was a clever ruse to play along with, the 'rebels' thought it was a not-so-clever ruse to ignore, and several groups loyal to neither side weren't helping with random attacks. Then there were details like Konoha having three of the seven swords now, two of which he'd personally checked the paperwork on to find out that they'd been reclaimed by the Uzumaki clan. One without anyone being able to say when beyond the paperwork sitting there in the vault with the original agreement! The only one they had any standing to ask for the return of was Shibuki and he was considering writing it off if he could get Konoha to help settle this stupid conflict peacefully.
If he couldn't get outside help in negotiating peace then his only other hope was probably handing the hat over to someone with a bloodline. Except that all the candidates worked for the 'rebels' for good reason, which probably meant needing outside help to reach out to them anyway.
...somehow his personal accounts had barely been touched for the entire time he'd been stuck with that genjutsu controlling him. Maybe he could just pay Konoha for a diplomat either way, and if he wasn't using the village's funds to do so then nobody would be able to yell at him for it on that basis.
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