I'm having issues with ch 56. So there's a slight chance the daily update schedule will be disrupted in three weeks.
The atmosphere was oddly conflicted as they packed up their holiday clothes to get ready to go home. There was happiness, at having had such a great time on Oceanus, and sadness, at finally having to leave. As was always the case for a vacation, they had brought far more clothes than they had actually ended up wearing, but considering that the crew were either in swimwear or nude for most of the two weeks, Naruto certainly wasn't complaining. They piled up their suitcases in the lounge, before walking out onto the sun-terrace to enjoy one last breakfast at the wonderful resort world.
As quickly as the tempestuous storm had arrived last night, it had blown itself out just as rapidly, and the skies were clear and blue this morning with not a cloud in sight. Shikamaru and his robotic cohorts had prepared a banquet of delicious food, and the departing guests sat around in the bright morning sunshine, sipping chilled drinks and enjoying the selections of fruit on offer. With wistful sighs, they finished their breakfast, and then meandered back to the lounge so that they could return their belongings to the Invictus.
While the crew took the cases back to the ship, Tenten helped Naruto pack up the simulation equipment. She eagerly volunteered to set it up again for him, and they planned on putting one of the currently vacant rooms in the Invictus to good use, as his new training room. She also promised to help him configure the pulse generator, so that he could still maintain an instantaneous interface with Lee's equipment, while they were out roaming the galaxy.
When they were fully packed away, Naruto bid the robots farewell, and strolled back along the rocky path around the cove, to reach the docking bay. The roof of the huge room was yawning open and the golden glow from the sun was bathing the Invictus in bright sunshine. The Assault Cruiser was awaiting him, and it looked radiant as it reflected the sun's rays. He stopped for a moment to drink in its appearance, and he had to concede that the others were right; it did look quite magnificent. Naruto worried that it was ostentatious, but the white look just seemed to work.
They walked up to the DNA reader on the airlock, but before they could lay a hand on it, it was already opening. "Welcome home, everyone," Shikamaru spoke through the speakers.
Naruto chuckled. "Good to be home, Shikamaru. Thanks for serving us these last two weeks."
"Of course, I'm a robot, the word literally means 'slave'," Shikamaru said self-deprecatingly.
Tenten frowned. "First correction, you are an AI. Second correction, you don't have to do anything you don't want to do. That's the rule of being Pack. Never doubt you have free will."
"Whatever you say, Mom," he said sarcastically but they could tell he was touched. "I'll get us to the Nav Beacon while you pack your clothes away."
Sure enough, they felt the Invictus begin to lift off when the airlock closed behind Sakura.
"You let him fly the ship? Is he allowed to fire the weapons as well?" Sasuke griped good naturedly. He'd actually started to see the AI as a friend after his invaluable assistance against the Nexus ship.
"Think about this one: do you really want to know?" Naruto teased.
They took the anti-grav tube to Deck 2 and put their clothes away in their respective closets. Naruto almost delayed them when he saw Hinata and Sasuke strip in front of him, but he maintained focus and they all made it to the Bridge.
"Shino called us," Gaara alerted the crew, opening the comm interface in anticipation of the coming order.
"Call him back," Naruto requested politely. He never barked orders except in the heat of combat.
The older man's face eventually appeared on the viewscreen, and he nodded to Naruto when he saw his friend.
"Hey, Shino," Naruto greeted him with a friendly smile.
"Nice tan, Naruto," Shino said with a dry chuckle.
Naruto's smile turned into a broad grin. "Thanks! Oceanus was incredible, we had a great time. Sorry I missed your call earlier, everything alright?"
"It's nothing urgent, I just wanted to let you know that I've done some digging on Vice Admiral Ebisu, and it appears he's currently in command of an R&D research facility in the Beta Persei system. I tried to find out more, but all other information is beyond my clearance level," Shino replied, clenching his jaw with irritation.
"Alright, well let me know if you find out anything more," Naruto said, looking concerned.
"Will do. Have fun with the Oto, but I don't think you're going to have much luck if you try for their Laser weaponry," Shino advised his old comrade, giving him a strained smile before ending the call.
