16

Naruto had discovered that part of his hair being a mess was it being partially caked with his own dried blood, which had been harder to clean up than expected. But he'd managed it by the time the clone he'd sent off with a summoning stone had dispelled, apparently finding a similar almost-cave to bury the stone in that was reasonably close to the tower. The clone had also passed several other teams in the process, including a very annoyed Team Baki.

It looked like they'd gotten their second scroll, made it to the tower, and then discovered the note that had replaced their first scroll. Probably followed by not being able to find another team before nightfall.

When Hinata had woken in the morning Team Yurei had cleaned up, Naruto had sent a handful of clones to the Uzumaki compound to take care of a few things including letting Old Man Hokage know he was fine now, and they'd opened up their little bunker to leave. Tenten had used an existing little almost-cave under the trees for it, meaning that it didn't even need to be filled back in.

"Where did you get that scroll from?" Hinata asked half an hour later, just after Naruto had summoned a clone with a scroll back to him.

"Team Baki," Naruto replied. One of his scouting clones had realized that it could turn into a scroll and replace itself with the real one that was just visible in Temari's pouch, then made another clone to allow the purloined scroll to be summoned.

"...why did you take a scroll from them?" Tenten asked.

"One of them was stupid enough to threaten the Hokage's grandson. Making them go to extra effort without it being traced back to us is the least I can do. They're going to be pissed when they reach the tower. Again."

Hoshi snickered at that, but a minute later the all-male team from Kiri that had been trying to intercept them for the past few minutes finally managed to catch them. By virtue of Team Yurei stopping in a clearing because they were looking for Karin and the Kiri team was getting annoying.

This time Naruto took point, mostly because he was positive that they were looking for Kubikiribocho. "You seem awfully intent on speaking to us."

"We're here to kill you and take back what you stole from Kiri," one of the three stated. Naruto couldn't recall which of the three was which right now, but they had all pulled their swords out.

A small movement had a broom in Naruto's hand. "Well then. Let's see if you were trained properly. Zabuza was pretty good at fighting blind, how are you?" He then started up the hiding in mist jutsu, filling the clearing and blinding the enemy team. The three of them immediately shifted into a formation that had them with their backs to each other, and Naruto just shook his head as they did so.

None of the three seemed to notice his actual movements as he approached them in a straight line, not even bothering to try to come from an unexpected angle. Though he supposed that made the straight approach the unexpected angle...whatever. He charged the broom with chakra, channeling the surface-sticking exercise through it to allow the ninja wire bristles to latch onto the sword he hit with them. The shock of him doing so was enough to prevent the Kiri shinobi from keeping his grip as the sword was pulled from his hands.

The yell of shock was enough to get the other two moving properly, but one went the wrong direction entirely. Based on that, Naruto assumed that the one that actually went for him got lucky. But it did lead to him needing to block a sword swing with the broom handle, something that seemed to take his opponent by surprise. Naruto let the sword on the end of the broom fall from the bristles as he continued to swing the handle around. His opponent was more skilled than he looked though, successfully disengaging enough to let the handle pass him before trying to come in behind it.

Perhaps this one of the three actually moving in the correct direction hadn't been lucky after all, given that they seemed to have skill the other two lacked.

Dodging to one side and swinging the end of the broom up, Naruto attempted to do the surface-sticking trick again when the bristles came in contact with the sword. But his opponent felt the tug and pulsed their own chakra down the blade to break the connection, spinning to where Naruto now was after likely spotting the angle of the broom's handle. Hinata directed Tenten on the use of ninja wire to retrieve the dropped sword before the disarmed shinobi could find it, and the third member that had gone off in the wrong direction had heard the combat and figured out which direction was the right one.

Naruto ended up needing to dodge a couple more sword swings, and he deflected two more, before he spat soapy water into his opponent's face and hopped left. The approaching shinobi was then tripped up with a strike to their shins, though they had enough control to not hurt themselves or lose their sword as they went into a roll. At least until they struck their teammate, who was yelling in pain from the soapy water getting in his eyes. Naruto took the opportunity to grab both swords and toss them in Tenten's general direction.

