10

The end of January brought with it the next graduation class from the academy, the one that Naruto and Hinata would have been in had they not graduated early. They might not have thought much of it had there not been a 'scandal' of sorts. Ino had graduated as Rookie of the Year, the first female to do so in the history of the academy. The way things were set up, the 'opposite gender best in class' was also recognized...as the Kunoichi of the Year, regardless of their gender, because nobody had considered the situation where a female took the top slot. This was part of an important and long-standing tradition of the top student of each gender and the dead last being teamed up together.

That had meant that Sasuke was officially the Kunoichi of the Year on the paperwork. His brother had decided to have fun with that and had given him a kunoichi outfit as a gag graduation gift...after hiding all of his other clothing. Which left Sasuke going through his jounin-sensei's test dressed in a skirt, and there were pictures of him circulating. Said outfit hadn't been seen after that day, but he was unlikely to live it down anytime this decade.

As a result of the gossip about Sasuke, they knew that he was teamed up with Ino and Ami. Choji, Kiba, and Sakura ended up together, as did Shino, Shikamaru, and Rio. Four other teams didn't end up passing their jounin-sensei administered tests. But Team Eighteen didn't really run into any of them. D-ranks were largely taken over by the new teams while the previous graduation classes were now almost entirely on out of the village C-ranks.

Those C-ranks were rarely infiltration friendly at all. Bandit-clearing was usually done in full disguise or while aiming to never be seen at all for practice, border patrols needed to be 'highly visible' half the time for deterrent reasons, and guard duty needed the shinobi to look the same the entire time for the benefit of the clients. At the same time, they were getting an entirely deserved reputation for returning to the village without using the gates, something that a number of jounin were apparently noticing. The only exceptions were notable, being when they were sent out to escort someone back to the village.

There was apparently a betting chart in the jounin lounge for how they were accomplishing it. Alongside thirty or so others for various other items.

Yoko kept a smile on her face as she endured weird stares yet again, but really had no clue what was going on. Sasuke was one of the regular visitors to the shrine, which wasn't itself unusual as a lot of people that had never bothered with it before had become regular visitors once water started flowing from the honden again. He spoke more to her than he ever did to Naruto, but likely out of politeness as he had no rivalry with her. She'd not been able to resist teasing him about his 'graduation gift' though, as the pictures had made it to her as well as Naruto, and Sasuke didn't seem to know what to think about her calling his kunoichi getup 'cute'.

He could pull off the look now, but probably wasn't going to be able to manage it in a few years.

The problem was that several of his fangirls had started showing up while following him, or more recently on their own. They were...weird when they visited, as though trying to judge her in some fashion? She had no clue why they'd want to do that though. It wasn't weird enough to bring up to others, as herself or as Naruto, but it was getting somewhat tiring to deal with at times.

"Good morning Naruto," Itachi greeted as Naruto was coming out of his apartment building.

"Morning," Naruto replied. "Did you need something?"

"I volunteered to deliver a bonus to you for keeping the academy students on their toes, since all the clan heirs graduated and came out with better attitudes than expected. Mostly because we never expected you to cause someone to overtake my brother in the rankings, which has...mellowed him out a bit given that I've teased him for it without actually referring to it as a bad thing. Well, no, we have told the two that being the top students is a bad thing, because it means they didn't properly balance improving themselves and hiding their skills...which is beside the point." He produced a scroll and tossed it to Naruto. "This is your bonus. Enjoy."

The man vanished in a body flicker a moment later. Since he had plenty of time, Naruto headed into his apartment with the scroll and opened it up, finding that it was a storage scroll with multiple storage seals. Fourteen, labeled in groups of two from twelve to eighteen. Curious, he unsealed the first of the seals labeled twelve and got a stack of clothing. Looking over it, he found that there were shirts, shorts, gloves, and a pair of boots. Black mesh undershirt and leggings, a short-sleeved dark orange buttoned overshirt and matching shorts. The gloves and shirts had the Uzumaki spiral on their backs and the Uzushio spiral was on the shoulder of the shirts. The boots were black and actually protected the toes, but had an odd pattern on the sole. Unsealing the other seal in the pairing marked twelve, he found a very similar but distinct set of outfits. The boots had more of a heel, the shirts and shorts were cut differently, and there were also skirts included.

