113

Naruto was pleased with the initial results of the incomplete computer array. They were getting much fewer false positive hits on the system scanning now that there was sufficient storage to keep more detailed previous scans and the scientists seemed happy with the improved tracking. Not that they knew the full extent of that, and he was reasonably certain that there were less than five people aware that the monitoring extended around the Sun now.

Admittedly, the 'around the Sun' monitoring was barely there and low-quality right now due to an insufficient number of satellites, but it existed. Being blindsided to a threat because it appeared on the other side of the local star felt like something to be avoided.

Unfortunately, while he was continuing expanding the computer and satellite arrays, he didn't think he had any good options for advance warning of something arriving from another dimension he wasn't monitoring or through a teleportation spell. Then there was the fact that the science-types seemed to think that there might be ways for things to approach or exceed the speed of light and all of the monitoring required light to reach something. Communication back to processing systems happened near-instantly, but only once the light arrived at the monitoring points.

The only good plan for 'things moving too fast' currently was unfortunately 'put monitoring further out to catch them before they get too close'. That had its own problems, mostly that building a shell around the system far enough out to matter was going to be more materials-prohibitive than the base satellite network he was sticking around the Sun. It wouldn't necessarily help with anything traveling fast enough either.

Hinata thought he was going overboard trying to account for threats that they didn't even know existed, yet also contributed ideas for how to improve things anyway. Ino had just shaken her head and declared it all to be beyond any scope she was willing to deal with currently.

Kurotsuchi found the decision of the two Iwa chunin to train on the moon to be interesting, but accepted their sent-back arguments that they'd found earth chakra to act a little weird up there and they wanted to be used to it. She personally thought that they'd mistaken 'acts weird in that particular chakra forest' for 'acts weird on the moon in general' though, and hopefully they'd report that later. It was also possible that they were hoping to get some training time with her grandfather up there, which she had no problems with.

The old man was probably not trying anything funny yet, thanks to establishing a reasonably self-sufficient settlement taking a significant amount of work, but the more distractions he had the better.

Meeting with councils to see who agreed with Uzushio's recommendations for promotions on the eliminated chunin front also needed to happen, though they hadn't yet indicated that they were all ready for those meetings. She was personally happy with the recommendations, but wasn't sure which side of things a couple of borderline cases should fall on and was hoping that there was a decisive answer there from the councils.

For now she had to go through the annoying process of arranging a meeting with the Kazekage to discuss some of their interactions in the buffer countries between the Land of Earth and the Land of Wind. She was annoyed that she'd been unable to avoid the formal meeting process through simply 'running into' him at the jounin exams, but couldn't blame him for not being present when none of his chunin had made it through the stage and the Wind Daimyo had wanted him to be present for an investigation.

Kankuro wasn't sure if he should be worried that Sasori seemed to have no problems finding things in his workshop or happy that his layout was obviously sensible enough to be understandable to the man. The grumbling about 'substandard materials' was annoying, even if it almost immediately got followed by apologizing for grumbling because he didn't have access to some of what Uzushio could produce.

The design aspects at least had almost entirely positive reactions.

"You're definitely approaching things differently than I do," Sasori finally said. "But that's to be expected and it shows that you're not just copying my work."

"No comments about my work being woefully inadequate compared to what comes out of Uzushio?" Kankuro questioned.

"The Uzukage built a moon. Comparing your work to what Uzushio can produce is meaningless, but aside from your material issues you're doing better than most of my students. I'd actually like you to look over some of the lesson plan, because I suspect that I'm not covering something well enough due to it being 'too obvious' to me."

"You want me to help you improve the puppeteering lessons you're giving in Uzushio?"

"I want to improve both sides because I'm positive that some things aren't being covered here. And I got you a voucher for bloodline island, since you should really pick up lava release so that you can use it to make more durable rubber for your joints."

Okay, it was still weird having a helpful Sasori, though seeing what the Uzukage could do had seemingly made most high-level shinobi a lot more willing to 'play nice' in a general sense even with the tailed beasts no longer being a thing.

Kisame found the gradually-calming continent to be increasingly boring. The few jobs he'd gotten lately hadn't really involved fighting. Sure, there had been some that would possibly pit him up against strong opponents...but he wasn't stupid enough to take anything that would directly provoke Konoha or Uzushio and wasn't in the mood to put himself on Kiri's bad side since he currently owned a house in the Land of Water. This largely left those hiring him to go after softer targets or minor villages.

Well, there had been the offer to send him to do some damage against Sunagakure, but he wasn't crazy enough to wander into a desert without backup that would be less affected by the lack of water. Granted, reports were that there were far more oasis-type places out there, but not enough to make him comfortable with the general idea, and taking the transport pads was advertising that he'd arrived. Those felt better-used as an escape option.

