23

The night before the finals was a busier than expected one for Naruto. He knew that he needed to remove the modified prisoner seals from all of the branch family members and apply new ones to the elders with the old one's warden seal, and had planned for that to take four hours or so. In reality, that took three quarters of an hour in total. Hiashi, his father, Hinata, Hanabi, and Satomi had ended up with the new warden seal during this. Naruto would likely replace the old one he'd applied to himself with the new one after the next day, but the only branch family member that hadn't been in the compound had been Neji. Who was still out in one of the training grounds, and Hiashi figured that revealing things publicly during the finals was for the best anyway.

Instead, Naruto would probably get the new one at the same time as whoever Old Man Hokage trusted with the thing outside of the clan. It was annoying that you could only have one warden seal at a time or else the multiple seals would interact with each other and both wouldn't work. The same applied to having any warden seal and a prisoner seal, unless the warden seal shared a key with the prisoner seal. That loophole didn't seem to be intentional though, just a side effect of the way things interacted, and it seemed unlikely that you'd have someone branded with the seal they could control in the first place. Even if it would make for an interesting and hard to prevent suicide technique.

When they were done Hiashi had needed to lightly reprimand six branch family members for immediately trying to activate the new prisoner seals as soon as they'd found out about them. Luckily, the elders with the old warden seal had been given the restored version of the prisoner seal that required the correct warden seal for any control at all or they'd probably not have survived the night.

After all of that Naruto had been grabbed by Anbu and tasked with reproducing his previous 'hide the entire village' genjutsu...plus doing so for every road leading to the village in short segments so that finding the roads would be difficult. The goal was to ensure that anyone trying to show up the next day for potentially invading would have as much trouble as they could arrange finding the village. Then, when he still had enough chakra for a large-scale genjutsu or ten, they'd instructed him to place three fake villages in the area as well, a genjutsu of a village hidden by another genjutsu to disguise it, plus genjutsu creating roads leading to each. But he couldn't make the roads work right, so he'd used a variety of jutsu to make actual roads instead and then hidden them like he'd hidden the real ones. That had impressed the Anbu, and he'd been told that regular missions to maintain the fakes might be needed. Plans to make real walls for the fake villages were mentioned as well, but with any luck that would be someone else's problem in the coming year.

The double-genjutsu of creating and hiding a village did make for a reasonably-close approximation of the way the real village felt though. But Naruto had an advantage in getting back home in that he could just use summoning to return. The Anbu either had their own tricks or would have to deal with the decoys screwing them up. Whichever happened didn't matter as nobody had warned him of this task ahead of time, even though the signed orders from Old Man Hokage had specified a two-day advanced notice.

While he'd been doing all of that, Anko-sensei and Hinata had been removing Orochimaru from the snake contract. That had taken almost three hours. It would've been five, but they'd instead worked with the snakes to clear the entire contract and re-signed it as an easier action than removing a specific person, even if that was going to remove the dead but respected individuals from the contract. Naruto didn't have any more details than that, beyond 'removing a single person is intentionally difficult'. When he'd asked why you'd care about the dead people being on a contract his parents had piped up to say that people didn't always stay dead.

No further answers had been volunteered, and he didn't think he wanted to know.

Orochimaru frowned as he looked over Konoha. He'd arrived a day before the finals, pretending to be Rasa, and had gotten worrying reports from a number of people. The one-tail was missing, some presuming it to be dead. As though you could actually kill a tailed beast, but it being extracted and secreted away was a problem. Without being able to release it to start the invasion they'd need to go to an alternate plan, but he had a dozen alternate plans so that wasn't an issue.

Being less informed about things in the village due to Kabuto's demise was another problem, but a few less-reliable agents he had been able to contact indicated that the village had put in more security measures recently. Holes in the defenses that were going to be used were no longer there or had been obviously secured in other ways to make them no longer useful for the invasion. The Raikage's party was smaller than expected as well, and the collection of Kumo cannon fodder seemed to be missing. All of this pushed additional plans out, but Kumo backing out of the invasion had also been planned for.

