"..Are you serious?" Naruto asked. This was a pretty drastic solution, even for Orochimaru.
"Entirely."
"This is madness."
"I am entirely sane, I assure you." Orochimaru said dryly. "There are many people I could convince to join us, even at this very moment. Promise them a safe location... and persuading them becomes easy enough."
Anko said nothing, only twitching when she heard safe.
"Where would we even start?" Karin asked.
"By finding a safe place." Anko said, still pretty quiet.
Naruto felt weird seeing her like this. It hadn't been her fault, far from it. They had decided to go, all three of them. Now was not the time to tell her that, though, as she would likely blow up on him. Later, he'd try talking to her.
"But the camp was safe." Naruto tried.
"Obviously not to somebody who can just warp in." Orochimaru drawled.
"That's what happened? What can we even do against that, then?"
"I'm still going over our options. Here's what I figured" Orochimaru mused. "First. The man who appeared can't go where he has never been at all. Otherwise, the organization would already have captured the other Jinchūriki long ago."
"Second thing." Anko said, finally looking at them. "He can't become intangible and teleport at the same time."
"What are you talking about…? Teleportation, intangibility..?" Karin asked.
"Can you tell us what happened, first?" Naruto added.
"…Starting from what Akatsuki is, please." Sakura concluded.
They brought her up to speed.
"In that case…" She wondered aloud. "What if you guys went somewhere he wouldn't think to look..? Somewhere he would have trouble bringing a large number of people, maybe? It would at least buy you time, while you worked on something to prevent him from teleporting in."
Anko stared. "…This might work, yes."
"Where could we go, though? The Elemental Nations are only so big. Any good sensor could locate a village by its chakra concentration." Karin said. She would know.
"The Byakugan …and maybe Nagato's Rinnegan might even make it easier." Orochimaru added.
"They have a maximal range, though. Don't they?" Sakura asked.
"Yes. But nothing is safe on the continent."
"And outside of the Elemental Nations?" Sakura continued.
"There are islands, but nobody lives there, it's simply too far." Anko said.
Earth was a large place, and there were a fair amount of islands stranded in the middle of the wide oceans.
Orochimaru nodded. "There are likely only wild animals there, if that. It could be just big pieces of land, too. And coming back would be at least as difficult as the initial journey to get there."
"I… could get you there and back. I can move people, not just me. Instantaneously. I just have to go to the place to put the mark." Sakura said.
Orochimaru and Anko stared.
She showed them her portal jutsu.
"This is fascinating." He murmured. "This might just work. And there's no distance limit, then?"
"No, but..." She winced. "Nevermind. It's not workable. I can only make two portals in total. So there would only be a single way in and out. And no way for me to make more… or use it otherwise."
Karin shook her head. "That's too risky."
Orochimaru looked at Naruto again. "Does your own gauntlet allow for something similar?"
"I… don't know." He admitted.
"Find out, then. I need to locate where our people went. Tell me as soon as you know." Orochimaru left the room.
Silence stretched in the room. Anko was back to staring blankly.
"Look, guys." Sakura said. "I'd like to stay, but I still have a contract to fulfill. It's already been long enough."
"Do you have any other assignment?" Karin asked."
Sakura shook her head. "Just this one."
"Will you come back?" She asked."
Sakura hesitated. "I…"
"Please. At least temporarily." Naruto finished. "You can decide for yourself if you want to get more involved or not later. We'll be staying here for some days."
Sakura sighed. "Still as push as ever, huh. Alright. Just… Just for a while, though."
After having been on her own for a few years, she was not sure what to think about the idea of joining someone's group for real.
She gave them a hesitant smile. "It's… good to see you. Both."
"You too." Karin said, smiling brightly.
She left one gate opening in their room before leaving.
Anko left without saying a word, as well.
Naruto looked at Karin.
"Wanna help me test it out?"
"Sure thing." She adjusted her glasses. "You might need the help."
"Okay, my gauntlet definitely opens no portals."
By now, he had tried enough times to say it with complete certainty.
"Go on." Karin said, taking notes. "Try other shapes."
"I did."
"Picture a walkway?"
"Done, too."
"A passage?"
"Yup.
"It's not based on light, either." Karin nodded, striking through one of the items on her notepad.
Trying it out in different types of lighting had been tedious, but progress tended to be.
"We can get rid of the lamp, then." Naruto said, still shielding his eyes from it.
"Sure."
"I don't think it needed to be so powerful."
Karin shrugged.
"Not an exchange of matter, then."
