114

Naruto stood up and looked over the sixteen chunin standing in the large arena, this one large enough to put four complete 'chunin exam' size arenas inside of it with their surrounding stadiums. The chunin noticed him standing up first and came to attention, and the crowd quickly quieted down. His clones confirmed that most of the areas he was monitoring had also calmed down, so he nodded. "Congratulations on reaching this point, and for making it through the past month without serious injury. I won't lie, today some of you are merely confirming that you're ready for promotion while others among you have not proven that you're ready yet."

There were worried looks from a couple of the chunin, A in particular nodding behind him, but he just waited a moment before continuing. "That said, today we will be starting with matches that we know at least some of you prepared for. You proved that you could work with someone forced upon you in the previous stage, some more willingly than others. Today your first match will be against the one that you had been partnered with, and you will be fighting in order of when you first acquired the full set of tokens you needed."

Even the other leaders seemed to be shocked at that declaration, Mei looking at the back of his head like he was crazy. He ignored that. "To be absolutely clear, you are to treat all of today's battles against each other as incapacitate and capture missions, as though your opponents need to be interrogated about what intelligence they hold or have already sent on to others. Any death can be considered to be a high-level mission failure and will be a black mark on your records. Chunin can afford to prioritize combat victory and survival over their mission, but jounin need to have the control needed to pull their punches when necessary. Do not make the proctors step in."

He waved for the team of proctors to take over, the arena too large to leave to one for monitoring, and sat down.

"You partnered them in 'worst case scenario' pairings for the previous stage," Kurotsuchi said once the little 'one or more cameras are focused on the box' light went out. "And now you're pitting them against each other?"

"Of course," Naruto replied. "They had to play nice, now they get to vent frustrations after having a month to 'calm down'. That it happens to itself be close to a worst-case scenario just makes it a better test. This is basically putting them in an 'ally you worked with recently has gone traitor to your team/village' situation. Both sides know some of each other's skills and preferred tactics, but not to the level of a teammate you've worked with for years going traitor."

"I don't like how much sense that makes," Mei admitted. "But it does, and is something that jounin need to be able to deal with. Anyone making it through to their own village or allies thereof afterwards is getting the effect ramped up a bit."

"Yep."

Hinata watched the energy levels as the arena shifted from 'semi-grassy field' to 'mountain valley' for the first match. It was the choice of arena for the Kumo chunin that was worse-placed for promotion in the first match, with the Uzushio chunin's preference having been forest. Enough energy to fully charge a chunin exam stadium's environment-changing seals had been consumed for the changeover, but you could do that twenty times in a row here before things ran dry.

The system was also already charging back up, drawing on the massive energy reservoirs available. It would take maybe twenty minutes to recover from the change, though that could be sped up significantly. When at less than a quarter charge it would request a higher priority from the energy distribution network, which in most cases would get it up to full charge in at most thirty minutes total so long as nothing else major was drawing on things.

She'd not checked the overall priority list, but knew that the atmospheric and protective shield systems were high priority items, with the motive systems for keeping the moon in orbit below them. The lights across the moon would turn off before those would be shut down, though she wasn't sure where the transport pads and several other evacuation systems Naruto had in place sat. Of course, shinobi using the pads could power them anyway, so they only had to worry about pads moving civilians or where most trips were with the one activating them not on the pad.

Shaking her head, she switched to the moon's overall energy report. On there the increase in draw from the arena recharging wasn't even registering.

"Don't suppose you have any clue what the 'standby' level is rated for on the protections," Kumin asked from where he was poking through things. "Because all I've been able to figure out is that it's quarter-power."

"I honestly don't know," Hinata admitted. "Naruto said something about rating things based on high-velocity rogue planets, but I have no idea if that was a joke or not. If it wasn't a joke, I don't know if that was simulated or if he actually found a way to test things. By the time he got to that point I'd also lost track of whether that was the full-strength protections, the standby ones, or even if he was talking about the moon or the planet itself."

"Extending the protective bubble to cover the planet would be insane."

Oops, right, he didn't know about the satellite grid's other functionality. Though thinking about it, she wouldn't be surprised if Naruto had planned for that, or for the satellite grid to expand what it projected to cover the moon. "For anyone other than Naruto? Perhaps."

"I suppose. Not sure why the moon needs large-scale protections at all though."

"Because there were signs that the old one took semi-regular hits from things moving around the star system and having one of those strike a population center would be horrible."

"Oh. You know, that would explain why the old one had so many craters, wouldn't it?"

