9

Team Eighteen had stayed in the village shifting between training and missions for a month and a half to help ensure that they'd recovered from the executions they'd performed. Despite that, they'd gotten a couple of in-village C-rank missions in. First they'd been tasked with investigating the academy without being seen, finding questionable records from a couple of teachers in the process. That had been followed by being asked to create a large and noticeable distraction, village-wide but also affecting the academy.

Anko-sensei had read the latter mission scroll, handed to them directly by Old Man Hokage, before looking up at the old man with a look of surprise on her face. "Are you ordering us to large-scale prank the village?"

"Yes," was the old man's response.

They'd ended up painting the Hokage Rock, making a pyramid of every desk from the academy outside of the building, 'releasing' a dozen animals with numbers between one and fifteen painted on them into the village, and to ensure that the academy closed for the day they'd also turned off the water valve feeding it. The animals had actually been paperwork clones and the three 'missing' numbers had generated some extra panic, and for some reason it took four days for someone to realize that the water valve had been turned off.

The teachers with questionable records were apparently picked up, interrogated, and not released during this. One supposedly decided they'd had enough and retired while the other had been hurt when they'd knocked the desk pyramid over and had left 'due to their injuries'.

As for team training, on the spells front all five of the team got spell-bullets down and were working on the Knight Armor and flight spells. Hoshi was still struggling there, and they weren't sure if the little guy could use spells. Otherwise they were working on getting various jutsu down without hand seals, sensing chakra, maintaining their alternate personalities for infiltrations, and moving without any trace at all. The latter included Kurenai-sensei having dug up jutsu for erasing your scent and the sounds of your movement.

Naruto had also learned to make seals that caused resistance on your entire body whenever you tried to move, something his father claimed was better than weights for speed training, and made a belt for each of them. They could each adjust their own levels, and the first few days had been horrible to adjust to the effect during. A week later they still weren't back to their original speeds, but they at least no longer looked like they were struggling just to walk.

"So Kurenai and I may have made a bet," Anko-sensei said, looking a little sheepish. "We shouldn't have, but we'd had a couple of drinks and it happened."

"You made a bet and I foolishly didn't stop you," Kurenai-sensei corrected.

"Okay, yes. But I got things approved as an official training exercise."

"Which was part of the bet, so you've not lost entirely yet."

"We're going to test one of the other genin teams that graduated with you. They're more taijutsu-focused, and to be honest I won the coin toss for which team got Buns here. Convinced Gai that the other kunoichi of the year candidate was the better fit for him as she was more taijutsu focused, even if he's not bad with weapons either."

Kurenai-sensei nodded. "Hinata's cousin is also on the team, making most genjutsu less effective by default. Now, in theory, pulling this off without being identified would be difficult, but we happen to have skills that most of the village is unaware of."

"Um," Hinata interrupted. "The byakugan can see the shapeshifting seal. It's somewhat distinctive, though Hanabi and I are assumed to have a variant of the seal used to let the byakugan be used without visible signs instead."

"...huh. I suppose that it's a good thing that Naruto and Hoshi don't have the seal, then."

"What's the actual goal?" Naruto asked.

Anko-sensei shrugged. "Test their combat skills in a way that can't be traced back to us easily. We don't actually have to engage them in combat, just present a credible threat of some kind for them to fight off in some fashion."

"Zombies!" Tenten exclaimed, and they turned to stare at her. "Sachie hates zombie movies, and Hinata has admitted that Hyuga have to focus on paying attention to what's underground in order to pick that up with their byakugan. Naruto could move a bunch of zombie clones into their training ground to see how they react to them."

"That sounds scary," Kurenai-sensei said. "But I don't know how frightening it would be, and the clones would just vanish when defeated."

"Make them earth-nature clones and they'll basically turn into statues when they 'pop'," Naruto noted. "Scent-changing can make them smell reasonably like 'rotting'. Mix in some fire and lightning ones to discourage getting too close to all of them? Neji might figure out which are which after the first few are destroyed, if he pays enough attention, and any that get too close could be told to explode. Maybe...I haven't figured out how to keep that down to a safe level..."