"Do they seriously not have backup weapons?" Tenten called in a slightly-mocking tone. "A weapon user should always be ready to be disarmed of their primary weapon or for said weapon to break."

"They do seem to have a single skilled team member escorting academy students," Hinata added. Naruto could see her tapping her chin 'in thought' as she did so. "Perhaps Naruto should teach them more basic lessons?"

"Such as not losing their temper," Naruto commented as he tripped up the first disarmed shinobi, who had decided to try to rush at the girls. "Sadly, I think that might be beyond their skill level." He then side-stepped an attempted grab by soap-in-his-eyes and spun around into a kick to the shinobi's chest. Chakra-boosting led to the shinobi flying and striking a tree with the back of his head, going limp as he landed. Naruto walked over and tore the shinobi's entire pouch off as it was faster and easier than removing the scroll from inside of it. He then removed the sheath for the sword as well before backing away while causing the earth to pull the shinobi mostly under. The other two didn't put up any resistance at all when he moved to them to repeat the process.

He let up on the mist jutsu as he threw the sheathes near Tenten, then moved back to the shinobi with the head injury and applied some basic treatment to keep the injury from causing him to fall over dead in the next few hours. Luckily there wasn't much to be done, it actually looked like the idiot had knocked himself out when failing to gather chakra for a jutsu. Likely attempting to prepare one when he got kicked and released the chakra wrong? Regardless, it didn't look like the impact with the tree had knocked him out, so Hinata's better control of things wasn't needed to stop bleeding in his brain or anything.

Naruto had just finished that as the mist had receded enough for basic visibility, showing all three of the Kiri shinobi with only their heads and shoulders visible. Nodding, Naruto looked over the three, but focused on the two conscious ones. "I figure you can dig yourselves out in an hour or so at the worst, but we're taking your scroll and your swords. Have fun explaining that to your sensei."

"Orochimaru was in training ground forty-four yesterday afternoon," Hiruzen said to the assembled group of shinobi, most of whom didn't react at all because they'd already known. None of the current jounin-sensei with students in the forest were present, but a number of Anbu and high-jounin were included. "I know his body language well enough to say that he had a goal in mind and very obviously did not complete it before attempting to kill Naruto Uzumaki on reflex and vacating the area." He gestured at the Naruto clone in the corner. "Naruto has obviously survived, and Inoichi was able to question his clone on the details that I wasn't able to observe remotely. Based on what Orochimaru asked for, his primary goal was to confirm that Naruto does not hold the nine-tailed fox."

"I can't think of any other reason for him to want to examine a genin's stomach," Inoichi chimed in.

"What we don't know is what else he likely wants while he's here. If his goals include others in the exams then it's likely that he's either still in or has returned to training ground forty-four. But it's also possible that he was using that as a convenient time to approach Naruto while the rest of his goals lay elsewhere. Whatever the case, we need to avoid interfering with the exams in progress while drastically increasing general village surveillance. We need to be aware of potential threats before they're sprung on us."

Naruto spoke up then. "Er, are you aware that there are three visiting jinchuriki in the village right now?"

Of course Naruto somehow knew about the...did he say three? Not two? "...no, I was not aware of there being three jinchuriki visiting."

"Gaara from Suna contains Shukaku, Yugito Nii from Kumo contains Matatabi, and Fu from Taki contains Chomei."

Hiruzen nodded, not entirely surprised to hear that Gaara was a jinchuriki, and based on what they knew of Suna that would make Shukaku the one-tail. "Thank you for informing me. Do I want to know why you're using names for the tailed beasts?"

The clone shrugged. "Because it's polite to use people's names?" He then started counting off on his fingers. "Shukaku, Matatabi, Isobu, Son Goku, Kokuo, Saiken, Chomei, Gyuki, and Kurama. Hagoromo named them all after making them."