He'd kind of hoped that blatantly robbing a bank would get shinobi to at least try to go after him, but he'd missed that the noble that hired him to do so had used him as a tool to expose corruption in the bank's owners. That annoyingly led to shinobi investigating the owners and not caring that he'd run off with half the vault's contents. Doubly so when the noble took the jewelry and other easily-identified valuables and started returning it all to the rightful owners to curry favor with them.

Really, it would've been nice to know that the bank was run by corrupt fuckers because then he'd have done the robbery differently. Maybe a bit more grandstanding to give someone time to show up to fight him in the place? But that was partially on him for not asking questions about why the bank had been chosen and why an obvious robbery in particular.

For now he was wandering between towns looking for his next potential job...or perhaps a list of bounties available. Hunting down a couple of those could be fun...if there were any. The last three times he'd found listings the pickings had been slim, and he was kind of offended that bounties on him had been dropped. But not enough to go slaughter people for the sake of doing so, because he'd found that being 'reliable' paid better.

Shino frowned as he evaluated options for protecting his hives from lightning chakra. It wasn't the first time he'd looked for options, and he had some minor things he could do already, but nothing that he thought would hold up against a direct attack against his puppet. Ideally he'd be able to wrap it in wind chakra, but only when needed as he didn't need to risk someone throwing fire chakra at it and cooking the hive instead. To protect against that he'd ideally be able to swap in water chakra, but that was secondary right now as he was expecting to go up against Sazen in the first round or two of fighting.

Currently he was looking at seals that could be added to the puppet, assuming he could find someone able to place them for him as he didn't trust his own skills in that area. Not for anything as intricate as the seals he was finding, anyway.

He also had thoughts on how to add a wire mesh to the puppet as well, connected to a deployable spike system in the feet to ground it. With any luck the mesh and what he needed for the spike system would be ready in a couple of days so he could start working on the modifications. Done right the spikes should also add to the ability for the puppet to hold itself in place or climb surfaces.

Hinata shook her head as she sat at one of the more secure terminals looking over Naruto's plans. She thought that he was going a bit overboard with protecting against unproven threats, but was never going to tell someone trying to set up sensible precautions to stop. Especially as her view was that he was only going too fast instead of spreading the work out over a few decades.

Of course, she'd not seen all of what was already in place before now, not having dug into those details too deeply before. He had weapon options that she hadn't even considered, based on a combination of a dozen different spells, though hadn't tested them at the scales he'd implemented them at. She'd not considered that the satellite network could function as a single giant spell platform either, allowing for scanning the planet to absurd degrees on top of other things.

Ino might be annoyed to find out that they now didn't need to infiltrate hidden villages to copy their paperwork. The satellite network could not only do so, but the spells could actually see through most of the security seals in use throughout the Elemental Nations. Uzushio and Konoha were the two exceptions, and she suspected that some of the sealing documentation she didn't understand properly was Naruto figuring out how to improve things there.

Despite herself, Hinata was finding herself taking notes on ways to improve some of Naruto's weapon insanity. Both the smaller ones that she wasn't sure if he'd considered certain tactics with and the stupidly overpowered untested system seemed like it could be tweaked to increase its effectiveness.

Fu felt bad about not helping Shino train, but they might end up fighting each other and shouldn't be too familiar with each other's preparations. He was also going to be far more focused on his insects than she was though. They helped her track and communicate, but in combat she much preferred to keep them in their hive and use a combination of physical and area-of-effect attacks instead. Putting her little friends intentionally in harm's way just felt wrong, and she couldn't carry enough insects to make most Aburame tricks usable on her own.

That didn't mean that she didn't have insect-related tricks of her own though. She'd gotten better at making webs and nets, and had even learned to set them on fire. A sticky ball of webbing with a fire core could get stuck on someone before it set itself alight while refusing to come loose. Then there was her new trick with the scale powder, going from merely being able to blind to adding some wind chakra to make the powder slice targets to ribbons as well.

Luckily there were large training areas that she could work in and varying levels of zombies to practice everything against.

Yoko was annoyed because Naruto's clones had spotted that Davaa and his people had reported that the two of them were gods. She'd missed that distinction in their documentation and wasn't even sure how they'd come to that conclusion in the first place. It was probably too late to correct the misconceptions too, which was even more annoying.

Even worse, now that she was digging into some of their cultural expectations that she'd not properly understood on a first pass she could see some of the problems. Chakra itself practically made you a minor god under their definitions. Non-human features just added to that, and they didn't have a non-god definition of a higher level of religious oversight. They considered their greatest holy leaders gods as it was, that she had actual 'divine abilities' and sat above the local priests and priestesses made her a goddess outright.

