88

Ino looked over the gathered genin, aware that several civilians that had earned honorary forehead protectors had needed to be turned away today.

"Good morning," Ino said. "You are here because you hope to prove yourselves and earn a promotion to chunin. We're doing things differently than you were expecting though. The entire first stage is a solo stage, and those of you that pass will be forming teams before the second stage." She held up an armband. "Each of you will be issued an armband to track your progress through this stage. There are categories on the armband. The last time we did this you only needed one personal completion and five unique ones across your team, but that is not the case this time. Each of you needs five completion markings by the end of the five-day testing period, a meager one completion per day. There are also category groupings, and you will need completions in at least three categories."

The genin looked shocked and worried about that, and she let them stew for a moment before she continued. "So that you don't waste time, each station is marked with the category it applies to. There are a small number of stations marked with multiple categories, and at the time of completion you will be asked which category you wish it to be counted towards. You will not be able to change the category for such a station afterwards, so choose carefully. Exceptionally good performances will almost certainly end up broadcast, as will exceptionally poor performances."

Getting everyone their armbands took a few minutes as there were a lot of genin here. Once that was done Ino looked over the group. "Okay. You all have your armbands, and they will allow you to travel through all the gates. The entire island perimeter is open to you for finding and completing tasks, but the central forest is still off-limits. It is on each of you to find the testing stations you need, using whatever means you can figure out."

When she dismissed the group she paid attention, and marked down the identification numbers of the four that had paid enough attention to grab a copy of the paper maps that had been slipped into the back of the room and left face-down on the tables.

Yumino had considered attempting a couple of the more 'mental' challenges likely available in the starting area, but figured that swinging through after failing to accomplish five things on a loop of the island would be the better plan. She was also a decent sensor, and was hoping that would help her find less-obvious testing points. Bursts of chakra down a side path had her heading that way, and she found...

...kids?

A group of six younger kids with a single older shinobi, apparently in the middle of a tree-climbing lesson. The sign just outside of the field did say this was a testing point though, so she entered the field and approached the group.

"Good morning," the older shinobi greeted. "Would you like to help some students learn to control their chakra?"

Normally this kind of thing was...held off until you were older. Sticking things to yourself was what you'd normally throw at kids this age, instead of adding in all the headaches of needing to reinforce your own body in addition to sticking your feet to a vertical surface. But she thought that this was probably part of the test, so nodded and moved over to a boy that was obviously not reinforcing his body.

Over the course of an hour she was surprised as three of the kids managed a few steps up the trees, but after that point they obviously needed a rest.

"Very good job," the older shinobi said. She thought he was patting her arm at first, only to feel a pulse of chakra and realize that he was adding to her armband. "Not many your age seem to have the patience to teach."

"Thank you," she replied. She'd actually forgotten that this was a test at some point.

"Good morning," Naruto said to Onoki as the man sat down in the temporary office on the flying island.

"Morning," Onoki replied. "I apologize for any...misstatements during negotiations, given how long it's been since I was able to do formal alliance discussions. My Daimyo prefers to only enter into such things from a position of power normally."

"Not like I have a lot of experience with it either, and he's mellowed out a bit after finding that there were benefits to working with other villages."

"That he has, though I suspect his brother-in-law vanishing and the dealings he'd been involved with coming to light also helped."

"Funny that. Tragic how that all went down."

"Without the written reports I wouldn't have believed that your people were involved at all. Worth every ryo and you're the only ones that can trace the job back to me."

"Indeed. But discussing jobs that shouldn't be discussed isn't the reason we're meeting today. Your requests for changes to the treaty are...incredibly minor, and nowhere near what I was expecting."

Onoki snorted. "You were almost insultingly straightforward in your initial response, with an entire range of levels of cooperation to choose from in order to line things up on both sides. My Daimyo was honestly a bit shocked as well."

"Wasn't expecting you to want to pay for a summoning contract as part of things."

"That's at the Earth Daimyo's insistence, after we talked security over and came to the conclusion that someone could open a transport pad for others but not a summoning stone."

"Ah. That is an unfortunate reality. We've had to severely lock down the couple of civilian-usable transport pads we've got for security reasons as well. Needing to pass through two security stations on the way into the village annoys our merchants."

"We only reluctantly let merchants into our village at all, but you probably knew that already."

"You've asked about an additional option for the summoning contract though, and I'm curious why."