Assuming it was accurate, where the child had learned that, and how, was definitely a mystery. A quick message off to Jiraiya to check with the toads, who might actually have members old enough to confirm the claim, was going to be needed. "I see. Are you aware of anything else suspicious going on in the village that you haven't brought up?"

"Er, Kabuto Yakushi is not genin level and I saw him slipping in and out of the village through secret tunnels repeatedly in the past month, as well as going through chunin- and jounin-level records. Both of his teammates and his jounin-sensei occasionally joined him for the meetings outside of the village walls, though never all of them at the same time."

Apparently the new forms for chunin and higher to report various types of oddities in the village needed a genin-level equivalent, despite genin supposedly not knowing enough to spot the kinds of oddities the forms were intended for. That was going to be a headache. Or maybe they'd just get Naruto promoted to chunin as soon as possible and not need to worry about it after locking him in a room with a stack of the forms. "I see. I'll have someone check on that in case it was expected."

Team Yurei had found Karin at a small stream filling a water jug, her teammates nowhere to be found. In fact, as far as Naruto could tell, her two teammates weren't alive in the forest at all.

"So did you ditch your teammates or did they do something incredibly stupid?" Naruto asked as they landed across the stream from Karin. Who also looked like she could use some healing, honestly.

She raised an eyebrow at that. "Are you asking that because I'm alone?"

"I'm asking that because I think they're currently dead. Can't feel them anywhere."

That resulted in blinking. "You're a sensor too?"

"Trained as one, but yes."

"And an Uzumaki?"

"Yep. But if you want more proof?" It only took a little focus to use chakra chains to make a quick bridge across the stream. "I also know that Kusa isn't treating you well, or at least your teammates haven't been."

She flinched at that being brought up as Team Yurei walked over the created bridge. "That's...yeah."

"I spoke with Old Man Hokage about things and he's on board with you staying in Konoha. Maybe learn how to be a medic-nin without people needing to bite you? But if your teammates are dead then the best solution is probably throwing some of your stuff with their corpses, especially your forehead protector, and hiding you in the Uzumaki compound until your jounin-sensei returns to Kusa with the news of your demise."

"...why especially my forehead protector? I don't think Shigeri's survived."

"Well, either that or we have to destroy it, since it's got a tracking seal etched into it."

Hinata nodded. "We assume that they didn't want to be blatant about putting one on you directly."

Karin frowned as she removed her forehead protector, looking over it. "They found out that any seals they placed on me broke when someone bit me for healing, but I didn't think that they'd stick things on my stuff instead." Disconnecting the metal from the cloth, she ran a finger across the back, chakra flowing out and revealing the tracking seal under the top layer of metal. "How in the world did you know about this?"

"It stands out to the byakugan," Hinata answered, tapping next to her eyes. "Doubly so when your jounin-sensei triggers the other end of it."

"If you know where your teammates died then I suggest dropping it in the mess there," Naruto said. "Let your jounin-sensei find everything and come to his own conclusions."

"And how do you expect to get me out of here safely without me being noticed?" Karin asked.

"Er, I was hoping that you'd be willing to sign a summoning contract with me so that one of my clones could summon you directly to the Uzumaki compound? But sticking you in a prisoner transport scroll long enough for you to be brought there would work too. Old Man Hokage can meet with you about options while you're hiding in the compound. Medic-nin in the hospital don't have to be in the shinobi ranks if they don't want to be, or you can get out of things entirely and be a civilian if you want. A second shrine maiden for the Uzumaki shrine might not be bad either, actually...the civilian girls trying to cover for me aren't doing well."

"...shrine maiden?"

"Perhaps that should be covered later," Tenten suggested. "You probably have to see it to believe it anyway."

Karin didn't look convinced, but nodded anyway. "Are you sure that I won't be locked up and used as a stupidly effective source of healing?"

Naruto nodded. "That we can guarantee...but there might be a little 'figure out how to duplicate things' and if it works the way we think it does there could even be the option of making it no longer work with you."