"Now that we've completed our youthful laps around the village," Gai-sensei said, ignoring that two of his students were panting. The man was definitely skilled and knew his way around taijutsu, but Neji would be perfectly happy to swap for a jounin-sensei that had less annoying quirks.

He wasn't stupid enough to think he could get one with no quirks, but less annoying ones would be nice.

Whatever it was that was going to be today's training exercise was interrupted by the sound of a fist coming out of the ground nearby. All four of them turned to look, and a moment later Gai-sensei was next to the fist and pulling the body out of the ground. Only for said body to be a rotting corpse, at least by the look and smell. Sachie screamed, Neji wasn't sure when he'd made it to his feet, and Lee dove in with a kick to the chest of the corpse even as it tried to grab Gai-sensei.

On impact it turned into a stone statue.

Finally remembering to activate his byakugan, Neji focused on the ground and saw that there were dozens of bodies with chakra networks moving under the training ground, and those on the outer edges had already started pulling themselves out of the ground. Some looked like adults, others looked like children, there were significant variations in their chakra that made it seem unlikely that they were simply being controlled by a single specific person, and there were far too many of them.

Sachie, in what looked like a moment of panic, launched a kunai at one of the approaching corpses. It impressively went clear through the first one and struck a second, the first turning into a statue and the second exploding in a fireball. She only carried a standard loadout though. Tenten would've been a lot more useful in this situation, given that she'd bragged about carrying hundreds of kunai and shuriken even in the academy.

Scowling, Neji darted forward, aiming to just barely strike each corpse before moving on. He made it five in before one with the blank eyes of a Hyuga engaged him...with the Gentle Fist. The shock was enough to throw him off, and the corpse managed to close several of his chakra points before he recovered enough to dodge around the next strike and land a solid hit on it. This one turned into a fireball, and he barely jumped back in time to avoid being burned.

Behind him, he could see Lee breaking up the first statue to use it as a source of rocks to launch. Gai-sensei was in the fray on the other end of the training ground, and Sachie was doing her best to be helpful while obviously being scared out of her mind. That the corpses were coming up out of the ground closer and closer to her probably wasn't helping her panic, but she was getting impressive power out of everything she was throwing at them.

Sadly, ranged was proving to be the best option, given that statues kept interfering with movement and every so often a corpse became a fireball or a burst of lightning instead.

Anko-sensei had won her bet and then some, and Gai's entire team was now somewhat paranoid about the training grounds in general. They'd done a circuit of them after clearing 'their' training ground, which had given Team Eighteen long enough to 'clean up' the destruction from the zombie attack. Which just made Gai's team more paranoid, because Neji swore that it hadn't been a genjutsu. Something backed up by the burns on several of their outfits and their visit to the hospital.

Hinata felt a little bad about it, but admitted that not having the truth revealed was better for getting a number of Hyuga to start carrying more ranged options. If they'd known that it was a combination of prank and training exercise then they'd not have bothered, but fear that it could have been enemy action was causing a number of people to take it and their training more seriously.

That Old Man Hokage had them duplicate things against four other teams in other training grounds probably helped. He'd been particularly annoyed that the one team of chunin 'tested' in this way was the only one seriously injured and had decided to push for more readiness drills as a result. Followed by a 'final test' a week into June, just before a number of genin teams were going to be leaving the village for the chunin exams. Teams Nine and Eighteen were both not participating this time, and officially Team Eighteen was on an out of the village mission.

In reality, the others were keeping an eye on Naruto as he recovered from making an insane number of clones. He didn't get the chakra back from the 'elemental' paperwork clones and he needed a lot for a village-wide zombie invasion. The destruction of the clones also took quite a bit out of him as the memories flowed back to him.

Old Man Hokage had congratulated the village on repelling the 'invasion' afterwards...incredibly sarcastically. Genin and the academy had generally been more effective than the average chunin, with jounin and special jounin barely edging the genin and students out in effectiveness.

