112

Karin looked across the group of chunin, shaking her head. "I can tell that you're worried about the number of you present. We have over a hundred plans for how to divide you up fairly, depending on a number of factors, but our preference was for there to be an even number of you. As that's what happened, you will be assigned partners for the next week." She produced four tokens from a pouch and held them up. "Each of you will receive one of four tokens, a different one than the token your partner receives. You and your partner will need all four tokens at the end of the week to move on. There will be no early exit for obtaining tokens before the week is up."

There were a number of grimaces at that, but she signaled for the screens to turn on. To her they looked blank, but to each of the chunin they should see their picture and their partner's information. Pausing a moment to let them look outraged, she spoke up before they could start yelling. "Many of you have noticed that your partners are...objectionable, to put it mildly in some cases. Village, clan, family, and even known personal grievances were taken into account as we worked to ensure that as many of you as possible were given your worst possible match-ups. Jounin must be able to put the mission above such grievances, rarely getting to choose who they must work with when assigned a mission that intersects with another village."

The general horror on the faces of the chunin at that declaration amused her, though not all the chunin knew what the problem was with their partner and there were six pairs that had no such problems at all. They'd run out of possible problems for those six and had to settle for horrible skill match-ups instead.

"As a reminder," she continued. "You and your assigned partner must survive as a team and collectively hold a full set of four tokens at the end of the week to progress. If you abandon each other and still collect the required tokens then you will still be disqualified, and we will know. We may even extract you at the point that it's obvious that you are no longer working together, failing you early and removing any tokens you hold at the time from play."

They made quick work of splitting everyone up into their pairs, getting them tokens, and sending them through a collection of transport pads to their entry points into the forest surrounding an artificial volcano that they'd be fighting in. Now, in theory they had enough tokens in play for half of the participants to pass. Assuming even distribution of the four tokens, anyway. In reality, half the tokens were identical with each team having one. The rest of the tokens were split three ways, to reduce things down to at most a third of the team count.

Shino was less than pleased with his partner, but at least it wasn't a member of the Kamizuru clan. Assuming any remained in Iwa's ranks, anyway. Dealing with an area of effect lightning user was...problematic though, especially as they'd regularly gone up against Aburame and wiped out large numbers of insects.

That they were apparently afraid of insects wasn't making this any easier.

Luckily, both of them were professional enough to look past their issues with each other for the good of the mission, unlike another team or two that appeared to be ready to try to kill each other before even making it to the transport pads.

"I can scout for others but not easily find out what tokens they have," Shino said as they moved through the trees, dodging the attempts by the branches to take them out. "The markings are not distinct enough for my partners to identify, and even if they were we cannot assume that tokens will be reachable."

"Makes sense," Sazen replied. "That's almost certainly part of why they're using tokens and not scrolls. Easier to conceal and harder to spot."

"Indeed."

"...but, er, what's with the puppet?"

"I can only carry so many insects with me at once. The puppet protects additional hives, allows me greater range and flexibility, and has a number of built-in tools to aid in close-range combat if needed."

"It's...full of insects?"

"Yes."

The man shivered, and gave the puppet a wary look, but didn't move to do anything to it. Thankfully, because the trip back to Konoha to fetch it after the skill tests had been annoying.

Han stretched as he moved away from the vegetables he'd just finished steaming, allowing those that served as helpers to portion them out. The fabrics he'd started on earlier needed another hit due to a particularly troublesome clay and should be ready for him to give another attempt. He didn't find most of this interesting, but it paid well enough.

Doubly so when you considered that the people in the area were willing to go to great lengths to get new books for him.

Unfortunately, he didn't make it to the cleaning room before someone started ringing the village bell. Grimacing, he hopped out of a window and headed for the village gates. Roshi had swung through and ensured that the village walls were strong enough to handle bandits, but the gates were a weak point and strong walls made most bandits think that there was more here than there was.

Sure enough, there was a group of bandits starting to make trouble. He hadn't had time to get his armor, not that it fit him well anymore. Not since the tail had started coming in, at any rate. But he also didn't need it anymore, barreling through the bandits without much concern for their weapons. No, he was now much tougher, and his appearance was enough to cause those unfamiliar with him to panic.

He was not kind to those that intruded upon the peace of the village, nor did the villagers expect him to be. When he was done only two bandits had escaped, and he'd allowed them to so that hopefully others would be warned away.

"I think I'll tackle the fabrics again tomorrow," he mused as the villagers started to clean up the corpses. They got a bit insulted if he tried to do things that were 'beneath him' and not directly related to his boiling and steam tricks.

