Konoha was having a baby boom.
Moreover, Konoha was having the sort of baby boom—
Well, Shizune was ordered to use her aunt's slugs to report it to her immediately.
And she actually showed up.
They'd started suspecting months ago, shortly after the war, when the number of pregnant women started ticking up, and up, and up.
But they had hard data, now, hard proof, now.
Konoha was not the only region having a baby boom—the whole of the Land of Fire was having a baby boom.
To such a level that the end of the war wasn't nearly enough to explain it.
Aunt Tsunade cursed. She didn't do it particularly quietly. Shizune stood on her toes, trying to read over her aunt's shoulders.
"What is it?"
"It's the fucking byoki. Fuck me. Of course it fucking is. I hate it when I'm right."
"But the byoki is gone now, right?"
"Gone? Fuck no. We've fought it back, but we haven't even figured out what the fuck the byoki is. And now we know that it has some way to, by its mere presence, deflate fertility rates in the surrounding area. Fuck. I need to go back—I need to deal with this—I—" Aunt Tsunade stopped.
Shizune desperately wanted to ask where she needed to go to. She didn't. Instead she cleared her throat. "If—if you, um, let me. Sign, your summoning contract. Then… I could summon slugs to be here for you."
"That," Aunt Tsunade said, "is an excellent idea. You're so smart. I love you. Here, let's do that now—I need to leave this evening."
.
Ibiki stared at the wooden boards above their heads, listening as the firefly in his ear whispered reports from the others who had scattered across the ship, hidden themselves in nooks and crannies to act as a scout system for Ibiki.
At this range, and without the ability to signal with light as well as chakra, the scouts weren't able to convey complex ideas, but that was fine.
Ibiki was mostly just concerned with whenever any sailors intended to go down in the cargo hold.
To his right he heard Misaki's quiet dry heaving. She'd foregone food for almost two days now, since they'd gotten on the ship—and she'd had the misfortune to learn she got seasick.
She'd live without food for the length of the trip no problem, but water was another matter, and Ibiki turned to watch Sadao attempt to convince her to take at least a sip of water again.
They needed to figure something out, quick, because this—
This was bad.
The voyage was only half over, and she couldn't even keep water down for more than five minutes before it came back up again.
They'd tried a hammock.
They'd tried relocating, somewhere where she would see the sky. (That had made it worse.)
Misaki had tried, was still trying, to perform iryoninjutsu on herself, alleviate her seasickness. Ibiki didn't know how much she was succeeding, but it wasn't enough.
They were running out of options.
They hadn't tried putting her in a coma. Ibiki was pretty sure he could, with the poisons he carried, but—
No.
That was the last thing they'd try, once everything else failed.
And then the firefly in his ear whispered something new, and Ibiki sat up.
Sadao's eyes snapped to his, and Ibiki quickly repeated what he'd learned.
And then Sadao and Ibiki were using the cloak of invisibility technique, moving slowly enough for the jutsu to accommodate their changing surroundings, and sneaking onto the main deck.
There—
Just a ripple, in the water.
Just the slightest hint of something off.
Another team was sneaking aboard.
He could see the ship they must've run from far in the distance; he'd bet anything that it was going the wrong way, to the Land of the Sea, maybe, or the Land of Jungle, and they were taking their chances by running to the first ship they'd spotted which was headed in the right direction.
Ibiki tapped his ear, knowing his firefly would send the code to the firefly in Sadao's.
He waited.
A short time later, he got a reply—
Good idea. Let's do it.
That's what he liked about Sadao—he was the leader, because he was a hell of a lot more powerful than Ibiki and better at keeping track of relative strength, but he also knew that Ibiki wanted to be a leader in his own right, and so a lot of the time he left the plans up to him, and then took charge when something unpredictable inevitably happened.
They could still see the vague outlines of where the other team was in the distance, approaching ever more quickly, and they couldn't ask them for supplies, for aid—
But they could steal it.
It was not technically illegal for a Fire shinobi to steal from a non-Fire shinobi.
They just had to hope they weren't Fire.
And that was where Ibiki's fireflies came in.
He only sent out a couple, the fastest he'd summoned before they'd snuck onto the boat, and now the three approached the runners, tried to attach to their clothes, get a sense of who they were.
Sadao, meanwhile, watched their back.
It may have been legal to stowaway, but it was also legal to throw stowaways into the water, and there was no ship close enough for them to run to in time.
Ibiki squinted at the approaching shapes, listening to the whispers of the firefly in his ear—
Water-natured.
Was that a good sign?
There had been relatively few water-natured shinobi in Konoha, but that was before the refugees from Kiri started to arrive, and several teams of refugees were competing.
