53

Lee darted through the trees of training ground forty-four, with the goal of heading to three different 'offense' delivery points. If he got a scroll out of any of them then he'd immediately head for the meeting point. Avoiding the obvious paths on the ground and in the trees was a priority, because they were all too likely to be trapped. Especially as they hadn't been here last time. Of course, the zombies also hadn't been here last time, and avoiding them was made easier by being in the trees as well.

Neji wouldn't have problems with the 'defense' locations, but Kin might have problems with the 'stealth' ones. Assuming, of course, that all of them were reliably labeled for what they required to get scrolls. Splitting up to get all three scrolls as soon as possible was essentially required with how many had already entered the forest before them, though most of those teams only had one or two 'delivery' scrolls. Which was part of why their first targets were further out as well, Lee having passed the central tower already on the way to his chosen targets. The further-out locations were less likely to be cleaned out of scrolls already.

Spotting the delivery point, Lee paused. It was in the middle of a clearing...and had three giant zombies guarding it. And a sign on the domed hut in the middle of the clearing stating that the zombies had to be defeated to deliver a scroll.

"Offense indeed," Lee said, evaluating the three zombies. Two had armored chests, two had helmets, and two had shields, leading to each combination of two items being covered. "If I do not overcome these three with no more than two strikes each then I shall do a thousand push-ups!"

Neji had been spotted as soon as he got close to the first 'defense' location, if not sooner, and wasn't surprised that he was almost immediately attacked. What had attacked him was another question entirely. Or how he'd been spotted, for that matter. He'd needed to dodge the ball of earth, only to then need to duck under a ball of fire. If not for his byakugan he might've fallen to the ball of wind that came next.

Ten minutes later he'd finally figured out that the structure in the middle of the clearing had those seal-powered technique launchers used in some of the token challenges. How they were being aimed was a bit of a mystery, but they were definitely able to track him. Incredibly well at that, and getting close required blocking shots instead of just dodging them.

Getting into the structure had taken almost half an hour, and he was on alert as he moved to place the 'delivery' scroll on the altar-like stone in the middle of the room. As soon as he'd done so there was a puff of smoke, the 'delivery' scroll replaced with a 'defense' scroll. That was collected, and then he carefully made his way back out. Except that the defenses weren't attacking him anymore at all. But they seemed to be tracking something in the distance now?

"...I bet the scrolls have tracking seals in them," he grumbled. It would be a trivial way to ensure that anyone approaching with a 'delivery' scroll was attacked.

"You didn't eliminate anyone before they entered the forest," Anko-sensei grumbled.

"Didn't expect to," Naruto replied. "Which is why there are only enough scrolls for just over a third of them to pass."

"...that was, admittedly, good thinking, and you dropped it on them right at the start."

"We also eliminated a number of teams that never figured out the meeting place for the start of the exams."

"Bah, that doesn't really count."

"And the zombies have already removed two teams before they ended up dead." There was a pause there, as Anko-sensei and several others in the room turned to look at Naruto. "What?"

"The zombies removed teams?" Hinata asked.

"Well, yes."

"But they're one of the dangers."

"And the ones in the forest pull any teams they find unconscious into the underground tunnels to evacuate them to the central tower."

Anko-sensei looked horrified. "You put safety measures into the Forest of Death?"

"Ones that do their best to knock your team unconscious to give an excuse to drag you underground, but yes. And then spawn zombie copies of you. That's how the second team was taken out, actually, because they were panicking over the first team's zombies showing up."

"...you know, if you'd told Ibiki about that he wouldn't have complained about the lack of mind games at all."

"Didn't know it worked until the first team's zombies popped up, and I'm more happy that the 'put all the gear of the knocked-out team onto their zombie duplicates' bit worked. No scrolls are removed from play by the zombies because of that, but I don't know if anyone will notice that some of the zombies have scrolls."

Hinata blinked a couple of times, then frowned. "The zombies are delivering the knocked-out teams to the central tower naked, aren't they?"