It looked like they hadn't been sure about that at first, but details like being able to speak their language when her followers couldn't, honestly minor illusions that were especially effective against them due to their lack of chakra, and the very existence of some of the floating island bits on Shrine Island had been incredibly convincing to them. They didn't realize that the latter were the same basic trick as the flying islands, though they did assume that the flying shrine island was divinely powered.

Naruto's clones running around the entire planet and interacting every so often hadn't helped, and a merchant had made their way to the continent with pictures of her and Naruto back in Konoha. Those were after the 'siblings' revelation and as such they were labeled as such in the pictures. Having the obviously-divine brother of a Goddess replace the moon was just seen as a bigger example of their divinity...and annoyingly, it made the other continent more informed about their ability to shapeshift than most of the Elemental Nations themselves were because Naruto showed up without the tanuki features.

If all of this wasn't making them less likely to be idiots that attacked them for no good reason then she'd be far more annoyed about it all than she currently was, but it was still quite aggravating. Worse, she had meetings planned over there and didn't know if she should bring it up to claim it was a mistake or pretend she didn't know. Especially when using their own terminology for the organizational structure of the shrines would have that labeling her as a form of goddess all on its own.

Oh, and if that wasn't bad enough, they'd been broadcasting the jounin exams all over the planet and it was assumed to be 'fledgling war gods and goddesses aiming to prove themselves' on that continent.

She'd be half-tempted to use rinnegan tricks to just give Davaa and some of his people chakra if they wouldn't see that as more proof of her divinity. Blessing them with added power would be just another sign of the divine.

Baisho was honestly surprised that he'd made it to the finals after repeatedly failing to kill Sasori. He'd used all of his best tricks and traps throughout the week to absolutely no success, wasn't sure if Sasori had even noticed the attempts to kill him in his sleep, and had basically only made it through the stage because the infamous puppetmaster hadn't seen fit to retaliate as he would've been justified to do.

It painted an unfortunate picture of his own capabilities that wasn't pleasant and he was taking advantage of everything Uzushio made available on the moon to try to compensate for that. He didn't think it was going to work, and he suspected that none of what he'd come up with was likely to even inconvenience most of the other finalists.

Really, the only other saving grace of the entire second stage was that he wasn't one of the idiots that had needed to be saved from the trees. How those teams had made it that far was a bit a mystery. Anyone who had seen or participated in one of Uzushio's chunin exams, or had ever been in Konoha's Forest of Death, should've been ready to deal with the trees.

Luckily the training areas on the moon all seemed to have instant zombie options at varying levels of difficulty, allowing him to work his way through his various attack patterns.

Ino had decided that it was time to consider starting a family and had diverted some of her work onto others so that she could focus on that a bit. A couple weeks ago she'd checked with Karin about timing, dragging Hinata into a checkup to see how far off their cycles were from one another. This led to significant initial confusion because neither of them had paid enough attention to notice that they didn't seem to have proper cycles occurring.

Luckily, inducing ovulation worked just fine for both of them and it was assumed to be a side effect of being bound to the remains of a tailed beast. Especially when things had seemingly reabsorbed when they'd taken precautions for a few days as they weren't quite ready.

After that she'd put herself in charge of figuring out things like how to build out rooms in the house for kids, childproofing the place to the best of their ability, and other such items. This wasn't difficult, and having her own clones do most of the work meant that she knew it was done as right as she could make it. Hinata was checking regularly as well, and Naruto occasionally just dropped better tools or instructions on her. The only thing he did directly was child proofing seals, which she appreciated. Both in that those were done right and that he was trusting her to handle the rest.

It seemed that bringing that up caused Karin and Sakura to start looking to begin their own family with Sasuke, but in their case they'd had to start with 'move to a larger place' as the three had opted for a smaller apartment. This wasn't difficult for them, and had the benefit of being able to remodel before moving in, with Naruto being easily convinced to help with child proofing seals there as well. Really, it was one clone for at most an hour in each home, at least before the seals division had found out and wanted copies of everything.

The current plan was to have a bit of a pre-celebration before the exam finals. Naruto claimed that the 'big' portions of his projects would be done by then, with just ongoing expansion to worry about afterwards. Said expansion was apparently possibly never going to be truly complete either, which turned it into more of a background thing.

