Welcome, one and all, to Kage no Naruto chapter fifty one. I still can't believe that this thing is so god damned long. You know that this story is now over a quarter million words long? I am not joking, check the word count, it's over two hundred and fifty thousand words!

Author's Note: By the way, I've recently discovered that Slash fiction has reached a new low with the entire yaoi premise. I have heard that there is a yaoi lemon story between Frankie Boyle, and Hugh Dennis. HOW FUCKED UP IS THAT!?

Amazing story length aside, let's get this chapter started.

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NARUTO SPOILERS

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Okay, a decent amount happened in this chapter. First and foremost, Ibiki headed off the Animal Realm Pein to stop him from attacking Inoichi and Shizune from pooling their knowledge. What nobody saw was the Human Realm Pein going after them when nobody was paying attention.

After that, we get a bit with Naruto and Fukusaku hardly able to believe that a problem like this is coming up at this stage of the training. Now Naruto is determined to find a method of using Natural Energy while moving, which is impossible. Fukusaku is pretty sure that Naruto is insane, but is going along with it anyway. Remember, Naruto tried to gather Natural Energy while moving before, during his earlier training and failed. He's planning to try the same thing. Remember, the definition of Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

After that we enter a scene with the Hell Realm Pein interrogating two Chuunin. They refuse to tell him anything and so they get their souls eaten by this weird Rinnegan thing. It's one of those things that you need to see for yourself, it's hard to describe.

During this time, Konohamaru had been watching the entire thing and makes a run for it, or is about to. Before he does though, Ebisu of all people jumps in and starts to fight the Hell Realm Pein. Then it shows him a bit later held by the throat like the two from before. It goes into a bunch of flashbacks about how the villagers reacted to Naruto's various triumphs through the years, then to a bit with Ebisu accepting his own death. And then, just before the end, it shows a bit of Naruto saying to Konohamaru that he had a technique for Konohamaru to learn, and then it has a page with Konohamaru stepping out of the alley he was hiding in, shouting at the HellRealm Pein that he was the guy's next opponent. One after another, Naruto's friends and allies are getting cut down, eh?

I would say that this was a pretty good chapter. Not much in the way of action, but it had plenty of potential in set-up action. I hope that the next chapter shows Konohamaru getting butchered, that kid always did seem a bit annoying to me, and Ebisu he's always been a bit of a prick, not to mention a pervert, albeit an in-closet one.

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Summary of last chapter

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Right, Naruto took a length of Kisame's hair and had his soldiers take the Akatsuki member to the border to set him loose. He did this because while he had Kisame's hair he could find him wherever he was and before long, wherever Kisame was, Itachi wouldn't be far behind. Naruto also promised that Kisame would receive a horrible punishment for killing Zodd after Itachi is captured and Kisame's usefulness had expired.

Temari was in Suna, reflecting upon her training while waiting for the Konoha team to show up. After a flashback of Naruto's cruel training, the four of them showed up in the distance. Temari decided that the best way to get rid of them would be to manipulate a nearby sandstorm, making it stronger than it should normally be, to the point where it would rip flesh from bone.

Naruto contemplated upon a way to breach the defenses of Houfu, the capital city of Iwagakure, thinking of the various defenses of the Kongoubenso which was the immense wall that protected Houfu for centuries without ever being pierced, the massive army, and the twelve ninja that were guarding Lord Yokushin, the Earth Daimyo. And that's where the last chapter ended. Let the fifty first chapter begin!

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With Kisame

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Kisame woke up in the middle of nowhere, with a pounding headache and a variety of wounds that had been bandaged up. He shook his head to clear it and got up, looked around and soon found and picked up Samehada which was nearby.

After that he had a look around his surroundings, and from a pocket he took a compass. He quickly oriented his position and headed south. He would look for a town, where he would then be able to find out where he was, and then once he knew that he would head for Amegakure. Pein had always said that if you and your partner are separated and cannot find each other, head for Amegakure. There, he would link up with Itachi and then follow their new orders, whatever they might be.

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With Team 7

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The newly re-forged Team 7, consisting of Tenten, Sakura, Sai, and led by Kakashi, weren't making the fastest of progress to Sunagakure. They had gotten lost in the desert and had to find their way again. In fact, the only reason they were able to get back on track was due to a combination of Kakashi's experience in the desert when he was here on the occasional mission, and because they had stumbled upon a traveling merchant who had pointed them in the right direction. Still, regardless of reasons, they had found the large cliff that was an important marker for finding Suna. 'Once you find the cliff, head north about fifty miles and you'll find Suna. You can't miss it.' Said the merchant.