Naruto nodded. "Yeah. There are plenty of spare clothes there, medics to tend to injuries, and any gear left on the zombie copies can be recovered at the end of the time limit. Couldn't figure out any way to make them act like the knocked-out teams though, so they don't even attempt to use weapons they're carrying. They should head for the tower after half a day to be more visible instead of being randomly spread throughout the forest."

Anko-sensei made a clone, which headed out a moment later. "Definitely making sure that Ibiki knows about this little unexpected addition, because the whole 'zombie copies' bit is definitely worth the 'extracting teams' part."

Kin had needed to skip her first target location because another team was already working on it. Poorly, but working on it. Her second location was even further out, and she didn't think anyone else was nearby. Unfortunately, it also looked like a potential worst-case scenario for her, because it appeared that she was going to have to slip by a bunch of zombie cats. With her having mouse features.

In theory, she shouldn't be concerned. In practice, the zombie cats were the size of humans at the smallest.

Now, she could just go to her third choice and hope for the best there. Or she could show that despite being a mouse, she wasn't scared of a few giant cats that could possibly tear her to pieces.

...she wasn't proving shit about not being scared of the giant cats. But perhaps she could prove that she was good enough to get past them despite them being giant cats? Scent-masking, covering her sounds more than usual, some visual masking even if none of the cats were currently looking around...

Three loops around the area to map it out in her head, two more to convince herself that she could do it, and a final one to ensure that nobody else was approaching to screw her up all followed. On the latter she also finally noticed that the human zombies were avoiding the area. Whether this was because they didn't play nice with the cats or as a courtesy to the participants was another question entirely.

Whatever the answer, she managed to convince herself that she was ready and started heading in, pausing whenever she saw one of the cat zombies so much as twitching an ear. It took far too long to slip in, little by little. Making it to the building itself, she found that there was a small altar-like stone...and stairs that led up to various windows. But no zombie cats inside, yet she kept her guard up as she pulled out the 'delivery' scroll and placed it on the altar. A moment later it was replaced with a 'stealth' scroll, which she pocketed.

The door slamming shut before she could get back out had her mentally swearing, at least until she realized that she wasn't under attack. Curious, she moved up to the windows and took a look out, and eventually noticed that another team had approached...and set off the cats. Which meant that she'd been right to not attempt the first location when a different team had been doing poorly at it, but also that she was currently trapped until this team gave up.

Or perhaps more realistically, until they were torn to pieces, because these cats were much stronger than they had any right to be. Each used a different element when attacking, and if you took one out a replacement appeared from the ground next to the structure basically immediately afterwards.

...yeah, this had all the hallmarks of a new personal nightmare going forward. But at least the horror show was happening to the idiots out there instead of to her, and it was likely going to be incredible motivation to not screw up leaving once the door opened back up. Even if it did look like there was another door on the roof that could probably be used to leave but not enter.

Sneaking through idle giant cat zombies? Doable. Going outside right now would result in 'run away screaming from the active cat zombies' no matter if they were paying attention to her or not. But she could sit down and focus to see if she could get a communication technique message to Neji and Lee about what was holding her up.

That night, Naruto was slightly annoyed that Team Gai had successfully made it into the tower just after nightfall the same day they'd entered the training ground. It was impressive, and splitting up had been risky, but nothing said that you needed a full team to accomplish any of the 'delivery' challenges. The stealth-based ones were even likely to be easier if you only sent one person in.

It just felt like he'd not put enough effort into things if they'd been able to slip through it all that quickly. Even if nine teams had failed, been extracted, and replaced with zombie duplicates so far. One of those teams had been pulled out just in time too, because two of the three members had been 'left for dead' by another team. Which was just sloppy, because if you were going to kill people then you shouldn't make them suffer like that.

Complaints about a lack of gear were surprisingly minimal, though some of that was assumptions that their bodies had been looted by other teams. Nobody had told them that their gear had been looted by zombies, though that first team that had been taken out while in shock over seeing zombies of a fellow team was getting close to realizing what had happened. Spare clothing and waking up fully healed and in safety were generally smoothing the rest over.