"Those look like the traditional Uzushio merchant guard uniforms," his mother piped up after he'd looked over both sets. "Or at least the warm-weather versions. Probably the only somewhat-standardized uniform used by the normal shinobi in the decade before the village fell because it was seen as a good idea for all the shinobi on board ships to look similar."

"I find it interesting that they provided male and female versions though," his father added. "Why would they expect you to need or use both?"

"They likely know about Yoko, but the shorts aren't going to be tail-friendly if they sit as high as I think they do. There were rules about them sitting high enough to not come off easily if you took a swim, which annoyed some of the genin but was great when fighting on the ocean and going underwater was desired. The skirts would be better there for the tail though as it would more easily come out from underneath."

"I suppose we should give you access to the jutsu for drying yourself and your clothing off after a swim."

"And the body temperature regulation jutsu. With that he could wear these in the middle of a blizzard and still be comfortable."

Naruto checked out the other sizes and found that they were largely the same, just larger, but obviously expecting growth in various ways. He eventually decided that for now he'd not wear them, but figured that he'd eventually do so.

Midway through February Naruto had visited Old Man Hokage to ask about the resistance seal belts, specifically if there were any problems with selling them. They seemed to be working well for Team Eighteen, but it was trivial to screw up their use and the rules for selling seals intended for use as training aids were...well, 'convoluted' might fit but was missing a few layers of eldritch horror.

It had taken over an hour for the two to go through things, with the eventual conclusion being that neither had any clue because the seal wasn't applied to the body directly. Putting it on a belt seemed to have fallen into a gaping hole in the middle of all of the rules, and from there it interacted with a couple dozen contradictory items that could have it as anything from perfectly fine through to near-treason illegal if someone wanted to be vindictive.

"I'll have some of the people who specialize in this come up with a way to untangle it all," Old Man Hokage finally said, looking over his notes. And those of his paperwork clone, for that matter. "I'd like you to be able to offer the seal, though perhaps only for jounin given some of the potential hazards, but there might be some kind of valid reasoning not to in this mess."

"And if there isn't then you can just bypass it all by giving me permission," Naruto noted.

"There is that, yes, but some of these laws were put into place after accidents and could be justified beyond the obvious. I'd like to be certain before bypassing them that way."

Well, that did make sense.

Any further discussion about the problem was prevented by the door to the office being slammed open and a young boy running in...only to trip on his own scarf and land on his face, his training kunai skittering across the floor. This was followed by an older shinobi coming in behind the boy.

"Honorable grandson," the older shinobi said. "This is the third time you've tripped on absolutely nothing when barging into the Hokage's office."

"Shut up," the boy said, before jumping up to point at the Hokage. "I will defeat you and become Hokage!"

"Ugh," Naruto said in response to that. "I don't know why you want to."

"...what? Why wouldn't I want to be Hokage?"

"Do you like doing homework?"

That obviously confused the boy. "...no?"

"The Hokage has to do paperwork all the time. It's like having to do homework all day. Every day. Forever."

"What? That can't be true!"

"Naruto is sadly correct," Old Man Hokage confirmed. "Ninety percent of the job is paperwork, meetings, paperwork about meetings, and meetings about paperwork. There's a reason the position comes with a desk, and it isn't because you look good sitting behind it."

"But with hard work and dedication you can become an elite jounin," Naruto said. "Only sent on missions that have incredibly straightforward paperwork because nobody wants to piss off the elite jounin by making them worry about lots of paperwork!"

"Well, that and paperwork really cuts into training time otherwise. Elite jounin don't stay elite jounin if they spend most of their time doing paperwork. On the other hand, being on the level of an elite jounin makes you a potential candidate for Hokage."

"Which can be turned down if you don't want to deal with the paperwork."

"...true."