A moment later—expensive clothing.
Also not definitive, but it did rule out some of the competing countries. Jungle, for instance, was only starting to really dip its toes into international trade, and Cedar and Stone were both very isolated countries, not the type that would be outfitting teenage genin in 'expensive clothing', particularly not for the chuunin exams.
Then—
Leaf.
Not Leaf.
Confusion.
The fireflies did not recognize the symbol they'd traced from the genin's forehead protector.
It wasn't Leaf.
It was shaped like a leaf.
Ibiki's mind raced—not Keys, not Birds, not Rivers, not Waterfall, not Steam, not Frost—
Tea!
He signaled to Sadao, and Sadao signaled back.
Carefully, Ibiki pulled out his fukiya. He'd only just started learning how to blow darts several months ago, Sadao having been their ranged specialist before then, but after the older boy's growth spurt it had made sense for Ibiki to fall into more of a support role, and he already knew a lot about poisons thanks to the Yamanaka and Sensei. This was a last resort, because while team-on-team violence wasn't forbidden it also wasn't required, but Ibiki had to have something ready if things went south.
Sadao dropped off the side of the boat.
His genjutsu cloak was far less visible than any of the other team's, and Ibiki quickly lost sight of him.
He bent slightly to keep his blood flowing, curved his lips so they were hovering near the edge of the weapon, and made sure to keep on target as the team continued to run.
This was going to be tricky, but Sadao was an expert at running, an expert at kunai.
There—
Just for a second, a bag falling out of the Tea genin's genjutsu before it was caught in Sadao's.
A moment later, another.
And then a third.
Ibiki took the chance to turn around, look.
Plenty of sailors, none suspicious.
He turned back around, refocused on the Tea team.
Waited.
And then Sadao was beside him, and they were shuffling back to the hold as quickly as possible, Sadao layering another genjutsu to allow them to get back in without notice.
They had to hurry, because the Tea team would be on board soon and might very well try to get to the hold through genjutsu too.
Sadao and Ibiki started searching, but Ibiki—now that he had a moment away from the adrenaline—was already losing hope.
Tea's shinobi force was brand new, a reaction to the constant threat from Water.
Would they even—
"Here," Sadao whispered. It was a medical pouch, though obviously nothing in it was labeled. Ibiki began parsing through as quickly as possible, looking for any of the motion sickness treatments he remembered learning about. Unfortunately, many of them had been pills, and because Ibiki had been stupid and hadn't thought to pack any, all non-labeled, non-sourced pills were to be treated with extreme distrust.
There—raw ginger.
Perfect.
"Misaki, I know you're going to hate me, but you need to eat this."
Misaki groaned.
"Please, Misaki. We need to be quiet soon, and this will help."
Misaki might have been miserable, and unlikely to ever take another boat in her life, but she was a kunoichi.
She sat up and forced herself to eat the ginger.
As she continued to nibble, Sadao finished weaving the genjutsu around the three of them. They were a crate, probably, Ibiki considered. Maybe of something useless, like cotton.
Most importantly, they would be invisible to the newbie Tea ninja, who couldn't even keep themselves fully invisible while running.
(Which, admittedly, was a high-ish bar. But it was one all three of them could do, so Ibiki felt fine being a snob about it.)
Sadao's brow was pinched, and Ibiki knew they'd be stuck, now, stuck under Sadao's illusion if the three Tea genin did decide to hide here. They'd stolen the genin's stuff, so just not attacking was almost definitely out of the question.
A genjutsu of the size and duration that Sadao was producing was taxing, however, so now it was Ibiki's job to keep Misaki and himself as quiet as possible and feed Sadao chakra pills whenever his fireflies noted his teammate's reserves getting low.
It would be a very, very boring few days.
.
There was a board in one of the conference rooms of the administrative building.
Every three or four days, a newbie ANBU who was in the middle of a very nasty bit of endurance training would race back to the conference room, scribble out a new report on how each team was doing, then race away to check once more.
With how fast the ANBU had to go, and how much chakra had to be used to manage it, Fugaku almost thought they were being unfair.
On the other hand, he'd heard from word of mouth that the newbie had bragged about his endurance capabilities, so… reaping and sowing, Fugaku supposed.
He peered at the updates to the board.
Both of Steam's teams were out, which had been quite the surprise—especially because both were out for the same reason, attempting to steal from civilians and assuming they weren't actually being watched.
They hadn't actually been punished as they would have been outside the exams, but they had lost the chance to promote their country in the final stage.
Waterfall was also out—one team had, on the orders of the oldest member, attempted and failed to run to Uzu, and the other had gotten into a fight with a team from Konoha, one of the Kiri refugee ones. Both teams had enough wounds that they'd had no choice but to drop out, even though Konoha had planned to not interfere with any inter-team fights unless they had to.