In some ways they had the unfortunate habit of worshiping him, honestly. Roshi's last visit had included a similar complaint regarding non-shinobi he worked around regularly as well.

Himeko scowled as her arm was looked at by the medic-nin. Nomio had been too trusting of obviously-faked clues and had failed the skill tests, something she and Bozane hadn't been stupid enough to do, but she'd not made it five minutes into the forest before she had to defend herself from her 'partner'. She got a kunai to the arm and nearly took a tanto to the stomach, but had gotten her katana into his chest before then.

What felt like fifteen seconds later a pair of proctors had arrived, stabilized the asshole's injuries, and dragged them both out of the forest.

"So," the pink-haired and wolf-featured medic-nin said. "Though you were eliminated, the reports will show that you made no attempt to attack until your life was put in danger, so it shouldn't hurt future promotion chances. That you came out mostly uninjured and were starting to treat your own wound will probably help."

"Thank you," she replied.

"They are unlikely to see promotion for a few years though."

"I should hope not."

"Well, your arm should be fine now. The poison didn't have time to spread deeper into your system."

"...he poisoned me?"

"Yes."

"Asshole."

"Definitely. As a consolation prize and apology for having to deal with him, you've got two free meals here and can pick up a free five-meal reusable storage tag from any of the shops selling them."

That had her blinking. "Oh. Cool. I'd been hoping I could pick up something like that." Pausing, she frowned. "How much of that is a bribe to not be angry with Uzushio for the entire format of this stage?"

"Probably half of it, though I don't think the others getting similar offers have noticed."

"I'm more annoyed that it's probably still going to work despite me having noticed."

Naruto shook his head. In three hours they'd pulled nine teams out of the forest due to one or both members aiming to deliberately kill the other. Nobody had died in the attempts, but a couple had been close. Luckily the plan and teams had been approved by the other village leaders ahead of time as well, with minimal grumbling after reading the justifications for why it was being done.

He was going to have to have a talk with the lone Uzushio chunin that had attacked their assigned teammate, though they'd been kind of manipulated into failing in that manner so that Uzushio would have at least one idiot to keep the other villages from complaining too much. Originally the plan had been to have three, to have a backup in case one of them got jumped before they could be an idiot, but five other candidates for that had all proven that they weren't ready for promotion at the skill tests stage.

It felt like they should've had twelve potentials instead of six as a result, but that was hindsight speaking.

Somewhat more surprising was that Sasori's teammate had made two attempts to kill him, but they hadn't been pulled out yet. Neither attempt had even been close to successful and the man had spent twenty minutes lecturing his teammate, but they were currently working together. If that would last was yet to be seen.

For now it looked like the bulk of the issues had been settled though, so he could leave things to others now and get back to focusing on the computer systems he was making good progress with.

Sasori found it amusing that they were two days in and had all four tokens they needed, and personally suspected that every team had gotten the 'shinobi' token. In addition, Baisho continued to try to find ways to kill him even after the lecture from the first couple of attempts, but now it felt more like probing gestures instead of actual attempts. Which would at least help explain how pathetic the attempts were at this point.

With nowhere specific to go at the end of the week they'd just hunkered down in a created cave, a few basic privacy and chakra suppression seals thrown around to hide their presence.

"You know," he said, looking over at his 'partner'. "I don't think you explained why you want to kill me."

Baisho frowned. "Why wouldn't I want to kill the man who killed my parents?"

"You feel a bit young for that to be a concern."

"You wiped out an entire village in the Land of Rivers."

That had him blinking. "Couldn't have been me then. I've never wiped out any entire village, let alone in the Land of Rivers. Spent too much time on smaller jobs and research after the war, and I spent the bulk of the war itself in the Land of Wind. I'm Sasori of the Red Sand because of all the blood spilled onto the sand, not blood spilled in forests."

"A likely story."

Perhaps Uzushio had some clue who had actually done that particular deed. If said person still lived then he might even swing a mission to show them that it was unwise to pretend to be other shinobi.

Davaa found it somewhat interesting that he was working against the legitimacy of their local spiritual beliefs...but in the face of actual Gods and Goddesses running around it seemed very much stupid to not adapt. Everyone he was working with on setting up smaller shrines agreed, though the political leaders were...problematic in their own ways.

Whatever had been done to warn them had at least appeared to stop them from wanting to force people on the Goddess though.