It would be several days before Naruto would learn that the boy was Konohamaru Sarutobi, Old Man Hokage's grandson, and the older shinobi was Ebisu, a special jounin tasked with looking after the kid.

Orochimaru stared at the pictures that he'd finally decided to look at as part of working on his paperwork backlog. Apparently Konoha had suffered a zombie attack, starting in a few training grounds before escalating to the entire village. With zombies that turned into stone, fire, or lightning when destroyed. Huh. He knew that he'd screwed up the wind and water aspects of that seal array, but he'd disabled and destroyed it long before leaving the village...hadn't he? Hmmm. Maybe that was one of the ones he decided wasn't worth his time to turn off because of how slowly it was powering up? Or perhaps someone found it and started it back up after he'd left. There were a number of projects he'd not actually destroyed due to time constraints on the way out.

Pity that it had gone off on its own, but based on the reports that had come back it was obvious that the shinobi weren't going to be able to handle a proper invasion. That was good, because he was being paid quite a bit to force the reveal of the container of the nine tails and convincing Suna to invade was his best bet there. Revenge, access to a couple of hopefully still unknown labs, and grabbing a few village secrets while he was there were bonuses.

Oh well. He had to ensure that a lot of things were in order before June. Needing at least a month and a half of being undercover was going to be annoying because most of his subordinates started getting...weird after two weeks or so. But unless things went incredibly poorly early on he'd need to be in Konoha for the majority of the time and wouldn't be able to pop in to check on people and stamp down on the stupidity. Which meant ensuring that the stupidity only had at least hopefully safe directions to go in, to the best of his ability anyway.

He was going to lose at least two entire bases, and if he was lucky he could ensure that they weren't his most important ones.

"How many other academies does Konoha run?" Tenten asked as they jumped through the trees on their way to one that wasn't in Konoha.

"Sixteen," Anko-sensei replied. "Assuming we only count the genin academies like the ones we're visiting. There are six chunin academies as well, tied to the largest six genin academies, though only truly exceptional shinobi ever make it to jounin if they made it to chunin that way. We're only visiting six of the genin-only academy villages."

"Most genin teams don't get sent out like this," Kurenai-sensei added. "But you three have better chakra control than most so having you help out with chakra control lessons makes sense. Anko and I will be doing routine checks of the mission halls and grabbing copies of reports for central filing, at least for the C- and D-rank missions they run. Anything involving leaving the Land of Fire or something above C-rank in general passes through Konoha via messenger hawk."

"Just don't make a big deal about having jounin for your sensei. Or being genin at your age, for that matter. Most of the out-of-village reserves only reach genin at fifteen to sixteen and the genin are led by chunin instead of jounin."

"Why do they take so long to graduate?" Hinata asked.

"Ummm..."

"Chakra capacity and control," Kurenai-sensei answered, saving Anko-sensei from obviously not having thought about it. "Ninety percent of Konoha civilians have at least three shinobi in their family trees if you go back four generations. That leads to better chakra capacity by default. Pulling those that have lucked into being able to use chakra from the wider civilian population rarely includes any shinobi ancestors at all, so they need more time to build up capacity and control. The best shinobi then tend to move to Konoha for better access to training and higher-paying missions, reinforcing the disparity."

Anko-sensei looked at Kurenai-sensei. "Where the hell did you learn that?"

"My mother explained it to me. She moved to the village as a higher-level out-of-village shinobi. She'll never reach jounin levels of chakra herself though and thinks that the Konoha academy standards are insanely difficult for the graduation age. I got subjected to a bit of a rant on the subject after the Uchiha helped push through increasing the physical requirements, actually, and my father had to explain to her that this is still less intense than the wartime requirements."

When they finally arrived at the first village they found that on the outside it looked very much like any other non-shinobi village they'd visited. The major exception was a single large structure in the middle that had the Konoha symbol on it, which turned out to be the mission hall and regional office. Surrounding the village were somewhat-hidden training grounds in clearings in the forest, and when they finally met some they found that the genin were closer to what would normally be chunin age in Konoha and the academy students they were to teach were older than they were. Based on that there were some scoffs that the three genin could teach anyone anything. At least until Tenten walked halfway up a tree and stood there sticking out from the trunk. That led to teaching academy students, genin, and a few of the chunin.

