105

Orochi wasn't all that interested in the actual fighting, having a pretty good idea who was going to prove they were ready for promotion and who wouldn't in her genin. Not that they'd be her people for much longer, officially speaking, but for the remainder of the exam they still were on paper. She was more concerned with other things, like how to convince Tsunade and possibly Jiraiya to accept some kind of treatment to extend their lifespans a bit. It felt very much wrong to have been the only one of the three of them to have managed to get an extended lifespan not tied to immortality. Especially when it had been entirely unintentional thanks to body-hopping and the beast-man formula.

Somewhat as expected, it turned out that Tsunade was very much conservative with experimentation and had been appalled at even minor items. Such as the incredibly simple technique that had been used to replace 'Orochimaru' with 'Orochi' in her own self-identification. It wasn't even remotely dangerous when performed on herself, only really having any problems at all if performed by someone on another individual instead of themselves, and it was even safer for shortening an existing name.

After how badly Tsunade had reacted to the news it had been done, though? No way was any mention being made of the variant used to fully excise subconsciously thinking of herself as a man. The only way that was being mentioned out loud anywhere was if the Yamanaka therapists found an indication that it'd been used and needed an explanation, and possibly not even then.

Unfortunately, coming up with solutions for extending the lifespans of others had never really been a priority or something she'd had any real success in. What little she had in prior research had generally ended up being failures, though the unexpected success of the beast-man formula once properly perfected was mildly annoying in that respect. Mostly from the 'it took an accident and someone else looking at things to perfect' point of view, but also in the problems it presented for her teammates. Tsunade didn't want to end up part summon slug and Jiraiya didn't want to end up part summon toad, but all indications were that those were the most likely results for the two at this point if they were ever exposed to any variant of the formula.

It was going to be hard to find anyone to experiment on as well, and not just for the duration of the pregnancy. No, it would years before she could reasonably run off and attempt things, assuming that she could bring herself to do so at all. She'd been...far more conservative with her own experimentation, to put it lightly, since settling into this body and felt it was likely a mixing of her host's original morals with her own. This mostly showed in her choice of test subjects, and she'd admittedly not held Ruri back as much as others seemed to think she should've, but it made a lot of experimentation much more problematic than it used to be.

Tsunade shook her head as she examined Tayuya. "I'm going to have to call in someone to put a proper block on your seal for the time being."

The girl looked incredibly offended at that. "What the fuck? You've not done so to any of the others!"

"Because the others aren't currently in the first stages of pregnancy and the seal is preventing me from getting a complete picture of things. It's possible that with the seal blocked we could safely abort the pregnancy, but I can't risk attempting that right now with how it interacts with my chakra."

That had the girl's entire attitude change, eyes going wide as she dropped to a near-whisper. "I'm...pregnant?"

"Yes. Somewhere between three and six days from when the zygote settled into the uterus. It's very early and I almost didn't notice because of that."

"But..."

"I highly doubt that you had an expert medic do the work for you, so I assume you probably got drunk."

She flinched. "No, I don't drink. Ever."

"Then I assume you likely remember the events that led to your condition."

"But I was supposed to be barren!"

"Your records from Oto indicate that Ruri fixed that six months ago. Orochi thought it unlikely to 'take', but it appears she was wrong."

"...the brat actually managed it? I might owe her an apology."

"Now then, we can either go with the short-term blocking for a quick abortion or..."

"I'm not giving it up."

Tsunade was honestly a bit surprised about that. The girl gave off an air of very much not wanting to be a mother. Though if she'd thought it was actually impossible then that might've been overreacting to cover disappointment? That was someone else's job to work with her on though. "Then I guess I'm going to have to get a proper seal master to stop by to block your seal for the duration of the pregnancy."

Not to mention grabbing Ruri to have her explain what she'd actually done to keep the enzymes from the 'cursed seal' from preventing pregnancy.

Naruto looked over the remaining genin after the morning's matches. "With the defeat of yesterday's free pass recipient, we've now met the official minimum requirements for the single-combat side of things. While there being eight of you means that we could trivially continue with one-on-one fights for the rest of the day, that's frankly a bit boring and repetitive. Besides, we're reasonably certain we know who's going to get promotions anyway."

"You just want to punish the betting groups that ignored the request to not take bets for the full bracket," Onoki commented.