Karin nodded. This had been one of her ideas.
The apple stood on the desk, intact. So did the rocks they had picked up, closer to Naruto in weight.
"Let's put this away."
"And if you try to… recreate yourself in a different place?" Anko asked.
"Re…Create?"
"Look, I'm no fucking scientist." She gestured rudely. "Making yourself anew. Whatever!"
Anko left the room.
She was probably looking for something to take her mind off what had happened in base camp.
A few days later, Sakura came back in casual clothes.
"Hey, guys." Sakura said, walking out of her gateway. "…Are you still trying to figure out how this gauntlet works?"
"YES!" "Obviously!"
"Why do they even call you… Ghost Hand? Did you pick it up for yourself?"
"Ah." Sakura seemed embarrassed. "I followed a Suna itinerant puppeteer for a while. That's where I learned how to use chakra to summon an … arm, let's say. The name stuck after a while so I decided to go with it."
She demonstrated. It was less an arm than a dozen chakra threads that extended from her stump.
"I can summon more and it kinda acts like an arm. Longer reach, too. Can't use jutsu with it, though." Sakura said.
"Ah… That's how you fooled my chakra senses." Naruto sighed.
Karin laughed. "Anything would fool your chakra senses."
"Not everybody is stumbling through life blind as a bat." He huffed.
"Technically, teleportation involves breaking yourself down to the atomic level and reassembling yourself somewhere else. Warping would be more correct." Orochimaru chided.
Naruto stared. "I'm still going to call it teleportation." He grumbled.
Orochimaru sighed. Why didn't he get somebody more science-inclined?
"Shouting the words doesn't help. Good to know." Karin said.
"We tried, at least." Naruto squeezed out, his throat raw.
"How's this Lightning Armor thing going?" Karin asked, looking for a distraction from their endless tries.
Naruto shrugged. "Pretty badly. Take a look."
Lightning shrouded him entirely.
"Wow! That looks like it's working though, doesn't it?"
"Nah. I can just manage to make a light show. It doesn't make me faster, or more durable. I can only manage to do that by focusing more. So just legs or arms for now. Not at the same time, even."
"Ah. Too bad."
Karin felt some chakra build up in the room.
"Naruto… Wait. It's the tag. It's reacting." She came to take a closer look.
It was shining. This was new.
He stopped channeling Lightning chakra. The tag faded.
"Ah, come on." He grumbled.
"No no no wait. Keep this Lightning thing going." Karin said, bubbling with anxious excitement.
"Okay…?"
He channeled Lightning to cover his body again. The mark lit up again.
"That's it. That's it!"
"I mean, it's shining, but besides that…"
"Try focusing on it."
"Which one? There are two in the room."
"Either."
He did.
Something built up within him. He focused on the feeling of lightning shielding him envelopping him.
Nothing happened.
Some instinct told him to go one step further.
He pictured himself becoming Thunder.
Ten seconds passed, during which he focused on keeping the feeling in mind.
The next instant, he was on the other side of the room, with a loud booming sound.
Both he and Karin were too surprised to react.
They stayed here in silence. Then they started cackling and laughing. Harder and harder.
It felt as though a dam had burst, and soon they were rolling on the floor, wiping tears from their eyes.
That's how Sakura found them again, coming back from outside.
"So no matter what, I teleport to the marker I put first." Naruto said. "I can remove it, though."
"I see." Sakura nodded. "How do you trigger it?"
"I picture myself becoming Lightning for around ten seconds. Or Thunder, whichever is more correct."
"It's like a relay, then. It's not the same as Sakura's. Not better, not worse." Karin said. "Okay. So… no matter to which mark you want to go, you have to go through the first gate. Let's call it the Main one."
"I want to call them Thunder Gates." Naruto said, stubborn. "It's mine to name. What did you name yours, Sakura?"
"…I didn't name them."
"How childish of you."
"Let's see how bloody this child can beat you, then." She snarked.
"Hmm? Did you say something? Beat me?" He mimicked being hard of hearing. "I think I heard you yelp when you had to dodge my Great Wind Arrow."
"Oh, please, guys." Karin rolled her eyes. Why had she ever thought Sakura was the mature one? She was just as bad.
"Come back at me when you make your own jutsu, Karin." Naruto put his nose up in the air.
"…Nevermind, I'm going to help her beat the shit out of you."
"So yeah, I can come back and forth from any marks. I still have to go through the main Thunder Gate, so that's the one I need to put in a safe location-"
"It's not really suited for battle. It stills takes him almost ten seconds to jump. " Sakura interjected, staring at her fingernails innocently. Naruto glared at her.