...there were times that she thought that some of their divisions spent too much time focused on their specialty stuff and not enough time on general science knowledge.

Fu had been surprised that she and Doyuki had been the third pair of the eight that passed to get their four tokens, and more surprised that she was obviously favored to progress based on his preferred terrain coming up. Her preference was 'basically impossible to function in unless you can fly' though, because if she was going to have an advantage then she wanted a proper advantage.

His preference was a mixed-environment setup that provided plenty of places for him to hide and take advantage of his stealth tricks. She'd planned ahead and stuck four different insects on him to aid in keeping track of him.

They'd been started at opposite ends of the arena, instead of being in striking range as was common in chunin exams. In fact, at the time the match started they hadn't been able to see each other at all, which he tried to take advantage of. But she was familiar enough with his chakra to pick him out anyway, even without the insects she'd gotten on him while watching the first two matches.

It was also obvious that he had no clue how to take the fight to her while she was in the air, on top of not expecting her to go straight for him despite using every one of his stealth tricks.

Annoyingly, the bulk of what she'd practiced in the past month was too likely to cause significant harm or death, so she couldn't use any of it. But she could drop down from the sky to knock Doyuki out of the ground before trying to hit him with capture nets, which almost worked twice. He changed his tactics a little though, to make it so that when she did that she'd have less time to hit him before he could get away.

Grumbling, she decided it was time to reveal one of her new tricks and formed a cross with the fingers of her hands. Eighteen paperwork clones appeared around her, which she thought was pretty good for only wanting two. They split into two groups, nine preparing sticky web nets and the other nine getting ready to slam the ground and force Doyuki to the surface. He seemed to realize that something was wrong as the clones were approaching him though, which just made things easier as he'd partially surfaced to take a proper look up.

One of the clones got him in the face with sticky webbing before the 'knock him out of the ground' clones even reached him.

A minute later she had a fully trussed-up opponent.

Davaa shook his head as he watched the matches being broadcast from the moon. The people participating were obviously far superior combatants to anything in the armies of this continent, at least since the weird blue crystals stopped aiding one group. It felt like those might've come from where these fighters did, but he couldn't be certain. Several people around him were assuming this was some kind of staged film though, but they'd never met the fox-featured priestess.

Right now, his assumption was that there was a continent with a number of fighters descended from the gods in some way. It would certainly explain the abilities they seemed to have, especially how so many of them obviously defied the laws of physics. Add in that several of them so far had non-human features, the latest being the girl with insect features including wings, and the biggest question became 'why there and not here?'

He wasn't sure anyone would have an answer for that though. The gods had obviously preferred where these fighters came from. Why probably didn't matter, if he was being honest with himself, and was probably ancient history by now. If they were all family then spending most of their time together would also make sense for why they hadn't spread, and there were dozens of other possibilities. Some kind of special food that grew there, a holy place that made it easier to come and go, pure chance that they picked that part of the planet...or even that there were gods all over the planet, but the local ones died off or left while the ones there had descendants.

Whatever it was, watching them proving themselves in combat inside of an arena that could become whatever environment was desired for the next fight was fascinating and terrifying in equal measures. The flying island reportedly had a small group of fighters that could do impossible things, originally attributed to intentionally falsified information or hallucinations when it had stopped a couple of times. The three fights so far had shown that what was reported was barely even scratching the surface of what these fighters could do, lending a lot more legitimacy to the reports themselves.

Baisho was worried as he entered the arena, because he was almost positive that he still had no way to seriously inconvenience Sasori. Being honest with himself, he'd hoped to have the man lose out to someone else in this round, or for things to be set up so that they'd only fight their partners from the previous stage in the finals if both sides made it that far. To have the entire first round of fights be going up against their previous partners intentionally hadn't been in his predictions at all.

Sadly, if he had predicted it then he probably still wouldn't have changed his training. He had no good ideas for getting around the skills Sasori had shown, and the Raikage was unlikely to be impressed by his impending crushing defeat.

The signal to start was given, and he slapped an illusion of a solid wall on one cave mouth before darting into another. He worked best in confined areas and had come up with a few new traps while trying to get his direct combat skills up over the month. Getting to a more advantageous position would be needed before he started laying traps out though, and he was somewhat hoping that Sasori would cross the arena outside of the caves before starting to search the caves themselves.

He got lucky and found a solidly-defendable cave structure before being found and started laying lines of traps while plotting his own sight lines for attacking puppets as they approached. Along the ground or through the air, maybe even crawling along the ceiling? Didn't matter. One line of traps went at the far end of things, manually-triggered where he hoped Sasori would end up standing while directing his puppets.