Ignoring the comment, Naruto gestured and sensor spheres manifested over each of the genin. "These will allow us to directly monitor your progress." To show how, holographic versions of the genin and their immediate surroundings appeared in the air over them, arranged evenly over the arena floor. As they were bunched up there were multiple of each showing. In the middle of the eight was a representation of the current central forest and arena. "There are exactly eight scrolls hidden in the forest. You have two hours to get your hands on two of them and return here. Any of you who do not have two scrolls at the end of the two hours will be eliminated, and we'll figure out if we're doing proper matches when we find out how many of you are left." He paused, snapped his fingers, and timers appeared in the holograms. Already running down. "You might want to get moving."

As soon as all of the genin had left the arena the map lit up with markers to show where each genin was and where each scroll was.

"Interesting challenge," Shisui noted. "But needing to find hidden scrolls and fight each other might take more than two hours."

"The eight scroll markers are on the outer edge of the forest ring," Gaara pointed out. "All of them are moving fast enough to easily reach them, and in fact seem to have split to head directly to one each."

"Didn't hide them at all," Naruto replied. "There are large glowing 'scroll here' signs over each one."

"Interesting."

"And those will remain over any non-destroyed scroll until the two hours are up or they enter the arena."

It didn't take long for all eight genin to have a scroll, and then they started heading for each other. Interestingly, this happened in two groups of four, though the initial fights were pairs that had been close enough to each other. Murmuring had people assuming that those coming in from further out were hoping for a quick win against someone who'd tired themselves out in a fight already.

One pair of 'not yet fighting' genin spotted each other, then obviously signaled across the clearing the fighting pair was in. Uzushio on one side, Oto on the other, and after some back and forth they did a combination technique that hit the fighting pair with a multi-layered genjutsu. A couple of minutes later they were both trivially knocked out and their scrolls taken, the pair working together then obviously heading straight back to the arena.

The other side of things quickly shifted to a three-way battle, every genin for themselves, and around forty-five minutes later into a five-way battle as the two genin who had lost their scrolls joined in. Off to the side was the lone genin not participating in the fighting, at least until they darted in and used stealth to grab a scroll from one of the three holding one. At that point they booked it back to the arena, joining the two that had already returned.

At the two-hour mark a horn blared and an announcement informed the five outside that they'd been eliminated. When they realized that there were two scrolls out there and not four they'd all looked angry with themselves.

"Congratulations," Naruto said to the trio in the arena. "You three ignored the obvious answer of fighting things out as individuals and went for more intelligent tactics. Once cleanup is done outside we'll move to a final three-way match between you for the finale."

Hinata scowled as she and a couple of clones dug through Naruto's island documentation, trying to find the documentation that they'd obviously missed on the sensor spheres and holographic projection of their information.

"You could just ask one of us," one of Naruto's clones commented from the door.

She looked up at him. "It seems big enough that I should've spotted it already."

"Fairly certain you just didn't spot the implications, honestly."

"As in, this is just showing off a different use of a seemingly unrelated system?"

"Yep."

"Which one?"

"Combination of the island monitoring routines and the arena's projection system. The latter was tripled up on for redundancy reasons and the additional projection units were easy enough to use for other things when not needed for primary functions."

She considered that, and glanced at her clones, before blinking. "Wait, the island monitoring system is just a bunch of stationary 'wide area search' nodes, isn't it?"

He nodded. "Yep."

"Manifesting following versions was entirely unneeded, wasn't it?"

"No, those were needed for the detailed display output. The stationary nodes can't provide that level of detail at range and aren't spread densely enough in the dome."

"But you included code somewhere in the system for mobile nodes."

"Yes. The ones that track intruders that make it outside of permitted areas, that randomly pass through secure but supposedly-unoccupied areas, do the daily detailed checks of various systems to look for significant wear and tear, and of course monitor specific people when told to. Admittedly, for the latter I temporarily designated the eight as not permitted in the dome."

Okay, she'd known about all of those, but hadn't thought of them as they were 'background' items for security and maintenance and not 'out in the open' items. Frowning, she realized that she'd helped with the code on a few. "And the display aspect is just pushing things to the arena projectors instead of screens in the control rooms. How long have you been planning this?"

"Since about a week before the reveal of the island."

"I hate it when you think several steps ahead of everyone else."

"Not like you haven't done the same for your own projects."

He had a point, though her projects were generally far smaller in scope.

Onoki was mildly amused at the five genin who had been eliminated in the scroll battle having been marked down for blindly going into fighting like that, especially the two who'd been defeated once and then didn't think 'maybe we need to rethink our strategy'. They just finished going through the larger group of genin for promotions or reasoning why they weren't being promoted, and he'd been happy to announce the promotion of the kunoichi that'd bowed out after the second stage as part of things. She'd obviously not expected it.

Knowing when to bow out was a decent quality of its own.