That had the girl blinking for a moment. "Okay, you now have me curious enough to go along with this just to find out what you're talking about. What was that about a summoning contract?"

"Personal summoning contracts between two people that lets them summon each other, the one being summoned has to allow the summoning to happen or it doesn't work. Both can summon the contract itself and destroy it if desired. Er, you'd have some issues summoning me for village security reasons though, beyond the chakra requirements of summoning someone with a lot of chakra in general."

Karin looked around the Uzumaki compound after one of Naruto's 'paperwork clones' had summoned her to it. "How sure are you that my former sensei can't find me here?"

"You have to be tied into the protections or let in by someone who is to enter," the clone replied. "We should check if you can see the contents of the shelves in the training hall."

"...why?"

"Because so far only the boss and us clones of him can, but if you're from the right branch of the Uzumaki family then you should be able to as well. If you can't then we can see if you've got the chakra for paperwork clones either way."

Okay, learning the solid clone technique did sound incredibly useful, and a minute later they were in the training hall where a pile of scrolls sat in alcoves. She was able to pick one out, finding that it was chakra control exercises. "I guess this confirms that I'm closely related to Naruto?"

"Close enough," the clone agreed, then gestured at a different set of scrolls. "These are the paperwork clone scrolls. They won't let you open them unless you have enough chakra to make at least one." He then pointed at a different set. "And you might want to read up on the communication jutsu. It works great for communicating with your clones without needing to dispel them, and if you're a sensor then you probably get to skip the hard part of learning it."

She held onto the chakra control exercise scroll and grabbed one of the paperwork clone scrolls and a communication jutsu scroll. She could feel the clone scroll testing her chakra and was fairly confident that it had found that she had enough.

"You can probably come and go from the compound as you please already," the clone continued. "But Old Man Hokage thinks you shouldn't be seen in the village until your sensei leaves and I can't be certain you can get back in. The boss will need to be here personally to check the permission list if you can't get back in and the old man will swing by tonight to talk to you. Figuring you'd need at least a few days, we've stocked up a kitchen and prepared a bedroom for you to use."

"Thank you," Karin said. This was already far better than anything Kusa had done for her. "Er, does the kitchen have things that don't require much prep?"

"It does, and so long as the boss is awake I can make something for you or go grab you some ramen. Or I can try to teach you how to make a few things if you'd prefer that?"

Okay, she knew from the info packets that Naruto was slightly younger than her, and a little weird if he was running around the chunin exams dressed as a maid, but right now he was feeling like a caring older brother. Karin found herself not minding though, as it was more of a family than she'd had since her mother died.

"You hid the extra scrolls in the area around the tower with explosive tags stuck to them," Tenten sent as the doors shut behind them.

"We didn't need them," Naruto retorted.

"But you're not supposed to make it easier for others to pass!"

"Anyone who can get a scroll out from inside the proximity-trigger fireball tag glued around it deserves to pass."

"...proximity-trigger?"

"I can approach them without setting them off. Anyone else with even a baby's chakra gets within a meter and the tags go off. I expect the wildlife to set one or two off before any teams notice them."

"Well," Hoshi chimed in. "I think that flips things from being too nice to being downright evil while providing a true test of skill. The elders would approve."

"That may be," Hinata said, gesturing at the incomplete poem on the wall. "But we appear to still have a task ahead of us."

"Just unroll one of each scroll so that they cross each other," Naruto replied, a clone popping into existence and taking a scroll from him. "The poem basically says you need to study and train instead of focusing on one or the other to succeed as a shinobi."

A moment later Naruto and his clone had opened the scrolls to overlap one another, and one of the various chunin tasked with greeting them appeared in a puff of smoke.

"Well done," the chunin said. "All three of you appear to be intact and I can tell that you had both scrolls. We've been laughing about the whole maid thing. Good job there, and I have to say that you look remarkably intact for a team that supposedly had a near-death incident. Anyway, as far as I know you three are the fourth non-disqualified group in the tower. I'll show you to your assigned rooms and point out the useful things since you're stuck here for a few days."