The man shook his head. "I figure that I can't be the first one to think about using such a system to retrieve traitors. It won't help as much if they can remove themselves before they run, but how many are going to do so? Especially if I keep that function locked down a bit more securely so that only a few are allowed to remove anyone from the contract."

"The problem with a plan like that is the 'permission to be summoned' clause of the contract, which is kind of important for not accidentally pulling people out of missions and such. That integrates deeply enough that even if your traitor is still present on the contract then they can just stop letting people summon them."

"That does sound problematic, and I'm not informed enough about how the contracts work to claim true understanding."

Naruto shrugged, then flipped through a few papers. "I have to say I was surprised to find that you were willing to let Uzushio accept missions from your civilians."

Onoki sighed at that. "That was the Earth Daimyo's decision, in part because it helped offset the cost of the telephone system and I suspect to try to force us to focus more on food production for him and other nobles."

"I repeatedly find myself happy that Uzushio has a single leader instead of two."

"Lucky you."

"I get all the paperwork."

"The 'between two leaders' paperwork is probably worse in volume and banality."

Tohi watched as replays of genin attempts at testing played on the bar's televisions, occasionally interspersed with 'example' completions from the testing phase of each station. Usually when a genin had an utter failure in their attempt, though first thing in the morning there had been more examples because genin hadn't actually gotten very far yet. The whole thing had gone somewhat slowly today, and the first attempt at an 'earth' challenge had just played.

It was kind of understandable that most of the 'elemental' stuff today had been fire and water due to those two being closest to where all the genin had started. Earth was obviously within reach of the genin in a day's trip while hunting for testing stations, and wind was closest in the other direction, but only those ignoring potential stops in the middle were going to head straight for any of the elemental outposts.

This morning's map showed quite a bit of distance to cross the island. It was like seven towns all near each other, and probably most of a day's trip walking if you didn't stop to check out things in the middle. The genin were expected to be able to visit six total of the seven if they did a single loop over the next five days, with repeated stops to attempt challenges, which just showed how fast even young shinobi could move. Only the center of the island was off-limits right now.

His personal interest was more in seeing what might be useful. He'd not had a lot of reason to hire shinobi for much more than bandit-clearing, though knew they could do more than that. Seeing a kid reshape a rocky field to form a defensive wall had him thinking about how useful that could be if the rocks in the soil could be manipulated into a wall separating fields in a few minutes instead of a few weeks.

Then there were the medical feats. Like when they brought out one kid being tested because another had lost their hand when screwing up a sword challenge. There had been an older shinobi monitoring the one being tested on the medical test, ensuring that nothing was done wrong as the severed hand was reattached as though nothing had happened. They'd been good enough to pass despite scowling at helping someone from a 'rival village', and had obviously softened a little at being thanked by their patient despite the scowling.

Yesterday's testing with the 'kill or otherwise get past a violent bear' bit had also gotten him thinking because that was a lot more 'real world' for him as far as threats went. Wild animals could be problems, and being able to take them out in any number of ways was a good thing. That the older, and presumably stronger, shinobi had largely been able to manhandle the bears out of the way while the kids generally ended up killing the beasts had been an interesting detail as well, and the videos of 'shrine maidens in training' taking bears out with throwing knives was going to have him more respectful than usual the next time he visited a shrine. Just in case.

Unfortunately, he was reasonably certain that having even a genin-level shinobi 'on staff' was going to be far too much trouble. Probably couldn't even afford one that could reattach a severed hand, since that seemed to be a bit more unusual. But surely 'regional outposts' would exist for rapid response reasons alone when time was of the essence? Or if they didn't, they should, so that you didn't have to wait for a messenger to make it to the main village and get back again. Ensuring that such a location was near his estate and businesses, and included at least one medic on-hand at all times, shouldn't be too difficult. Sure, it would benefit a couple of his rivals as well, but it was more honorable to defeat them through superior quality anyway.

His musing was interrupted by a clip starting of a genin attempting 'the swarm'. Which looked fine at first, standing in the middle of an empty field, until suddenly it became obvious that the kid was the target of a horde of zombies. And doing quite well at taking them down without getting hurt, despite the zombies looking to be more coordinated than most bandits he'd had the misfortune of running into.

But he'd already known that shinobi were excellent bandit deterrents. The thing that had him sweating was the 'summon swarms of zombies' trick. He really hoped that only worked in well-prepared areas.

"What?" Yoko asked, blinking after having been asked about 'proper forehead protectors' a couple days after the genin tests.

