91

Naruto found it amusing when the various leaders carefully examined all of the chairs before A pulled out a hat and they drew lots to negate 'biases' in selection. Shisui had gone along with it, and Shibuki was a little confused as to some of the reasoning. This led to Orochimaru and Onoki on either side of Naruto in the eight seats.

The couple of minutes of speech about the exams, finals, and already-eliminated candidates were mostly for recap at this point as by now it should all be 'old news'. Naruto then looked over the genin. "Unlike last time Uzushio hosted finals, this time we checked evaluations on all of the genin here and conferred with their sensei. Each of today's fourteen matches will be in an arena that is believed to disadvantage the genin believed most likely to earn promotion while providing an advantage to the one least likely to earn promotion, with the scale of the advantage and disadvantage matched to the difference in passing expectation. Though the genin were also asked for their opinions, this merely factored into the calculations instead of serving as a direct choice. We're going to run things through from 'least extreme' to 'most extreme' on the environments, with two to four matches per environment today."

Unlike with Konoha and the original Uzushio arena, Naruto sat down without needing to dial in the environments. The control in the box with them had an obvious switch indicating that another station had control right now, allowing things to be adjusted by the proctors.

"So," Naruto said. "You should find that the pre-match analysis packets for your genin fighting today are under your seats."

Shibuki was the only one that seemed actually surprised about this, and an examination of the seats that now all held village symbols on them led to several sighs before the packets were extracted.

"He's going to get information under our seats repeatedly without us noticing until he mentions it," Gaara said to Shibuki. "Though admittedly, I'm a little more surprised that my control of sand seems more limited than being near him would imply."

"Figured out how to make seals block that," Naruto answered. "So that we can have genin in a sandy environment without influencing things."

"Ah. Might need to hire you to put some of those in Suna's arena."

"Assuming that the price for renting use of this island isn't set too high," Onoki pointed out. "Having a suitable place outside of our villages to host exams in is probably the biggest village security boon available, even if it would remove some of the country-specific environments for the team combat round."

"Still not sure why that's even mandated," Naruto pointed out. "They're aiming for individual promotions, not team promotions. If you want to test willingness to work with others then throwing a random set of genin together to complete a challenge would be far better than existing teams anyway, especially if you intentionally mix the teams across village lines so they're even less likely to have already worked out teamwork issues previously. Unless some of you field-promote entire teams normally and nobody has noticed?"

Why a couple of them flinched was unknown. It wasn't like any of them had come up with the original agreements that hadn't really been changed since at most each major village's second leader.

Shibuki wasn't sure why he kept being surprised at what Uzushio was capable of. As if the flying island large enough to hold multiple villages wasn't enough. Seemingly swapping out chairs while they were sitting in them was impressive, though it felt more likely that the chairs were just changing to include a village symbol after they sat down. The packets under the chairs were just as impressive in their own way.

...having the arena's environment go from 'seating for the genin' to 'a rocky area with a stream flowing through it courtesy of a waterfall coming out of the wall' in a few seconds while someone obviously changed settings elsewhere was another matter entirely. The supposed 'illusion made real' from reports was a lot harder to dismiss as poorly described when you saw it happen in person, though the pulse of chakra that accomplished it made it obvious that it was far from trivial.

Compared to all of this, the previous 'handed out chakra bloodline beads in jewelry and weapons' was a minor footnote. Really, the most notable portion of that was that nobody dared try to fight over them out of fear that Uzushio could track the things and would violently object to them changing hands in that manner. Lots of attempts to purchase things, very few willing to sell them even without knowing what they were, but a lot of who-knew-how-credible rumors about what would happen if you stole them. Claim from a fallen enemy when you'd run into them for entirely different reasons was known to be fine though, and Fu had claimed one of the kunai that way before giving it to someone that seemed more likely to make proper use of it.

Then there was the information on the genin in the finals. Summaries existed for all the non-Taki genin, but the detail in Moreo's assessment was frankly scary. Strengths and weaknesses across a couple dozen categories with citations for everything implying far more monitoring of the genin than seemed otherwise reasonable. Apparently videos could be requested for a number of cited items as well. Though Shibuki wouldn't have pegged the boy as a natural leader given that he'd been following another's lead...which could've been intentional to avoid unnecessary friction on the team. Hmmm. Oh, there was a note from post-arrival observations of that almost certainly being the case, along with at least one instance of 'feeding' his teammate a better plan.