He'd then blamed the whole thing on an experiment gone wrong that they'd hopefully resolved, but also claimed that they'd only found three of the five hidden workshops believed to exist and thus couldn't be sure. Team Eighteen's official return two days later had included a whole pile of people describing the 'invasion' to them, and for some reason Neji complaining that even the zombies were 'pandering to the main branch'.

The return of the final teams that had gone to the chunin exams in August came at the same time that everyone other than Hoshi on Team Eighteen had finally figured out the basics of chakra sensing and the flight spell. The Knight Armor spell was taking longer, but it was also the most complicated of the three spells in general. But with chakra sensing came the communication jutsu, which was surprisingly simple once you had chakra sensing working.

Naruto had made several copies of a combined scroll of the two for the Uzumaki training hall.

Experimenting with cooking and field medicine had also happened, initially in the village and then on standard C-rank missions outside of it. Despite all of them reading the field cooking guide, Naruto got the best results out of it. Then again, he was apparently the only one of the team that had spent any significant time learning to cook for himself before then, so that might make sense. The other two had their own unexpected skills though. Making field medicine came easiest to Hinata, and Tenten was incredibly good at bandaging wounds.

Scary levels of good. 'Has the bandage on and sealed before the cut started bleeding properly' in at least two cases. She called it a necessity when learning as many weapons as she did.

Even if they didn't all have the silent moving and scent erasure jutsu down, since Naruto was the only one who could spam clones until things worked, Anko-sensei had decided that it was time to do some proper infiltration work outside of the village. Silent communication that was nearly undetectable would help with that, and they'd lucked out that there was a low-level infiltration mission available.

"Every so often someone gets the idea to compete with shinobi and samurai by building up a large force of mercenaries and trained muscle," Anko-sensei explained. "Nine times out of ten they end up pitted against shinobi by pure chance early on and are shown to be useless against even a couple of properly trained genin, but every so often a group survives long enough to appear to be a legitimate alternative to shinobi."

"In this case," Kurenai-sensei continued. "There's a group that's gotten lucky enough to not run into shinobi resistance long enough that they're starting to tell clients that shinobi are 'afraid of them', supposedly because they don't need the 'underhanded tricks' shinobi use. In reality, they've been operating primarily in areas heavily patrolled by the village because they're paths between key points in the country. Directly benefiting from shinobi while trying to claim that we're not needed."

"For reasons of reputation with the civilians, we can't actually step in and crush them directly to prove that they've gotten lucky. So instead we get to slip in, gather information on their operation, and on the way out loot them to the ground if possible. Other optional goals include taking out most of their men without it looking like they were intentionally taken out, ruining their equipment if we aren't running off with it, and engineering a scandal they won't be able to recover from."

"And ideally we don't want anyone to notice our cover identities vanishing either, because that would be more likely to point back at them having been cover identities. Getting while the getting's good is fine, or the majority of those who interacted with them being dead before leaving, but the group shouldn't be able to point at the identities and realistically blame them."

Hoshi hadn't been happy to need to return to the foxes during the mission, but had agreed that training with them was safer than possibly revealing the infiltration. He'd been sent back shortly before the team reached their target town, and they'd lucked out. It seemed that the company they were looking to infiltrate was hiring for a bunch of positions. Most of them were 'muscle' positions, but they wanted support staff as well. A couple of cooks, a handful of cleaners, and a pile of couriers. Anko-sensei had convinced Kurenai-sensei to have the three genin go in alone, with the two sensei hiding in the forest nearby to be 'backup' as well as giving them more freedom to move around town during the day.

The three made themselves look like brown-haired brown-eyed siblings and applied for jobs, with Naruto proving he could cook well enough to get a job in the kitchen. Hinata and Tenten were more 'pity hires' for the cleaning crew after that, because the boss liked Naruto's cooking more than the current stuff being served and didn't want him to leave with his 'sisters'. After seeing the 'food' the current cooks had been making? Naruto honestly couldn't blame the man.