Tokishi fidgeted with her 'honorary genin' forehead protector. "We're wondering if there's any way to be 'shrine maiden' kunoichi. You're obviously training us to at least genin ability."

"You mean like I'm paid to be the primary maintainer of the shrine here?"

"No, not tied to Konoha, or Uzushio, or at least not directly? Like, with a 'shrine' forehead protector, to show that we've trained to defend the shrines we take care of, but aren't necessarily 'combat' kunoichi? Asami thinks that requiring basic medical skills and being able to make some of the basic seal tags we sell to merchants to keep bandits away should be needed too."

"Those tags are...harder than they look, but I've already figured out how to work around that. But why would you want to make a...I don't know, 'village hidden in the shrines'?"

Tokishi blinked. "...as a sign of the quality of the shrine maidens compared to those who probably can't defend their shrines? You said that there are priestesses in some countries that are trained to use chakra too."

Yoko had to admit that so far nothing horrible-sounding had been brought up, and she had given them explanations of things while helping them generate 'light' chakra. "And how would this 'village' work?"

"Connect the shrines with a telephone network, and maybe transport pads hidden in the shrine buildings so we can move around more easily? That would also let us be discreet places that Konoha and Uzushio teams could come and go from, as we'd essentially be a 'vassal village' of the two instead of actually independent." She produced a slip of paper from one of her pockets. "We even brainstormed other effects that seals might let the shrines provide, as not everywhere needs clean water. Uzushio uses seals to help grow crops, and mention was made of hot springs that 'purify' people. That's noticeable when you do it, so setting something up that creates that kind of effect around the honden of a shrine would likely convince a lot of civilians."

...informing the girls that the shrine was technically managed with seals might've been a mistake, but Yoko did have projects in motion that could be trivially adjusted for this and Odoroki would probably love the escalation. Especially with all the 'obviously legitimate because their gods are providing aid to the area' tricks seals could provide compared to shrines without seals. Taking the list of ideas, she noticed that it was more than just 'honden effects'.

"I'm going to have to clear anything even remotely like that with my brother and the Hokage," Yoko finally said. The girls didn't know that she was Naruto and he was her, but something like this would need to be run by Shisui as well. And she'd probably need to severely alter a few things she'd already built, come up with additional items for variety, and determine how 'leadership' and 'promotions' would work for a 'village' made up of decentralized shrine maidens.

Building a summoning contract for them, if only for the registration with various systems aspects, might also be a good idea. Most of them didn't have the chakra to summon anyone else at least...though testing to see if they could summon themselves to a stone might not be a bad idea either as that was a much smaller chakra cost. Hmmm. It would definitely make for a good emergency exit option, and then have transport pads available to get back to their shrines instead of shrine-specific summoning stones?

Yazo had spent the night between the wind and lightning areas, having lucked out and picked up 'defend against fire' and 'use wind' markings yesterday. Both sadly in the same 'elemental' category on his armband, but he needed five total markings so that wasn't a big deal. He figured he should focus on the areas between the elemental points though, so had checked a little more carefully here.

Which led him to the station he'd found. What looked like an arrival stone from a transport pad was sitting at the base of the wall, with a ladder and sign pointing up to the top. It wasn't an elemental grouping station, and now he was curious, so he climbed the ladder and found himself at a platform sticking out over the wall.

"Welcome to the daring leap," a kunoichi greeted. "All you need to do in order to get this marking is visit my partner."

He blinked. "Your partner?"

"Down on the floating platform."

"...floating platform?" She gestured at the edge of the platform they were on, and he looked over. Sure enough, very far down, past a pile of mysteriously-floating rings, was what looked like a floating platform bobbing slightly on the ocean's surface. He gulped. "What's with the rings?"

"Pass through all the rings of a given color without breaking any of them and you get a prize. The large red ones are worth a small prize, the medium yellow ones a larger one, and the best prize comes from passing through all the small green rings. Prizes invalid if you use flying abilities as this is a test of falling, but flying down to the floating platform still gets you a marking."

"That sounds like you've turned a test into a game."

"Maybe we have. Wanna give things a shot?"

He had no clue how the rings were just floating there, and examined the patterns they formed. The red rings you could probably hit just by jumping correctly, the yellow ones would require at least a small amount of control over your fall, and the green ones were hard to see and definitely required being able to be precise in where you were going. But he'd practiced cliff-diving and avoiding obstacles, so he thought he had a chance. The biggest question was how he'd fare hitting the water.