Kakashi urged his team to hurry up. "We're already a bit behind schedule as it is, and there's a big sandstorm coming. We've got to get to the cliff before it hits, or we'll probably get lost." Kakashi said to the rest of the team. The three merely nodded and quickened their pace.

At the pace they were moving at, they quickly closed the distance, but the sandstorm moved even closer. The strange thing was that the storm moved faster than it should have. By the time they were halfway to the cliffs and the caves that would offer sanctuary from the harsh weather, the storm got even closer, and it was a lot stronger than Kakashi thought it would be. Before long the wind was stirring their hair and sand was moving around the ground. By the time they were three quarters of the way to the cliff, the wind started blowing sand around enough to deteriorate line of sight.

Things got a lot stranger when the wind picked up even more. This time exponentially. Suddenly Tenten cried out, and the other three looked back immediately. She was holding a hand to one cheek. She pulled it away and they saw that her cheek was stained with a slim, horizontal line of blood. "What the hell was that?" She asked angrily.

Kakashi looked at the sight with serious concern. Were they under attack? Then he felt a line of fire against one finger and looked down to see a similar cut to Tenten's. He looked at the cut closely and picked a single grain of sand out of one end of the wound. That's when he realized what was happening. "GET TO THE CAVES!" he shouted. "WE CAN'T GET CAUGHT IN THE STORM!"

Galvanized by the fear in his voice, the other three started running as fast as they could in the sand, desperate to get to the caves in the cliff. As they moved, they suffered a number of similar small cuts across their arms, legs, and faces. Small gashes were torn in clothing and seeing became more and more difficult. During this time Kakashi was trying to sense what he feared would be there, and he soon found it. A large amount of chakra was feeding the wind of the storm, making it far stronger than it should have been under normal circumstances. He shouted back to the rest of the team to hurry up and everyone put all of their effort into movement, pushing large amounts of chakra into their legs to propel them greater distances.

During this time, the storm got even closer, pushing the sand around faster and faster, causing small, thin cuts to happen more frequently, and as the sand flew through the air faster, the cuts they inflicted became longer, and deeper.

The storm only got worse as they neared the cliffs, and Kakashi could feel the chakra that fueled the storm increase as whoever worked the wind worked harder and harder to make the storm move faster, to move closer and unleash more of its fury upon them. Kakashi knew that so far they were only in the storm's outskirts. If they got caught in the center of it they would be lucky to have any flesh left at all.

Kakashi and the rest ran as fast as they could, and they finally reached the cliffs, and the caves that would provide shelter from the deadly storm. There was only one problem though. There were no caves. Kakashi could see mounds of rubble where the entrances were, but the holes in the cliff-face had been sealed shut. They were trapped.

Far above Team 7, Temari stood at the peak of the cliffs, above the storm and safe from it, holding her fan in one hand as she drove the wind to move faster and faster to kill her targets. Behind her stood four Soldier Zombies. Each of them a bit worn from recently ascending the cliff again, and each minus several explosive notes from when they arrived in Kaze no Kuni.

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With Naruto

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Naruto stood in a rocky, grassy plain, in the valley between two chains of mountains. Two miles in front of him stood the Kongoubenso, the impenetrable wall that protected the capital city of Houfu from all would-be-invaders. It stood as it had stood for over five hundred years. Tall and magnificent. The polished granite that made up the wall shone like a mirror in the sun, and the steel of the doors was kept in top condition, bright, shining, and impenetrable. It was meant to be a beacon of hope to the citizens of Tsuchi no Kuni. A light in the darkness, a place where the people would be safe from their enemies, no matter how fearsome. The Kongoubenso was built over a one hundred and twenty year period under the command of the first Earth Daimyo, and continued by his son who inherited his title. Ever since then, the great ninja of Iwa, the Tsuchikages, the Jounin, the seal masters, every man who could came to reinforce the great wall even more ever since it was built. Before them, it was the ninja clans that existed before the Hidden Villages who reinforced the walls under the terms of their pact with the Daimyo. He let them stay in his country, they kept his city safe.

It was on this day, eight hundred years since the great wall, the Kongoubenso, the Diamond Defense, was built that Capiorcorpus no Uzumaki Naruto, the master of shadows and the undead, the terror of Tsuchi no Kuni who had conquered, murdered, and enslaved its people would for the first time in two hundred years test the greatest defense in the Elemental Countries. For the first time in living memory, the impenetrable defense was to be challenged.