During the day the three did their thing. Hinata and Tenten were stationed in the kitchen and mess hall with Naruto, to 'keep the family together', which limited the amount of the area they could be seen wandering through as the barracks where they'd been given a room was connected directly to the mess hall. They were paid decently for the work and weren't charged rent for the room they'd been given to stay in. Mealtimes were also excellent for picking up on a lot of information that could have been hard to come by normally, including a bunch of things that were likely not written down anywhere.

No attempt was made to keep them in the company's buildings when they had nothing to do, and at night there were minimal guards looking over the office areas. This made it trivial to slip in and check all the paperwork with clones or while clones were wandering the town, though it was still time consuming. While wandering the town they also discovered a rival company, one that was smaller and had a worse track record due to running into shinobi multiple times outside of the patrolled areas.

Anko-sensei and Kurenai-sensei had slipped into the other company's offices to check on them, mostly to see if there was anything they could use against their actual target. It turned out that the other company kept records of altercations between the two companies that their target didn't, going back a couple of years. Every so often the muscle from one of the two would start something, but the bosses stepped in and stopped it before it got too far. This was backed up with gossip from around town, with everyone expecting one side or the other to escalate eventually. Even if only temporarily before being slapped down.

After three weeks there were still things not lining up though. Both companies had more money than their list of jobs implied that they should, implying under the table deals of some kind that never made it into the paperwork. Rumors of what those might be reached the three genin, but nothing concrete enough to investigate. What they did find was that both companies had been paid a significant amount of money that appeared to have come directly from Konoha's bank.

Neither company did jobs on any route touching Konoha.

"I vote we take both companies down at once," Anko-sensei said during a late-night meeting. "Even if we won't be able to interrogate anyone. But the way they're structured, even taking out their funds isn't likely to take them down. They both pay frequently enough that the grunts would be willing to hold out until replacement funds came in."

"We're thinking that a 'tragic accident' of some kind might be the way to go," Kurenai-sensei explained. "But we want to know what you three think could work."

"The worst troublemakers tend to get drunk together at the same bar every few days," Naruto pointed out. "After they do their normal screaming match and stomping off while drunk we could easily make it look like they weren't satisfied with screaming at each other. Pretend to be one from each company and have them set fire to the other company's buildings when everyone has gone to sleep?"

"There are several that end up sleeping their hangovers off in the streets," Tenten added. "Losing their buildings, paperwork, and supplies would cramp things significantly."

"That could work," Anko-sensei said, nodding to herself. "But either both bosses or a significant number of the men have to not make it out of the fires."

Naruto joined the girls in grimacing, but nodded. "I don't know about the other company, but I could trivially slip a knockout drug into dinner. The troublemakers usually skip it for their drinking anyway, so wouldn't be affected."

"I'll handle that side in the other company. Do you know when we can expect to be able to do this?"

"Um," Hinata said. "Four days? Something important is happening in three days, but nobody we've heard talking about it knows what. Just that the troublemakers are worse than usual the day after whatever it is."

"Interesting," Kurenai-sensei said. "You three should see what you can find out about it. Whatever it is might be important. Otherwise, build your escape plan with as much of the money and supplies as you can manage while we work on the other company."

Three days later plans were largely in place. Scrolls to seal money, weapons, and food supplies were ready to go and there were an abundance of disguised clones in the area to see what could be discovered about the 'important event'. During the day things were unusually tense as security was triple-checked and guards on the primary building were doubled.

None of that stopped what looked like a Konoha Anbu from making it to each company's building shortly after dinner. The one Anbu had come from the direction of Konoha, activated a disguise technique to look like a nondescript jounin before meeting with each boss, handed over a single sheet of paper alongside a sizable amount of ryo with Konoha bank wrappers, and then left. Unlike normal Anbu, this one didn't have the tattoo seal that Naruto was used to seeing on their arms back in Konoha, but did have some kind of seal on their tongue.

The papers provided lists dates and times to 'prefer' on specific routes, as well as dates and times to avoid on others. Different lists for each of the two, and the entries were carefully copied into calendars with believable excuses for the scheduling. The original lists were then burned.

