Naruto : Chapter 95

Naruto found the laboratory easily, thanks to having seen the position through a window, while his clones had been spying in crow form. He had left two of them outside to give him a warning if something major happened.

Thanks to his mirage jutsu, none of the scientists noticed him while he stood in a corner of the laboratory, keeping silent. He watched the scientists working and listened to their conversations, memorising anything he thought could be of use later on.

For example he easily saw the code that one scientist tipped on the number panel on the safe, which opened the safe. The blueprints for the chakra armour were put inside before the scientists left for the day.

Naruto had watched the room for three hours now and he waited for twenty minutes after the last scientist had gone before he went to the safe. He was honestly surprised that there weren't more security precautions to make sure that only identified and cleared personnel had access to the safe.

There were no traps, you only had to give the correct combination. Admittedly, the combination had eight digits, meaning that guessing the right combination would be next to impossible for burglars, but there was nothing like a proximity alarm for example.

Thanks to knowing the code, he easily got the blueprints out. After a brief check, he used some new papers that were stored in a cupboard in the room to create a halfway convincing fake. After all, he didn't want to alert Doto to the fact that his headquarters had been infiltrated too early on.

He intentionally changed a few things around, especially the power source's set-up. That would make any chakra armour that was created in the future based on these plans, should that happen before they could deal with Doto, fail in action. He repeated the procedure for other technology that looked interesting.

It would be up to Konoha's research department and Kakashi sensei to decide which ones they wanted to use. The original plans went into a storage scroll. Naruto left the rest of the laboratory untouched, as he didn't want to tip anybody off too early on.

Right now his mission was information gathering and subtle sabotage. Nothing obvious. He made sure that nobody was outside of the laboratory before opening the door and leaving the area. The next destination he had was trying to find out if Doto had any direct plans for how to capture the princess.

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Haku needed an hour to find the quarters of Doto's guards. To his delight a guard schedule was pinned to a notice board, so he copied it down when nobody was around.

He also created mirrors in the three windows around the quarters and put a genjutsu over them to make it appear as if nothing had changed. They looked like the windows before, but they would enable him to get into the room at any time.

It was another improvement to his jutsu. While he needed to see the place where he put the mirror, he could go into any existing mirror from any other mirror.

So if he had the chance to prepare mirrors in a place, he could return there at any time, for as long as the mirrors still had chakra and didn't melt down. So far his best result was keeping up to six mirrors for four hours on end.

After that he lost control over the jutsu thanks to chakra exhaustion. He was still working on the number and the time, but it was already a really useful skill. His plan was to simply put all the guards into a false death state.

He still wasn't comfortable with killing people if he had any other choice. And his skills with senbon rarely made it necessary to kill. Instead he delivered his captives to the T & I division to let them be interrogated for useful information.

A look at his wrist watch told him that the main number of guards would return to the quarters in two hours. They would get dinner there, which he had found out on the schedule, and he expected them to go to bed about two to three hours after that. Of course some had guard duty during the night, but the number was far smaller than during the day.

He left the room to follow the schedule of the man he was impersonating. Right now he was expected to guard the north entrance for the next two hours. After that he would have a break. The guards rotated every two hours, which made security tighter than with rotation schemes that had longer periods. You had to exchange more people after all if you were after a specific area.

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Naruto had sent five clones under the mirage jutsu out to map out the fortress. It would come in useful once they led a direct attack against Doto. Well, as direct as a ninja would act. Sneaking in and hitting core locations was more likely the course of action.

He got a note with the guard schedule from Haku when they crossed paths again and he made sure to not blow his cover. The more time they had to gather information, the better for them.

The real attack would happen soon. Haku would strike against all guards in the dorms and take them out for at least a week.

By Haku's estimation, according to the note, that would mean that they had three quarters of all guards presently at the fortress taken out. That would change the odds a lot in their favour. With all the existing machines that Doto could use, it would be needed.

And the rebellion of the people of Snow Country couldn't really be called a danger to Doto. They seemingly only had the hope that their princess would take over the lead and defeat the murderer of her father. As if that would be easy.

Koyuki wasn't a trained fighter. She was an actress and traumatised by the incident when she was a child. She might be able to take over ruling the country, if they freed it before that, but she wasn't qualified to lead a fight.

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Naruto and Haku watched the chaos unfold in the morning when the condition of the guards that Haku had hit was found out. And there was a number of leading personnel missing.

Thanks to knowing who led which unit of guards, they had decided to capture them for interrogation. Naruto had had to create two dozen new prisoner scrolls for it, but he had easily done that.

Though he would have to stock up on new sealing supplies when they returned to Konoha. His would last for this mission, he had made sure to have triple the supplies you normally calculated for, but with the pace they were using them up, he would need to restock.

They had given up on their disguises and now hid under Naruto's mirage jutsu to not be found before they could sneak out. It was too bad that during the night there had been some kind of barrier that prevented that anybody could leave or enter the fortress without being detected. And even Haku's mirrors hadn't been able to get them through.

It was an advanced sealing array, one which Naruto knew, as it was an Uzumaki creation originally. He suspected that it had been stolen when Uzushio had been destroyed and somehow Doto got hold of it.

You could only deactivate the barrier if you had a special key, and none of them knew where that key was kept. Not to mention that they key could be anything that was decided on while the sealing array was created. Therefore they decided to wait until the barrier was deactivated in the morning.

Naruto had unsealed two of his specialised flying devices, which he had created for the invasion of Konoha, but which hadn't been used then, as it wasn't needed, and now the two were waiting for some guards to search the roof. They would follow them and keep hidden until they could take off unnoticed.

It didn't matter that Doto was aware of the attack on most of his guard force, he wouldn't notice what else they had done until it was too late. And Naruto had left a nice little surprise in the storage of the chakra armour.

A few explosive notes, try about five for each armour and the large storage room was filled up to the roof, would go off once his chakra signature left the fortress. Which was why he wanted to use the devices and didn't use his transformation abilities.

The explosion would probably destabilise his transformation and he didn't want to risk that. The seals, which operated the devices, were tested to withstand any kind of foreign chakra. Once activated, they would only react to another chakra after being deactivated and newly activated.

Haku had been really impressed with this, when Naruto had explained his emergency escape plan. They had discussed how to get away in case something went wrong with their first plan.

It was simply common ninja sense to always have a few alternative plans up your sleeve. After all, if they could do it without giving up the possibility of the flying thundergod jutsu being in their arsenal to their enemies, all the better.

Finally a group of four guards went up to the roof, unsealed the door, with one of them giving his fingerprint as identification, and checked if the attackers had hidden on the roof.

The inspection came up negative, but none of them were ninjas and none noticed that Naruto and Haku had sneaked out with the group and stayed on the roof after the group left and sealed the door again.

Naruto and Haku activated their flying devices and sped off towards the ocean where the ship would now be close to the shore. About half a minute after their take off, the explosive notes activated and blew up the storage room with any chakra armour that was kept in the fortress and which wasn't worn by a person at that time.

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