Chapter 286: Gundam of the Ninja World
"The lab alarm went off, so I went to check it, just as you instructed. At the entrance, I saw a very strange creature fighting another very strange thing." Uchiha Shiori's attitude was as respectful as ever.
Kenichi raised a brow when he heard that. Someone was fighting at the entrance to his lab?
That was interesting.
Orochimaru had set up several defensive barriers around the laboratory. It was a critical place for both him and his teacher, and there was absolutely no room for error there.
But since Orochimaru had not come out personally to deal with it, that could only mean one thing.
He probably knew who the troublemakers were.
"I understand. Let them keep fighting for now. I'll go have a look." Kenichi hesitated for a moment.
Originally, he had intended to ignore it. If Orochimaru had not interfered, then the people fighting were most likely still within the safe range of the barriers, such as Sasori, his long suffering scapegoat, and Deidara, the ever generous patron.
Yes, Deidara had practically become a patron at this point.
After all, his Bloodline Limit was extremely unique and frequently resulted in various explosions. Sasori usually ended up suffering the losses, yet Deidara's work was also incredibly useful to Sasori's research. Because of that, Sasori often ended up covering Deidara's mistakes.
It made Kenichi a little curious. Just how much money had Sasori saved up to afford this kind of extravagance?
Still, if he ignored the situation and Sasori and Deidara somehow ended up damaging the lab, then he would really regret it.
So Kenichi decided to go out and take a look after all.
After casually instructing Uchiha Shiori to properly settle the two experimental subjects and keep them supplied with anesthetic, Kenichi removed his gloves, took off his lab coat, and headed outside.
Kenichi only ever wore his lab coat inside the laboratory, just like in his previous life. The people who wore lab coats to supermarkets to film videos were all fakes. Real researchers never walked around outside the lab dressed like that.
"…No, wait. Did I walk onto the set of an Ultraman movie?" The moment Kenichi stepped outside, he felt violent tremors shaking the ground. Then he saw the two giant figures locked in battle ahead of him, and his expression turned complicated.
Because in front of him were two colossal constructs.
One was a gigantic humanoid machine made of metal. It looked like a person, only far larger. It was probably Sasori's modified Unit One.
The other was an enormous scorpion.
Kenichi recognized the scorpion almost immediately. It looked almost exactly like the one he had seen before, except this one was vastly larger. The entire scene made it look like a Giant of Light fighting some oversized monster.
He was honestly one step away from humming a theme song.
"Kenichi? Why are you out here?" Seemingly noticing him, the giant machine stopped moving.
In the next moment, a concealed hatch opened in the chest of the mechanical giant, and Sasori stepped out from inside it.
However, he was still wearing a smaller mechanical battlesuit beneath it, which made Kenichi's expression grow even stranger.
So Sasori really had managed to develop a mecha powered by a mecha.
Kenichi remembered Sasori mentioning this idea to him before.
"You actually did it…" Kenichi's feelings were complicated. He had truly not expected Sasori to build something like this for real. He also found himself wondering how high its combat power really was, though based on sheer size alone, wiping out a small country probably would not be difficult.
"After hearing your idea, I thought it was very interesting, so I tried it." Sasori smiled, then proudly opened the smaller mech and stepped out completely.
The moment he did, Kenichi noticed something off about one of Sasori's arms.
It looked like...
"You modified yourself?" Kenichi looked at the stitching on Sasori's arm, then at Sasori himself.
Fortunately, Sasori's face still looked normal for now. Kenichi just did not know whether Sasori had already modified his head as well.
"Yes. Otherwise, it would be difficult to control these large puppets with complete freedom." Sasori did not seem bothered in the slightest. He looked at his own hand, his eyes full of intense pride.
He had always been pursuing the beauty called eternity.
And in his view, turning himself into a puppet was the simplest road toward it.
Flesh and blood would decay. Flesh and blood would age.