Triggering things during the finals themselves was no longer going to be advantageous, and without agents that could put the entire audience to sleep it would be foolish to attempt anyway. No, they needed to use one of the plans that had things happening after the finals instead, ones that Kumo hadn't been informed of either as it was likely that any plans the other village had been aware of were compromised.

What hadn't been planned for was someone figuring out how to stop summoning in the village. One of his contacts was known to have a contract and had been 'keyed in' so that they could still use it, but hadn't been able to report on that when it had happened due to not having been in Kabuto's reporting group. Orochimaru himself had checked in private and wasn't able to use any of his own summoning techniques at all, which was a problem because his normal fighting style depended on far too many. It exposed a weakness that would need to be dealt with later, but that he didn't have time to correct before the invasion.

He did have plans for 'the summoning groups are prevented from bringing in large snakes' though, and had enacted the contingencies already. A defensive boon like this being deployed only within the village walls would be foolish unless it literally depended on the walls themselves, and Hiruzen was no fool. It was thus likely that you couldn't summon anything within a good distance of the village itself without being keyed in. Which meant that taking the walls down was unlikely to happen, leaving bypassing them in entirely different ways as the primary option. But he'd prepared for that, distributing specially-designed seal arrays that allowed temporary passage through the reinforced walls would be far less flashy, but they'd been covertly tested three months ago and it was unlikely that any defense against them had been implemented.

The village not having a giant 'the attackers are entering here' sign in the form of the snakes knocking down sections of wall would probably make the invading troops more effective at first anyway, even if it left less of a hole in the defenses for later.

Well, not needing to time the start of the invasion correctly during the exams would have the additional benefit of being able to enjoy watching them more than he might have otherwise. Why, little Kin had surprised him by making it to the finals when her teammates hadn't, and he'd ensured that she had several new tricks to show off. He didn't hold out much hope of her making it past her first fight, but if she did well enough against his apprentice's student then he'd probably give her a promotion.

She'd certainly shown more brains than her teammates had. Not doing the summoning he'd been planning meant that the two boys needed a little added humiliation as a lesson, and putting them under the command of the promoted 'useless kunoichi' that they'd spent far too much time whining about sounded like a great start. Why so many discounted the strength and intelligence of females was beyond him, but it did make it easier to pick out the idiot males.

The morning of the finals came far too soon for Naruto, who hadn't gotten nearly as much sleep as he'd have liked. But he had gotten up and taken care of things before getting dressed for the finals, and now he was looking over his outfit in the mirror. A long-sleeved shirt and shin-length pants in a dark orange, but with sand-colored patches to break up the lines of the outfit. The Uzumaki and Hyuga clan symbols on his right shoulder, the latter smaller and more of an outline to show affiliation instead of membership. Matching cloth for his Konoha forehead protector, with the Uzushio forehead protector serving as the 'buckle' of a blue belt. Full coverage sand-colored boots instead of exposing his toes, matching fingerless gloves with metal plates on them, and a couple dozen metal seal tags visibly attached around the outfit.

To say nothing of the additional couple dozen hidden inside of or beneath the outfit, in and around the armor plates.

He also had weapon pouches on both legs and in the small of his back, each with seals that could refill them a dozen times inside of them before he'd need to swap the refilling seals themselves out. Hinata and Tenten were similarly equipped on that front...except that Tenten's seals were larger and able to refill her pouches three dozen times instead of a single dozen. That made them significantly more annoying to fill, but she didn't mind because she preferred to have plenty of throwing weapons on hand.

