45

It had taken a couple of days to settle into the routine of the three genin making a clone each to run the food carts before summoning the real three back to Konoha. They'd then train in the Uzumaki compound or take other forms to go out to the training grounds, depending on their goals for the day. Naruto and Hinata were frequently sending clones with them, but their real selves remained in the general vicinity of Kumo. Regularly sneaking out to unused training grounds to get their own training in despite not being officially allowed to use them, admittedly, but they were also repairing the training grounds they used beyond the damage they were causing.

They were also checking on the other two teams at least twice a day, made easier by them having used the campsites that Naruto had pointed them at and due to them not really hiding their chakra. It didn't look like any of them had noticed the privacy and security seals spread over the areas they were in either, but none of them were really trained in seals. Karin would've been his guess for the only one likely to pick out that particular detail, being an Uzumaki.

Of course, projects in Konoha were still being worked on as well, and that included Naruto's decision to sort out some archives before someone decided to burn them down and start over. He'd sent the Tome back to Konoha to help out with that while he was still in Kumo, figuring that a scan of both archives would be a good starting point for figuring out a proper indexing system.

Kurenai waited as the Hokage looked over the initial reports, though he'd immediately taken those from Naruto and Hinata and placed them off to the side. She suspected that they'd been turning copies in directly.

"I see there's a last-minute addition from Yugao," Shisui said. "About the campsites Naruto 'found'?"

"Almost certainly created," Kurenai said, having seen one of them. "And likely heavily secured in advance, as chakra signatures seemed to fade when you got outside of the immediate area of the one I saw, implying privacy and security seals of some kind in the area to dampen things."

"Clever, if true. I see nothing in any of the reports that indicates a problem with his leadership up to when you departed the area."

"There wasn't a whole lot for him to do, admittedly, but what did come up he handled as well as any of us could expect him to."

"I believe he's got support of over half the jounin, with Hinata falling just behind him, after their...impressive actions in their more direct tests."

"Snuck in without anyone realizing that they were there, went above and beyond in pointing out flaws in the security?"

"And then dropped the target scrolls and their mission reports into my locked desk without being spotted. The fakes they left behind were detailed teardowns of the security of the facilities with better maps than we had of them. I might have to start sending those two out to map all of our various facilities just to see what secret passages the existing Hyuga teams have missed."

...Kurenai could easily believe that, but it was definitely showing off. "So it's likely that both of them are going to be promoted?"

"So long as at least one of the three genin proves themselves worthy of promotion, yes. Or one of them does the impossible, anyway."

"The impossible?"

"Hiashi seems to think that one or both of them could sort out the jounin archives."

That...would probably put them on a short list of people to become the sixth Hokage. Spending more than five minutes in the room took an incredible act of will, and the only reason Anko hadn't burned the place down was because she feared that the mess was keeping some eldritch horror trapped and burning it all would release it. Something that Kurenai couldn't bring herself to argue against with the feeling of doom in the room.

"Seems we're still in charge," Naruto commented as he looked at the message passed through Yoko. "And I assume the two sealed letters for Tekuno and Yugao are confirmations of that for them."

"Any sign that they've noticed the genin training in the village?" Hinata asked as she looked over a couple of fire techniques that weren't working for her. She'd grumbled about her flames being too strong for them.

"Not at all. I don't think Ino or Sasuke were noticed sneaking into their clan archives to make copies of scrolls either. Our activity has gotten more interest here after one of the training grounds we borrowed yesterday was visited by a clean-up crew this morning."

"Weren't you intercepting those requests?"

"Yes, but this was an off the record cleanup."

"Ah. So we're likely a mysterious repair team now?"

"Probably, they haven't filed reports yet though so I can't easily tell what the official response is going to be."

"Maybe we should do an overnight cleanup of anything we can find as a helpful prank?"

That...had some merit. Leaving an itemized list of things taken care of would even give them something to distract them from other things, like looking too closely into the clones running the food cart. They'd easily planned for doing that, and got started just after the post-sunset guard rotation shift.