"No summoning contracts today?" A questioned.

"We've only got a few left and none of them indicated interest today," Naruto explained.

"So," Onoki said. "When do you officially take 'ownership' of the Land of Sound?"

"Tomorrow morning, though Orochi here gave permission to do basically all the cleanup and build-out already so I've finished basically all that. With no major roads through the country there isn't a lot of benefit to a contact point either, though I have built out the docks into a proper port facility. That'll save time when dealing with countries further North."

"You could've just worked with us to build a port."

"Along which cliff?"

"I suppose that's a fair enough point."

"Still, before we depart to congratulate or berate our genin, I'll warn you that I'm starting construction in three days. Information packets are being dropped off in the appropriate places for general notices this afternoon."

The only reason to notify all of them was for something big, and he was acting like this was something they should already know about. But the only big thing that had come up recently was...the replacement moon.

"Are you going to broadcast anything useful for the masses?" Gaara asked.

"I'm planning on broadcasting some entertaining bits," Naruto replied. "But not everything and probably nothing 'useful'. Some of the construction is obviously going to be considered sensitive information and will need to be handled carefully to avoid being picked up by people with telescopes too. Of course, the first step is removing the remains of the destroyed moon, which will impact tides. Dedicated warnings are going to areas where tides are important for fishing and similar."

"There aren't many areas that would apply to," Shisui pointed out. "Land of Waves, maybe?"

"Here there aren't. The tides are global."

"...how far does your information network reach these days?"

"Probably easier to ask where it doesn't reach. There seems to be a frozen-over continent that nobody lives on that we've not expanded to."

The most annoying part of that statement was that the only surprising piece of it was the frozen-over continent. Checking for updates to shared maps would be needed to see where that might be.

Hiruzen looked around at the group sitting at the table, wondering how things had come to this. His team had gone from loyal to scattered and then come back together again under the weirdest circumstances. "I'd heard that Orochimaru was female now, but hadn't really followed most of the details."

"It's Orochi now," the chipmunk-woman corrected.

"Orochi Senju," Tsunade added. "As of this morning, anyway. Being made to take that on officially myself is a little annoying. My father wasn't one and the family tradition was to avoid clan names, something I was happy with following."

"I see," Hiruzen said, looking over at Jiraiya. Who seemed fine with this development. "And you've gotten yet another medic to tell you that you'll likely never have children?"

"Yep," Jiraiya replied. "Though admittedly, Tsunade was under the impression that she'd never have a child either. Intentionally screwed up her Strength of a Hundred seal to ensure that she couldn't have kids after Dan died, and here she is having a daughter with Orochi."

"I suppose that's a fair point. Though there does appear to be a...physical age difference involved."

Tsunade snorted as she glanced at Orochimaru. Orochi? Didn't feel like the chipmunk-woman fit either, honestly. "She's almost adorable with how concerned she is about that. I've caught her trying to figure out life-extension tricks several times now."

"I'm liable to severely outlive you," the woman replied. "Which seems unfair to our daughter."

"Short of being killed in a fight I'm still liable to outlive you. Senju and Uzumaki seem to either die in combat or live way too long. A couple of the Uzumaki running around Uzushio today were already grandparents when Konoha was founded and likely have decades left in them."

"She's got a point," Hiruzen noted. "Though supposedly Uzushio has some life-extending treatments figured out too."

"Seven so far, yes. Eight if you squint and ignore that there's no way to apply that one to more than ten people, all of which have already been affected. I'm...far less likely to deploy things here in Konoha, as we really don't seem ready for people living that long, but Karin and Sakura forced me to accept the treatments that counteracted some of the damage I'd done to myself over the years."

Orochi looked betrayed. "They've already got solutions?"

"If you play nice and pass my medic-nin evaluation then you'll be permitted to go over and study with Karin and Sakura. Then you'll just need to convince them to give you access to the records."

"They were involved in the 'prank' that led to exposing me to the beast-man formula."

"Only because you went after records you weren't entitled to. Besides, you have enough of your own experimental results to trade."

"Perhaps."

This was definitely a bit of a weird reunion. Meeting Ruri was also on his to-do list before likely going and finding a nice out of the way hotspring. Every time he wandered back this way he found out that things had gone crazier.

Sarnai looked over the information that had been left in the 'confirmed for release' pile...without anyone actually confirming it. She was reasonably certain it was someone's idea of a joke, but copies had been left all over the country and the various news distribution groups had let the public know. At the very least they'd been intelligent enough to realize it was likely a prank as well, but the science portions included were very well-written.