It would be nice if they hadn't given him a ninety-plus chance of losing his match today, even with a significant 'home field' advantage, but barring doing so in an absolutely idiotic manner he was still likely to get a promotion recommendation from Uzushio's evaluation team. Doubly so since apparently the kunoichi the boy was up against had a two out of three chance of making it to the final round tomorrow.

Miho looked over some of Yoko's work, shaking her head. Just as insane as Naruto's work, which made sense, but noticeably not his work at the same time. How two sides of the same person created things so differently from one another was definitely an interesting question, though not one anyone was likely to have answers for anytime soon either. Some of the things Yoko had put into this seal alone looked like they'd been developed through an entirely different research path than Naruto's versions of the exact same functionality, and nobody who had examined things thought it was intentional to keep their work from giving their connection away.

Despite being the 'same person', they were very different people in some fundamental ways and had been long before Yoko became 'real'.

"I give up," Miho finally said, pointing at one part of the seal to draw the attention of Yoko's clone to it. "What does this bit do?"

Yoko's clone leaned in, not that she had to, before nodding. "Disconnects the light chakra bead if nobody with a light chakra node has been present recently enough, as well as fires off a couple of triggers that can be picked up elsewhere."

"...why?"

"So that when a shrine maiden stops taking care of a shrine the benefits the shrine offers turn off. No mystical light chakra aura around the shrine grounds, the plants and possibly a few animals go from 'particularly helpful' to 'hostile', the honden's effects shut off, that kind of thing. I've got timers in the planned honden seals so that those will shut down without a regular action taken by the shrine maidens so an incompletely trained shrine maiden can't keep everything going as well, but things won't go hostile if someone with the node is at least visiting frequently."

Miho blinked and looked at the section more closely...and realized that it was basically a detection array for 'similar enough to the item sealed within'. "Won't it trigger if someone were to be carrying a light chakra bead too?"

"No, because it's specifically scanning chakra nets. You might be missing where it should prevent the plants and wildlife connected to the seal from attacking those with that node too, actually."

That...was not obvious, but there was an identification section that was hard to decipher connected around there. "I don't get how you can come up with stuff like this, but still need to have the Tome create the base seal designs for installing the nodes in people to begin with."

Yoko shrugged. "Getting the precision down for that kind of thing is harder and the Tome isn't always able to figure things out either. Naruto and I aren't even sure how we managed to get the 'grant shapeshifting' seal array to work after we built it. And duplicated it six times to prove it wasn't a fluke."

"...when did you get that working?"

"Last week, and we can't get it to function unless we each build half. The only in-village copies are in the secure infiltration training areas and need two different computer systems to activate portions of the seals to function as added security. We want to try and get fireproofing figured out next, mostly because that's just a nice safety item that works even without Knight Armor or similar protections active."

Miho blinked again, because a seal that required two people to build it or it didn't function was ridiculous even before considering that the two people were the same person. Unless it had something to do with each having a different aspect of the Sage of Six Paths' chakra? Naruto with the physical side and Yoko with the spiritual, the latter fitting her shrine maiden/priestess vibe quite well, and only the combination being able to create seals of that kind...

Orochimaru was mildly disappointed in her genin today, though couldn't really fault the two that had lost to Uzushio genin. Despite their published standards, she was certain that Uzushio was training their academy students clear past 'genin' and halfway to 'chunin' as it was. No, it was the shinobi that had lost to a Kumo genin that was more annoying. How did you spend the entire break training and not consider that someone from Kumo might be good with lightning chakra? Doubly so after losing all excuses regarding being able to learn a couple of wind techniques and Guren offering several over the break.

They'd lucked out in making it this far at all, and definitely weren't ready for promotion. Something all of the provided analysis agreed with, thankfully, or all of Uzushio's recommendations would need to be treated as worthless.

The last few arena options today had distracted a bit from that idiot though. A stormy ocean surface with only a couple of small boats to stand on, high winds, and irregular waves. What appeared to be a tornado in a sandstorm, which had the unfortunate side effect of reducing visibility quite a bit. That had been somewhat countered with chakra-viewing cameras though, something that was definitely a new revelation and would need some research. Then there were platforms floating on flowing lava, with the heat able to be felt from the stands and a need to treat one of the genin for severe burns afterwards.

Naruto had promised to let them explore the full set of environment options in the week or so, after tomorrow's rounds of finals. It was something several of them were going to be taking him up on, if only to see just how many variations actually existed. The control system here was decidedly more impressive than the ones in Konoha and Uzushio had appeared to be, though the latter had the whole 'secret set of environments' trick that this one probably didn't. Or at least if it did, it didn't look like the in-box controls supported it with the way they were laid out.