Fixing every training ground, the cave-in that had caused problems during the second stage and all of the related things around it, shoring up several other weak points in those caves and tunnels, reinforcing several foundations in the village proper, and other various maintenance tasks had taken clones half the night. They'd just dropped off the list of things 'fixed' for someone to find in the morning when things went decidedly off-script.

Specifically, the waning moon had gone from 'not too bright' to 'literally glowing almost like the sun, lighting up the night' moments before the moon seemed to shatter. Kind of. It didn't spread out, but instead almost imploded. It was noticeably smaller when the glow faded, and...less impressive in an unquantifiable manner, as though some other aspect of it was no longer present beyond the physical changes.

"I wonder if fixing too many things at once causes the universe to break something else to compensate," Naruto mused.

"...please don't come up with reasons that the moon breaking is our fault," Hinata pleaded.

Zetsu had started to panic when the moon had started to glow, but that paled in comparison to what happened next. Zetsu itself had started to glow with the same light and burn. Whatever was happening was attacking mother directly in a way that shouldn't, couldn't be possible. The previously-diminished connection it had with her was being obliterated, the life fed to it over the connection to her being torn away, no, burned away.

Someone, somewhere, had found a way to do the impossible. Mother's connection to the God Tree meant that she shouldn't be able to be killed...but for the first time Zetsu truly accepted that the tailed beasts had actually been killed instead of merely hidden away. They were also connected to the tree, and killing them had obviously weakened the tree enough for this attack to kill the tree...and through the tree, kill mother and it.

The world gradually went black, a limited circle of vision drawing in towards the moon, as it screamed its final physical and emotional agony.

Obito stared at the crushed moon, heart racing. The eye of the moon plan required reflecting things off of the moon, and the moon no longer had a smooth enough surface to reflect anything off of. There were now entire sections that appeared to be too bright or pitch black, and he was fairly certain that there was one point that went clear through to show stars on the far side somehow.

...and he'd only come outside to avoid the exploding statue, which was just as critical to the plan. Maybe more so? It was feeling very hard to quantify what was the most important part of things right now. The two events also felt very much connected, though how they were connected was a mystery unless the moon and statue had been linked somehow.

Actually, that would make quite a lot of sense...except that someone had just destroyed both. Some actor that hadn't given any indica...

Uzushiogakure, and the Uzumaki thereof. It had to be them. Perhaps they'd learned of the plan and didn't agree with it for some reason, but they were definitely doing everything they could to not only kill the plan but obliterate it and spread any remaining ashes across the land.

Finding them was now the only priority, as the rest of the plan seemed to be in tatters.

"Pity you had to kill off the last of your descendants in the moon," Hagoromo said.

"Turns out that I can only make myself seen or heard by those with functioning eyes," Hamura replied. "So I had no good way to deliver a warning, or correct the misconceptions about my plan in the first place. Probably should've used a hand or a foot instead of eyes to form the energy siphon, but the eyes were the most efficient option short of sacrificing entire people."

"Because you were unconsciously tapping the eye-based power node when you built the thing."

"...sadly. What are we going to do about those things? I know we're currently sustained by them, but that won't last more than a handful of years."

"They need a proper connection, like mother and I had to them but that I didn't want my descendants to ever seek out."

Hamura frowned. "Really?"

"That's my interpretation of what I've learned. I have an idea or two for handling it, and we now have time to work on that. The excess energy from the vessel should give us a few extra years that we didn't think we had, on top of the reserves in the power nodes themselves."

"Hmmm. Perhaps, but I suspect that the excess energy will burn off a lot faster."

Orochimaru stared at the damaged moon, one of his eyes twitching.

"Someone decided to show off," he grumbled. "And I have no idea who, and thus no way to pick their brain."