Camping outside with the roaming zombies was, of course, more of a challenge than the training ground usually presented. The animals had learned not to bother hunting the zombies, but also not to fear them, and most of the remaining teams had figured out that the paths through the forest were more dangerous than doing your best to ignore them entirely. In fact, the only teams that seemingly hadn't figured that out just by looking at the paths were in the eliminated group, one of which had been catapulted by one of the trapped bridges and not been able to land safely.

Juro scowled as the altar didn't exchange the 'delivery' scroll. It had a sign attached saying that it was out, but he'd hoped that was a lie from another team. But no, they'd fought past a zombie one-tailed tanuki to get into the structure only to find that it no longer had 'offense' scrolls to dispense. At least it had only had some basic wind techniques to fight back with and hadn't been made of or capable of controlling sand.

"This is the fifth delivery point we've tried," Kaito noted. "Didn't the proctors say that there were only enough scrolls for a third of the teams to pass?"

"They did," Mari confirmed. "And my estimate is that there were more of the 'delivery' scrolls being handed out than other scrolls to claim. If anything, I'd expect the furthest-out points to be the only ones that might have anything left, but we'd probably need to get lucky as other teams would likely have assumed those were their best bets from the start."

"You said that yourself," Juro admitted. "And you were probably right, even if Kaito and I disagreed at the time, but by now we can probably call it too late. As much as I don't want to have to spend another night out here, we're going to have to set up to ambush other teams."

"So head to the tower, find a defensible spot, and set up traps that the zombies hopefully won't trip on us."

"Yep. Hopefully we can get the 'offense' scroll we need quickly."

Shisui looked over reports relating to the exam, shaking his head as he did so. "I might have made a mistake letting an Uzumaki do most of the planning and prep work."

"Naruto has set a rather high bar to overcome," Hiruzen agreed. "But you did want to shake things up, and all indications are that this is working on that front."

"Oh, no doubt. Just the methodology has been praised by the various sensei, local and visiting, let alone the execution. There were far too few 'usable patterns' for exams, so any new ones are welcomed."

Hiashi nodded, with a grin. "I personally liked hearing about the various jounin that praised the act of forcing the genin to hunt down paperwork. Especially with a convoluted and needlessly troublesome set of hurdles thrown into the mix. Far too many genin hit chunin with no idea how annoying paperwork can be."

Hiruzen snorted. "Especially those who get promoted through the exams, generally being elites that get their hands held in that area." They paused there, before the old man shook his head and gestured to the pile of paperwork. "Have any of the visiting sensei used the 'mission desk' we set up for them?"

Shisui frowned for a moment, then flipped through the stack of paperwork before pulling out a couple of sheets. "Looks like yes, but only a couple, even though we outright told them about it due to not having been something we did before now. Granted, we probably have a boring selection compared to other villages."

Tsunade scoffed. "Yeah, because we're not about to put anything that could impact our reputation if done poorly on the list for visitors to do. We don't lack the manpower needed to keep normal missions going while throwing a bunch of our people into exams-related work. Which left some of the 'make-work' missions such as bandit sweeps."

"Of course, throwing out everything that had been expected in the way we're running exams was likely involved in the decision to not bother as well. The only missions taken were by single jounin from villages with at least three others with teams, meaning plenty of monitoring of the way we're doing things this year, and Naruto reported that all of those taking those missions did so at least partially as cover to get initial reports out sooner."

The three looked shocked at that, but Hiruzen shook his head and spoke first. "That boy is a security nightmare. If other villages had any inkling of his capabilities..."

"They'd be torn between options," Hiashi replied. "Ganging up on us in the hopes of killing him, assassinating him in any number of ways, or praying that not antagonizing us would cause him to not be used against them. Add in the rumors of a resurgent Uzushiogakure, and the thought of what they might do in retaliation..."

Shisui nodded his agreement with that assessment. "I really need to find a reason to get him into Suna and Iwa. We're...very much lacking in information on the two villages, compared to Kiri and Kumo."

"A reason?" Tsunade questioned. "With him and Hinata you just need to give them the mission. Let them figure out the excuse, then prepare your snacks and drinks of choice for when you read the report of what they did. Assuming, of course, that they officially enter either village at all."

That...was honestly an excellent point.