Over the course of the afternoon they worked with anyone who had time to come to the training ground being used while their sensei were going through things in the mission hall. Of the three, Naruto cycled through more students, moving on when he'd gotten each group to progress through whichever exercise they were working on. The leaf-sticking exercise for the academy students and surface-sticking for the genin and occasional chunin.

"You are way too good at explaining these exercises," Tenten told Naruto over dinner. "I never noticed half of the things you mentioned."

"He has to do a lot of chakra control exercises," Hinata chimed in. "I think he has at least twenty clones a day doing nothing else?"

"Usually thirty or so," Naruto agreed. "Five each on leaf-sticking, surface-sticking, water-walking, chakra strings, chakra sensing, and shape training. Makes getting to sleep at night really easy, since having all of their fatigue hit me at once knocks me right out. Can't do that when we're on missions though, so I only keep five or so clones active."

"...I missed something," Tenten said. "You keep clones active while we're on missions?"

"Yoko and a few well-known animals. First thing I do when I get up in the morning is make the clones and they reverse-summon themselves to the compound before splitting up into the various roles. I think that all of them being in the village even when we're out on missions has even convinced a few jounin that they can't be tied to me, but the Yoko clone is frequently one that will survive me going to sleep and sometimes I forget to have her dispel until the new one shows up the next morning."

"Huh."

Over the course of the two weeks the pattern of 'arrive, be scoffed at for their ages, prove themselves, actually get training done' happened at every single village...as did the locals wanting Naruto in particular to stick around longer to help them understand where they were going wrong better. Hinata and Tenten hadn't found the 'early' exercises difficult enough to develop a deeper understanding of them like Naruto had, even though he'd had to work his way into them from the wrong direction.

"Hey old man," Naruto greeted Old Man Hokage. "What's up?"

"Two things," the old man replied, shaking his head as Naruto casually dodged multiple attempts to slap the back of his head for being disrespectful. The old man didn't mind and Naruto knew it. "For one, we finally untangled and smoothed out the laws impacting the sale of your belts." A scroll was picked up and tossed to Naruto. "This is an order for fifty for the Anbu, another fifty for the jounin armory, and a list of trusted shops that you may wish to work with for others."

"Awesome."

"Secondly, I have two missions for your team. One that came in this morning is to be treated as a cover mission for the other." Two scrolls were picked up and tossed to Kurenai-sensei, who handed one to Anko-sensei. They read the scrolls, swapped to read the other, and then nodded.

"So we're doing a C-rank that's probably at least a B-rank as cover for looting a pissant to the ground," Anko-sensei said. "Using said looting to pay for both missions and ideally tanking his shipping company so hard that ours gets a bunch of emergency contracts that will lead to longer-term relationships."

"With the possibility of things going A-rank on the cover mission if certain rumors are correct," Kurenai-sensei added, sounding doubtful. "I...don't think we're ready for A-rank missions as a team."

"There's at most a single jounin-level opponent expected," Old Man Hokage explained. "Mostly because Gato is cheap and we're fairly confident that he wouldn't be willing to pay for more than that. If he did find one then you and Anko should be able to handle it. The rumors point towards Kiri missing-nin, and you might be able to scare them off entirely with Naruto's Uzushio forehead protector as well."

"...what?" Naruto asked, confused.

"You haven't been wearing it, but Uzushio shinobi have a reputation. Especially in Kiri, where they clashed regularly on missions to protect shipping. Now, I doubt that you can live up to the reputation for humiliating your opponents in the way they used to, but doing anything to humiliate them would count."

"We've got three days to prepare," Anko-sensei said. "I'm sure you can come up with at least something by then, even if you still need hand seals for it."

"Okay you three," Anko-sensei explained as they met up half an hour later. "Most genin don't get the standard talk about missing-nin until they actually run into one, but suspecting that we'll do so means that you get it ahead of time."