Puppets would not.
They only needed parts replaced.
"Amamiya-senpai!" At that moment, Deidara also popped out and happily waved his hand.
Right after that, he took out a crude little paper glider and flew down from the giant construct. The descent seemed a little too fast, and the moment Sasori saw it, he instantly raised an earth wall in front of himself.
Then Kenichi heard an explosion.
Kenichi's mouth twitched.
Then he looked at Sasori with deep sympathy.
Sasori really had it rough. Just how many times had Deidara blown him up for him to cast Earth Release: Earth-Style Wall that naturally?
"Amamiya-senpai!" Deidara burst out of the smoke and dust, grinning brightly.
It had been quite a while since he had last seen Kenichi, and now that he had, he could not help feeling a surge of excitement.
"Deidara, I've got something good to show you later." Kenichi thought of the fusion between explosives and chakra he had developed before.
Strictly speaking, it was not directly related to Deidara, but Kenichi was fairly certain that Deidara would love this kind of explosive enhancement. It might even inspire him to create some new techniques, perhaps by fusing Explosion Release with actual explosives to amplify the effect even further.
"Huh? Great!" Deidara froze for a moment, then smiled even more brightly, looking at Kenichi with unconcealed admiration.
Kenichi almost laughed, but he held it back. Instead, he asked Sasori what exactly they were doing fighting in front of his lab.
If the two of them had not been out here making such a mess, he would already have begun trying to induce the awakening of the Sharingan in Subject One by now.
"We were testing the practicality of these two war puppets. If they perform well, I can begin work on my Hundred Puppets." A fanatic gleam entered Sasori's eyes as he spoke, and then he looked meaningfully at Kenichi.
Kenichi paused and met his gaze.
He remembered saying before that he intended to establish a country that unified the entire ninja world, though back then he had only said it casually. In truth, governing the entire ninja world sounded incredibly troublesome.
If one's military power was overwhelming enough, suppressing the entire ninja world would not be the difficult part.
The real problem would be what came after that.
How would one govern it?
How would one keep it stable after forcing every nation into a single state?
As for simply crushing the nations themselves, both Naruto and Madara had already stood at a point where they could potentially do that.
"If there were that many…" Kenichi looked at the two massive war puppets in front of him.
They really did feel similar to the Uchiha clan's Susanoo. Their presence alone was intimidating. Still, he had some doubts about how strong their defenses actually were.
"By the way, Sasori, do you remember that metal I told you about last time?" Kenichi thought of something and asked.
He had previously told Sasori about the material he found in the Land of Snow. It was a fascinating metal. It could absorb a certain amount of ninjutsu. While it could not handle techniques that were too powerful, it was still far superior to ordinary metal.
"You don't think my Unit One looks a little different?" Sasori shot back.
Kenichi narrowed his eyes and looked more carefully. Only then did he notice that the outer color of the Gundam was a little different, and the surface itself seemed off somehow, as if...
"Sasori bought a lot of that chakra metal from me." A voice with a very magnetic tone drifted over.
Kenichi turned and saw Amado standing there with a cup of tea in hand, smiling as he greeted him.
Amado's daughter stood beside him, and she also looked somewhat familiar to Kenichi. He remembered her. Still, he noticed that she seemed far more lively now than before.
How should he put it?
Back then, every time Amado's daughter was brought out through Edo Tensei, she had looked like she wanted to die. Now she looked much better. Although she still had an Edo Tensei body, she no longer resembled that empty shell from before.
It seemed Amado had made some new progress in his research on Edo Tensei recently.
That made Kenichi hesitate slightly. He wondered whether he should remind Amado that continuing down that path might eventually touch on something far beyond his expectations.
Such as the Pure Land.
Or the old man, the Sage of Six Paths, residing there.
Kenichi himself had his doubts about all of that.