Behind Naruto stood a number of his subjects. Fifty Soldier Zombies armed to the teeth. They were clad in steel armor specially prepared by Naruto to be stronger than normal steel and made to take chakra strikes and shrug them off like a feeble wind, they carried gigantic axes to crush rock, massive shields to defend themselves, and heavy spears to pierce the material that stood before them. All of these weapons were large and sharp, forged by Zombies in the forges of Dark Heaven Castle, imbued with seals and power to rip defenses apart. These weapons were meant to be wielded by Naruto's inhuman, supernaturally strong monstrosities, not man. Ten of them would stay in the back wielding massive bows so large that normal men could not hope to pull the string, fit with specially prepared steel headed arrows that, wielded by the undead warriors that Naruto created would send deadly projectiles that could run through a steel wall, and then strike fully armored man, pierce his breast plate, his heart, and the armor upon his back and still retain enough force to kill the man standing behind him. These were Soldiers meant to destroy the defenses of the enemy, to be indestructible messengers of death to the people of Houfu.

Behind them stood a hundred or so Soldiers, not nearly as heavily armed. They were armed with knives, hammers, axes. But strangely, beside them stood great piles of lumber, boxes held nails, iron spokes and other such building supplies. They didn't look like they were here to fight at all.

Naruto watched as the army meant to defend the city and its lord gathered upon the wall, he watched as the figures in shining iron armor gathered to defend their home. He waited until a large amount had gathered that he said a single word. 'Charge'

The moment that the word crossed their master's lips, the fifty heavily armed Soldiers screamed in defiance and fury and ran full sprint to the gates of the Kongoubenso. They ran almost a mile hauling that heavy equipment and they didn't slow down at all. Fifty yards from the gates, the archers held back and took up their bows. They pulled from their quivers arrows two inches thick and four feet long that they fitted to those massive bows made of fine oak. They took aim for a moment, pulling the bow-strings under incredibly tension to a position beside their ears, and after a moment's aim they let them fly. The wood snapped back into position with a sound not unlike a gunshot and the deadly shafts of wood and metal went flying into the air. Not toward the gates though, the arrows went higher, and struck the army that was watching from the top of the wall.

Now THAT was utter carnage. Nobody knew what happened, suddenly three men were spitted upon a length of wood and a fourth was left with a dent in his chest plate deep enough to restrict his breathing. The arrows rained from the sky like a hailstorm from hell, piercing armor, smashing helms, piercing flesh and bone and killing everyone near where they landed. Flecks of meat flew through the air, limb were torn off by the sheer force that the projectiles carried. Every arrow killed at least one man, and most of them killed two or three, or more. The ten Zombies that wielded the bows had two hundred and fifty arrows between them. As suddenly as that, almost a tenth of Lord Yokushin's army was slaughtered.

As the soldiers were hastily getting off the wall, trampling the bodies of the dead and the badly wounded in their haste to get away from the raining death that killed their fellows. While they did, the archers dropped their bows and took up their spears, as did the other forty Soldiers. They raced for ward and, as one, threw their spears in a perfect formation. The spears landed with an ear-splitting CRACK!

They struck the great wall of the Kongoubenso in a perfect arch, burrowing almost half of their length into the stone and cracking a visible shape into the defensive wall of rock. The fifty Soldiers took up their axes and ran to the cracked doorway in the wall they swung them back and with deafening howls swung the steel into the stone of the wall, cracking the rock beneath them and splitting it, slowly but surely hacking their way through the wall that had stood as long as anyone could remember.

It was at that moment however, that the wall struck back.

The stone let out a groan almost like a living thing and the nearby earth shook, knocking the zombies off balance. There was hardly a warning before the area cracked into an arch flashed red and the area of wall the zombies were hacking at flames spewed from the stone, bathing the creatures in fire.

The Zombies however were all still protected by the seals that Naruto placed upon them to absorb fire, to protect them from a terrible weakness. Their armor glowed cherry red, the steel in their hands shone white with unbearably intense heat, but that did not still the zombies from hacking at the wall as though the flames weren't there at all. Before long, the flames stopped as a combination of the chakra dedicated to the attack by some unknown ninja wearing out and the steel of the axes, sealed within them the power to pierce defenses, hacked into the very fabric of the chakra defense and shorted it out.

The imbued defenses of the Kongoubenso did not stop there. Barely a second after the flames ended, the wall shivered and spears or rock shot forth from the granite wall, but barely dented the steel armor of the siege zombies. They were made to defeat the Kongoubenso's defenses and hack through the granite and diamond standing before them and they were doing their best to split the rock before them.

Then the wall shivered and groaned again, once more as though it was alive and a great surge of water poured from the top of the wall over the zombies, drenching them horribly but they did not care about the cold, nor the blazing hot steam that rose from their cooled weapons. They continued to attack the wall before them, determined to pierce it. Far from the offensive, Naruto and the hundred Zombies watched in anticipation.