"He looks like he's burning the candle at both ends," Hinata said worriedly.
"If Itachi is riding his ass and he's also worried about this AI business, I can relate," Sasuke said, having worked Shino's job for 11 years.
Shikamaru had been good as his word and the ship had reached orbit while they were putting their clothes away. Fu assumed manual control and led them to the Nav Beacon marking the edge of the gravity well while Hinata did her thing.
"Course plotted and laid in; destination, the Oto Regency," Hinata announced to everyone, and pressed a button that displayed the sector map for them.
The glowing map cast a blue haze over the bridge, and Hinata's course suddenly appeared as a glowing green line, showing the route they would be taking through the Konoha Federation to get there. Oto space was directly above the hundreds of star systems that made up Konoha space, and the information displayed next to their route indicated that it would take them two days to reach it. The trading station that was their final destination was located on the border between the two galactic empires, a short distance inside Oto space.
Once Fu had brought them away from Oceanus' gravity well, Hinata powered up the Tachyon Drive, and the Invictus leapt into hyperwarp. After the ship had been enveloped in the blue field of the Tachyon Drive and surged away from the planet, the comms interface lit up and showed a dozen missed calls from a Koeman Peter.
Naruto sat up. "Guess he changed his mind about helping us," he mused.
Hana got an uncomfortable frown. "Or he's gotten desperate. If he failed to get us to the ambush site, he might be being hunted down for his failure."
Gaara was already hitting the recall button on the comms interface. They waited a minute, and then an unexpected face appeared onscreen. It was a middle-aged woman with brownish-blonde hair that was probably dyed given the amount of wrinkles on her face. She had a cop's shield hanging proudly around her neck. "This is Detective Hargitay Mariska. Why have you called this number?"
Naruto coughed. "Do we have the wrong number? I'm returning a call to a Koeman Peter."
The detective sighed. "I regret to inform you that Mr. Koeman has disappeared mysteriously. I'm about to close the case as incomplete, there's simply no leads. He vanished from his bedroom and no one's seen him since. I'm sorry for your loss."
Naruto nodded stoically. "Understood, Detective, keep up the good work."
"Will do. Oh, what's your name. I need to make a note of whoever calls suspected kidnappings," the detective asked.
"Commodore Uzumaki Naruto," Naruto said, hoping she hadn't seen the news pieces.
She had. Her face lit up with surprise and joy. "The Alpha? Thank you so much for your efforts in Iota Leonis, Commodore! You and your Wolves saved my husband's life!"
"Happy to help. Goodbye," Naruto said awkwardly, mentally ordering Gaara to cut the call.
"So, his employer got to him first," Sasuke noted.
"It would appear so," Naruto sighed.
Hana steepled her fingers. "That last thing he said to us is stuck in my head: 'everyone knows pain'. What is that? A code phrase? A clue to his employer's identity? It's driving me bonkers," she sighed.
Tenten nodded and projected her agreement. She turned to her console, going with a hunch. "Shikamaru, I want you to take one of you and run a search on the holo-net for anyone named 'Pain' or the phrase 'everyone knows pain'. And I mean ALL the holo-net."
"Naruto ordered me to stay off the Dark Net," Shikamaru protested.
"That was when you were younger. You're much wiser and tougher now after all the reading you've done. I trust you to dip your toe in the filth and not turn into a rampaging monster," Naruto said trustingly.
"I'm also much hornier. There's a LOT of porn out there. I'm looking forward to you making me a wife/husband or building that android body so I can join in," Shikamaru joked. "Anyway, tasking lucky number seven with the search… done. It might take one of me a day to trawl all those zettabytes, especially with the false pings from using such a common word as pain. I'm probably going to get a lot of hardcore S&M and snuff porn, that'll be less fun to watch."
Naruto sighed. "We can't thank you enough for doing this, Shikamaru. The more we know about this threat, the better prepared we'll be to face it."
Sakura coughed from the inactive Intelligence Officer station. "Can I show you all my findings now?"
They all perked up. "Sure, honey. Would you mind doing it in the Briefing Room?" Naruto asked.