There was the potentially interesting question of how many training areas Uzushio had that could pull these tricks though...assuming they had any at all. It was quite a large amount of chakra per environment shift, after all.

Onoki had ended up next to A for the morning of the second day of the finals. Once they'd realized that their village symbols had shown up on the seats they'd marked the things with their chakra and traded, using their marks to ensure that the seats weren't swapped out again while they sat there.

Instead of delegating the arena selection, Naruto had pointed out that there weren't enough rounds to let each village leader choose an environment. Instead, he said that they'd be doing a couple of special ones...and that there was a surprise after lunch. This was followed by selecting an arena environment that looked like a grassy field with a hot geyser in the middle...if a geyser was capable of flowing in a lazy spiral into the air. It wasn't even correct for the water source spinning, and the water was very obviously not flowing at a correct speed for the height it was reaching either.

The proctor had looked at the geyser while waiting for the genin to come down and had interrupted the stream for a moment. A very obvious gap sat there in the stream for nearly two minutes as a result, slowly spiraling up with the rest of the water until it reached the top where the water was dispersing into water vapor instead of falling back down to the ground.

As if that wasn't enough, around the edge of the field was what looked to be a half-meter thick ring of lava. Seemingly not all that hot, until one of the genin was obviously curious and poked a senbon into it. That senbon had almost immediately started to melt, meaning that the lava was incredibly hot but not heating its surroundings up.

"Nice try swapping seats," Naruto said as the match was starting. "You'll still find that under them are the right packets for yesterday's eliminated genin and our recommendations for promotions or justification for holding them back."

Onoki blinked, glanced up at the back of his seat to find that Iwa's symbol was now there...despite his chakra still marking the seat that A was now sitting in. That seat was now showing Kumo's symbol. Which meant that the chairs themselves likely weren't being swapped at all...or the method used to do so left foreign chakra behind to 'mark' the replacement chair somehow.

Naruto looked over the remaining seven genin after the break for lunch. They were standing in an environment that appeared to be a bend in a road with a few trees around them. "Believe it or not, a strict reading of the treaty governing these exams says that we've met all the requirements for the one-on-one matches portion of the exam. All of you have gone through two rounds of single-elimination fighting and come out on top. Obviously we're going to continue, but with the official requirements completed we can mix things up a little."

A pair of academy students were brought in, the genin looking oddly at the duo. Fraternal twins that were still a couple of years away from graduation, but not dressed for combat. Naruto grinned. "Instead of fighting each other, you will be working together to defend yourselves and your 'clients', the latter represented by the pair of students. They don't think they need to be defended, of course. You will need to form an effective defense, keep from harming each other or your headstrong 'clients', and take down enemies. Each enemy is worth a specific number of points based on their type, not that you'll know that in advance, and killing them grants you points. Harming your temporary teammates loses you points, and harming your 'clients' loses you more. The four highest scores move on, with the exception that if either of your 'clients' rack up more points than you then that's an immediate disqualification for you. Of course, if your 'clients' are eliminated then you've failed your 'mission' and this will be the end of the exams."

The genin looked at each other nervously, and the academy students just grinned.

A quick gesture brought up information on the screens that the audience could see. "Enemy point values, as well as the current scores for all nine participants, are now visible to the audience. For those watching remotely we've dedicated one feed to this if you're receiving a multiple-feed broadcast. Otherwise, we apologize for needing to take up screen space to display it in the single-feed broadcast."

He let the proctor take over, with instructions to let the genin plan long enough to allow betting to happen. All of those running betting on the exams had been warned that this stage was going to be different and to not accept normal bets until they found out how, and Hinata had sent clones out with information before lunch so that they could be ready if they agreed to not leak the info early.

"Definitely a unique way of handling things," Gaara said. "Better in some ways than other examples of 'unique' rounds in Suna's records."

"Don't think anything survived on our end," Mei said, looking at him. "What 'unique' rounds has Suna seen?"

"Twelve or eighteen genin leading to a three-way final round was the most common, but a couple of exams did 'two rounds of single elimination, then the rest were three-way fights' as well."

Onoki nodded. "One of the first exams I remember watching back home was two rounds of single-elimination followed by a free-for-all of at least ten genin. The thing that all of these have in common was the genin working against each other though."