The smaller shrines, with the talismans provided by the Goddess, seemed to work though. Things actually improved, petty overnight theft in particular dropping out almost entirely around them, which was another blow to their local spiritual traditions. Being able to set up a shrine and have things immediately start changing around it for the better was an incredible demonstration of true power.

After all of this, focus had instead shifted in part to an attempt to teach their own people the language that the Goddess apparently used to teach others currently, instead of just waiting for others to learn their language. They'd finally found references to it, now that they were communicating with other nations a bit more, and relative experts from dealing with merchants were going to be coming to take a look. Non-military experts, and with any luck they would be able to help ensure that no mortal insults were dealt. Or help confirm that none had already been issued to the Goddess, for that matter, though she seemed forgiving of accidental insults.

In some ways, her less-known brother was the bigger concern. He may have been the one to issue the warnings, and there was an implication in things that he was the more violent of the pair. How true that was couldn't be fully determined though, and they didn't even know if the appearance he'd used when visiting was his true appearance or not.

Hinata grumbled as she sat down at dinner. "Your computers are insane."

"You're just mad that I figured out how to make them faster and more efficient with seals," Naruto retorted.

"No, I'm mad that you underestimated everything and don't understand any of the units. You've completed two units, and the first one tested at just over three thousand exaflops before the power requirements forced throttling it back significantly. How you seem to have managed yottabytes of storage is eluding me."

He frowned. "Three thousand exaflops in what time period?"

"Flops are floating point operations per second."

"Oh. Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Huh."

"That the performance goes up that much when you shove more power into the system is ridiculous."

"Well, that's probably the time-compression seals."

She blinked as she processed that. "Time-compression seals?"

"Yeah. They compress time in the computing areas to speed them up."

"But...that should break all the clock cycles?"

"That's why the computing areas have an independent clock system, isolated from the rest of the system."

"But that still shouldn't work. Though it does explain a few things I hadn't understood yet. How did you get yottabytes of storage?"

He shrugged. "I obviously don't know what the units actually are, but I took the solid-state storage system and used seals to allow the storage chips to store exponentially more data thanks to being able to put things along an additional couple of physical dimensions. As an added bonus, if you try to bypass the controller and attempt destructive analysis then the chips explode violently. Writing the driver to allow access was annoying though."

She took a couple of deep breaths, because it shouldn't be anywhere near that simple and he was obviously glossing over a large number of details, before turning to Ino. "I hope you're at least having fun."

Ino sighed. "He and Yoko dropped a seal array on us that creates an impossibly accurate fake of someone you stick on it, the only differences being instructions you prepared ahead of time. Only works on those with at most one tenth of the chakra of the one who activates the array, and only for up to two weeks, but the initial tests had copies of nobles successfully transferring their holdings to their next of kin."

"...what?"

"It's a less combat-focused version of the fight yourself array," Naruto pointed out. "Needs more chakra to keep the copy going for over a week, but otherwise the same basic premise."

"And what did you test it on?"

"Yoko grabbed a couple of troublemakers in their sleep, didn't give one any orders at all and gave the other one orders to cheat on his wife. The originals were put back in bed, the duplicates let loose a couple towns over, two days later they met up and confused everyone by killing each other."

Ino groaned at hearing that. "Of course that's how that was managed. Why wasn't that in the report?"

Naruto blinked this time. "What do you mean? The 'techniques used' section should've connected right to the documentation on the seal array. At least if you were at a secure terminal when you read the report, anyway."

That was one of the more annoying things about Naruto doing this kind of thing. It was always documented, but generally in a manner that made perfect sense in hindsight while not necessarily being obvious when you first went looking. Well, that or it was documented in Uzukage-eyes-only storage and there was no way to get access to it.

Jono wasn't sure who had stolen their tags, when they'd done so, or even how, but their tags had been missing after they beat down another team. That team's tags had also been missing though, which implied that someone was being stealthy.

Unfortunately, anyone that good at being stealthy probably wasn't going to be trivial to find.

This led to the unusual situation of teaming up with first the team that they'd just beaten, and then over the next two days a collection of others that had lost all their tags to go hunting for those responsible. So far they were up to ten shinobi working together on that now. None of them had lost their tags in combat, though a couple had stored them in a manner that made them being stolen instead of something like 'fakes that vanished' confirmable.

They had at most a day to find someone with tags, and they weren't having any luck at all. It was as if everyone who had tags had vanished, despite there being no way out of the forest without being disqualified.

Fu hadn't gotten along with Doyuki at first, the man being offended by anyone with non-human features in general. But he was incredibly good at being sneaky, apparently having been trying to get up to Uzushio's level of stealth, and she was good at moving them around the forest. This led to her flying him in, letting him steal the tags off of everyone in the area, and repeating.