For an honestly nerve-wracking change when planning on going out in public, he wasn't shapeshifted. His ears and tail were thus fully visible, his eyes had the new darker rings around them, and the spiral armbands were visible if you looked under his sleeves. In addition to those he had on the arm-mounted blade holders with chakra blades loaded into them, though he rarely engaged in ways that made them useful. They still made for a good surprise, were good for cutting things that needed some chakra channeled into the blade to get through, and gave him an extra slot in each spiral armband in case he needed to store a weapon away. A quick test showed that he could cast the Knight Armor spell and have all the seal tags stay in place, but he dismissed that before leaving his apartment. It wouldn't show his skills off well enough if he relied on that protection and the finals were all about showing off, but that went out the window if trouble started.

He also had no weights or resistance seals on at all today, which felt incredibly weird in many ways. That was a decision that he'd made alongside Hinata and Tenten, and he idly wondered what new tricks they might have come up with. Each of them had tried to come up with new moves without showing or working with the others, but he thought that they'd failed. His new tricks were almost entirely tied to his sand, Hinata had been focusing on her fire, and Tenten had needed far too much help with her summoning seals to not involve him. Even if they'd failed to make what they wanted in a month.

Due to summoning range limitations that were harder to get around, they'd eventually made a large box with twelve slots for scrolls. Each scroll was able to have a set of weapons sealed inside of it, in up to five seals per scroll for sixty weapons or sets thereof in the scrolls. The entire box could be sealed into a metal plate that would sit in the small of the girl's back. A contract of sorts with the box allowed her to treat the palms of her hands as though they were the seal interface for any scroll inserted into the box's slots. There were two major exceptions. Stacks of explosive tags were placed in special slots in the box as double-sealing them was dangerous, and for the same reason Shibuki was kept in the lid of the box instead of in a scroll.

They hoped to get a better version that didn't require carrying the box around, sealed or not, but that would come later.

A tug on his chakra pulled him out of his musing, and he quickly grabbed Hoshi before allowing the summoning to latch onto him and pull them to the Hyuga compound. Hinata hugged him a moment later, grinning while Hoshi dropped to the ground next to them. She was wearing an outfit that was superficially similar to his in overall shape, but in dark blue with lighter blue flame patterns on it instead of orange with sand patterns. She also had just the full Hyuga clan symbol on her shoulder, her Konoha forehead protector serving as her belt buckle instead of being worn on her head, and dark blue boots and gloves...plus half as many seal tags.

"You cut your hair short again," Hinata noted. Her hair was free and currently down to just below her shoulders.

"More like I turned the extra hair into sand," he corrected, moving some sand out of one of the hidden pouches put in for holding sand in his outfit to demonstrate. "Figured out how to do that two days ago, and I didn't want an entire sand clone's worth."

"Oh."

"How are the elders?"

"Those with the new seals are extremely unhappy," Hiashi said as he came into the room with Hanabi. He was dressed formally, but Hanabi had a cat-ear headband and false tail that matched Hinata's real cat ears and tail in color. There had been an argument a few days ago about her not being allowed to shapeshift to give herself the ears and tail, but the false ones were merely 'showing support' and had been permitted. Well, the elders had technically forbidden it, but they no longer held any real power. "The rest are looking forward to not having the branch family held hostage to prevent changes being made. Satomi has no interest in watching the matches, so she volunteered to stay behind and keep an eye on things. My father will be here shortly with Neji's mother, and then we can go."

"And Neji is going to make his own way to the arena?"

"I can only assume so, but you probably know where he currently is better than I do."

"He swung through one of the public baths this morning, but I've not been keeping an eye on him specifically."

"With any luck he will not shame the clan by being late."

A few minutes later they left the Hyuga compound. It was obvious who was paying attention to them by the way they reacted to Hinata and Naruto having non-human features. Most were shocked, a few looked at Naruto with suspicion before obviously noticing Hinata and visibly deciding that their initial assumptions were probably mistaken, and a number ran off to spread the word.