Two minutes later he was falling through the air, twisting and turning while using bursts of wind chakra to help change the direction of his fall. Feeling the rings out with chakra instead of trying to keep them in sight was also helping, and he'd decided to go crazy and try and pass through all three sets of rings on a single trip down. The green ones were his primary focus, but they seemed set up so you could go for all of them. Barely. He nearly put his head through the last green ring thanks to detouring through the last yellow one, but managed to correct himself before he struck the ring, and then he braced for impact with the water.

Swimming over to the floating platform, noting that it seemed to be heading towards him to help, had been easy enough. His chakra needed time to recover before he'd be water-walking.

"Impressive," the shinobi on the platform said after he'd climbed aboard. "One completion marking and all three prizes!" A pat on the armband and a pulse of chakra was likely the completion marking, and then three scrolls were pulled out of seals. "The small prize is a set of explosive kunai in a single-use storage scroll, so you'll want to be ready to store them when you pull them out. The medium prize is three hot meals in a single-use storage scroll, so pay attention to the labels since once you unseal them you can't put them back in. And lastly, the large prize is a two-person tent with privacy and anti-dojutsu seals guaranteed for ten years so long as you follow the care instructions. It seals into an integrated storage tag."

Yazo accepted the three scrolls, putting them into a pouch before using the transport pad on the platform to return to the island.

Mei sighed as she looked over things on her desk. Even a couple of days away had far too much paperwork build up and she had to work her way through the backlog. Her meeting with Naruto had been less productive than hoped, but with any luck the Daimyo would be happy with the adjusted terms proposed for getting a telephone system installed in the Land of Water. Not one for inside of Kiri in general, just a couple of access points so that they could be called, but it would still help with communicating across the various islands and would connect to the 'wider network' so that calls could be made to other countries with telephones installed.

It wasn't an alliance, merely a purchase, and the back and forth negotiation trying to get more for less had been more intense than expected. Naruto was immune to her feminine charms, wasn't intimidated by her strength due to being able to wipe the floor with her, and had no need for basically anything the Land of Water currently produced. Being an island nation meant that Uzushio already handled fishing and boats, and all indications were that they did both better than the Land of Water in general.

Access for Uzushio teams to pass through the Land of Water with only notification for completing things such as seal maintenance for their customers, where Kiri didn't or couldn't provide the same services right now, was the sticking point. It was entirely reasonable from her point of view, but the Daimyo might disagree and set her back to negotiating for something else instead.

Noni had watched the genin for three days now, alternately amazed by their accomplishments and exasperated by their failures. Why someone who couldn't swim would leap into a large body of water was beyond her for one, but at least five genin had needed to be rescued from the water area for that alone. That two of those five had been saved by other genin was nice though, one causing the water to act like an octopus to drag the drowning genin to shore and the other walking across the water to drag their apparent-cousin to safety.

Both had gotten markings for that, but she wasn't sure what those markings were.

She had no clue how anyone could survive the 'daring leap' test, let alone manage to get prizes from it. Most of the genin doing that one damaged one of the rings on the way down, but a few had been shown getting prizes. From the footage, there were also at least four points where that was set up on the walls. Or maybe it moved day to day?

Seeing kids lift giant boulders, race through swinging blades, bounce across a pit of spikes when not walking upside-down on the planks over the pit, and more were all impressive in their own rights too. Then there were the ones that she felt were more her speed, like proving they could think through solving logic problems or planning out a mock mission. There were even 'get into this locked building' tests, and sneaking through an area without being spotted.

For some reason, the cameras following their every move didn't disqualify the genin on that last one.

Gaara looked over maps of the Land of Wind, mildly annoyed that he'd not been able to arrange for anything with Naruto but unable to blame his fellow leader. They were too much 'in flux' right now, populations moving around, so installing anything significant would require far too much adjustment almost immediately. No, requesting that they wait until civilian migrations stopped happening at their current levels made sense.

The Wind Daimyo wasn't going to like it though.

At least the genin were reportedly doing well. Being able to have people monitor the highlights here in Suna and runners get updates from the exams thanks to the transport pads made keeping tabs on things a lot easier. He still wasn't sold on the longer 'first stage' dance being done, but had to admit that testing individuals for skills made far more sense than testing teams for those same skills. Especially with how the finals worked.

What he definitely wasn't sure about was the 'teams can be made across village lines' aspect of the second round. Naruto hadn't cleared that with anyone...but everyone that had checked agreed that the agreements didn't forbid it. Several things believed to be required were merely traditional or assumed as well, for that matter.