"To Thunder Leap."
"…What was that?" Karin asked.
"Thunder Leap is the verb." He said, crossing his arms.
"This one is too goofy, change it please." She decided.
"…Fuck you. Maybe I will."
Thunder-Gate himself? To Thunder-gate…?
"What about other people?" Orochimaru butted in, unwilling to assist to yet another squabble. Hard to believe they were in their late teens.
Then again, Jiraiya and him still did the same, even now.
"I can definitely bring people with me." He nodded. "I don't know if there's a way I can get people to use the jutsu. To let them use the Gates on their own."
"Ah." Orochimaru said, thinking fast. "I can help you there. This might just work, then."
"The last time I saw this expression, you played mad scientist with my body and brain."
Sakura looked at him curiously. "What…?"
Karin and Anko just shared a look.
Orochimaru shrugged. It had worked. His latest apprentice could be pretty narrow-minded, sometimes.
"Let's take a few more days with your gauntlet." Orochimaru said. "We'll tinker with it and come up with something."
"Sure thing, sensei. You're still the brains. For now." Naruto nodded, magnanimous.
Orochimaru snorted. "The brawn as well. Come again when you get your first what… B-rank, A-rank page in the bingo book."
"…I'm the heart, then." Naruto frowned.
"That's Karin." Sakura supplied helpfully.
"Oh, fuck off."
Orochimaru sighed.
Three days later, he was hunched over the gauntled Naruto had lent him, and that he was still sustaining with his chakra.
It was going to take them a bit longer than expected, most likely. The way the jutsu worked was something he was not familiar with.
He started to draw a rough model of what could understand.
Anko unfolded a world map on the table. She had come back after two days away.
"Do you see this?" She asked, looking more like her normal self.
Karin squinted her eyes. Anko was pointing at… the middle of the sea?
"…There's nothing."
"Exactly what it looks like, right?" She said, smugly. "Except there should be islands there. Supposedly. Sensei confirmed, at least."
"Where exactly?" Naruto asked.
Anko hesitated. "..Somewhere in a circle of a diameter of around a hundred kilometers."
Naruto blinked. "Uh. Okay."
Anko grumbled. "Look, if we can't find it on any map, then this Tobi guy won't either."
Karin nodded. "True… But…"
"I picked it at random." She said, as if this were a good thing. "It's completely out of range of… anything."
Naruto had a bad feeling. "…How far is it, and how do we get there?"
Anko looked sheepish. "Ah. Well. With a boat. It's something like ten thousand kilometers, I guess."
Somebody gasped.
"You were planning to send us sailing there..?"
"No, of course not. Well. Not the whole way, at least. Just put one of your fancy teleport marks on a boat and let's let it drift..?"
"I can't put my mark on something that moves that much. And there's no way a bot is going to drift thousands of kilometers in the right direction." Naruto frowned.
They had tried to find out the limitations.
Sakura shook her head. "Me neither."
"Ugh." Anko winced.
She tried to look upbeat.
"So… Anybody wants to go sailing across the world?"
Orochimaru looked thoughtful.
"The idea could work. But you'll need to hire somebody to get you there, and this could be a loose link. Unless you kill the man after you're done, of course." He shrugged.
Naruto frowned. "We're not doing that."
"I assumed you would refuse, yes." Orochimaru said dryly. "Do you know how to maintain a boat?"
"Nope."
"Have you ever been out at sea before?"
"Nah."
Orochimaru sighed. "I'm not done working on a way to move people in and out with your jutsu. I'm confident that it will just take me a month, maybe two."
"That's a bit less than the time we'd take to get there. If it's workable." Naruto thought. "If I hire a small crew, is there any way you could… maybe erase the exact location from their memories once we're done?"
Sakura gave him a somewhat concerned look.
"How cold of you." Orochimaru said, amused.
"Well, considering you'd kill them, otherwise…"
The Snake sage shrugged. "I should be able to, yes."
"Then I'll pay for it." The bounty from Suijin's corpse had been a lot of money. "I'll leave a mark here, in case anything goes wrong, since distance apparently means nothing."
He had tried, of course.
"Will Sakura join you?" Orochimaru asked. Having the extra layer of safety might come in handy. If Naruto managed to find himself stranded...
Naruto laughed. "If you pay her, sure."
They made preparations. Two more days were spent planning a possible itinerary.
The easiest way would likely be to leave from the north of Land and Rice, to head to the north of the Land of Earth, where they could take a bigger sailing vessel.