"Even if I'm still not sure why we accepted the mission," Kurenai-sensei said, shaking her head.

"Because we're awesome enough to handle it. Anyway, long story short, the general policy in the elemental nations is that hiring missing-nin means open season on you from the hidden village system. That includes missing-samurai and the Land of Iron's samurai in general, by the way. Now, Kirigakure's missing-nin are a little bit of a mixed bag due to their civil war, but Konoha hasn't changed interaction rules. If they're listed in the bingo books, especially their home village's, then our primary goal is to capture or kill them and anyone working with them for their bounties. Capture is preferred when deemed reasonably possible so that they can be properly interrogated, but limb disabling or removal is recommended to render them safer if we can't keep them secure otherwise."

"We have options for capture that others don't when in the field thanks to summoning tricks. If we can knock someone out then we can get them back to Konoha with a short-term prisoner transport scroll. They can only hold weak shinobi for up to six hours and tend to fail on strong shinobi after forty-five minutes, but we only need fifteen for Naruto to get the scroll to T&I."

"You have three days to prepare whatever you want to prepare. We'll be leaving on the fifteenth, but I want you to know every Kirigakure missing-nin in the bingo books by then. Especially the stronger ones. Do remember that we'll be doing both bodyguard and infiltration work, so ensure that you have suitable kits ready for both."

They'd split up at that point to ensure that they had supplies and clean laundry ready. Except that as soon as Naruto was alone with Hoshi his attention was grabbed by the Tome.

"I wasn't going to teach you these for a while," his mother said. "But if Hiruzen wants you to live up to the Uzumaki name then you need to know them. Some of them are merely classic Uzumaki tactics, at least one of which you figured out on your own already far too early, others are jutsu that range from stupid-seeming but weirdly effective to effective-seeming but actually useless. A few of the jutsu have gone by hundreds of names, independently recreated by generations of Uzumaki."

"...just be aware that some of these will knock your allies out due to shock," his father added.

"I suppose you would know. You didn't appreciate seeing me use several of them..."

Naruto half tuned them out as he pulled the Tome out to flip through the new pages. Tips for appearing to be completely clueless while getting close to an enemy, various distraction methods, creative use of explosive tags, and a couple dozen new jutsu. He blushed at the thought of some of the distraction methods, especially some of the ones he'd not understood when he'd started using them when younger, shivered at some of the jutsu, and tried to figure out why the explosive tags were so inefficiently positioned for a couple of the tactics.

A hundred clones were created to work on it all before he went to check his various storage seals to see what he'd need to pick up in the next few days. He'd probably include things for making a bunch of the resistance belts, but figured that dealing with finding a store to sell them for him would need to wait until after the mission. If things went well he'd probably have the two existing orders finished before they left though.

To the team's surprise, on the fourteenth Naruto had gathered them and applied seals to select portions of their gear, including their forehead protectors. Thanks to the spiral armbands the Tome had been able to figure out how to make other things be ignored by the Knight Armor spell. For the most part it was best used with pouches that you wanted to retain access to even with the Knight Armor up, but he'd also been able to add the seal to the Uzu Anbu masks and their stacks of metal storage seal tags for various combat gear.

The biggest problem was that you needed to either add the seal to the belts the stuff was attached to as well or have a suitable belt in the same position in your Knight Armor template. Less of a problem for thigh pouches that were wrapped around your legs, but still annoying and took some experimentation to get right.

Anko-sensei had taken the opportunity to hand over a crate of various knockout drugs to make capturing missing-nin easier. Naruto had commented that some of them weren't that effective and had been 'volunteered' to test them as a result, only for them to find out that they genuinely weren't all that effective on him. Tenten had fallen over almost immediately with a couple, but they needed dangerously high doses to properly knock him out.

He'd been dragged to the hospital so that a medic-nin could figure the mystery out, and the best they could say was that his recovery rate was high enough that the normal doses were working their way out of his system before they'd even kicked in properly.

"What are you wearing?" Anko-sensei asked as Naruto arrived at the arranged meeting point near the village gates.