It took a couple of days for general panic over the moon to start to fade, though things switched from 'assume it was an attack' to 'the moon was built by some ancient group and something finally broke'. In part because historians in several areas were able to point at local stories of the moon suddenly existing that all matched up pretty well. Though Naruto had spotted some reports coming in, both to Konoha and Kumo, saying that Amegakure seemed to be the exception. They were panicking and thinking this was an attack, and their 'attackers' of choice were Uzushio.

...there was zero indication as to why they thought that though, so it wasn't obvious if he should be worried about it. Beyond that, indications were that the search for the probably-didn't-exist reborn Uzushio were likely to be ramped up significantly.

Likely enemies wasting time searching for something that didn't exist was perfectly fine. The more resources they devoted to that the less likely it was that they'd become a bigger problem later.

Kumo's reaction to the sudden repairing of things in the village was...muted due to the panic surrounding the moon, and the eventual decision was that it wasn't worth worrying about. Searching for hidden explosives or similar was still being done for security reasons, but a mysterious benefactor saving them months to years of work fixing things was being seen as a show of good faith on the whole. Oddly, they seemed to think that it might be something done by those in the Land of Frost, as an apology for having an idiot in the second stage.

Training was going well for the three genin, who had settled into a pattern of two days training alone, one day training together, aiming to only bother Naruto and Hinata when they were stuck on something. So far that hadn't happened, with all three wanting to show that they didn't need hand-holding.

"What are those?" Hinata asked as Naruto flipped through a couple small stacks of paperwork alongside his breakfast in the hotel room.

"Copies of things my parents knew were in the jounin and Anbu archives," Naruto answered.

He'd have stuck to reading them in the Tome, but Yoko had noticed that all of the remaining tailed beast masks were damaged to varying degrees. This wasn't what had been expected at this point in time, so the Tome was still with her to get some time examining the masks to see if it might be due to how they were created or if things with the tailed beasts fading were actually moving faster than expected. Maybe they'd figure out things about the other masks while they were at it as well.

"...you actually sorted the two archives?" Hinata finally asked, sounding shocked.

"Yes," Naruto answered. "They both had the past decade or so in a single line of filing cabinets right next to the door, the only labeled records and only kept in chronological order instead of being properly sorted. I sent the Tome back to Konoha with a clone a few days ago so that it could help grab scans of both archives, figured out a filing system that works for both, and implemented it last night."

"But...did the sense of doom from the absolute horrible state of things just not affect you? I had a single clone slip into the jounin archives once and couldn't believe the visceral reaction it had to the mess."

"You mean the doom-generating seals in the ceilings? They're part of the security system. I turned them off to keep them from distracting me, but fixing the linkage to have them turn on again when unauthorized people go in is going to require a lot more effort because someone ripped out the authorized chakra signature linkages entirely. Probably when the original filing system sabotage happened. I left documentation on how to replace the linkages, but they should probably be tied to a more advanced blood and chakra array at a minimum and I also left a sketch of a basic system for locking all the filing cabinets with high-security tamper-evident seals unless you're on the approved list."

"So you tore the security apart, documented where it had been sabotaged, and offered improvements?"

"Yes."

"...but you didn't get permission first."

"...no."

"So either they're going to promote you out of gratitude at this point or bar you from promotion for being reckless."

Naruto shrugged. He didn't really care either way, and he had found the various things he'd been looking for. Notes that his parents knew were in the archives somewhere, just not where due to the horrible state they'd been in. Granted, after the scans of the archives he didn't need to fix them up at all, but it really hadn't been that difficult to have clones put things right so that records were actually able to be located.

Hiruzen stared at the index sign on the wall of the archives, then looked down at the scroll he'd found attached just under it. One that was signed by Naruto, and detailed all the actions taken. From the sorting and indexing, to the analysis of the security of the room and the information on repairing the now-disabled security system elements in the ceiling.

The boy was on a month-plus long mission outside of the village and had still managed to pull this off, while being evaluated for promotion. It was possible that he'd known about the potential 'conditional promotion, if you can sort out the archives' plan, but the scroll indicated that he'd instead felt that someone was liable to torch the entire room before he could find things left in the records by his parents. It also indicated that the Anbu archives might be similarly sorted.