"No, that would be perfect."
They all filed into the Briefing Room and everyone took their seats in order of when they'd joined. Sakura was sat next to Fu and opened the report she'd compiled over the vacation. "As you know, I've taken extensive tests ever since that first load of Naruto's cum. I was able to use your Commodore clearance to pull the data from the physical I took when I first got the Port Medea, so we were able to establish a baseline."
"This is me when I initially joined you," she said, pulling an image from one of the cameras in the airlock. "As you can see, I went through a significant transformation over this two week period, with my body changing to how I appear before you today," she said, gesturing to her spectacular figure. "I gained just over an inch in height, my bust increased three cup sizes, and I gained another eight pounds in weight, which was all due to an increase in muscle mass. And, of course, I got pointed ears. I've tested my strength, speed, agility, and reflexes, and I'm now at the top end of all categories achievable by Konoha females. As we share the same body type, it's apparent that you girls are enhanced to the same degree too," she added, looking at each of the girls in turn.
Everyone nodded, but this wasn't news to them. They knew the Thrall body was inherently meant for combat.
"Obviously Fu and Gaara are special cases, but I'll work with them to find out what I can about their physiology," she said, smiling at the Nymph and Grey.
"I can't wait!" Fu replied, and beamed back at her happily.
"I am most curious to see how I compare to the others given I started off much 'worse' than they did," Gaara mused.
Sakura nodded and then continued. "My lung capacity has also massively increased, and oxygen transfer through the lungs is much more efficient. This has proven to be very helpful when there's something substantial in my throat, preventing me from breathing normally," Sakura explained with a coy glance at Naruto, to the accompanying laughter of her crewmates.
Sakura then turned back to the holograph of the full-body scan, and clicked a button on her remote, which changed the image to one that made the girls giggle.
"Now, I'm sure I don't need to explain that this is a Konoha sperm," Sakura said, smiling as she looked at the image. She pressed the button again, and the image changed so another sperm appeared, but this one had a bigger head and longer tail. "This is an Uzu sperm, that I took from a lip swab a week ago. It's bigger and more powerful than the Konoha equivalent, but as your mother proved, Naruto, it will be just as compatible with us in the future."
At this little tidbit, the girls began to squirm in their chairs, darting hungry glances at John, and even Sakura started to look a little flushed. The men went starry-eyed, little fingers and toes clearly in their heads. Naruto smiled at the obvious arousal in the girls, and then nodded at Sakura to continue.
"As you can see, just the thought of you... breeding us," she said, stifling a little moan, "has a pronounced effect on our state of arousal. You warned me this might be the case when you explained what being with you might entail, and you were right. It's a psychological change that swallowing down your cum has made to all of us, which I'll explain a little later."
When Naruto nodded his understanding, Sakura clicked the button on her remote to continue her presentation. The image changed to show a full-body scan holograph, but this one showed her with a hugely swollen belly, along with the pints of thick white liquid that had so greatly expanded her stomach.
"Now I'll go through the exact mechanics of what happens during the 'change'. This image you see before you, I took after the first few days. I've studied the effects that swallowing down your cum has, and I've made a number of interesting observations.
Firstly, you mentioned that when someone first starts to suck on your cock, they go into a kind of daze. There's a component in your genes which is carried via your pre-cum, that causes this narcotic/anaesthetic effect. It's an intoxicating, addictive, mind-numbing, throat-coating, pleasure-inducing, liquid relaxant, which tastes delicious to compatible men and women, encouraging them to ingest more.
The more the person swallows, the less they are affected by the sedative effects, until by the third 'exposure', they become immune to it, and the accompanying memory loss. The muscle relaxant properties still remain, which helps you to fit your big cock into whatever receptive orifice you choose on a compliant lover," Sakura explained, struggling to retain her professional composure.
"The muscle relaxant also protects a person's stomach, allowing it to stretch to accommodate all that cum, and the healing properties prevent any stretch marks from occurring.