They had nine teams worth of tags, though only two full sets. She'd even spent some time close enough to Shino to find out that he and his partner had managed to get a full set and were in 'hunkered down' mode. That was something she couldn't really do though, not knowing any way to hide her chakra well enough, which is why she was running Doyuki to near-ish teams and then letting him do the stealth work.

"You'd think someone would've seen us flying up to the cave on the volcano at least once," Doyuki commented as they sat down to a meal.

"Several did," Fu pointed out. "But reaching here without being able to fly is hard."

"Oh."

"And last night someone tried to attack, but they were easy to drive off."

"Huh."

Himeki looked over at the screens showing the jounin exams. "So gentlemen, did any of you bet that only eight teams would be in the running as the stage closed?"

The grimacing from all of them told her that they hadn't, and she'd known that. But she wasn't supposed to know what anyone had bet on, so had to ask. If any of them had been potential winners then she'd need to escort them to the back. After she confirmed that none of them were going to claim otherwise, she moved to the next table to repeat the process.

Eventually she made it through everyone, and the timer had run down as she reached the last table. Nobody had assumed that so few would pass, so the house had won big on this one...and the cheaters had lost enough money that their shinobi leaders were likely to show up wanting answers.

Four drink orders were collected on her way to the bar to report the lack of claimed winners, but she was more interested in the most nervous gang members. They were the ones that seemed most likely to be directly answering to the shinobi leaders, and the owner's son wasn't in the list. She found that interesting, since he seemed to be running things otherwise. Perhaps he was only allowed to believe he was in charge and they were planning on double-crossing him later?

It didn't matter right now, but it was something to mention to Hanabi if he hadn't picked up on it already, and they might need to mention it to the owner as well.

Naruto looked over the group of sixteen chunin that had ended the week with their tokens. "I have to admit, I'm a little surprised that we ended up with so few of you after a week. Admittedly, we lost just over half of the teams to the trees and four teams to the wildlife, but three teams running around successfully stealing as many tags as they could wasn't anticipated."

You could tell which teams had done that by the shit-eating grins on their faces.

"We also only had four deaths in combat," he continued. "Mostly due to everyone realizing that the tags were far easier to hide in ways that would be difficult with a corpse, or so it seems. Still, the end result simplifies things as it allows for a straightforward final bracket. As is standard, you will have a month to train. Here or elsewhere isn't important, beyond being here on time for the finals. You will not find out who you're fighting ahead of time, as jounin shouldn't need that kind of direction to prepare to show their skills."

There was nodding at that, and he dismissed them before turning to the other leaders present. Mei shook her head as he did so. "You didn't mention the emergency evacuations of most of the participants so that your medics could be miracle workers."

"The public already knows about those."

"I suppose. Forcing everyone to work with 'enemies' was a bold move though, and revealed quite a bit more than expected."

Kurotsuchi nodded her agreement. "Shinobi that can't get over grudges for the good of their mission are...problematic."

A chuckled. "Yes, but I noticed that Uzushio and Konoha were the only villages whose shinobi just took or ignored the attempts to kill them and continued on anyway."

"Well," Shisui said, grinning. "We're also some of the most likely to be able to ignore basic poisoning attempts."

"Very true, and that's quite annoying to deal with. Luckily your shinobi are also currently the least likely to go on violent rampages for no good reason."

"Removing the string-pullers trying to improve the village by screwing up everything helps there. You should have Naruto here give you a list to target."

"We've given him six lists so far," Naruto pointed out. "He's having trouble working around his daimyo at this point."

"Ah. Having a good relationship there is useful."

"Definitely," Kurotsuchi said. "Do we know if the others didn't show up because their chunin didn't make it to the finals, or because it wasn't important enough either way?"

Naruto shrugged. "A mixture. Gaara was called to meet with the Wind Daimyo about an attack that needs immediate investigation, but I think most of the minor villages didn't see it as useful to show up when their shinobi were already home. Which is a shame, because a bunch of them are getting glowing recommendations despite being eliminated because they went above and beyond working with others in pursuit of their goal."

"Ah. Pity. I'd hoped to have a quick chat with him in a neutral location."

Shisui shook his head as he turned away from the moon. "Having obvious lights in the dark portions of the moon is going to take some getting used to."

"As if having forests and oceans up there isn't unusual enough," Hiashi pointed out.

"True. I might need to replace Tsunade as an advisor though, if she's going to spend too much time up there doing low-gravity medical research."