...even more impressive, Hiruzen had been down here last night trying fruitlessly to find a record to see if something Shisui had asked about regarding the moon in the Hokage's archives was originally incomplete or if the jounin's filing had been more complete. Naruto had pulled this off overnight.

Actually, a good test would be to find that record. It didn't take long to figure out where it should be according to the index, the filing cabinets were labeled appropriately, and the record was...exactly where it was supposed to be in the system, along with four others that were probably relevant. Total time of under three minutes, not knowing the indexing system at all yet, and a third of that had been recalling the pertinent details of the record.

"If Hashirama and I could both be labeled the God of Shinobi then Naruto can definitely be labeled the God of Paperwork," Hiruzen decided. Sure, making those titles official required jounin-corps buy-in, but after finding out about this there wasn't likely to be a single detractor in the village.

...outside of Naruto himself. But he wasn't a jounin yet and thus didn't currently have a vote.

Naruto grumbled lightly, having returned to Konoha temporarily in person because Shisui wanted to travel to Kumo 'in style'. Specifically, the Daimyo had revealed his mobile house and Shisui felt that there should be at least one for the Hokage as well. The original version wasn't difficult to build at this point, admittedly, so he'd decided to just get it over with and build several before other orders could come in.

Because he was positive that other orders would come in.

Yoko technically could have handled this side of things instead of Naruto, but the weather was honestly a bit crappy in Kumo today anyway. The genin's clones weren't even running their food cart today, instead visibly studying scrolls in their hotel room as it didn't seem likely that opening the food cart would have enough customers to be worth doing.

"Can't really make them fly," Naruto mumbled as he looked over his plans while clones worked on building several to the same spec as the Daimyo's. Shisui wanted the Hokage's mobile house to travel faster than the Daimyo's, on the justification that shinobi could handle rougher rides than nobles. Add in being able to use more chakra because it could be recharged by the shinobi and there were options available on that front. The biggest hurdle was handling the roads at higher speeds. Wooden wheels, even with a metal strap around them, might have problems and the basic suspension system normally used on wagons wasn't going to cut it.

Well, there were some notes from Kumo's archives about making a durable rubber-like material with lava release that allowed training dummies to survive years of abuse. Perhaps that could be used on the wheels or as part of the suspension? And if that worked out then maybe it could be added to puppets to make them more durable too...

"What are you annoyed about now?" Hinata asked as they prepared to do a quick run to ensure that Tekuno and Yugao knew to plan on returning a couple days earlier than originally agreed upon to be present when Shisui arrived.

Naruto sighed. "Yoko just found out that I've gotten an official nickname." Because of course he had. "Or more accurately, a third official nickname."

"...I didn't know you had two already."

"The first two are Anbu-only, admittedly, so aren't in the normal records. They dubbed me Konoha's Trickster when I was younger and Konoha's Ghost once they realized how completely I was infiltrating the village. This is the first one in my more public record though, Old Man Hiruzen sponsoring it and my clones seem to think that Tekuno and Yugao are the only jounin that didn't provide their approval."

"Because they're stuck out here?"

"That's my guess."

"...what's the new nickname?"

"God of Paperwork."

He sighed as she broke down into giggles. It wasn't exactly inappropriate, and was tied to his solving the jounin archive problem. And for those who were also in the Anbu, the Anbu archive problem. A few minutes later she'd recovered, but kept smirking.

Shisui stared at the mobile house in the Uzumaki compound. "This is...larger than I was expecting."

"You provided a list of things you wanted," Yoko replied. "They required a little more room than the first model, and Naruto ended up needing to figure out how to allow the structure to bend in the middle where you'd normally just rely on each individual wagon in a chain being small enough to navigate curves."

