Then I realized I was being an idiot, because I already had a technique capable of creating massively complex physical structures on demand. So I re-worked the anti-summoning array to handle being drawn in three dimensions instead of on a flat surface, and turned it into a transformation template.
Sasuke actually looked faintly pleased when I reported success after less than a week, and I felt a thrill of pride.
“Show me,” he said.
I beamed, and activated my new transformation. The array appeared instantly, a maze of softly-glowing blue lines that covered most of my body.
“I can do it separately, or make it part of my normal transformation from child to adult forms,” I reported. “Doing it this way also means I’m not stuck inside a static diagram, and it’s tied directly into my chakra system so it’ll function as long as I’m alive.”
“Excellent,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you to succeed so quickly. I assume you can remove it the same way?”
“Yes, sir!” I chirped, barely able to contain myself. My master had praised me! I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so happy.
“Hnn. Could you do this with other seals? A summoning reversal array, or perhaps the Heaven Seal?”
“I can do it with anything I understand,” I replied proudly. “Did you want me to build a reversal array to pull Naruto to me when he tries to summon me? I’ll have to anchor it to something pretty massive when it activates, but I think I can make that work as long as we’re in the same world at the time. Oh, and I think I must have studied Orochimaru’s seal research at some point. I know a bunch of ways to re-engineer the Heaven Seal to get different effects, or even draw on different power sources.”
“Interesting. Do the summoning trap first, and make sure you can switch between that and the anti-summoning array quickly.”
The summoning trap was a tricky piece of work, but in less than a month I had a design that I was confident would do the job. I had to create it in a compressed form that completely covered my skin, which wasn’t much of a fashion statement. But it only took a few seconds to activate, unfolding to cover the ground around me in a maze of sweeping curves a hundred yards across. Sasuke kidnapped and brainwashed a version of Yugito from another world to have her test the array’s resistance to bijuu-level brute force, and it worked beautifully.
Sasuke used his dimension-travel technique that way quite a bit during our preparations. Apparently he’d spent several years cataloging dozens of alternate worlds he could easily reach with his Sharingan abilities, and he frequently used them as sources for exotic materials and research subjects. His time travel was much less useful, a fact which puzzled Hinata.
“I don’t understand why we need such an elaborate plan to ambush Naruto,” she complained to me one day. “I’m sure Sasuke knows where the looping Naruto’s world is. So why can’t he just take us all there a few days before the Chuunin Exam starts? Then we could make our preparations, and attack as soon as the child version of Naruto gets replaced by the looping one.”
“If only it were so easy,” I chuckled. “You have to remember that the Sharingan was designed by demons, and the last thing they want is for a Sharingan user to be able to undo their mistakes. So the time travel power sounds really impressive, but it’s actually crippled to keep it from being used as an undo button. You can’t open portals into the past or present. Your portals open into possible futures that may or may not ever happen. You have to pick futures that are at least a few weeks out, and you can’t see how your own actions will change things. Stuff like that. It’s really only reliable for finding out about distant events that are pretty much inevitable, like the Red Moon thing.”
“I see,” she replied thoughtfully. “That explains many things.”
We lapsed into companionable silence for awhile, me working on a variant of the Heaven Seal for Hinata while she perfected another of her tricky seal-implanting water-spike jutsu. Her form was as flawless as ever, but polishing those elemental seal techniques seemed to take her a lot more effort than I would have thought. The ones I’d seen her use in our sparring were as smooth as anything I could have done, but if it took her months to master a new one how had she ever developed such an arsenal of them? Unless…
“Hinata, how old are you?”
She paused, and turned an unreadable expression on me.
“It is difficult to be sure,” she pointed out. “My training did not cost me nearly as many memories as yours did, but there are substantial gaps. Also, in my younger years I often went for long periods without attempting to count such things. But I know I began extending my loop not long after our first encounter, and I can remember seeing the end of the world twenty-six times. Usually that takes three or four years to happen, but if Madara is killed it sometimes takes as much as a decade for one of the backup plans to succeed.”
I didn’t bother to hide my surprise. “Well over a century? No wonder you’re so good! But why did you run so many extended loops? I remember doing that a few times, but it gets lonely after awhile.”
She smiled faintly. “At first, I had a rival to surpass. Our first encounter made quite an impression on me, and I was determined not to lose my Naruto to you.”
“I don’t remember that very well, but I’m pretty sure I never wanted to take him from you,” I protested.
“I know that now. But it was years before I began to restore some balance to my life, and only then did I begin to suspect the true motivation behind your remarks. By then I had discovered the end of the world, and I was certain that somehow the time loop must be related. So I kept going back. I trained until I could resist the insanity of the red moon, and defeat the demons that roamed the world after mankind’s fall. The lower-ranked demons are not immune to the Yamanaka interrogation techniques, and I learned many things from them. But I never did find an answer.”
“You were looking in the wrong direction,” I told her. “I don’t know why, but I remember being convinced that the Bright Kami were the ones that arranged the time loop. I think we’re supposed to save the world, though I’ve no idea how.”
“I had begin to suspect as much. Let us hope that our master’s plan is the correct path, then.”
Hinata returned to her practice with her usual calm serenity, but my own doubts continued to trouble me. I wasn’t at all sure Sasuke’s plan was a smart one, but what could I do about it?
Healing Nagato was tricky but doable, and it easily doubled his chakra. Raising his bodies as soulless flesh puppets and synching their natural chakra to his was even trickier, but using living puppets instead of corpses did wonders for his control. The whole process took three days of exhausting work on my part, but Sasuke pronounced the results well worth the effort. Personally I didn’t see how we were going to get this version of Nagato into the past with us for the fight, but whatever.
Sasuke had several effective methods of kidnapping Yugito Nii, who was a pretty good kunoichi for her age but lacked any special mental defenses. He brought two versions of her back from one of his frequent trips and broke them in a matter of hours, then had them spend several weeks training against each other in bijuu form. Then he had me do a memory copy on the more stable of the pair, and save it to use after the next reset.