It was fitting that the 'God of Paperwork' had essentially forced the rest of them to pay attention to the actual agreements and not just how things had always been done.

Okachi swore as he dodged streams of fire. He had nine markings, but only across two categories because he'd not paid proper attention to things. That alone might cost him promotion, but this test could be applied to the physical category he'd not gotten any markings for yet. Assuming he was fast enough to not get burned without blocking the fire itself, anyway, as making it through by blocking meant he would get the 'counter fire' marking instead and he didn't need any more 'elemental' markings.

Jump, duck, slide, spin around a convenient post and let the fire hit the post, backflip over that stream but drop straight to the ground to let the next one pass over him...

Ten minutes of making his way through the area, culminating in diving through a ring of fire at the end. Panting, he looked up at the kunoichi proctor, who nodded. "Good job. You got a little singed, but nothing hit you directly."

"Wooo," Okachi said. That meant he was done and could spend the night in a proper bed.

Orochimaru's eyes flicked over the scroll in front of her. She'd not expected Naruto to have no problem with handing over notes on the improved zombie seals, though she was starting to think it was because it had now been properly Uzumaki-fied. Understanding anything here was going to be nearly impossible. Trading some of Jugo's enzymes and notes on them and some spare ryo for the zombie seal notes and a basic telephone system for the Land of Sound had probably still been worth it though.

Ruri would at least be able to call a couple of her friends that were now in Uzushio...and that may very well be part of why the price had been 'reasonable'.

That request had also obviously been anticipated, because the telephone system had been installed before the end of the day and Ruri had made her first call on it after dinner. The entire thing was fascinating and infuriating at the same time, because there was no way to safely dismantle it to attempt to figure out how to duplicate it. Or just customize it further, even. Far too much of it was 'out of reach'.

Which wasn't to say that Orochimaru wasn't coming up with options anyway. There were hookup points not in use that she could assign numbers to on her own, and she had computers she thought she could interface with the system in various ways. A cradle to attach a remote unit's handset to, and a conversion of data to and from audio, could likely be used to copy information across the network. It would need some experimentation, and wouldn't be secure, but she didn't think any of her remote computers were secure against Uzushio infiltrators anyway.

With only a few hours left to go, Nize had found her team. She was happy to find that both of them had made it through, and they'd traded stories of the tests they'd found. Dotsu was the only one of the three that had dealt with zombies as anything more than a ranged target, Tazo had found but not been eligible for six different bloodline tests, and Nize herself had been the only one of the three to notice the camping test just outside of the gates. How much of that was due to the use of genjutsu and other redirections to keep people from noticing a test while someone else was in the middle of it compared to just them having different priorities was hard to tell...but not one of them had actually run into someone else being tested.

Zero interaction during an actual test, with that many participants, over five days? It felt impossible, but some questioning of others that appeared to be done confirmed it...with the exception of tests that ended up using one genin's failure as the launching point for a different genin's test. Patching up injuries or rescuing a now-stuck genin being the examples they'd gotten. Outside of those they had no stories of anyone seeing someone else being tested at all.

It baffled all of them, and had gotten the others they'd asked thinking as well.

But eventually they had to focus on other things, so she changed the subject. "Do you think we get to choose teams, or is that going to be forced on us?"

Dotsu frowned as he processed that. "I hope that we get to choose, but I don't think that was specified."

Tazo shook his head. "I checked with sensei and we get to pick teams, we're just not limited to our village or allied villages. We should be able to stick together unless we think that splitting up is a better plan."

"Oh good. We're reasonably balanced across our specialities. Ending up on a single-focus team when going into a team combat round would be horrible even before not being familiar with your teammates."

Nize had to agree with that. "So we're good there. Think we should get ahead of things on resupplying ourselves? We just spent most of a week running around and eating into our rations at a minimum. I didn't really touch my weapon pouch, but if you two did..."

Tazo grimaced. "Lost half my pouch to a bad decision on the second day, so yeah, I should pick up some replacements. Grabbing replacement rations is a good idea too, because I don't know how long we'll have before we get thrown into the next stage."

Finding suitable stores hadn't taken long, and the prices were more than reasonable. Better than back home, and everything came in storage scrolls. They all ended up getting more than they'd normally carry just because the offerings looked to be higher-quality than they were used to for the price, and she'd never even considered dragging some of the food on offer on a mission before finding pre-filled scrolls on the shelf. The only problem was that all of the scrolls were single-use so they couldn't unseal them to examine them ahead of time.