Then last night someone had installed impossibly-thin color screens all over the country, and possibly all over other countries. In every government office, plus gathering points for the people. All with countdown timers running, indicating that they'd start showing what was happening with the moon when the timers hit zero.

Thus, she was sitting in a nearby bar with the information, instead of in her office. According to the timeline provided, first the destroyed moon would start to be dismantled to make way for a new one. It was a seemingly-farcical claim, but so were invulnerable superpowered flying metal islands and the entire concept of true Gods and teleportation. Sadly, they had first-hand information on a flying superweapon island and an entire team that had been teleported to a place of divine worship.

Reaching a decent point to stop, she put the paperwork down and checked her drink. She didn't need a refill yet, and took a sip as she glanced up at the screen. The countdown was nearing zero, and people were moving into better positions to see what the screens showed. For her part, she turned to the telescope sticking out the window and sighted it on the remains of the moon.

As the time hit zero, the screen went blank for a moment. Then it snapped into what certainly looked like a close-up of the remains of the moon. Teams of oddly-similar people then started flying around as if gravity was a mere suggestion. Text on the screen indicated that they were preparing to blow apart chunks for easier removal, though how lines of paper tags would manage that wasn't explained.

Turning back to the telescope, she took a look...and while she couldn't see details, she could see that something was happening around the remains of the moon. Which said disturbing things about whatever force was behind all of this, given the estimates for how far away said moon was. But if they were connected to the flying island, the teleporting holy people, or both then it wouldn't exactly be a surprise, honestly.

Dismantling and removing the remains of the destroyed moon had taken longer than expected because of remaining effects from both the original creation and the power core that'd imploded. Eventually they'd given up on dismantling the core of the remains and had just shifted them into another dimension to either sit there or be examined later. Naruto and Yoko had decided to take two days off after that, as opening that portal had been incredibly draining.

Naruto had noted that they'd also caused a bit of a panic, because the two of them having signs of low-level chakra exhaustion was entirely unexpected and frightening to those who recognized it.

Two days turned into a week as other items came up, diplomatic meetings with people wanting to complain that Uzushio couldn't just do this kind of thing unilaterally coupled with Yoko needing to do head priestess things. Naruto told all of those complaining that they were welcome to stake a claim to parts of orbit when they could reach it. Then he'd also added that he was confirmed to be descended from the Sage of Six Paths and his brother, who had made the moon just removed, and considered this in part cleaning up problems his ancestors had left sitting around.

Yoko's side of things had been far, far less annoying in a general sense. Testing a priest to confirm that he was ready to take on a shrine, starting the process of identifying where said shrine would be, and taking information on a believed 'pretender shrine' off to the West from a concerned traveler.

They'd look into that last one more closely later.

Futo looked over at the screens as the countdown neared zero, then at the sky. "So you think you've made a telescope spell that will let us get a much better view."

Wame nodded. "Yes sir. It worked quite well during the end of the dismantling, when they obviously moved the core of the remains into another dimension. Let them crash down next to a mountain, it looked like?"

"Interesting."

"The math looks reasonable enough," Odoroki said as she flipped through the book of equations. "Clever trick, really, combining aspects of sensor spells with a display effect. Doesn't require sending magic out over the distance either, which keeps the energy cost down."

Futo nodded as the timer hit zero. Approximately eight seconds later the screen was showing a team of clones spreading out over an area, and Wame started casting her spell. A moment later the air shimmered above them and a very clear picture of things appeared, including the opening tear across dimensional boundaries that wasn't shown on the screens. The first pieces of things were brought through that, a pre-assembled core and a collection of bolt-on anchors to attach to it. Plus the giant bolts.

The bolts alone dwarfed the clones moving things into position.

As they understood it, the first week or two was going to be purely structural items, assembling a literal central anchor point for everything else to build off of. Nothing powered would come in for another week or two afterwards, but anchor seals to help with targeting spells to move things across dimensional lines were supposedly involved in the core pieces. He'd not attempted to figure it all out, and wasn't sure if they were cleared for most of the details anyway.

On the other hand, Naruto probably needed to know how much was able to be seen with this spell.

"So," Futo said, turning to Wame. "What made you think about creating this?"

Wame grinned in response. "I'd actually been examining the remains of the moon before knowing that they were going to be removed. Normal telescopes just couldn't give me enough detail and I didn't think that we'd be able to get anyone out there."

"Ah, a personal curiosity project that turns out to be great for observing work in progress."

"Yep."

"Doesn't help with explaining how they're going to install those bolts though."