Most of the branch family members in the group spread out to the various 'watching points' around the arena. Immediate family and teammates of participants, plus clan leaders, were given tickets to watch. Everyone else had needed to purchase tickets or decide to watch from another location on monitors. The latter was less than ideal for seeing everything, but better than nothing. All of those locations being bars, coupled with alcohol not being allowed in the stands, was another matter entirely.

Old Man Hokage had ensured that Naruto had three tickets for family. The likely intent had been for Yoko to attend with clones of his parents, but instead Karin had been offered one ticket as his only living relative in the village with the other two going to his parents. As for Yoko, he felt that having an outside perspective observing was much more useful with a paperwork clone or three disguised as animals that could both get better angles to observe from and be more likely to be ignored. So the shrine was going to have a shrine maiden in attendance today instead of her running off to watch the finals.

Karin and his parents had all left early, well over an hour and a half ago, in order to get good seats. The plan had been for him to arrive with the Hyuga anyway and his parents had taken forms that wouldn't draw attention. Some of that was that it would be much better for the village to see him and Hinata together with animal features for the first time instead of him alone, or at least that was their assumption.

Tenten joined them along the way, wearing a pink sleeveless shirt and greenish shin-length pants. Black boots, forehead protector on her head, seal tags all over the place, two shorter swords crossed underneath a harness with scrolls slotted into it on her back, and a pair of goggles around her neck.

"Goggles?" Naruto asked, curious about that addition. Sure, he had a pair in a seal, and was fairly certain Hinata did as well, but that wasn't sitting out in the open.

"You've accidentally blinded me with sand several times in the past couple of weeks," Tenten explained, Hoshi nodding in agreement. Healing eyes had fallen to the little guy because Hinata's control was still partially shot and Naruto wasn't 'gentle' enough before the additional boost to his chakra. But he was getting better much faster and suspected he'd be fine once things finished settling due to the extra medical stuff he had from Karin's net. "Since I don't have 'clear my eyes instantly' tricks like you two do I need the protection. Besides, while Hinata is going up against the wind mistress from Suna I'm under the impression that the box we'll be watching from isn't protected by glass."

That was probably a good point, but she was usually good at keeping her eyes clear with a little bit of chakra. His sand was just able to bypass that trivially due to the chakra in it...but wind-chakra infused dust and dirt might also get through it? The cleaning jutsu didn't tend to, but they didn't know everything about the techniques Suna taught.

Upon reaching the arena the group split, Hoshi going with Hanabi to watch with her instead of joining those participating. This was mostly an acknowledgement that the little guy was more of a support aid than a combat one and the finals were entirely for showing off combat and tactics, but also partially to help protect the audience if anything started during the finals.

Hanabi...probably didn't realize the latter, but the other Hyuga present obviously did.

All ten participants had stood in the arena while Old Man Hokage gave a summary of the purpose of the exams. He'd followed that up with introducing the Kazekage and Raikage, each of their villages having two finalists present in the ten.

"Before we continue," Old Man Hokage said after the other two Kage had sat down again. "There are explanations to be given as to the states of four of the participants. It is well-known in the village, but less so outside of it, that a team of genin acquired animal traits on a mission where their jounin ignored the concerns of the genin. Sasuke Uchiha is on that team, and you can see that he has the ears and tail of a wolf. Keeping them out of the exams due to the actions of their sensei would have been punishing the wrong individual and that young Sasuke has only had a couple of months to adapt to the changes to his body will be taken into account when evaluating his performance."

A minute was given for the murmuring about that to die down before Old Man Hokage continued. "Those paying attention will notice that there are three genin with animal features present in the arena. The other two are Hinata Hyuga and Naruto Uzumaki, who are not Sasuke's teammates. Rumor of a plot to use a tailed beast against Konoha reached remnants of Uzushiogakure, and they took it upon themselves to ensure that it wouldn't happen by removing the threat. At the time the one-tail and two-tails were in the village, so the squad of Uzu remnants removed both of them from their jinchuriki. Gaara of Suna was one of those, undeclared at time of arrival, and I personally took responsibility for his tailed beast being removed and sent reparations to Suna. Yugito Nii of Kumo was the other, but the Raikage insisted that no reparations need be paid. More important is that the Uzu remnants have since learned how to kill tailed beasts and bound elements of their remains to the two Konoha genin."