"And Naruto has just unexpectedly turned them into an impromptu 'team'," A said with a nod of his own. "One that's still in competition with itself, but has to work together or be humiliated in front of an international audience." He then looked at the screens there in the box. "These are just more of your 'zombies' though, aren't they?"

"Only some of them," Naruto admitted.

"...some of them?"

"The early ones like the exploding squirrels are, but there are surprises in the mix."

Mei turned to stare at him. "Exploding squirrels?"

Mafumi checked the markings of her approach area. The seven of them had stuck the kids in the middle of the arena and split the circle surrounding the kids into seven segments. They'd agreed to focus on their own segment unless they needed to step in to defend the kids...or keep the kids from running out of the protective circle. This was for practical reasons of keeping a solid perimeter as well as to make it less likely that area-of-effect attacks would hit one of the others.

A glance behind her showed that the short walls erected as a fall-back point were holding strong. They weren't solid, but should make it less likely that any enemy with ranged options would have a clear shot on the kids. As a downside, it made it harder to keep a direct eye on the kids.

One of the others yelled, and she focused on the surroundings again. There were...squirrels coming out of the trees? Frowning, she kicked up some pebbles and launched them at speed. Three out of eight hit their marks, which was pretty good for her, and the hit squirrels exploded. Scowling, and wondering who the hell figured out how to make exploding squirrels, she noted that they didn't have an 'in the trees' path to reach this side of things at least.

A few hand seals and some focus had a line of earth turn into a bit of a grinder. This wasn't really useful on larger animals, and normally you'd use it for helping to turn soil over by sweeping the effect, but held in place she knew it was good at taking out rats. She wasn't surprised when it worked on the squirrels, though keeping it going amidst the explosions was annoying.

She was reasonably certain that she did a better job than a couple of the others with the squirrels, but what looked like bandits flowing in from doors in the walls had her grimacing and preparing herself for a more physical fight.

Mei had given up on 'shock' and was just in awe over the escalation of enemies the genin had been made to face. Exploding squirrels, apparent bandits, various less-explosive animals, what appeared to be genin from an unknown village using chakra, and then more incredible things like flying bat-like men. The students had taken out a number of everything other than the squirrels so far, but were comfortably sitting at the bottom of the points board due to mostly being limited to sniping things from a distance. At least when not defending themselves from flying enemies that had bypassed the defenders.

The current group of enemies appeared to be multiple-tailed demon cats. Three tails each, and they were very obviously much more durable than everything else that had come before them. Shrugging off everything thrown at them, the tracks they were leaving showed that they were visibly heavier than they should be, and with the ability to spew flames and coat themselves in electricity demonstrated so far.

"Now we see if they can figure out how to actually work together," Naruto commented.

"What do you mean?" Shibuki asked.

"None of them have the ability to take one of these on solo. Can they figure out that there's a weak point behind them and work with each other to target it? Or are they going to be stubborn and try to work alone and likely fail their mission?"

"How did you manage that?" Shisui asked. "I'm reasonably certain that none of your other 'zombies' have been able to have a weak point that was so focused."

Naruto grinned. "You're right about that, but that's just the zombies. These are automated puppets. Calibrating their difficulty took our technology division quite a bit of effort, but I think it was well worth it."

"...puppets?" Mei asked, even as she dredged up memories of reports of Uzushio's territories having roaming puppets defending them. Except that the cats down there didn't look like puppets.

"Yes, puppets. We've made great strides in making them not look like puppets for various uses."

"As if you didn't make Suna's puppeteer corps look useless enough as it was," Gaara sighed.

It took the genin a couple of minutes to realize that none of them could defeat even one of the cats alone. A couple more minutes of probing and experimentation before they were able to figure out that one of them could distract a cat to allow another to attack from another angle. Taking out the first of the cats revealed the decidedly-mechanical internals as the cat exploded into pieces. Seemingly without needing to discuss things, they then switched roles for the next cat. The remaining Iwa genin was the only one that didn't take a cat out, having focused on defense through terrain manipulation.

"How does the scoring work for keeping the cats away from the kids?" Onoki asked, likely having noticed that himself.

"The 'partial' values listed are for stopping attacks," Naruto answered. "Though I don't blame you for paying attention to the fighting and not the screen to notice that detail. But now it's time for the final boss of this round."

"...what have you concocted this time?"

Mei didn't need Naruto to answer, because she could see what had been 'concocted'. A team of seven had just appeared, with crossed-out forehead protectors, but otherwise appearing to be identical to the seven genin. Each then immediately and obviously went after their counterpart.