Additionally, that first time a person swallows a load, the sedative knocks them out for fourteen hours, during which time their body absorbs your cum, and their DNA begins to change, reprogrammed by your genes. There's some additional catalyst for this change which I haven't been able to identify yet, but I'm continuing to look into it."
"It's probably psionic energy. And you're saying the DNA changes happen from the first dose?" Naruto asked worriedly. His mind went to all his lovers before he'd met Hinata.
Sakura nodded and continued. "The healing that we've all experienced begins with that exposure. It seems to start with more serious conditions first, then physical enhancements, and finally moves on to cosmetic improvements afterwards. The body reshaping takes a week mainly because of the vast numbers of calories needed to grow new hair, muscle and bone, which were all fuelled by our bodies absorbing your cum to provide the energy for the change."
"But what about typical Uzu? They have as many Thralls as possible. I can't imagine one taking the time to spend a week on each girl until she'd fully transformed to the Thrall body template," Hinata asked.
"This is pure extrapolation based on Uzu ancestral knowledge and my own reasoning. But I think the typical Uzu gets around the problem by creating or altering an existing species to be naturally athletic and Thrall-like, and able to form an Astral Bond on just a small sample of cum from the Feeder. He could theoretically customize multiple slave races to do different tasks, enslaving the women for his armies and the men for his workforce," Sakura reasoned.
Gaara jumped. "Forgive me, it honestly slipped my mind. But that's exactly what Orochimaru did. He made the Suna to do psychic grunt work and an experiment in a group mind. He made the Iwa for miners. The Konoha, so far as we could tell, were a simple experiment to see what would happen. And of course, there's the Oto."
Naruto perked up. "What about the Oto? You're telling me the Suna know their secrets?"
"The knowledge was restricted to the High Council. There was such a culture of secrecy it honestly didn't occur to me to tell you until now. The Oto were the blue-skinned white-haired race you saw in the cave paintings of Orochimaru. Matriarch Guren was one of them. He modified the whole race to have a 20-to-1 birthrate of females to males and to all be naturally Thrall-like in body. After ten thousand years without reinforcement, I'm sure mutations have sprung up. But the Oto were Orochimaru's main stock for Thralls."
Naruto gaped. "20-to-1? How could they possibly survive with that skewed sex ratio?"
"They've somehow managed. From what we know of their culture, the women rule the core worlds and the men retreat to the trading stations for their own safety and sanity. The politics and intrigue that have become integral to their way of life are quite… deadly," Gaara explained.
"So why the armor?" Hinata asked. "To protect against assassinations, if they're all playing power games?"
"From what the Suna can remember, the culture of full-body armor is explicitly to prevent another Uzu from recognizing them and enslaving them again," Gaara said with a shrug. "Whether they remember that's the reason, or Orochimaru's reign in general, is beyond my knowledge."
Sakura nodded. "Well, this has been fascinating. But may I finish my report?"
"Of course, honey, sorry for the interruption," Naruto said apologetically, turning back to his pinkette Thrall.
"You mentioned that you had each become smarter during the change, and when you observe the activity in my brain over the week period, it seems likely I have been affected the same way too. My brain now uses a greater number of synapses, and the electrical activity has increased fourfold," Sakura said, as she pressed the button on the remote a few times, showing several images of her brain in succession. Each one was more brightly lit, showing all the extra activity that she had mentioned.
"There's also conclusive evidence, that the areas of my brain that affect personality and behaviour have been rewritten, which ties in with your own observations. Again, the genes alone shouldn't be able to trigger this level of intricate modification of our brains, so there's something else at work which I can't clearly explain. Yet..." she said confidently.
Gaara raised a hand to contribute. "I am hardly a psionicologist, but I will happily share the Suna's knowledge on the biological basis of psychic powers."
Sakura beamed. "Thank you, Gaara. And finally, the best for last: our DNA. All of us now have triple-helix DNA as opposed to the standard double-helix that the Konoha and Suna have. According to his physical when he first joined the Navy, Naruto's DNA was already triple-helix, but the third strand was all but inactive. Every connection is lit up like a firework now, so I'll posit that the third strand is what contains all our psychic powers and Uzu knowledge. And, of course there's our immorality. Every being with DNA has structures called telomeres in their chromosomes, which ensure the cell maintains integrity when it reproduces. Unfortunately, telomeres wear down, and damage starts to accumulate. It's the whole copy-of-a-copy problem. But that doesn't apply to us. We all have, for lack of a better term, 'super' telomeres. They never wear down and each new cell is perfectly healthy and identical to its parent."