He suspected that the Sage of Six Paths' death had not been inevitable at all. In fact, Kenichi even suspected the old man had chosen to die on purpose, with the goal of entering the Pure Land. Only in the Pure Land, perhaps, could one interfere with matters like reincarnation.
He had formed this theory while conducting experiments before.
His suspicion was that the Sage of Six Paths had deliberately died so he could control reincarnation and the souls of ninjas from within the Pure Land.
His basis for that theory was simple.
Among all the ninjas in the world, the only reincarnations clearly mentioned were those of the Sage's two sons.
If that reincarnation were simply an Otsutsuki clan ability, then another question emerged. The Sage had a brother as well, Otsutsuki Hamura, who was also Otsutsuki. Yet Hamura's descendants showed no signs of such reincarnation at all.
That made it very hard not to suspect that the Sage himself had interfered with the reincarnations of his sons.
Furthermore, whether the Sage and his brother had learned something from Kaguya when they fought her, and whether the Pure Land itself was some kind of contingency plan against the Otsutsuki clan, those were all things Kenichi could only speculate about.
Still, Amado's attempts to study Edo Tensei and retrieve people from the Pure Land might eventually provoke the Sage, because unlike Naruto and Sasuke, Amado was certainly not the old man's son.
Of course, Kenichi leaned more toward the conclusion that the Sage was unable to directly interfere with the living world, or at least unable to exert much force if he could.
"Then it's fine." Kenichi waved his hand.
Since Sasori had already used the chakra metal that Amado had developed, there was nothing more to say on that matter. The only thing worth reminding Sasori about was that these giant puppets should probably focus more on mobility. For defense, a barrier system would naturally be better.
"That's not all, Kenichi. There's something I need your help with." Sasori sounded slightly embarrassed, but he still spoke.
Kenichi looked at Sasori, then at the enormous puppet behind him.
"Are you talking about Nine-Tails chakra?" he asked after a moment.
Sasori's Gundam clearly needed an energy source, and the power it used was Nine-Tails chakra.
But Kenichi did not have much of that left on hand anymore.
Sasori nodded immediately.
That was exactly what he wanted. With Amado's help, Koji Tadokoro had made further progress in converting chakra, and now they could even use Nine-Tails chakra. The Unit One Sasori had built required Nine-Tails chakra as its energy source.
"These... won't be enough. Give me a few days, and I'll get more for you." Kenichi hesitated and ultimately did not take out the scroll containing the sealed Nine-Tails chakra.
It was not because he was being stingy.
It was because what he had on hand was one of the very few complete reserves of Nine-Tails chakra currently available.
The chakra inside Naruto was only half of the Nine-Tails. The other half was still trapped in the belly of the Shinigami along with the Fourth Hokage's soul. Kenichi had considered whether he should release Minato and the others, but after thinking it through, he abandoned the idea.
There was no benefit in doing it right now.
So if Sasori wanted more Nine-Tails chakra, the only real solution would be to make a trip to Konoha and extract some directly from Naruto.
That might attract the Third Hokage's attention, though, so the operation would have to be handled quickly.
"No problem." Sasori was not particularly anxious. There was still enough for now.
He had even considered becoming a jinchuriki himself at one point, but being a jinchuriki did not fit with the road he wanted to pursue.
"Amamiya, there's something I want to discuss with you." Amado finally spoke up. He had some ideas related to Edo Tensei.
Meanwhile, Deidara stood beside them, looking at Kenichi eagerly. He was still waiting for Amamiya-senpai to show him that good thing.
Kenichi felt a headache coming on.
This was the price of spending too much time buried in the lab.
The moment he came outside, a pile of things was waiting for him to deal with.
At that moment, Kenichi genuinely started thinking about getting a secretary to help handle all this for him. Otherwise, he would never be able to carry out experiments in peace.
But human beings were social creatures in the end.
So after suppressing the urge to turn around and dive straight back into the laboratory, Kenichi decided to deal with these problems first.
.....
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