All of them looked at the image above them, likely all considering that the bolts really shouldn't be possible. You'd need a tool far too large to operate to secure the things properly, even if teams of clones were likely able to get them started well enough.

Naruto grinned as they finished up the second day of work, getting the last of the central anchor pieces into place. The last bolt was just being started now, and was probably two rotations away from the last seals making contact and activating the entire array. Waiting for that was actually a little annoying because the bolts took forever to turn by hand like this, but when they got enough momentum for the bolt to clear the seal connection point they let go and let it spin to that point on its own.

Even the clones didn't want to be in contact with any of the bolts when the seals connected, and as they did so that caution was demonstrated as a good thing. The seals inscribed on everything lit up and the support struts themselves suddenly pulled together into their fully-assembled positions, some of them swinging quite a bit as they moved into position, before the bolts all started spinning themselves into place. At quite high speed, with what would've been a resounding clang if there was enough atmosphere to transmit sounds as they all settled into place basically simultaneously.

Less obvious to most was that the threads of the bolts and the bolt-holes were currently being welded together by the seals, as were all the other contact surfaces. The bolts were more 'extra insurance' than required in this case, on top of being a good show. Besides, if someone thought they had a hope of causing sabotage by going after the bolts that were already incapable of being undone then that would keep them from messing with other elements.

Once the seals seemed to have finished up the clones moved back in, producing measurement tools. If anything was more than a millimeter out of position then they had to figure that out now, before moving to the next steps. Even half a millimeter would be possibly concerning as things expanded out from here, depending on where in the structure things were off. Luckily the use of a number of tricks and tools would allow them to take incredibly detailed measurements reasonably quickly.

Kin looked up at the barely-visible structure floating in the sky. It'd been over a week since the new construction had started and if you knew where to look it was a speck.

"Hard to believe that there's a construction project up there," Neji said.

"Can't you see it better than I can?" Kin questioned, giving him a look.

"Supposedly."

"So you should be able to see some details."

"It's an occasionally-shiny speck in the sky when it's in the right position relative to the Sun. There's only so much we can do at this distance without some kind of magic telescope, but it'll become more visible as the larger pieces are brought in."

"Huh."

"Still, we should probably get moving. As annoying as it is, some of the clan's traditions exist for good reasons. They can't put you down on the clan roster as a member if not informed."

She nodded and allowed him to pull her to her feet. "Not sure why you're so concerned about this now though.'

"Because you've started pushing for possibly having a child after your weird talk with Orochimaru."

"Just Orochi now, apparently."

"Whatever. Until you're on the clan roster we can't use that as an argument for keeping me from long-term missions during a pregnancy and that could affect the formation of the byakugan in the child."

"Wait, really?"

"Yes."

"Huh."

Kakashi looked over the group of twenty formerly-Oto shinobi that had finally passed their initial evaluations. Granted, he couldn't blame them for 'moon-what?' delays. This was also only the portion of them that were interested in covert work, not that they were going to be trusted for infiltration training for a few years. But there were plenty of other things they could be tasked with.

"Not sure any of them could sneak their way past a civilian," Obito commented.

"We haven't asked them to try yet," Kakashi pointed out.

"True, but they all stand out far too much.'

"And being able to be stealthy despite that is a known skill."

"That I highly doubt they have."

The semi-rehearsed discussion had the intended effect of annoying the group. "Well, their first test is simple enough, swapping their tokens in the base of the statue in the town over the hill without being identified as shinobi by any of the watchers."

"Fat chance of that for most of them."

A few minutes later the entire group had dispersed and Kakashi pulled out a book. "Most optimistic guess is that four of them manage it, and only because they're not as bad as the others."

"I'm actually assuming five," Obito answered as he pulled out a snack box.

"...five?"

"Two of the kunoichi pulled out changing booths in seals and seem to understand that they need to wear civilian-style clothing."

Blinking, he activated the sharingan in one of his eyes and scanned the area. "Really now. How did you spot that without a sharingan? The genjutsu effect seems to be working fine."

"Not my fault you assume I don't have skills, but the assessments said that they assumed none of them would think to have a change of clothing on them."

"Which is why we're testing them instead of assuming they'll fail, yes. I'm pleasantly surprised that a couple of them have brains and wonder if some of the others just moved further out before deciding to do the same."

Over the course of the following three hours they'd actually get six passes, exceeding all of their expectations on numbers. That all of the passes were kunoichi wasn't a surprise though, as Orochi had regularly pointed out that the kunoichi were on average the more intelligent members of Oto's forces. The fourteen failures would get another test in a week to see if they could learn from their mistakes.