"Which explains how Orochimaru lived for thousands of years," Sasuke noted.
"If we were normal Thralls, we'd have to rely on ingesting Uzu cum to combat aging. But since we have such a generous Alpha, we've been adopted into his species with all the benefits that come with it," Sakura said with a saucy smile. "And now he has an immortal harem who are all so very grateful for the Gift he's bestowed upon them…"
Naruto grinned, sensing where this meeting was going. "Fu? I think it's time we test your shapeshifting ability, particularly that special one when you have an Uzu cock up your ass."
They all went down to the Commodore's Quarters (Hinata noting they'd have to change to plaque), and stripped naked. Then, lining up in front of him with the exception of Jade, his Pack all bent over. Naruto, sitting on the bed, welcomed Fu into his lap. She gave him a quick blowjob to lube him up and then settled her tightest hole over her throbbing cock and sat down. They both moaned at the pleasure of stretching Fu's body with Naruto's manhood, and in a few short moments six cocks sprung out from Fu's front.
Sakura turned to look over her shoulder and gaped. "Christ! You guys told me about it but I didn't actually believe it!"
"Yeah, Fu's a wonder. Now prepare to take it hard and fast. Naruto's not going to last long under all this stimulation. Luckily, we all cum when he cums, so everyone wins," Hinata told her from the other end of the line.
"Good Nymph. Now, I want you to stretch those cocks out to plunder all those tight little holes," Naruto whispered in Fu's ear, licking it and biting her neck afterwards.
Fu furrowed her brow and concentrated. The green copies of the Alpha's cock grew longer and began to flex, until there were six tentacles extended from Fu's front, each one lined up with one of the Pack's holes. They all relaxed their bodies in anticipation of that first stretch. And then Fu pushed her tentacles into them.
*Fuck!* they thought as one as the psychic feedback of them all being simultaneously penetrated hit them. It was all but a white-out of pleasure. Naruto almost came like a teenager, feeling three asses and four pussies at the same time. He clung to his legendary endurance and held out, though. And then Fu began to writhe in his lap, which consequently moved the tentacles within their respective holes. Naruto mentally thought, 'fuck it' and began to thrust up and into Fu at a manic pace, chasing his orgasm relentlessly. Fu squealed and replicated the furious pace in her tentacles, making the Pack moan and cry out in pleasure. Finally, after about two minutes and he was quite proud of that, Naruto roared and released. Fu funneled his cum into each hole, saving a portion for herself.
The Pack all recovered from their collective orgasm, and used Telekinesis to move Naruto's cum to their mouths in their respective methods given which hole had been used. Sakura was a bit hesitant with the Telekinesis, but the prospect of the sweet treat of Naruto's cum motivated her. They all had a quick shower and then got dressed again, deciding on an early lunch given the appetizer they'd just had.
"Any requests for lunch?" Naruto asked, feeling chipper as a chipmunk after such a massive orgasm.
Sakura blushed and coughed. "My mom used to make a spicy shrimp linguini. She had to fight the chef to let her cook, but it was delicious."
Naruto grinned and gave Sakura a kiss, happy that she was opening up about her past and her mother. Naruto sensed a great pain in his pinkette lover's history, but he figured she'd open up about it when she was ready, and this was a first step. "I'll whip something up. Can't promise it will taste the same, but I'll do my best."
Thirty minutes later, Naruto brought out a platter of pasta loaded with prawns and in a cayenne cream sauce. Sakura took one bite and almost broke out in tears. "It's perfect," she said quietly. Naruto flooded her mind with a mental hug and kiss plus waves of affection and even love. She grinned radiantly and tucked in, everyone else taking their own appreciative bites.