Sachie hadn't expected to have a reputation, but over the past two days they'd been able to get two different 'offense' scrolls off of other teams entirely because they were afraid that she might put a kunai through one of their skulls. It went nicely with the 'defense' scroll they'd obtained on their own, and left them needing a 'stealth' scroll. Which unfortunately meant finding someone with one, because they'd only gotten five tokens.

...those able to get the 'stealth' scrolls were, unfortunately, stealthy. No games were being played with the delivery points like had been played with the token challenges and waiver bullshit. You had to prove you had the skill associated with the scroll type to get the scroll out, just in different ways at each station.

"Ugh," Rio whined. "An Aburame is nearby."

"...how do you know?" Choji asked.

The girl held up her hand, to show an insect on the back of it. Her fear of insects had...diminished under Kurenai-sensei, but not to the same degree that Sachie had her fear of zombies all but forced out of her. Or at least her severe reactions to them, anyway, which had come in handy for not causing who knew how much damage upon seeing them in the streets. But this did bring up an interesting point. "That looks less like 'is near' and more like 'wants to meet', given that we haven't been swarmed."

"...oh," Rio said, shivering slightly as she looked down at the insect. "Which means...Shino, probably? I don't think anyone else would target me specifically, and they had that older genin paired with them to take Shikamaru's place for a team of three."

"Indeed," Shino said as he landed on a branch nearby, Ami and the older genin landing to either side of him. And then the older genin's nin-dog, marking them as an Inuzuka even if their face markings weren't visible. "I'd like to propose a temporary alliance."

"There aren't really enough scrolls to go around," Choji pointed out.

"That may be, but there are enough for our teams."

"We stole a 'defense' scroll off of a Suna team," Ami elaborated. "And got two 'stealth' scrolls because the first 'offense' station we hit was already out and we decided that having non-delivery scrolls was better than nothing. Shino claims that you have your own 'defense' scroll, but two 'offense' scrolls."

"Meaning that between our two teams we have enough scrolls to pass, if we can make it through those arrayed around the tower in order to enter it. We are, unfortunately, not stealthy enough to slip by. Strength in numbers is likely a far better strategy than hoping we can slip by the more desperate teams."

Sachie looked at Rio and Choji, still not sure how she'd ended up 'team leader', but both signaled that they were okay with this idea. She then turned back to the others, idly wondering just how much monitoring the Aburame was doing to know what scrolls they'd obtained. "That does sound reasonable. Though your temporary teammate there seems to be awfully quiet on the subject."

The Inuzuka lifted the cloth covering his face to show an injury to his neck, which nicely explained the lack of speaking.

"Perhaps we should start with taking care of that," Rio said. "I took medic-nin lessons so that we'd have someone able to patch things up."

"You were hoping to learn from Naruto," Choji retorted.

"...shut up."

Sachie and Shino traded an 'offense' scroll for a 'stealth' scroll while Rio patched up the Inuzuka's throat. Then, with plenty of daylight remaining, they started out towards the central tower.

Naruto came up to Kakashi in the upper portions of the tower. "Hello there."

"I have to say that having the deadline be in the middle of the night is a lot more interesting than the traditional mid-day deadline," Kakashi said as he watched out one of the tower's windows.

"In that a bunch of tired teams are fighting in the dark, hoping to obtain the last scrolls they need and not have others take the scrolls they already have?"

"Yeah. The zombies are just an extra bonus."

"Have you spotted the two teams hunting zombies instead?"

"...no. Why are they hunting zombies?"

"They figured out that zombies that look like eliminated teams might have any scrolls those teams were carrying on them."

Kakashi looked confused. "Eliminated teams?"

"Yeah. Any teams that the zombies pulled out were replaced with zombies wearing their stuff."

"Oh. That would explain the team that screamed in panic and suddenly started taking the zombies a lot more seriously shortly before sunset, if they thought it could happen to them after seeing comrades apparently zombified..."

"So what brings you by anyway?"

"I was asked to be available to help get failed genin out of danger once we hit midnight, which is going to be interesting as well."