Their 'assigned rooms' turned out to be a single room for sleeping and a bathroom two floors down from Anko's preferred room. They were told which training areas they could use and which were reserved for other teams, shown the cafeteria that they'd known about already, and told about the observation areas for looking out over the training ground. The little tour ended with the room they'd meet up in at the end of this stage of the exam.

In addition to the tour they'd also learned that the entire tower really needed to be torn down and rebuilt. Piping and wiring went along the outside in far too many places because there was no way to get it through the existing structure, but it was also technically an old war outpost so was in many ways overbuilt to the point of being far too troublesome to tear down to replace.

Once left alone, they retreated to their room, sealed it as best they could, and finally let the panic they'd been dumping into their 'inners' since the Orochimaru encounter out. They'd next emerge in a couple of days, after working through most of the panic.

"Where did you find what looks like fresh breakfast ramen?" Sasuke asked as he dropped into the seat across from Naruto the morning of the last day of the second stage.

"Ichiraku's," Naruto replied as Ami and Ino sat down to either side of Sasuke. "What brings you to us?"

"How did you get to Ichiraku's?" Ino asked instead, while adjusting herself to likely un-pinch her tail.

"Secret."

"Bah."

"We ran into Orochimaru in the forest," Sasuke said after taking a bite of his breakfast. "He...applied seals to us that he claimed would make us stronger if we survived the process. We finally made it here with both scrolls late last night, and Shito-sensei was waiting for us. He said you've got access to 'hickey removers' and offered to approach you for us, but wasn't sure if you needed time to pick some up or not."

Naruto blinked and activated his byakugan. Sure enough, there was a marking on all three of Team Seven's necks. "Huh. Same one Anko-sensei got?"

"Sensei said something about it being the same as Mitarashi's seal 'before it was removed', so if that's your sensei's name?"

"Yeah, Anko Mitarashi. Give me a minute to whip up the hickey removers."

Three blank seal tags were removed from a storage seal, a bottle of ink from another, and then the application of chakra had the ink flowing out of the bottle and onto the three blank tags. A minute later there were three identical seal tags sitting there. Each was picked up by Naruto and examined before he used chakra to properly set the ink on two of them and scowled at the third. The ink on that one was flowing out of place in one spot because there was a flaw in the paper of the tag, and it would definitely create problems if used. That tag was torn in half before another blank tag was pulled out of the storage seal. This one was examined before the ink was applied and set. Once done he placed one of the three good tags in front of each of the members of Team Seven.

Naruto gestured to the three tags. "These are fairly simple. Apply to hickey, activate with chakra, when they fall off burn with prejudice."

"I hate that I know why they're called hickey removers," Ami grumbled as she picked hers up to look at it.

"That said, Anko-sensei claimed those seals have a horrible survival rate."

Ino sighed. "The sicko decided to 'test all of us' after realizing that we'd all survived one of his other experiments. We suspect that he's the one that sealed us in the cave we spent a day knocked out in, but the enhanced healing kept us alive." She lightly flicked one of her ears as she continued. "The medic-nin we saw when we woke up this morning fears that even with the seals removed we're going to be stuck with the animal features now though. They said that the seals had 'settled them in deeper' or something like that."

Ami had been all-but-glaring at her tag, but apparently decided to trust it. A moment later she'd slapped it down over the seal on her neck and pushed chakra into it, all of them watching as it did its thing. She shivered, grimaced, groaned in pain, and it looked like bled a little under the tag. Apparently these were currently more solidly anchored into the three than Anko-sensei's had been. But after a couple of minutes the tag fell off, taking the tomoe markings with it.

Sasuke stared at his teammate's clear neck, glanced down at the tag holding the three-tomoe markings, and picked up his own tag. He was more careful in positioning it before he activated it, and Ino wasn't far behind him. Both also groaned in pain and bled a little under the tag, but soon there were three tags with the tomoe markings on them on the floor and three genin with animal features but no seal on their neck.