Unfortunately, none of them could say what their kids would inherit. Beast man formula changes didn't normally pass down, but the kids of jinchuriki had minor physical features from the tailed beasts. Who knew how much would pass down from being bound to the remains of a tailed beast, and she had no clue if her dog features would pass down or not as they'd started as beast man related but had picked up some similar qualities to the features Naruto and Hinata had once she'd picked up her own tailed beast bits. Presumably to provide physical elements to bind things to, but she wasn't entirely certain.

If their kids picked up features from Naruto as well then who knew what combination of things might manifest.

Slightly annoyingly, Yoko had once again declined to participate even without needing to be directly intimate with Naruto. Hinata agreed that they should embrace both parts of the duo, but it seemed that all of the desire for physical intimacy had ended up on Naruto's end of things.

A had been making trips to the moon every few days to check on the four chunin training up there, though he didn't think that they knew he'd been making trips that frequently. Existing jounin were staying there to monitor as well, and provide assistance if needed, and he generally checked with them instead. Three of the chunin might even earn their promotions, Baisho being the unfortunate exception.

Why the young man thought that he'd been orphaned by Sasori was a bit of a mystery. Yes, he'd been pulled out of the remains of a village in the Land of Rivers years ago and eventually made his way to Kumo, but Suna hadn't been involved in that battle at all. Honestly, the 'spy' that 'rescued' the then-child had probably done the deed themselves after seeing that the boy had strong chakra. It would fit the actions that got them executed for being a traitor, at least.

As for the other three, he honestly liked that they claimed to have stayed on the moon for the experience of being in long stretches of abnormal conditions. Well, at least compared to being on Earth. You could trivially spend weeks inside of a cave to avoid sunlight. It was a bit harder to do so and still experience adverse weather, and that did nothing for experiencing constant daylight.

The only place on Earth that most knew about where you could experience constant 'day' was Shrine Island with its Amaterasu shrine's 'Sun'. That said, for years scientists had theorized that going far enough north or south would bring you to points where the Sun would rise and set on a multiple-month cycle, but with the downside of it being far too cold to do much. Over the past twenty years there had been dozens of requests for missions like that, but none of them had been accepted and the only scientists to make attempts had never returned.

So of course he'd gotten curious and asked one of the Uzushio people about that, since they had incredible maps and tricks nobody else did. They'd freely shared pictures of the small building at one pole and provided an explanation that the other pole had no ground under it before allowing him a chance to go through transport pads to see both. It was no surprise that the 'small building' was the top of a large complex filled with scientists, ones that were currently not wanting to advertise the existence of the place and be forced to share as they learned about the area.

Supposedly that facility hadn't existed a month ago, and he felt that tracked with how Uzushio seemed to do things. One of the scientists working more closely with them had probably asked loudly enough for Naruto to hear and the crazy kid had just popped out to the poles to take a look. A few hours to a couple of days later an entire facility had likely been thrown up at one pole and a small floating island had been set up at the other to hold the transport pad.

Hiashi had been surprised when Hinata had swung through to inform him that she was likely to be pregnant within a few weeks. He was happy that Himeki wasn't likely to carry his first grandchild in several years like some had predicted. It seemed that Naruto had been waiting for his wives to decide that they were ready for children and none of the three had realized that they needed to take extra steps to make it happen until a trip to the hospital had revealed things.

Needing to ensure that news, and the scrolls describing suitable items, was passed along to Fu had been slightly more annoying. Mostly because Tsunade wasn't in the village at the moment and the hospital administrators had been slightly obstructionist until he'd threatened to call her back from the moon to handle it. Fu had thanked him just this morning, and he'd ensured that she knew all the details passed along just in case.

Hanabi and Himeki should be done with their mission before the jounin exam finals as well, as teams had been dispatched to take care of the combat portion of things last week, so a family dinner should hopefully be able to be arranged to spread the news among the clan. Children bearing a byakugan under the Uzumaki clan name would cement an old form of alliance between the clans, though it was yet to be seen if that would happen. Especially with Naruto also having the sharingan and rinnegan on top of the byakugan. Even without that, the chance for the bloodline to reassert itself in grandchildren or great-grandchildren was always present as well.

Wame had been on a quick mission when word of an Uzushio civilian's daughter being abducted had been relayed. The mission desk did not want to alarm Naruto, and she had been closest to where things had happened. She'd made quick work of things thanks to the tracking spell she'd asked for the mission to test in the first place, and found the kid in the middle of a bandit camp...guarded by four shinobi, and with five other kids tied up as well.

They'd also cut one of the girl's hands off, in case she had enough training to perform hand seals to escape, and supposedly had said hand preserved in a scroll. That was listed on the signs posted around the camp, which also stated that if any shinobi attacked then they'd kill all five kids.