"She's not exactly hard to reach if you want to call her for a meeting," Kakashi pointed out. "And three quarters of these meetings are more 'informal' gatherings where one or more of us just doesn't show up."

"I know, but having an advisor not be in the village for long stretches of time is still a potential problem."

"And she wasn't going to take much interest in jounin promotions anyway."

"...okay, that's probably a good reason to stop worrying about her not being here now. Usushio already provided a number of recommendations regarding those who didn't make it to the finals. Several special jounin potentials, a couple for which they just had bad luck, and a few that seem like they're very much not ready for promotion."

Hiashi nodded as he accepted a copy of the recommendations. "Hopefully none of the latter are mocking us for being fooled by someone very obviously not ready."

"My quick skim said that it was more attitude than skill creating the problems, and that's hard to spot unless you're working with them extensively."

It didn't take long for them to start going through things, cringing at some of the mistakes cited but finding the arguments hard to argue for each recommendation.

Gaara grumbled a bit as he finally returned to Suna. Being made to personally go out to placate the Daimyo was annoying, doubly so when the problem turned out to be someone the Daimyo insisted be allowed through security when his guards thought they were trouble. Games like that made security for nobles a significant pain on the best of days, but at least they had a better situation than before politically.

Directly saving the Daimyo's life from the person he had trusted, in front of his own eyes, made justifying the guards ignoring the Daimyo for a bit trivial.

"How badly did our chunin do?" Gaara asked as Kankuro came up to him.

"All the remaining ones bombed out in the second stage for a number of reasons," Kankuro answered. "But there were several sneaky teams running around stealing instead of fighting, whittling the numbers down significantly. Only two of them seemed to have an Uzushio member, which was the surprising part of that."

"Counter-stealth is horrible to train, especially in forest environments when most of our training is still in the desert, so I understand them having problems detecting the thieves. Did we have any more blatant idiots attacking those that they were supposed to be working with?"

"Nope, and we've got recommendations tied to some that worked together with a large group hunting down stealthy thieves. No actual success, but they were willing to try."

"That's some good news."

"We also have a large amount of great-quality supplies picked up from shops up there, and all the chunin who were 'betrayed' by their partners got consolation prizes."

"Pity that I won't be attending the finals as a leader. Not sure I want to bother getting tickets for myself at all, honestly."

"Uzushio passed along tickets anyway. If you don't want to use them then some of the analysts would probably jump at the chance."

Yeah, that was probably the better choice. Especially for hopefully jounin-level combat on display. "Anything else I should know about immediately?"

"...er. Sasori wants to spend some of his training month here?"

That brought Gaara up short. "Why?"

"To work with me on puppet designs, I think."

"Huh."

Ino found it interesting that only the Konoha and Uzushio chunin had returned to Earth for their training. Admittedly, they were also taking advantage of the dedicated training islands instead of the more generic facilities on the moon. A more normal day and night cycle was probably also a plus for most of them, honestly.

She was currently going over the recommendations for the group based on various observations. Baisho, for example, was probably not getting promoted without a really good showing due to having never given up on trying to kill Sasori. Conversely, Sasori was very likely to get a full promotion at this point, in part due to his professionalism when it came to said attempts on his life.

The most interesting pair for her were Shino and Fu though. They'd regularly communicated in ways that most hadn't noticed throughout the exam and it was kind of surprising that they weren't officially married at this point. All reports indicated that they all but acted like they were, though it could be that they didn't see things the same way others did. Too much of their communication happened through their insects, above and beyond what Aburame normally did when dating or married. Then again, Fu was part insect now due to Chomei's remains, so perhaps that was to be expected.

Fu's partner, Doyuki, had also drawn attention due to being incredibly skilled at stealth. Some of that was low chakra reserves being easier to hide, but he'd demonstrated that being on the low end of chakra capacity wasn't a significant hindrance to him in the skill tests. Burying some of his dislike of Fu's added features had been a good showing as well, but being the only non-Uzushio participant to attempt and pass the stealth skill tests was telling on its own as well. He deserved careful observation.

By the time she'd made it through the stack she could confidently state that Baisho was the only example of 'needs a good showing for promotion' in the lot. He was literally the only one who made multiple attempts on his partner's life without being pulled out immediately too. Mostly because he was also inept enough to be the only one to fail to seriously injure his partner, admittedly, which was the other part of why he was marked down.

Spending a week with someone and failing to seriously injure them even once with at least thrice-daily murder attempts just didn't point at jounin-level skills.L