"So," Hinata said as Ino held up a mirror so that Sasuke could see his own clear neck. "Do you have a safe fire jutsu to burn them with, or do we need to take care of that for you?"

"...I don't think we have anything suitable for use here," Ami admitted. "Sasuke's fireball is a bit too big for the size of this room."

"I've got smaller ones," Sasuke retorted. "But we'd need something to contain them in, I think."

Naruto popped a metal bucket out of a seal. "Will this work?"

"...why do you have a bucket?"

"To use with the mop."

Team Seven didn't seem to know what to think about that, but only took a minute to get all three seal tags into the bucket, as well as the two halves of the unusable one. Sasuke then blew a stream of fire into the bucket, destroying the four tags. Each of the three used ones released a distinct pulse of wrongness, but if you weren't expecting it then it would be easy to miss that there had been three overlapping pulses instead of one larger one. If they hadn't been the only ones eating then it would likely have made for an interesting show.

"Thanks for that," Sasuke finally said as Naruto checked the bucket. He might need to replace it as he'd not intended for it to take fire jutsu. "Itachi has been adamant that 'power ups' like that seal just make you weaker and Orochimaru just creeped all of us out."

"I don't like the way I know I was thinking when the thing activated yesterday," Ami admitted. "We couldn't even figure out which village the team we ended up attacking was from afterwards."

"Well, they did try to kill us first, so leaving unidentifiable charred remains instead of a team wasn't horrible."

"...true."

"It did mean we couldn't take their scroll," Ino added with a frown. "I didn't think we were going to find anyone left out there before that Ame team tried to ambush us and we definitely got lucky slipping through the ring of teams around the tower."

"Only because one of them had just set off that fireball nearby," Sasuke noted. "Don't know what that was about though."

"Naruto left extra scrolls around the tower with fireball seals glued to them," Tenten answered. "Presumably someone failed to get the scroll without setting off the tag."

"Of course the team that decided to run the start of the exams acting like maids got extra scrolls. Do all powerful shinobi need strange quirks? Because it seems like all the good jounin have a pile."

"You either develop quirks as coping mechanisms or you break down," Ino answered. "Ideally those quirks don't stand out so much as to cause problems, and some families 'pass down' their quirks. All of that said, I think the maid outfits are more of a prank or showing off than a quirk."

Naruto nodded. "That's mostly correct, and it was Anko-sensei's idea to do the whole maid thing. You three should eat up and take a nap though, you'll want your energy this afternoon."

"...why?" Ami asked.

"Preliminary rounds because more than sixteen genin have arrived already. More than four rounds in the finals takes too long so they're going to want to cut the numbers in half."

Team Seven groaned at that, but dug into their breakfast anyway.

One thing Naruto had done that morning was make a bunch of clones to spread out and observe the tower, and one of those clones had found an unattended computer. Sure, it was on the far side of two heavily-secured doors, the outermost of which was decently guarded, but they'd not blocked the vents properly at all so it was practically in the open for anyone who could crawl through the vents even without shapeshifting. It appeared to be set up to control the preliminary round selections, and had a bunch of settings to make things decidedly less than random in specific circumstances.

Apparently it built the list of matches as a whole, then picked from the list it had built at random afterwards. This was done so that it could ensure that teammates didn't get paired up at all, but also to fudge other things. One of the settings that concerned the clone was the one that appeared to make it impossible for Hinata and Neji to not be paired up, ostensibly to prevent duplication in the finals. Ensuring that it didn't look like that had been messed with but that the two didn't get paired up required some fiddling, and he needed to fake things out so that the expected count of duplicates 'paired off' was correct.

In the end he decided that Kabuto deserved a challenge and set the system to think that he was a 'duplicate' of Gaara. A decidedly-not-a-genin against a jinchuriki should at least be an interesting match to watch, right?