That was somewhat obvious, a rubber-like material between slats of wood forming what looked to be a junction between the front and rear of the structure. There were four lines of wheels that looked like they had their own ribbed rubber coatings, two axles in front of the junction and two behind it. Right now the sides of the front section were expanded outward to allow for checking the internal room, with the rear section having been designated as more 'office' than 'living quarters'. Official symbols and colors of the Land of Fire and Konohagakure adorned the entire thing, and a quick check showed that the wooden panels on the outside might as well be armored.

"I was half-joking about wanting this to be done in time to take it to Kumo," Shisui finally said. "Naruto is, after all, in Kumo and not here to work on it."

"That isn't exactly a significant problem for us," Yoko retorted.

"...surely it would at least be an annoyance, needing to travel back and forth between working with the genin?"

"Nah," Naruto said, or perhaps one of his clones said, as he came out of one of the houses in the compound. "Nobody seems to have noticed that our genin have been doing their training here and not in Kumo."

That brought Shisui up short. "Is that them staying here and you just faking them being in Kumo?"

"They travel back and forth each day," Yoko answered. "So that when they're checked on by shinobi in Kumo they don't obviously have nobody sleeping in their rooms. I may generally handle creating the in-village clones for us now, but before I became 'real' instead of just another clone there were clones being sent back every day already. This isn't much of a change in how Naruto handles being out of the village."

"Apparently I need to rethink how clever Hiruzen was with his words. Where did the rubber-like material come from, because I don't think I've seen anything like it locally?"

"Lava release variant in one of Kumo's families," Naruto answered. "It came easy to me once I paid attention to the scrolls on it because the earth component needs to be stronger than the fire component and earth and wind are my strongest elements. Hinata hasn't managed to pull it off yet, but she leans towards fire and wind."

Casually referring to bloodline skills as things that could just be picked up, from scrolls, was something that felt wrong. But Team Yurei was infamous for not letting what should be impossible stop them. "I see. Do you think operating this can be taught in the two days needed before I have to leave if taking it?"

Yoko snorted. "I took it out for a test run last night. You probably need a Hyuga to at least sit next to the driver to watch for others on the roads if you want to go full speed, but on a clear road you can probably make it to the border in a day."

Now that sounded more impressive than expected, and Shisui was suddenly quite interested in the trip.

The evening before the Hokage's delegation was to arrive saw the other two Konoha teams return from their training. The two Kiri teams hadn't returned yet, but would likely arrive during the next two days as they'd stopped about a day out. Something that Naruto only knew because he had a clone as the one operating the mobile house for the Hokage's delegation through use of a summoning stone and was thus keeping watch around it as well.

"We've been asked to be ready for the Hokage's arrival," Hinata explained to the gathered group at dinner. "Naruto will let us know of their approach around an hour in advance."

"They're arriving in a mobile house," Naruto continued, mentally grumbling about there being far too much work along those lines to do. He'd been asked to make another couple copies of the larger version after the Daimyo had tried one short trip at the higher speed they could handle. The one going to the Daimyo was actually being kitted out to be an evacuation unit, because it was far too rough for normal use but being able to move at shinobi speed was seen as an asset in an emergency.

As for the other larger one, Shisui was planning on giving it to Kumo for the Raikage's use and had it with him.

"Will you know they're close because you'll be sensing them?" Tekuno asked.

"Not really," Naruto answered. "I'm in communication with the one operating the house and they'll be warning me when they're an hour out."

The man blinked a couple of times, and several of the genin gave Naruto odd looks as well.

"In addition," Naruto continued. "I've been informed that I'll be acting as one of the Hokage's guards during the finals. That will leave Hinata in charge." The two jounin didn't seem surprised at that, so it had likely been in the last sealed messages they'd gotten. "We also have a request for a large container of jerky for the Kage's Box, which I'm hoping Kiba was able to finish in the past couple of days."

"I made three," Kiba answered, producing three metal seal tags. "There will be three leaders in the box, after all. No need to force them to share."