Unfortunately, the first puppets showed up before he was halfway done with the traps, not having even started on his thoughts on collapsing part of the ceiling. Worse, it was a trio coming in with no obvious sign of Sasori. That was...worrisome, and one of the three stayed back while the other two headed his way. It was acting like it was the puppeteer, instead of needing Sasori to be around. The first line of traps was tripped by the other two puppets though, and one ended up entangled in reinforced wire. That wasn't enough to stop the other one though, which ignored his direct attacks as it tore through two more lines of traps while the entangled puppet was freed by the one that had stayed back.

Another group of three puppets showed up while the fourth line of traps was being tested, and he tried triggering a couple of the manual-activation traps to take them out before they could join in on trying to reach him. That didn't work, but he got a good shot in on the first group's 'leader' puppet in the distraction. The puppet's head came off, and the two puppets it had come in with had fallen over at the same time.

It didn't take long for the new group's 'leader' to reach out to and start controlling the two puppets, bringing it up to four it was apparently controlling. That wasn't enough of a hindrance for it to provide any new opening though, and he was quickly overwhelmed and captured by the puppets...without Sasori making an appearance at all. One of the puppets gathered up the damaged one as they dragged him out of the cave, Sasori coming out of a different one as they emerged.

The fucker had figured out how to make his puppets work without even needing to be near them...though in hindsight, the Uzukage seemed to treat puppets that way too. Having others in Uzushio's forces be able to do the same thing really shouldn't be a surprise, and wanting access to that secret was possibly one of the best ways to convince Sasori to join up.

A shook his head. "That was honestly a better performance than I expected from Baisho."

"He obviously didn't expect Sasori to be able to split up on his own," Shisui noted. "But if that hadn't been shown before then that's understandable."

"Managing to disable one puppet with how tough they are is no easy feat," Naruto noted. "Especially as they aren't weak to lightning and Baisho is particularly strong there, but it seems that he didn't really look for ways around the failures to harm Sasori previously."

"I saw the footage," A said with a frown. "And I don't know how I'd handle Sasori with only a month to prepare either. That wasn't enough time to build up proper muscles to crush the puppets."

"Good luck with that unless you find weak points to exploit like Baisho lucked out with."

"You know that I'm very strong."

"Sasori is using wood release wood with reinforcement seals making it stronger these days."

That...would make crushing the puppets incredibly difficult. That Baisho managed to damage one at all was far more impressive knowing that.

Sazen scowled as he took to the trees. His area-of-effect lightning was obviously putting him as the expected winner of this fight, which meant that he had to deal with the Aburame working best in a forest environment. That he'd worked on making it even better at frying insects over the past month probably hadn't helped the evaluations, and he'd already taken care of several that had landed on him before they'd even been called down.

For now he had a constant flow of lightning chakra over his body to prevent others from landing, and when he started seeing scouting insects he resisted the urge to start hitting them. His opponent knowing where he was would likely be to his own advantage anyway, as the more insects that swarmed the faster he could kill them.

The puppet was the first thing to make an appearance. Oh how he'd wanted to fry that thing a month ago, and now he had his chance. A massive blast of lightning chakra was sent out, one that should bounce around inside of the confined space of the puppet between any bits of metal inside of it. No attempt to dodge happened, and the attack hit the puppet head-on...only to seemingly sputter out. A moment later the puppet started moving again too, though it seemed to leave a couple of holes in the ground?

Fuck. The thing had grounding spikes.

Well, he wasn't only good with lightning, and had some practice at manipulating earth to stop it conducting. Dropping out of the trees, he channeled a wave of earth chakra under the puppet to harden it into stone before sending another lightning attack at the puppet. This time the grounding spikes failed to even penetrate the stone, pushing the puppet up a little before retracting again, and the lightning...still sputtered out?

What the hell?

Realizing that a number of insects had gathered around him, he generated an expanding orb of insect-frying lightning chakra to clear the area while he decided how to handle the puppet. For some reason the puppet wasn't approaching him now, so he might've caused enough damage to it despite the last attack not seeming to be...

"Ouch," Shisui said he watched Sazen fall over after being struck from behind. "Getting him overly-focused on the puppet was obviously a good plan."

"He didn't notice that there was an airborne knockout drug around him either," Naruto said. "I believe that one has the effect of dulling chakra senses in lower concentrations, which seems like it was the actual goal."