That was the signal for Naruto to cause sand to spin around him and Hinata to light her tail and ears on fire, to the obvious shock of both the crowds and the unaware genin. Gaara seemed doubly shocked, though that might be because his chakra had mingled with Naruto's in the sand and lost the battle of control.

"All three genin have had only a couple of weeks to adapt to their changes," Old Man Hokage continued. "That will also be taken into account when evaluating them."

Obito frowned while sitting in the audience pretending to be a civilian. He was positive that the tailed beasts couldn't be permanently killed, with the possible exception of if you dispersed all nine at the same time and forced their chakra to spread out far enough. Something that would be nearly impossible to pull off to begin with, of course. At the same time, he wouldn't put it past the remnants of Uzushio to have declared the beasts 'dead' because they'd sealed them away where they felt nobody could reach them.

That would also nicely explain where the nine-tails had gone. Someone possibly wanted to use it against Konoha, the remnants found out, and removed it from play in the same manner. Just without a farcical binding of the power of the beast to a child. No, that was almost certainly clever work to grant someone a facsimile of a tailed beast's powers to serve as additional 'evidence' that the beasts had been killed and to thus keep demands for their return from being made.

But even without killing the tailed beasts, the lack of them in Konoha meant that the plan to use them to force the reveal of the location of the nine-tails was a bust. They couldn't even blame Orochimaru for not seeing this coming because who would've thought that a long-dead village wasn't actually dead?

...Nagato, admittedly, had repeatedly questioned if there might be some true survivors of the destruction of Uzushio instead of the scattered remnants around the elemental nations. He felt that there should have been more survivors than were ever accounted for and Konoha should have gotten an influx of them as the village's primary ally. That not happening...now felt far, far too obvious as a giant missed warning sign.

Zetsu would need to start searching for where the likely-rebuilt village had ended up being established, and all the work put in to sneak into the village undetected three days ago to be available to immediately grab the nine-tails was going to waste.

Oh well. He did appreciate a good chunin exam single-combat round, so it wasn't a complete waste of time. Though that idiot that 'snuck in' six bottles of sake a couple of rows down was going to be a nuisance if not dealt with before the matches began. Nothing a little bit of subtle manipulation to break one of the bottles wouldn't help with, so long as it was timed while one of the shinobi doing safety checks was passing by.

Usually Konoha's insistence on keeping the civilians safe and happy was annoying, but it came in handy at times as well.

With all the shocking revelations out of the way, Gekko took over as the proctor.

"Okay you ten," Gekko said. "This is single-elimination to knock-out, surrender, or until I decide that a battle has been won. Continuing to attack after a given battle is over is grounds for your opponent continuing on instead of you and your ejection from the finals. You are also to treat this as a mission where you're under orders to not cause unnecessary deaths. I've also been asked to remind you that anything widespread enough to risk the safety of the audience is discouraged. Lastly, I apologize for the late notice, but summoning techniques are only permitted so long as you aren't using them to summon other shinobi."

"...summoning contracts are with summoning clans," Kin noted. "Not other shinobi."

"This question was anticipated. Mitarashi volunteered to be a demonstration subject, would one of you care to summon her here?"

Hinata stepped forward and summoned Anko-sensei, who grinned. "Why hello there, apprentice. Good thing that the matches haven't started yet."

"Thank you, Mitarashi." Anko-sensei nodded, then ran over to and up the wall to return to the stands. Gekko turned back to the rest of them once she was gone. "While being able to summon a squad to your position is useful, it doesn't demonstrate your personal capabilities. Use of non-human summons is permitted, but for similar reasons you will be marked down for relying too much on them. With that said, due to some recent incidents with protective elements covering the village I also need to know who here has the option of using summoning techniques in advance. No description of what you can summon is needed, just if you can or can't use summoning techniques."