"I think we need an extra early night to reset our internal clocks. It 's lunchtime on Oceanus but past dinnertime on Konoha Standard Time," Naruto told them. "I'll use Psychic Sleep on all of us, don't worry."
"What if there's an Interdiction again? Will Shikamaru be able to wake us?" Tenten worried.
"It just puts you to sleep, it's not a coma… depending on how much power you put into it," Naruto explained. "But just in case… Shikamaru, feel free to wake us up if you see any threats along the way to Geniya Station!"
"Will do, that's not too troublesome," the AI drawled.
"Good man," Naruto congratulated. "Come on, off to bed. Think of it as we'll get to the Oto Regency just that sooner."
"Where you'll seduce Kakashi and get your first Oto male Thrall, the first of thousands as you take Orochimaru's slave race for your own ends, mwahahaha!" Hinata cackled dramatically.
Naruto rolled his eyes. "I'll offer him the Gift, it's up to him whether he accepts. And I'm a quality over quantity kind of guy, remember? Besides, compared to the Bonds we have, a standard Thrall connection would be pitifully inadequate."
Gaara nodded. "The depth of connection we all have to each other makes our stores of energy exponentially greater than what Orochimaru had in the past. Each one of us is good as 10,000 Thralls, given our individual strength and the 'bandwidth' of our Astral Bonds."
"I just wish I could remember when he was my master. I'd like to compare his technique to Naruto's. I'm sure Naruto would prove the victor, but part of me is curious," Fu mused.
Sakura shook her head. "It still blows my mind that you're at least 10,000 years old. You were alive when humanity was still knocking rocks together to make fire."
"Imagine what the original Nexus must be like. If we could find and restore it, maybe it would be saner than these clones that R&D keep fucking up. Orochimaru's old research assistant must know so much, especially about the Uzu. We don't even know what Naruto's real home system is," Sasuke mused.
Sakura bonked her own forehead. "Crap, I completely forgot to mention. Naruto, you're genome has definitely been engineered. It's hard to describe, but when I was reviewing your DNA strands, I started being able to read it like music. And certain sections have a certain… rigidity that tell me you've been genetically modified, though I couldn't tell you how many generations back."
Naruto blinked. "Huh. That makes sense. It's kind of hard to believe that natural evolution would produce a customized conqueror race like the Uzu. I wonder when and how it happened, and if it had anything to do with that Astral Entity."
Tenten grinned. "Once we get powerful enough, maybe we could all take a trip to the Astral Plane and kick its ass for answers!"
Naruto and Hinata instinctively shivered, remembering the encounter two months back near the start of their adventure. "I've showed you the memory, Tenten. That thing was good as a god. A lowercase 'g', but a god nonetheless. It'll be millenia before we're on that kind of scale, and that's if we keep recruiting at the rate we have been."
"But still, we're only going to get stronger. Someday, we'll be good as gods ourselves," Hana said confidently.
"Just remember, Orochimaru was estimated to be 60,000 years old and he still was vanquished," Gaara cautioned, slipping out of his clothes and putting them in the hamper, his grower ten-incher swaying as he walked.
Everyone else followed the Grey's lead and piled into the bed, which was starting to get a little crowded.
"If we ever have the time for another major refit, I think I'll turn the entire floor of this room into a giant mattress. That way we can just lie on the floor like actual wolves, just more comfortable," Tenten mused contendly, sandwiched between Sasuke and Gaara.
"Good idea, Tenten. But then it'll take a lot of recruitment to get enough people to fill the entire room," Naruto chuckled, readying his Psychic Sleep power.
"XO is in charge of recruitment. I'll get right on it," Hinata said, before a wave of psionic energy washed over her and the others, including the originator, Naruto. They all fell into an early sleep to reset their internal clocks. Shikamaru continued to faithfully watch over them, considering them his family and an honor to serve them.
The next morning started in the usual kind of way, if a little early at 0530, with Naruto waking up first and stretching with satisfaction as he looked down over the crew. He grinned to himself, with the happy look of a man who has five astonishingly beautiful young women and two handsome men at his beck and call. Like a rippling wave, the Pack started to wake up too, and they smiled as they recalled the previous morning, and the biggest orgasm they'd ever shared. Even Sakura, who'd only felt a fraction of it.