"Ah, that one. I hadn't realized he'd gotten his hands on some of it."

"Now I'm annoyed," Kurotsuchi said, shaking her head. "Because that sounds like an incredibly useful drug and it'll take us a few years to get our hands on a sample to start working with."

Mentioning that it was actually a side effect of trying to come up with improved training methods was probably a bad idea. Training chakra sensing under the influence of it resulted in far better skills when it wasn't present, though you also built up resistance to the drug in general. After three months of training you were immune to the drug in its entirety and had to hope that you got enough training improvement out of it to make it worth it.

Still, Shino had used excellent tactics against an enemy that should have had him on the back foot for the fight and had come out as the first one that had been favored to lose to manage a victory instead.

They'd taken a break for lunch before bringing the eight chunin back in, and Naruto was personally amazed that they'd made it through the first eight fights in such a short period of time. Nobody had bothered playing with their opponents, all treating things seriously, which was appreciated. He looked over the group. "So, you've all proven yourselves in a round of combat. That is required, but the treaty allows the village leaders of remaining participants to unanimously agree that additional single-round bouts aren't needed once down under ten remaining shinobi. I checked with the others here, and even the Tsuchikage agreed despite having had both of her shinobi eliminated in their fights."

Several of the chunin looked pleased, as though they were done. As if.

"As such," he continued as the ground started to rumble under the feet of the chunin. "We're going to see how long you can survive a zombie apocalypse."

The first zombies started to crawl out of the ground around the chunin, which they very obviously weren't ready for, and the fight was on. Despite the surprise, they still handled the first zombies well and then started to move mostly as a group towards the center of the arena. Hopefully that was because they'd noticed that there were more zombies spawning around the outer edge of the arena to make it very much not a good place to hunker down.

Fu was the major exception, having taken to the air and started hitting further-out zombies with wider-scale attacks.

Sasori had fifty puppets out under his direct control and another twenty being controlled by paperwork puppeteer clones. This, combined with Fu's work in the air, had been enough to give the others time to set up more static defenses. Luckily Uzushio pushed for all basic elements, providing them with the ability to get walls up, and the Kiri group was pretty good at making moats that stopped the zombies.

Or at least, stopped the zombies before they started showing up with floatation devices, anyway. The ones with balloons letting them float impossibly were being handled by Fu without much trouble right now, though how buckets were providing so much protection to the zombies with them on their heads was unknown. So far it was all 'civilian' zombies as well, which was...concerning, though they were coming in large enough numbers to make that not too much of a hindrance on their effectiveness.

He didn't want to know if a zombie assault of this size could be managed with combat-grade zombies, but suspected that by the end of the day he'd know and not like the answer.

A kunai bouncing off of one of his puppets told him that he probably shouldn't have been thinking those thoughts though, because that signaled the beginning of the more effective zombies. One out of ten of the zombies approaching his outer ring of puppets now looked to have forehead protectors, all with a picture of a brain on them. He estimated that they were, at least currently, genin level in skill. Moving faster and employing basic tactics, as well as being the first zombies to not be heading for them in a straight line. No, they dodged and weaved around the other zombies.

"The shinobi zombies can water-walk and use surface-sticking," one of the others yelled, after having swore. Probably because one of those zombies had just bypassed the moat and walls.

Then, as if to mock him, he spotted puppeteer zombies with zombie puppets. Because of course Naruto would figure out how to make zombies that could control puppets.

Shino was annoyed at how useless he felt against the waves of zombies. He was good at closer-in defense, and managing quite well there, but didn't have enough range or chakra capacity to handle wider-area actions. This left him watching for zombies slipping through the ranks, and occasionally pulling a pile of chakra from Fu to then have his hives push into some of the others.

She'd not so much as run low on chakra, basically ever, so it wasn't doing much to her effectiveness.

He was also going around in circles checking the state of the moat and walls, pointing out where they needed reinforcement, and was using some of his own minor earth chakra to reinforce the ground and walls as he did so. None of them wanted zombies to start appearing in their midst.

"The zombies have a catapult," Fu suddenly yelled, causing him to pause to consider that. It didn't take long to realize that a catapult could likely launch zombies clear over the moat and walls, and he shifted to starting to make spikes while getting his puppet out of the middle of their protected area. Both actions proved useful when the first group of three zombies landed near him, and he tore through them without much trouble. The next group seemed to have been taken out mid-flight, and he had no problems taking out the following two groups that made it in.