In the morning the bosses at both companies paid out 'bonuses' from a small fraction of the ryo that had been delivered the night before, which seemed to be the trigger for the troublemakers to be worse than usual. They started drinking earlier than usual, starting just after lunch instead of closer to dinner thanks to having more ready spending cash. Naruto ensured that dinner would put those who ate in the mess hall, which tended to include the night guards, to sleep, minus the portions that he and the girls would be eating. His clones had seen Anko-sensei slip in and coat cookware and dishes at the other company with something.

Naruto, Hinata, and Tenten appeared to return to their room for an early night, alongside a number of others, but immediately slipped out the window and split up. Hinata went for the food supplies, Tenten for the armory, and Naruto for the office because he'd proven to be the best at getting the safe open. It took the two girls almost an hour to seal everything away and Naruto a little longer to rig the safe with a 'manufacturing fault' that would cause it to unlock and open in a fire. Anko-sensei was doing the same to the safe in the other company's building, which was made by the same manufacturer and only one serial number digit off of the one Naruto was working on. Both safes had a pile of magazines crammed into them to represent the ryo that should have been there, with a little bit of alcohol to ensure things burned well.

Clones had ensured that everyone at their primary target was unconscious and stripped them of their ryo and weapons as well, though no attempt to do so was made by Anko-sensei or Kurenai-sensei for the other company. They only went to the effort of grabbing the safe's contents. Once everything was looted, they met up and moved to the next part of the plan, which involved waiting for the troublemakers to do their bit. That happened shortly after midnight, two groups storming away from each other after being kicked out of the bar. They split up, most of them going back to their barracks. But five didn't, going to look for more 'entertainment'.

Kurenai-sensei used subtle genjutsu to have one man from each of the two companies wander down alleys and fall asleep out of sight, after which Naruto made clones to look like them. Each of the two chosen had left their bar with a mostly-full bottle of strong alcohol, and those bottles were taken by the clones. The two 'drunk' clones snuck around to the back of the buildings of their 'rival company' without any actual consideration for stealth and were seen by a number of people. Lighting strips of cloth they'd stuck into the bottles of alcohol was followed by throwing them through open windows and then wandering back the way they'd come. The trail would lead back to the unconscious real bodies.

Team Eighteen had stuck around until morning in the small camp. The two men they'd framed were blamed but escaped town. The campsite was packed up, all traces of their presence removed, and summoning used to get them back to Konoha.

"This is troubling," Hiruzen said as he looked over the ryo with the Konoha bank wrappers, then the list of dates and times that looked to align perfectly to planned patrols and other missions. "You said someone that looked like a Konoha Anbu, but with a seal on their tongue instead of their shoulder, delivered some of this?"

"Yes," Hinata answered. There seemed to be something wrong there, but he wasn't sure what as she was the only one that could have spotted that detail.

"Very troubling indeed, and what you've recovered is sufficient to pay this out as a B-rank mission instead of the C-rank it started as." If he could he'd have swung it as an A-rank, but they'd not actually engaged with enemy shinobi. It was going to be a high B-rank though, for providing some of the most direct proof that Danzo hadn't truly disbanded Root to date. Especially as the hidden account markers on the ryo wrappers were still in place, and all matched.

Admittedly, it was also likely that those were faked to frame someone else in case this had been discovered, but this amount of money was going to leave a trail of some kind that could be followed.

"In addition," Hiruzen continued. "You are to speak to nobody about this mission. It was under strict information security before you left so as to not compromise your infiltration and is going under stricter security now. The completion will go on your records for purposes of paying you, but no details will be recorded outside of my personal archives." They nodded, likely having expected that already.

Ten minutes later the paperwork for the completed mission was filled out and Team Eighteen had left, five minutes after that trusted Anbu had gone to investigate accounts at the bank, and eight minutes after that Danzo showed up unannounced. It took quite a lot of self control to not confront the man right then and there, but Hiruzen couldn't justify killing him yet. It was, after all, technically possible that someone else was framing Konoha or even Danzo specifically. Better to gather information before acting.