Naruto cleared his throat. "So what's everyone's plans for today? We won't reach the borders of Oto space until early tomorrow morning, so we have a full day to do whatever you like."
"I'd like to start my in-depth study of Fu and Gaara, if that's okay?" Sakura asked hopefully.
The two aliens nodded, happy to help and curious as to what the Medical Officer would find anyway.
"I'm working on some maintenance bots for Shikamaru, so he can help us make repairs to the ship and also have a rudimentary presence before I get around to constructing an android body. They'll also double as security drones, to help the next time when, not if, we have boarders," Tenten explained logically.
"I got quite used to having shells to move around when you were on Oceanus. I'll help with the designs," Shikamru spoke up from the speakers in the wall. "Also, I have the report on this 'Pain' character. Saw some stuff that made me want to vomit, which I didn't think was possible, but I got the data. Do you want it now or later?"
"Wait a couple minutes while we hash out our daily plans, Shikamaru. Then you can brief us," Naruto told the hard-working AI. "Congratulations on such fast work, by the way. It would have taken Tenten or the rest of us weeks to find what you did."
"Well, that's the problem with you organics, you're stuck with electrochemical thought instead of purely electric," Shikamaru said teasingly.
"Cheeky AI. Anyway, the rest of you?" Naruto asked.
"I'm going up to the Bridge to work on that side project we talked about," Sasuke said.
"And I'll finish off the analysis of the Dragon March orders. It's not looking good, though. We might need Vice Admiral clearance to see which Admiral gave which orders and confirm the traitor or traitors. There definitely is at least one, though. They're clever, but it's obvious if you know what to look for," Hana explained.
"And I'll just swim laps in the pool with you until your session with Lee. It'll feel a lot different after Oceanus. After facing ten-foot waves, a calm puddle doesn't scare me anymore," Hinata offered.
"Good. Now, Shikamaru, what did you find out?" Naruto asked, getting comfortable.
"Pein, spelled P-E-I-N, is the king of hitmen in the Konoha Federation. He and his operatives are credited with over a thousand assassinations spanning over the last hundred years. Based on brief video clips and eyewitness accounts I managed to dig up, they're all either psychic or top-of-the-line cyborgs. He has a ship, though I don't know the configuration, and he has a secret base somewhere in the Core Worlds. I couldn't find anything else without setting off alarm bells. Most of this data was scrubbed from the Holo-net, but not well enough to hide from me. He's not cheap, either, so whoever put the hit on Naruto must have big bucks," Shikamaru reported faithfully.
Naruto considered the information. "So some shadow king of killers is after me. Now, let me think. Whose life have I ruined in the last few months?"
It was Hana who realized it. "Gato! He disappeared, remember, and he made off with millions of stolen ryo. If anyone was going to put a hit out on you, it'd be him or Momochi, but Momochi is penniless in prison."
"That makes a lot of sense. So, should we turn around and hunt down Gato to make him remove the hit?" Sasuke asked.
"If this guy has the success rate Shikamaru says he has, this might have become a matter of pride for this Pein character. Even if Gato asked for a refund, I don't think he'd give up," Hinata argued.
Naruto shrugged. "I say the same thing I said when we caught Koeman. I won't live in fear, and now we know what to look for. We'll continue on our way and be on the lookout for the next attempted lure or ambush. If we're lucky, this guy might try to come after us with his ship and he'll find out how effective Uzu weaponry is," he said with a feral grin.
They all nodded, trusting in their Alpha.
"Now, to the real important question, who's getting my morning load?"
After several intense games of rock-paper-scissors, which was made exponentially more difficult by mind reading, Fu would up the lucky girl. She used her very best skills on Naruto and soon he was pumping her belly full of spunk. She began to glow as left the room to get dressed, trailed by an awed Sakura and the rest of the Pack.
Naruto laid back in bed for a moment, feeling the warm spots left by his mates and thought *Life is good.*
Tad filler, but still necessary to the plot. Please fave, follow, or review.