The tags were slipped into Naruto's pouch while the two jounin nodded their approval of the foresight. "Thank you. Does anyone have any questions?"

"Do we have time to talk with potential opponents to arrange for proper demonstrations when going up against each other?" Shikamaru asked. "Having a general idea of what we'd like to show off may be beneficial for those of us that don't expect to make it past another Konoha genin."

"What you do with your time tonight through to the morning of the finals, outside of being present to greet the Hokage's delegation, is yours to do with as you wish. For a show of solidarity the plan is to show up as a group for the finals, which will require all of you to gather shortly after breakfast to make a combined trip to the stadium."

A looked at the approaching delegation, having scrambled to get into position to welcome the Hokage when someone realized that the Konoha teams had suddenly started preparing for the same.

That they'd known only an hour before the arrival time was either impressive or just luck in scheduling.

Either way, what hadn't been expected was for the Hokage to arrive in a high-speed self-propelled mobile house. It was a small one, admittedly, but still incredibly impressive and something that left the shinobi involved at essentially full strength. More surprising to A was what looked like lava release style rubber in use on the thing. Kumo was the only village known to have that available, and only in a small clan that hadn't had a defection since the village was founded. How had Konoha gotten access to the material?

"Good morning," the new Hokage, Shisui Uchiha if A recalled correctly, greeted as he stepped out of the back of the mobile house.

"Welcome to Kumo," A returned. "I'm not sure that we have any suitable place for you to keep your mobile house inside of the village."

"That was expected." He held a hand out and both a large metal plate and a small book were handed to him by the operator of the house. "They store into these plates when not in use, though there is a procedure that must be followed for making them safe to store."

It didn't escape A's notice that the plate that had just been handed over had Kumo's cloud symbol carved into it, nor that the operator of the house immediately moved inside of the structure. "I see. So you merely need to prepare it for storage during your visit?"

"We actually took care of most of that after breakfast this morning." The Hokage turned to look as the operator came out of the house, and then placed a hand next to the closed door. A moment later the entire thing was engulfed in chakra smoke, leaving a metal plate with the Konoha symbol carved into it on the ground. That was quickly picked up and stored in a bag. "There was quite a bit involved with ensuring we'd be ready on arrival though." The book on top of the metal plate with the Kumo symbol on it was tapped. "Do have someone read up on things before you unpack this one I obtained as a gift for Kumogakure. It would be unfortunate if you made a mistake and caused damage to it due to improperly storing it."

A absently motioned for one of his guard detail to accept the metal plate and book, trusting that they'd do as complete an examination as they could for safety before he took a closer look personally. "Thank you for your generosity."

"It's the least I can do after finding out that we've got over half the finalist genin in the exams that you're hosting."

...that was a bit of an embarrassment, yes, but also had been somewhat expected after their best two teams had an unfortunate run-in on a combined mission a month before the exams. Hell, after that there'd been a betting pool that gave favorable odds for Konoha being the only village in the finals and if the jounin had survived the encounter then they'd have been demoted for being stupid enough to intentionally engage with S-rank shinobi with genin present. It's one thing to get into a fight when targeted, but another to decide that it would be a good entry on your record to claim a bounty and initiate the fight.

It had been a bad day, and they only knew any details at all because Kakuzu had been a combination of professional and annoyed with his partner Hidan. That meant that two surviving genin had not been allowed to be sacrificed to Jashin and had instead managed to finish their original mission and report back...with a letter chiding Kumo for such unprofessional jounin.

A had granted both field promotions and then not let anyone say anything when they'd decided to take in-village guard duty cycles instead of some of the normal semi-hazing duties that were normally used to test newly-promoted chunin without teams to work with.

Rumors that Konoha's most recent known interaction with Akatsuki members had ended without any injuries at all, because Deidara and Sasori wanted to test Uzumaki, just made the whole situation more annoying. Being reminded of it was...less than pleasant right now, but A bit back his frustration and started going through the motions of properly showing a fellow Kage into the village.