It would be needed to handle ocean waves and unpredictable weather, without being too big.
A crew of three people — without including Naruto, Karin and Sakura — would be best.
They would have to find the crew there… and convince them to go into uncharted waters with no clear objective but to find a suitable island.
Orochimaru had given him a scroll filled with cash in order to make sure they'd manage to get there.
Sakura had accepted to come. Naruto didn't dare ask Orochimaru for the amount. The expedition could last as long as three months.
Three months… At sea. He felt a bit queasy.
Sakura had left one portal close to the mining town, as precaution. Naruto did too, erasing the other ones remotely. For the time being, this one would be the Main gate. He'd switch it around once he got there.
"Well. This is goodbye for now, then." Orochimaru said.
"Have a safe trip." Anko grinned.
"Thanks. We'll see you once we reach the island." Naruto added.
"Take care, Orochimaru-sama, Anko."
Sakura just bowed to her latest client.
They departed for the harbor.
'Should be easy enough.'
Naruto puked over the side of the medium-sized boat they were taking to reach Iwa's northernmost port city.
"…Can you stop?" Karin asked, looking sick herself. "I'm gonna throw up myself if you keep this up."
"Mhsorry, can't help it."
Sakura just looked away. Was this their first time on a boat… at all?
They had a few days of this, so hopefully they'd get used to it soon
The city of Naita was a major port for the Elemental Nations. It was also the fifth biggest city in the Land of Earth.
The Nation of Earth was so big that by foot, it would take several days for a ninja to reach it, starting from Iwa.
The city itself lay on the North Ocean. It had a long history, having started as a fishing village centuries ago.
With the advent of long sea routes to Lightning Country, the Daimyō of the Land of Earth had a strong reason to invest in Naita's development.
Before the end of that century, Naita was the third merchant city of the country.
Even today, its economy was still based entirely on shipping.
That's why it had two ports. One port lied at the heart of the Reed district for the river one, and directly on the North Ocean for the second one.
"Su let me-a get dhees streeht. Um de hur de hur de hur."
Naruto stared at the man.
"Yuoo vunt me-a tu seeel veet yuoo und yuoor tvu vumee tu zee mee-a oof noohere."
He squinted his eyes, sweat dripping from his forehead in concentration.
"Un yuoo cun ifee tehl as vhere-a... oor vhy?"
The man started laughing.
Naruto turned around, looking at Sakura in despair. "I don't think I get this language." He whispered.
"…I think it's just his accent."
"Do you get him?" He asked.
"I think he told us to get lost." Karin added, hesitant.
He sighed. That was the tenth person today.
"You try, Karin." He was giving up.
"I guess it just took a little more… tact." She said, trying not to look too smug. Karin had found the three men she needed, in less than two hours.
"And more than one million ryō. And they don't even have a boat." He muttered, in between his teeth.
The three men were ex-sailors, now working odd jobs. A helpful officer had recommended them to him, saying that they could definitely use a job.
"What was that…?" She said, frowning.
"I said thanks, Karin."
Shinjiro.
Takaya.
Heizo.
These were the names of the three men they would be sailing with. Naruto didn't bother remembering their family names.
They would be spending three months in pretty close quarters with them, so there was no big point in keeping things too formal, he felt.
Speaking of…
They were looking for a boat to buy.
Apparently, the crew they hired had been a bit down on their luck. They had come from Lightning Country, years ago, and had been part of a shipping company that traded solely with Earth Country.
With rising tensions between the nations, it was deemed unprofitable to keep as many boats running and their company investors had basically cut down on every corner they could.
This was why Naruto went with Shinjiro, looking for a boat to buy. Today. Sakura and Karin were doing the same with the remaining crew members.
"So. What kind of boat do we even need…?"
"Well, boat size doesn't really impact its bluewater abilities, but we're a crew of six people total, so…" He thought. "Bigger is gonna be faster, too, and less affected by the waves."
Naruto remembered how he felt on the small boat.
"Yeah. You know what, let's get the best, biggest boat we can get for six."
Shinjiro hesitated. "Are you sure…? This can get more expensive quickly."
"Like?"
"Up to two millions."
"Well, that's a lot, sure." Naruto winced. "But I'm not gonna spend the next three months sick. Where can I find one?"
The sailor shrugged. "I know a guy who knows someone."
When the sun set, they found their means of transportation.
It was a large, modified, ocean-going junk ship with a dragon hull pattern and red battened sails.
Its name was Kujira.