"Traditional Uzushio uniform," Naruto answered. He mostly had on the male version of the uniform, but with one of the skirts instead of shorts so that he could release his tail if he wanted to. Still needed to adjust his underwear before doing so, but he'd tested and found that it worked well enough. His Konoha forehead protector was on his forehead and his Uzushio one was sitting around his neck, and he'd ensured that he had a Knight Armor version of it all just in case. "Figured that if we want to push the Uzu connection then I should go for it."

"Looks good on you, and I think I based my look on pictures of the thing that I saw when I was in the academy. Though I'd expect shorts for you, not a skirt."

"The shorts sit too high to shift back comfortably if I need to."

"Ah. Good thinking."

"Where's Kurenai-sensei? She usually beats you to meetings."

"She did, but went to find the drunk that happens to be our client."

Hinata showed up a couple of minutes later, followed by Tenten. Both needed an explanation for the change in uniform for Naruto. Hoshi found the need for the repeated explanations amusing. Then they ended up waiting for three quarters of an hour before Kurenai-sensei finally arrived with an old man. He had gray hair and a somewhat standard civilian traveling kit, as well as an open bottle of alcohol.

"...I thought I was getting shinobi," the man said as he looked over the group. "Not a bunch of little girls...and is that a fox?"

"I'm a guy," Naruto shot back. "I just have a specific trick that the skirt works best for."

"...what? Really?"

Kurenai-sensei nodded, not asking for an explanation on the outfit. "We each have our own abilities, and these 'little girls' are all experienced genin. Naruto is the blond in orange and is probably best described as a support specialist, Hinata's white eyes let her see things most people can't, and Tenten is a budding weapons expert. Even the fox, Hoshi, has useful skills when it comes to deception. You already met Anko yesterday morning. Team Eighteen, this is our client, Tazuna. We'll be escorting him back to the Land of Waves and then guarding him and his crew as they work on a bridge connecting to the Land of Fire."

"Huh. Where am I waiting while you all grab your packs?"

"What packs?" Naruto asked.

"...your food, clothing, tents? You don't think that we're going to make it to Wave in a day, do you?"

A tap of a seal tag and a puff of chakra smoke revealed a chest, in this case one full of cooking equipment, not that Naruto opened it to show that. "With the right equipment you don't need packs."

"...damn. That would've made the trip out here a hell of a lot easier."

"Not being burdened by our equipment gives us more options in the event that combat comes up," Kurenai-sensei explained. "That Naruto's personal studies include creation of this particular type of equipment means that we're better equipped in that regard than most teams, but most shinobi eventually come to use this to some degree."

Tazuna nodded, eyeing Naruto with more respect than he had before. "I see. How much can one of you carry?"

"Enough to make former classmates jealous if they found out," Naruto answered as he re-sealed the cooking chest. "I don't know what some of the girls will do when they can't bring a full wardrobe, makeup, and portable shower along on missions."

Anko-sensei turned to stare at him. "Hold up, are you implying that you do have a portable shower? As in you finally figured out how to get one working that isn't just a tank with a hose?"

"Yep. Figured out how to get hot and cold water working a couple weeks ago." Finding out how the honden at the shrine worked had been crucial there. Mixing in some fire nature chakra for the hot water was then trivial, and feeding it into a standard shower system as though it was installed in a building had been easy enough. Didn't look pretty, admittedly, but it worked and adding decorative covers could happen later.

Tazuna blinked a couple of times while the rest of the team stared at Naruto. "What's next, saying that you've got a portable toilet too?"

"Those are standard-issue for teams like ours," Tenten said, after shaking herself out of her awe over having access to hot showers on the road. "They sell nine different models here in Konoha alone."

"Not leaving that kind of evidence that you've been in an area can be crucial on some kinds of missions," Anko-sensei added. "The annoying part is cleaning them out when you get to a place where it's safe to do so, and the basic models are literally just the toilet with no cover."

Tazuna seemed shocked at all of this, but half an hour later they had made it out of the village and started on their journey to Wave.