Then, while the water was still pouring over the zombies, bolts of lightning arced from the stones and struck the water, electrifying the undead warriors. THAT got a reaction. The electricity forced their muscles to clench tight, and they were paralyzed as they were electrocuted. That hardly mattered however since they couldn't die. Before long the water ran out, the lightning stopped, and the Zombies were freed from their paralysis. Then they returned to hacking at the wall with a single minded fury.

Then the wall shook and the stone filled in. The damage they had done so far healed over in moments, the rock flowing like water. They were about ten feet into the wall at this point. They moved as fast as they could, but the Soldiers were trapped in the encompassing rock as the wall was healed. Two Soldiers managed to escape the fate of their fellows and were not devoured by the wall.

Then, fifty great tendrils of stone emerged from the smooth rock and wrapped around the spears that were still embedded in the rock face, they pulled the shafts from the stone and the wall healed the damage that they had caused. Then the tendrils launched the spears through the air toward the remaining two Soldier Zombies. The spears pierced their armor like hot knives through butter, and pierced their bodies in all places. The head, the chest, the limbs, the stomach, they were each run through twenty five times by spears meant to destroy built in defenses. Not even Naruto's Zombies could survive that. They fell dead to the ground.

Even though the Zombies could not be killed by normal means, they still depended upon the seal placed upon them by Naruto. Their shadow, under normal circumstances, would vanish the moment that the original owner died, killing the zombie with it. Naruto's seal prevented that by trapping the shadow in the zombie. If the zombies are fed salt, then the shadow is released from the zombie and if the original owner was still alive, it would return to them. If the original owner was dead, and the shadow was kept on Earth by Naruto's seal then the shadow would vanish. The spears that Naruto created to destroy defenses did the same thing to the zombies that they did to the wall. They destroyed the built in chakra defenses of the zombies. The spears destroyed the seal that kept their shadows trapped on Earth despite the fact that their original owners were dead. The shadows that kept the zombies alive and moving vanished, still trapped in the zombies, and the Zombies died as well.

Atop the great wall, the remaining soldiers of Houfu's army cheered in victory, happy that the great defense had held.

A good distance away, Naruto scowled with distaste and thought. 'Well, that ended about as I expected it to.' He thought. 'But it was necessary to see what that wall was capable of.'

Then he turned to the Soldiers behind him and nodded, giving them a clear signal to begin. The Soldiers nodded and took lumber from the piles, nails from the boxes, and started laying them on the ground and nailing them together. They were building a foundation.

As the army of Houfu stopped cheering and watched what was happening, they watched as the Zombies built something. In the next six hours, a definite shape took form and was filled in by rock and stone. In the six hours since Naruto's attack failed, the Soldiers had built a structure across the entire valley. It was a wall. Nowhere near as grand as the Kongoubenso, but a wall nonetheless. It had one gate, and that was barred by several steel bars. It was fifteen feet high, and as wide as the valley floor. The hundred Zombies that built the wall sat upon the top of the wall, putting away building supplies and taking out swords and shields and spears.

Naruto went to the land before the Kongoubenso and shouted, chakra filling his voice to make it carry. With a handseal he altered the wind and made it carry his voice longer, so that everyone in the entire city could hear him and said. "People of Houfu! I must congratulate you, that wall is quite sturdy, but not impenetrable, and even if it is, what good does it do you but to keep you in as well as keeping me out? My servants will stay here, and man this wall. No supplies of any kind will reach Houfu until I say otherwise. It does not matter to me how you fall. Either you are defeated by me, or you starve to death it makes no difference. So now, I offer you a choice. You can surrender, and you will all be taken as slaves, your lord will be killed, and you will work for the rest of your days under my command, you will work in the mines of your country, extracting ore and gemstone as you have always done. Or you can defy me, and I shall break down your wall and kill you all. And should I fail, I will merely wait here until you all starve or die of thirst. It makes no difference to me. I will go now, to conquer Iwa, to slay the Tsuchikage and the ninja that might yet offer you assistance. You have until I return to make your choice. I suggest that you make the right one."

Then Naruto released the handseal and the wind stopped amplifying his voice. He turned and stepped into the shadow of the wall that would block any and all trade with the city, that would leach Houfu until it starved, and vanished as though he was never there. The people stopped cheering ,and they realized just how bad their situation really was.

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And that is the end of the chapter. A bit short, I know, but it seemed right to end it there. You all saw a bit of what's happening to Kakashi and Co., and you see the defensive abilities of the Kongoubenso. Naruto gives them a lose-lose ultimatum for a lose-lose situation and prepares to take on the other nugget of resistance that stands between him and complete conquering of Tsuchi no Kuni.

As for what happens in the battle for Iwa, you will have to wait next chapter.

Until the next update,

Artful Lounger