"Ah, that shouldn't be a problem. All of the remaining genin are near the tower, and the zombies will be dropped into 'safely escort everyone in' mode just after midnight. I actually had clones dismantle all the delivery stations earlier, figuring that it made no sense to wait when they're all empty and all of the remaining genin are here anyway. My plan is to pop outside and yell at everyone to stand down and get in the tower because time's up and they failed, alongside a comment that the zombies were flipped into escort mode."

"Huh. You planned this out quite well. Normally Anbu and various jounin are helping collect wayward genin for a few days after exams."

"Pure luck that they all ended up here, really."

"...you evacuated over half the teams with the zombies, likely saving many of their lives in the process."

"Okay, you have a point there. A few still died to the wildlife or combat though."

"Waivers are needed for a reason, but I wish that I'd known that you had everything under control before I bothered coming out here. Are there going to be any preliminary elimination rounds to watch?"

Naruto nodded. "With twelve teams making it through there will be, but in the morning. That's a bit of a departure from the tradition of immediately after the stage ends, but also more fair to those who came in at the end."

"Hmmm. That's just enough to manage with one round of eliminations, but if a couple more teams make it through..."

"Honestly? Nobody out there is going to pass, because there's only one 'offense' scroll left outside of the tower at all and none of them have it. Two different teams entered the tower carrying two 'offense' scrolls each, another went out of their way to destroy any scrolls they got that they didn't need to reduce the competition, and the six remaining 'defense' and seven remaining 'stealth' scrolls are distributed among those fighting. But the last available 'offense' scroll is half-buried in mud on the riverbank almost at the fence. The team that tripped the bridge trap dropped it when they were sent flying and nobody retrieved it."

Revealing to the genin that none of them had an 'offense' scroll just after midnight was enough to get them to settle down, though they were still wary of the zombies. Equipment was recovered from those zombies that had been outfitted with a genin's stuff, all the teams were stuck into rooms for the night, and clones handled some last-minute cleanup. Mostly taking care of some explosive tags that had been left sitting around, plus grabbing the scroll that had been left in the mud.

In the morning the twelve passing teams had been gathered, Shisui had given his version of the 'what the exams actually are' speech that was obviously heavily inspired by Old Man Hiruzen's, and then by prior agreement Anko had stepped in to proctor an elimination round instead of having Naruto and Hinata do so. She'd also reluctantly decided to allow those who wished to bail to bow out, since two-thirds of a Kiri team had their chakra networks heavily damaged by a forbidden technique used against them and a Yamanaka had screwed up a mind-body switch variant and gotten stuck while swapped with a teammate.

Those four were the only ones to bow out, but they still stayed to watch.

Naruto wasn't all that invested in the matches themselves and was primarily focused on using clones to escort eliminated teams out of the training ground through the tunnels. But he did keep an eye on things. After the bow-outs, Konoha had nineteen genin left, Kiri had four, Kumo had two full teams for six, and Suna had one full team for three. This meant three different Konoha-on-Konoha matches in the preliminaries, and Lee had gotten one of those straight away with being put up against team Shikamaru's temporary Inuzuka member. Unfortunately for the Inuzuka, who wasn't ready for Lee's insane strength.

Triply embarrassing was that Lee spent most of the match ignoring everything thrown at him and doing push-ups in the expectation of not being able to properly hold back his strength against a 'youthful comrade'. Followed by being absolutely correct and resulting in Hinata stepping in to provide emergency medic-nin assistance.

Most of the rest of the matches were less exciting overall. Neji and Kin took out a Kumo shinobi each, Sachi took out a Kiri kunoichi, Rio scraped out a win against a Suna shinobi before Choji destroyed another, and Ami and Shino got the other two 'Konoha on Konoha' matches and won. On the flipside, Kiri had three wins, Kumo four, and Suna eked out a single participant in the finals. Meaning an even split between Konoha and non-Konoha participants for the finals themselves in a month.

A couple of days later Naruto, Hinata, and Anko-sensei were called to the Hokage's office.

"Congratulations on a successful elimination stage," Shisui said, throwing scrolls to Naruto and Hinata. "These are your evaluation summaries, but in general everyone agrees that you did wonderfully, especially given how many teams were sent this time. Unfortunately, we have a problem."

"The foundation issue spotted with the arena last week?" Naruto guessed.