Tea's single remaining team was still going, apparently, which was honestly already a better showing than anyone had expected. Fugaku happened to know that, while they'd begun training shinobi in response to Kiri's coastal raids, Tea was actually planning to make their hidden village the go-to cult killers, and he wished all the best to them in that plan; Fugaku himself knew of sixteen separate groups who worshiped the Uchiha as direct descendants of gods, and all that meant was that there were sixteen additional groups that every Uchiha had to watch for whenever they were on a mission—
Bloodline theft was a constant risk with kekkei genkai as powerful as his clan's.
Jungle… they were already at Uzu.
Unsurprising; they were an island country, and their shinobi were primarily hired as merchant ship protectors already.
Frost…
They were still in it, but only barely.
They were somewhere in the former Land of Water, now, having misunderstood where the ship was headed, and were desperately trying to figure out how to get to the right island in time.
They had a lot to earn, too; while Konoha and Fire at large had recently stepped back from controlling Frost's nobility and samurai directly (both having been deemed competent and Fire-loyal enough to not need constant resource-intensive direction from Konoha), the shinobi… hadn't. This was presented to them as their chance at earning independence, and so far they hadn't done a very good job at proving their skill.
Rice…
They didn't even send shinobi, just samurai.
They were on a ship, though, headed in the right direction—it had taken them time, but they'd relied on the family name of one of the samurai (a prominent merchant name, apparently) to get a favor from a ship captain, and that was a perfectly viable strategy.
Mushrooms… out of the three that could have made it, only one had. The other two were out—one had accidentally eaten an unripe nightshade, and the other team had dropped out after one of their members attempted to climb the mast of the ship they'd snuck onto, fell, and broke his back.
In several places, apparently.
Konoha was restoring his ability to walk as a 'favor', and Fugaku was sure Mushrooms loved being even more indebted to Fire.
Rivers… they were really just here to try to keep tensions between Suna and Konoha from boiling over. They'd basically spent most of the lapsed time following Suna teams around, trying to talk politics.
Fugaku… he hadn't so much forgotten about Tanigakure, as it just hadn't… come up much. They were competent enough, from what he remembered, for a hidden village from a minor nation, but they were very trade-centered; the Wind-Fire route was a money-maker, and between the new water trade and Wind's increasing hostility, Fugaku was quite sure that they weren't feeling very secure.
Still, because Suna had made it all the way back to a Wind port and gotten passage to Uzu, Rivers was now trekking back to their own land to attempt to do the same.
It was… possible, he supposed, that they would make it in time.
The only competing Birds team was out, as was Cedar—they'd apparently come across each other and, upset over some sort of scandal involving a Birds noble's daughter marrying a Cedar commoner, fought each other into unconsciousness.
Which…
Fugaku imagined their higher-ups weren't exactly going to be pleased.
Keys had made it to Uzu, at least, as had Stone, whose reputation for constant good luck had apparently shown true once more.
Kumo only had one team left, after another had snuck some poisonous berries, believing them to be a lookalike berry native to Earth, and had to be immediately rushed back to Konoha to have his stomach pumped.
Suna's four teams had all made it, or were only a few days away.
Iwa's three teams were all still in it, too, would almost definitely make it in time, which was rather surprising—according to the notes scrawled in the margins, not one of the nine genin had shown any familiarity with ships at all, and they'd still figured out how to bluff their way onboard with forged foreign paperwork.
Of Konoha's team, twenty-five were definitely going to make it (most were already in Uzu, or would be within forty-eight hours), four were still in contention, and another three definitely weren't.
One team was caught and thrown overboard, unable to protect themselves without breaking the law; another were still trying to talk themselves onto ships, and had clearly become so dead-set that they wouldn't change their minds until it was too late; and the third had had to drop out after the girl—an Inuzuka—turned out to have been hiding an eight-month pregnancy, and the jounin watching them had to rescue all three when she went into premature labor (Fugaku still wasn't sure how she'd pulled that one off, but at least the infant was in good health.)
That had been the latest unexpected update from four days ago, and skimming the board now, Fugaku could see that little had changed.
He smirked.
None of his clansmen had failed yet.
Every single one of them had demonstrated the ability to do a skill so basic to ninja that most had argued that a month was too generous, too kind, and had only been placated by the argument that more battles were better, especially as these would be the first broadcast throughout Fire on the radio.
Fugaku still thought the second part was too lenient, but that was fine; the Uchiha clan's goal was still well in hand.
The Uchiha, byoki or no, were going to show true power in the finals.