He went down the line of them. Hinata, Naruto, and Tenten all admitted to having access to summoning techniques, as did Hitomo. In the latter case he volunteered that he wouldn't be using them as his contract was strictly for non-combat use. Temari had grumbled about not having passed the test for getting a summon yet at the same time. One of Naruto's clones noted an Anbu leaving the immediate vicinity after hearing all of that, possibly to adjust the summoning protections on the village. Or at least that was his assumption, since if none of the visiting finalists was going to be using summoning then they could turn off the 'allowed areas' and only allow the locals that were keyed into the protections already.

More immediately interesting was the reaction from the other genin to Team Yurei all being able to summon things. Kin looked a combination of calculating and concerned, the latter having started after Anko-sensei's apprentice comment. Hitomo and Karui looked like they were evaluating options they'd not considered before. Gaara and Temari...had barely reacted and were obviously mostly concerned with Naruto having control of sand, honestly. Sasuke was visibly curious, and Neji...

Well, he always looked like he had a stick firmly wedged up his ass, so perhaps that had nothing to do with Hinata being able to summon. That, and it honestly looked more like he'd been glaring at the Hyuga clan symbol on Naruto's shoulder more than anything else since first noticing it.

Kin and Tenten were told to stay in the arena while the rest of them were sent up to the waiting area, but the fight didn't start right away due to some kind of commotion in the stands. That probably wouldn't have been enough to delay things if a couple of bottles hadn't been thrown to the arena floor. It looked like someone had brought alcohol into the stands, someone else had noticed, and things had gotten a little heated.

"You have mother?" Gaara said, surprising them all. While staring at Naruto.

"Mother?" Naruto asked, blinking.

"The idiot thought that I was his mother," Shukaku volunteered from inside of the Tome. "Made him far easier to influence...though I wasn't exactly in my right mind either and I'm almost certain that I wanted blood because I was part of the roots of the damned tree originally."

"The sand listens to you," Gaara elaborated.

"Ah," Naruto said, shaking his head. "I have a small part of Shukaku's remains bound to me, but I doubt that it has much to do with your mother."

"Shukaku?"

"The one-tailed tanuki was named Shukaku by Hagoromo."

Everyone in the box other than Hinata stared at him for that one. She just nodded, her ears and tail still burning. "And I have a small part of Matatabi's remains bound to me."

"Now that the disturbance has been taken care of," Gekko called from the arena floor. "I'd like to remind the audience that taking actions that might interfere with the matches is grounds for expulsion, potentially from the village itself. Our Anbu haven't had an asshole-launching competition for almost a decade either, meaning that many of the current members haven't had so much as a chance to get on the leaderboard. Please take that into account before causing trouble."

"There's an Anbu asshole-launching leaderboard?" Hinata asked, blinking.

Naruto nodded. "Yeah, I've seen it while slipping in to play pranks, and they rank distance and accuracy. The best so far apparently hit a specific hotel in Tanzaku Quarters when launching a drunk Iwa nin from the Hokage Rock. The rules say that the one launched has to survive the landing as well, so I don't think they'd use civilians for it, but there are a number of shinobi in the audience."

"Ours aim for nearby camping areas in the desert," Temari volunteered. "But it isn't limited to our Anbu. I can only get someone a quarter of the way to the closest camping area, personally, but Gaara once got someone to the second camping area."

"The man was...difficult to kill," Gaara admitted, a wary look sent Naruto's way.

"And he came back for a second attempt after he enjoyed the first one too much for his own good."

"...he did, yes."

"I don't think Kumo has such a leaderboard," Karui offered. "But I honestly wouldn't have expected Konoha or Suna to have one either, so now you have me wondering."

They might have continued the discussion, but it looked like the pre-fight banter was over in the arena and the fight was actually starting.