Naruto God of The Shinobi

CHAPTER 23

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It was several weeks before Minato gave any kind of announcement to the village as a whole, the Hokage spent most of this time couped up in his office, overseeing the amped up security and repairs to Konoha.

During these several weeks, the Iburi Clan was given refuge in the emergency bunkers underneath the Hokage Monument until proper accommodation could be secured. While their presence was unknown to Konoha, they still lived in the Land of Fire, making them citizens, albeit, uncommon ones. Unfortunately, four of the members, including a child, had been lost in the transition between their old cave homes and the emergency bunkers, their forms unravelling in a slight breeze. The system of tunnels that spread underground near Konoha was then collapsed with a series of planned explosions to prevent hostile forces using it against the Village Hidden in the Leaves.

When what remained of the clan of smoke users was transferred, Minato had set several people to work on different ways to allow the clansmen and women to be able to maintain a physical form indefinitely. Unofficially, the Yondaime had also asked his father for his assistance as well, offering the research task to the man as a job with payment.

In the aftermath of Orochimaru's attempted defection, thorough searches were made all across Konoha and several places in the Land of Fire, many uncovering unregistered laboratories that each contained its own collection of desecrated corpses, deadly traps and twisted experiments. Many of the experiments would be later identified as several people who had gone missing days, weeks and months prior, adding more grief to grieving families, but also much closure, others were too mutilated to identify. Only scraps of notes were found in the labs, the ashes of the remaining research spoke of Orochimaru's foresight. The ANBU who raided these labs were lucky enough to find those slivers of information about the snake Sannin's dealings if they managed to prevent the hideouts from detonating.

Several experiments were, unfortunately, found alive and moving within several laboratories, most of them groaning in pain or having lost themselves to insanity. The ANBU were forced to put all of beings who were once human down. There was one notable exception to this rule though, in a room containing sixty children all floating in individual tubes filled with an unidentified green liquid.

Dozens had been thrashing around in the fluid, screaming out bubbles of air in absolute pain when ANBU had broken into the room. Others were disturbingly still, blood trailing from their orifices while some had scratched into their skin, ripping off flesh to reach the bone beneath. More simply floated in their tubes, all of the poor children that were still alive in the room were put out of their misery, the only exception being a young boy, roughly six, who was discovered to be breathing normally. The child was rescued from his confinement and sent immediately for medical attention while under heavy watch. The child had been a dead-end, information wise, when he had awoken, not remembering anything about himself prior to being kidnapped by Orochimaru. The boy was eventually found to be a young chūnin by the name of Yamato, an orphan, who had gone missing two weeks prior to being discovered.

A lucky discovery by one team was Orochimaru's apprentice, Anko Mitarashi. The twelve year old chūnin was found unconscious in a cell in one of the labs, strapped to a table, her upper body naked and her neck branded with an unknown cursed seal. Once removed for the labs and taken to a hospital for treatment, the purple haired girl had woken to the shock of finding out that her teacher was dead after being labelled as a traitor. It took two days to convince the girl of this fact before she was then interrogated for what she knew. While she was a Konoha shinobi, she also had a close relationship with Orochimaru which made her the subject of much scrutiny.

Anko hadn't known much about Orochimaru's more sensitive activities, though she had noticed that some of his experiments had begun to cross the moral line. Ultimately, the girl hadn't known much about the illegitimate side of her teacher's actions. When interrogators had enquired about the mark on her neck, the chūnin replied that she'd never seen it in her life. It was theorised after that Orochimaru had given it to his pupil as a 'farewell gift' and one last experiment, this theory was only made stronger when Anko had mentioned her teacher's last words to her; 'A pity I didn't have more time to perfect this, farewell Anko-chan', before he'd knocked her out. Anko was eventually released after it was determined that she was, in no way, in league with Orochimaru.