This was not a good way to impress an Uzushio shinobi, and definitely wasn't a good way to impress someone who had been learning everything they could about casting spells. She'd even gotten teleportation spells working, though preparing and holding six so that they'd trigger simultaneously was harder and required two paperwork clones to bring it down to two spells each. Luckily her teammates for the mission were able to watch her back while she and her clones were focused on that.

Having all six kids appear with them outside of the camp was a vindication on its own, even the effort caused her clones to dispel, though the alarm was sounded inside of the camp almost immediately. Wame directed the others to protect the kids while she personally showed her displeasure with the bandits. She made sure her Knight Armor was up before grabbing her sword and heading out of the trees.

"What the fuck?" one of the bandits yelled, looking between her and the shinobi that had just yelled about the kids vanishing.

"Abducting anyone from Uzushio isn't something we tolerate," Wame called. "You're lucky that nobody wanted to bother the Uzukage."

"Only in that it meant that you got here first," a familiar voice called as suddenly the entire camp was surrounded by Naruto's clones. "Good job getting the kids out, but an...example needs to be set. One that won't be likely to be forgotten anytime soon. Still, you look rightfully pissed off, so I'll let you pick one of the shinobi to deal with personally."

"I think I'll take the big one. Being beaten by someone so much shorter than him will probably be extra-insulting."

The various clones looked at her, then grinned. A moment later they all transformed into what looked like toddlers, which was entirely unfair. Especially as she knew that wasn't a spell.

On the other hand, 'toddler-sized Uzukage clones' was still a collection of Uzukage clones, so probably not as humiliating as the death of small cuts that she gave the largest of the shinobi.

Himeki had claimed Hanabi's lap as a seat, in part because she was disturbed by the fact that a group of shinobi-led bandits had been grabbing the kids of important civilians from various countries to use as 'bargaining chips'. That they'd successfully grabbed someone from Uzushio had led to their very quick undoing, and she personally found Uzushio's very graphic demonstration of why you don't do that to be reassuring.

Civilians probably thought it was gruesome, admittedly.

She was also enjoying being able to be herself after far too long transformed on their latest mission. Hanabi seemed to be enjoying that part of things himself, though kept grinning as he looked at her collar. Not that she was surprised, as they'd exchanged new collars that morning. Her collar had his name on the back of the tag and his collar had her name in the same place. It wasn't quite a formal declaration, but they weren't old enough for one of those yet.

"I'm surprised you went as far as you did with those bandits," Hiashi-sama said to Naruto, who was sitting between Hinata and Ino.

"There have been plans for what to do with the first idiot to abduct a non-shinobi Uzushio citizen for years now," Naruto replied. "I actually toned things back a little due to the team on site having already extracted the kids, though regrowing a hand and ensuring that all six would be able to learn to be shinobi was a little annoying."

"That's something that I'm curious about. Supposedly at least four had previously been tested and found to be lacking in chakra."

"And the Sage of Six Paths had the ability to grant others the ability to use chakra, above and beyond what seals can do. It required bringing in Yoko to help to get right, but we were able to use that to grant them all quite strong chakra networks. The five from outside of Uzushio will be joining the next class we start up, and two of them are moving to Uzushio as the bandits foolishly killed their parents. Hard to extort money when you've got an orphan that the rest of the extended family probably wants to vanish so that they can inherit."

"So this wasn't an attempt to provide a warning against someone grabbing your own soon-to-come children?" Satomi-sama questioned.

"Oh no," Hinata said, shaking her head. "Naruto has promised not to go after anyone that stupid unless Ino and I are both unavailable."

"We think he'd be too nice," Ino added, with a grin that spoke volumes on its own and sent shivers down most of their spines.

"And I think they just haven't seen me properly angry," Naruto added. "So I have to keep my plans secret and hope that if it ever comes up that they aren't immediately available to step in."

Himeki thought that Naruto's grin made Ino's look tame, though she blinked after looking away. "Wait, soon-to-come?"

"Sakura confirmed that Ino and I are pregnant yesterday," Hinata said with a happy smile, placing a hand on her stomach. "It'll be months before it's obvious, and we don't know how our tailed beast aspects will affect the length of the pregnancy, but we're both carrying twins."

"Maybe more," Naruto added. "If any of them split into identical twins instead of fraternal twins."

"Karin claimed that was unlikely, but did acknowledge that it was a possibility. She seemed to think it more likely if bloodlines were fighting though, causing a split with each twin getting different bloodline traits."

"We'll just need to wait and see what happens."

Himeki pouted at that, which Hanabi noticed. He poked her side. "What's got you pouting?"

She blushed. "I won't be their aunt until after they're born."

Getting snickers and giggles at that just had her pouting more.