"Yes, courtesy of that tunnel collapsing next to it and the giant crack in the structure screaming that something went wrong. I'd originally thought that we might rebuild the arena a month or two after the exams, but as it stands we need to do so immediately. Initial assessments are that the normal repair crews would take six to eight weeks to fully evaluate the condition of things and repair the known issues, assuming they can at all. We obviously don't have that much time, so I'm asking you and Hinata to handle things as you were able to take care of the much more complicated tower in training ground forty-four in less time. If you can reasonably fit more seating in then it would be appreciated as well."

"Oooh," Anko-sensei said. "I have ideas for things to add!"

"Do keep in mind that we need it ready in under a month."

Orochimaru looked over reports from Konoha, still mildly annoyed that Sound had been snubbed by not getting an invitation to send teams to their chunin exams. Not that it was unexpected, or even unreasonable, but it did make it harder to slip in to obtain information. And there was a lot of information to obtain this year, because they'd completely upended tradition and built an entirely new exam format.

A longer single-stage setup for the 'elimination' portion of things was definitely a new one, and they'd expanded their use of the zombie seals to ludicrous levels. Which he wasn't annoyed about, at least since finding out that one of Anko's students was behind their use and improvement. Being unable to properly examine samples of the improved seals was another issue entirely though, not that he expected to be able to decipher too much about them.

Uzumaki-created seals tended to defy analysis. Unfortunately.

Forcing all the participants to prove their skills repeatedly, allowing for multiple types of skills to pass, and even making them collect their own paperwork all got his approval. The changes to the Forest of Death...well, many of those were older, the tower had long been due to be refurbished, and it seemed that the rest of the changes noted had simply made idiots more likely to fall into a false sense of security.

"Orochimaru-sama," an underling called, getting his attention.

"...I said I wasn't to be disturbed," Orochimaru replied, coldly.

"We found reports of a 'ghost ship' spotted to the South of the Land of Water."

Blinking, he considered that. For one, it was something he'd given orders to inform him about immediately, so his annoyance over being disturbed was misplaced. "How reliable are the reports, and when were they?"

"They're from a couple of small island villages, so reliability is variable, but they spotted the ghost ship every four to eight months for three years, ending a little over two years ago."

Two years ago? So old reports...and now that he thought about it, he was fairly certain that he'd previously dismissed those as an optical illusion due to large marine animals and weather conditions in that area. Well, that and the 'ship' being impossibly large and made out of metal of some kind. So at the time he'd decided that it was much more likely that the metal-like coloring of the wildlife was creating an optical illusion in the distance.

But if anyone could make a giant metal ship function then it was likely the Uzumaki.

Accepting the papers that had been brought with the news, and finally recalling that the messenger was named Masaru, he looked over the information. The dates...didn't quite line up with 'four to eight months' exactly, but that did seem to be the average between sightings with some sightings being far closer and others further apart. Directions also varied, so it could be that trips were being spotted going in different directions. But the descriptions were as he'd half-recalled, reading to him more like illusions created by the marine animals surfacing and being distorted than as ships.

Then again, that would make for an excellent illusionary disguise for a ship, and only recently they'd either shifted routes or improved their ability to hide.

"Do we have any information on why sightings stopped?" Orochimaru finally asked Masaru.

"The villages that had sighted the ships were destroyed," Masaru replied.

"...destroyed? I don't recall hearing about that."

"Kiri heard of the ship and sent a team to investigate and potentially take it for their village. The team did not return, and the villages that had seen it were supposedly destroyed by the ghost ship from afar. Those reports only made it to Konoha, and then to us through our remaining spies, after the rebels took control of the village."

That...did not sound like something the Uzumaki would've done, as the villages would've been innocents. Take out those directly assaulting the ship? Yes. Get revenge on Kiri itself for being arrogant? Likely. Obliterate innocent settlements trying to make a living on the islands, just for having spotted them? Not so much.

...perhaps the reborn Uzushio was running around in impossible to see ships not because they didn't wish to be spotted by the Elemental Nations, but instead because they weren't the only ones on the waves. This was going to make finding them much harder, assuming they were actually out there.