They had mandatory time off of missions after the C-rank turned B-rank, during which they all finally managed to get the Knight Armor spell down. Well, aside from Hoshi, who was managing various jutsu but didn't seem to be able to manage spells. The little guy seemed to have balanced elemental affinities like Naruto did and had gotten all the basic elemental balls down, as well as several area genjutsu. At the same time, his chakra capacity wasn't the best, so it could just be that he didn't have enough power to put into the admittedly chakra-intensive spells.

Jiraiya hadn't shown up for Naruto's birthday, but had sent gifts. More books on seals, three solid chakra-metal fuma shuriken, a scroll for a hair-lengthening and control jutsu, and several pictures of his mother. Without the Tome the pictures would have been the best thing ever, but the jutsu and fuma shuriken ended up being the best parts. One shuriken was placed into each of his armbands and Tenten had obviously been incredibly excited to be able to use the third while trying to hide it because she didn't think she should be taking his birthday gifts.

Naruto's response was to tell her that she really needed to start teaching him how to use the tantos he already had, which she'd jumped on. Along with every other weapon she could convince him or Hinata to so much as hold.

"Okay you three," Kurenai-sensei said as they met near the end of December. "We've done a lot of work on combat, you've proven that you don't need genjutsu to infiltrate..."

"Which is awesome," Anko-sensei interrupted.

"And you're able to dispel most genjutsu I throw at you. It's time to see how good you are at learning and using genjutsu." She produced a stack of nine scrolls tied in bundles of three each and tossed a bundle to each of them. "There are three primary kinds of genjutsu, and each of these scrolls covers the basics of one of them. The academy clone and disguise techniques are commonly considered to be normal jutsu, but are better classed as physical illusion genjutsu as the illusions they create can be seen by cameras. Mental effect genjutsu are the most commonly thought of as being genjutsu and trick the brain directly without affecting the physical world. Last are the 'physical response' genjutsu that control parts of the nervous system other than the brain."

The three genin all looked over the scrolls. Each had a basic description of the type of genjutsu and two examples. The physical illusion scroll had campsite disguise and darkness creation genjutsu, the mental effect scroll had tree-binding and sense-manipulating genjutsu, and the physical response scroll had sleep-inducing and paralysis genjutsu.

Flipping between the mental effect scroll and the physical response scroll, Naruto frowned. "It looks like the tree-binding genjutsu is a paralysis genjutsu?"

"Good catch," Kurenai-sensei said. "It is, but the physical response genjutsu paralyzes by directly interrupting the nervous system while the tree-binding genjutsu paralyzes by tricking the brain into thinking the target is bound. The effects are similar, but the method is distinct."

Over the course of the next two weeks they tried all six genjutsu. Naruto could only seem to get the physical illusion genjutsu working, but he was incredible with them and the bigger the better in many ways. As a test they'd gotten permission and had him attempt to hide the entire village, and it had worked. It had then taken four days to dispel, but hadn't caused the roads to vanish so had only needed minor encouragement for civilians to walk through the illusionary trees hiding the gates at arrival. Hinata had the best results with the physical response genjutsu and ended up admitting that it was nice to be able to put her sister to sleep with the sleep-inducing one. Tenten just didn't seem to have an aptitude for any of them.

Hoshi immediately took to all of them and then some, even if the little guy didn't have the chakra reserves to pull off large-scale physical illusion genjutsu.

A problem with the mental effect and physical response genjutsu was that they were hard to test on the group. The chakra sensing training had made them essentially hyper-aware of foreign chakra entering their systems, triply so when combined with getting used to receiving communication messages from each other. This didn't stop the physical illusion genjutsu at all, and they had to be actively sensing chakra in some fashion to spot them trivially, but it did mean needing to find test subjects elsewhere.

Anko-sensei's solution had been pranking a bunch of people that had annoyed her that she knew weren't trained in sensing chakra.