Sasori gave him a nod after the last of those groups, while Fu was reporting that she'd taken out the first catapult. Shifting from 'feeling somewhat useless' to 'being the one in charge of protecting the rear from sudden invasions' at least made him feel better about things.

Mei shook her head as she watched the group of chunin fighting against constant waves of zombies. "This is insane. Every time they get complacent another surprise shows up."

"They've not even hit the first 'boss zombie'," Naruto pointed out. "Though they're getting there."

"Boss zombies?" A questioned. "What counts as a boss zombie?"

"Well, the first ones are just larger, but they're easily jounin-level in strength on their own."

"Really."

"Yep. Should be spawning any time now. Ah, there's one off to the left."

She looked over and saw a zombie pulling itself out of the ground behind a boulder. It was at least twice as tall as the other zombies, significantly muscled, and picked up the boulder to carry with it. The chunin saw it coming, as if they could miss it, but it got close enough to launch the boulder at their makeshift fort.

The boulder went clear through one of the walls, nearly took out the Aburame in the middle, and did heavy damage to the far wall.

"That's 'just larger'," Mei said, thinking about it. "What are the ones that are more than 'just larger' like?"

Naruto grinned. "They're going to have fun when the stealth zombies start showing up."

She gave him a look, as did at least Shisui. Uzushio's definition of proper stealth was horrific enough without being able to use it with their zombie-creating seals.

"I do hope Naruto got the giant robot system working," Orochi commented as she watched the prospective jounin fight off waves of zombies.

"Giant robot?" Ruri asked.

"He already has smaller robots, but having a zombie piloting a robot seemed like a fitting way to have a proper 'boss fight'. Or at least that's the terminology used in most of the video games for that kind of thing."

"They're going to have to fight a zombie piloting a giant robot?"

"If they last that long anyway, but I don't think that they're going to have issues. They just took down their third boulder-throwing zombie."

Ruri looked doubtful, but that was okay. Orochi had found working with Naruto on ideas for weird zombies to be a nice distraction, though she had no clue how he'd made several of them work. The balloons and water floatation devices felt like they should be beyond what the seals could manage. Not that any of those were in play anymore, with the 'basic' zombie now being the shinobi zombie that could walk across water and up over the walls.

Ino was honestly impressed that none of the eight chunin had taken any serious injuries. Some of that was luck, most of it was honestly skill. Shino and Fu working together to keep everyone's chakra levels topped up was also obviously doing wonders, even if he'd lost his puppet to one of the boulders.

Looking over at the 'wave timer' screen, she grinned. The computer was powering up the first robot that Naruto had slapped together. Unlike everything else, that wasn't seal-generated so the chunin would have at most eight of them to go through. Assuming, of course, that they managed to survive the first one. It appeared that the randomizer had picked the robot that other zombies could feed onto the conveyor belt at the back to be launched forward as well, which was going to put extra strain on everyone.

Her screens showed that the 'boss zombie' with an extra-big brain had generated and was climbing into the robot. Once it was settled the robot vanished in a flash of light to appear at one of the transport pads hidden under the arena, and then the robot started to claw its way up.

A beep had her blinking and focusing on another screen entirely, one that had just shifted to what looked like a Moonscope feed. Three things she wasn't sure about had just been highlighted, causing her to frown even as she felt energy starting to redirect itself.

Yoko jumped up as she felt the protective bubble on the planet start powering up, several of her clones joining Naruto's to see what was going on. It was quickly obvious that unknown space-traveling ships had appeared far out in the system, started moving like they were going to circle the planets, and then stopped before turning towards Earth. All indications were that they were able to move far too fast as well, making them difficult to track. The way they appeared indicated that they possibly had faster than light tricks that weren't teleporting.

Naruto's clones had the war island powering up to deploy, but the ships didn't wait to be intercepted or seemingly broadcast any messages. Instead, they'd obviously launched an attack, one that was barely visible before the projectiles struck due to how fast they'd traveled. Luckily, protections were already active and shifting to full power, so the first strike seemingly trying to hit the chunin exam island just slammed into the planetary shield. The second strike looked to have targeted Shrine Island and similarly failed, both obviously high-speed physical objects based on how many broken bits of material were left in orbit. It was only the third shot that targeted the moon, striking nearly opposite the stadium being used for the exams.

The satellite grid started charging up retaliatory shots of its own under the direction of clones, and she jumped to the Tome. Grabbing it and placing it on a specially-designed pedestal was easy enough before pushing her awareness into the Tome's world, Matatabi realizing what was going on fast enough to connect her to the war island's control systems directly instead of using some of the slower control methods.