"Figuring out how to tone this down a bit was tricky," Naruto explained. "But I think I managed. The fakes should only have the skills the originals had a month ago. Have they improved enough to defeat their old selves?"

Nagato grinned as he watched the duplicates of the genin engage with their originals. Naruto said he'd deployed that particular seal array in variations as security in a number of places, but this particular use was far more spectacular. Perhaps it would serve as a good advertisement for the thought of setting it up for training, in the academy or on the training islands. Assuming it worked out here, of course. This was obviously a variant of the original though, as appearances did differ and it had needed to be calibrated to not run clear over the already-tired genin.

"You like that seal array far too much," Konan commented.

"Even the sealing team admits that the original is a work of art," Nagato countered. "The only downside is that it can only work up to the level of chakra stored in it, so it always fails to properly duplicate someone with more chakra than the one who prepared it."

"Something that doesn't seem to be a problem here."

"Or with any of Naruto's placements in general, really, barring another bound to the remains of a tailed beast triggering them."

"Seems unfair to have them fighting fresh copies of themselves after running a gauntlet of everything else though."

"Supposedly these duplicates were templated a month ago, after the preliminaries, and only activated today. If that worked, they're lacking an entire month of training and improvement, which will essentially allow seeing just how much a given one of the genin has improved." He gestured at one of the monitors, which was stating basically that. "If this is reliable enough, then I could see it as being a great training tool. Template a group, a month or two later activate the duplicates to see who slacked off and who didn't."

"Is that what you've been talking with the sealing team about?"

"...not really."

"Then what horror do I have to prepare for, if not this?"

"Probably not much, as we've determined that the current path we were taking isn't a viable one. Making paperwork that hunts you down when you haven't completed it is hard, though we managed to create forms that you can hit with a chakra pulse to cause them to fold themselves up and fly to the office to submit themselves. At least when they're within a limited distance of their destination, anyway."

She didn't seem to appreciate how much of an accomplishment that was, at least when taking into account other security features on the paperwork.

Naruto looked over the collection of genin. The 'defend the students' round had taken the show for the day and the three matches following it had been seen as a bit boring in comparison. Then again, they'd eliminated three genin because the students had needed to save them from their duplicates. Of course, there had also been the problem of the four who had continued to the final three matches had been relatively exhausted and not really up to a proper show either. Now they had all the genin from the entire exam present, though that had been a bit of a last-minute decision by the other leaders.

"Congratulations on surviving the exams," he said. "We'll be announcing who earned promotions and who didn't shortly. I have no additional gifts this time either, as those were handed out before the exams, but we've gotten large numbers of requests for more general access to the island between exams. Right now we don't have enough population to run the island full-time while the various things shinobi would like to utilize are active. Uzushio has its own training areas that are far easier for us to use as well, so we have little to no incentive to run the island for shinobi constantly. That said, we need a comparatively small crew to run the basics of the island for non-shinobi visitors and plan to offer that service for those who would like to book rooms on it."

A pause allowed obviously-mechanical but humanoid puppets to climb on top of the box before he continued. "However, those who would like to use the 'low staff' state of the island to infiltrate and figure out how things work should be aware that any area not in use by visitors will be protected with seals and guarded by automated security. Once you are past the point any non-shinobi is expected to be able to reach you will find that they default to crippling at a minimum. If you're lucky, you might survive long enough to be captured and interrogated."

He let that sink in before dismissing the puppets and beginning the process of going through all the promotions. They called out specific high and low points for a number of genin, but there were too many to be particularly detailed with them. Any that wanted to know how they'd personally done could simply read their final packets, as could their sensei and others that were getting copies. Of the twenty-eight genin that made it to the finals only twelve had earned promotion and eight had been passed over because of mistakes made during the finals. Then there were the genin promoted despite not making it to the finals, though not making it through the second stage was a universal disqualification this time. Even if it had come close for a couple.

"I hope that all of those watching have a better appreciation for what shinobi go through," Naruto said once the promotion announcements were made. "Though this level of examination is not yet entirely normal, it was designed to cover a number of situations that shinobi run into directly and indirectly. We work hard for our skills, just as professionals in any other field would, even if we then do our best to make it all look trivial. Then again, what profession doesn't? Experts will do things with experience that take years of expertise to be able to accomplish in order to show off to an apprentice that doesn't yet know enough to manage the feat with preparation time and more tools at their disposal. I've seen it with chefs, carpenters, smiths, tailors, and more. Just keep in mind how much effort all professionals take to get to being professionals, regardless of their field of expertise."