Akeno opened her eyes to beams of light filtered through he canopy of leaves.
It's peaceful here, she thought.
She got up bringing her hands up to her face to rub her eyes when they tugged at metal, she found chains connected to a metal manacle on her wrists and a metal collar around her neck.
"Oh you're awake. Good," said a gruff voice.
She found herself being dragged by the chains, her knees scraped the ground as a man dragged her out of the cool shade of the trees and into the harsh glare of the sun. The sounds of shouts and whiplashes became louder, the man then grabbed her hair and threw her forward.
She fell on her hands ripping her soft hands, hissing in pain as her regenerative abilities slowly began to heal her cuts, she got up. A cruel sight lay before her eyes she saw other slaves wearing collars and chains like her being forced to do manual labor.
This is a dream, right?
She saw a girl her age in brown tattered clothing hauling a rock twice her size as she struggled to take a step forward. Blood dripped down her face, staining her ripped clothes. Akeno saw children younger than her doing the same, some who collapsed were being dragged off and thrown into a pit.
Right?
BOOM.
A flash of orange found itself embedded in rock, yellow adorning the top. Dust trickled down before the boy in orange disappeared in puff of smoke.
A tall white haired shinobi grinned.
It seemed his student was finally learning...after being smashed into the cliff face thirty times that is.
Naruto crouched underneath the bushes as he covered himself in leaves and tried to hide his chakra, which was pretty much futile considering his control and the size of his reserves.
But Jiraiya didn't seem to care, if Jiraiya found him, then he would send him into on a low level flight to the nearest collection of bandits, where he had to land on his feet or be intercepted in mid air by Jiraiya.
The Bastard wouldn't stop either, he kept attacking him sometimes using the bandits as human shuriken. Taking out the bandits while trying to fight him was incredibly tasking.
And they would do this for thirty hours straight and even then sleeping was training as the white haired bastard tried to kill as he rested.
He'd get maybe a break from this to do some light exercises some sit-ups, squats, and push-ups... all with boulders on his back.
Oh, and an added bonus, he WASN'T ALLOWED TO USE CHAKRA DURING HIS TRAINING.
Naruto managed to focus again finding his face on the receiving end of the trunk of a tree. He managed to grab it and in one fluid motion used its momentum and throw it back.
He grimaced knowing that was a distraction he formed a shadow clone to jump off of to get the ground to get his bearings, unfortunately he had jumped right into his sensei's fist.
He blacked out.
Seemingly moments later his instincts whispered at him to move, Naruto managed to roll over as his eyes snapped awake and got into his basic stance before the ground cratered and shook from Jiraiya's fist.
The bastard missed him by inches or so he fought when he found he suddenly couldn't move, he noticed he was standing on a seal, a capture seal.
Naruto paled and Jiraiya's eyes glowed that unnatural light the promised pain and he grinned like a psychopath.
"Grit those teeth"
Naruto blacked out again.
Naruto rubbed his jaw as his regenerative abilities kicked in and the swelling went down.
"Did you have to break my jaw?" Naruto moaned, even talking hurt.
Jiraiya smirked,"Now, now as your sensei I have a duty to my disciple, and I can't exactly be half-assing it, you practically walked into half my attacks, what did I tell you about thinking before leaping."
Naruto sighed, " 'keep yourself aware lest you find yourself on the receiving end of my fist', but I've been aware!-"
Now it was his sensei's turn to sigh, "Naruto, if you had been aware you would've noticed the seal, and my fist, I telegraphed that distraction for you and you still went flying towards the ground without even checking if it was safe, that's the epitome of carelessness."
Naruto scowled knowing he was right, but that didn't mean the guy could break his bones for it. He was bing tortured-, training for the past few weeks and the sannin decided to call for a break to check up on some of his contacts, Naruto hoped that they didn't find anything on Orochimaru, he wasn't quite in the mood to meet creepy snake face, and emo duck butt mcgee just yet.
Naruto didn't voice it but he was still sore from their last fight, both from failing his promise and from losing to him, granted it was because he had hesitated at the last second but didn't change the facts.
He had lost.
.
Master and student walked at a sedate pace to one of the nearby villages dotting the Fire Country. Naruto hoped at least one of these villages had ramen, he swore he wasn't going through a withdrawal...but it would be better for him and everyone surrounding him to find some soon.
As per usual, Jiraiya went off to research and with nothing to do Naruto went off to get some supplies. He had been testing the weight of some of the kunai to see if the price was worth buying it, when he overheard two customers to his left.
"-bandits are getting bolder."
"Its getting harder and harder to travel the countryside without encountering some, swear they're coming' out of the woodwork."
"Apparently rumor has it that their base is located in the forest east of this village, I know now what route to avoid."
"Bah, its probably rumour, I heard-"
Naruto stopped listening as they delved into village politics. On one hand there was experience to be gained and on the other- yeah, he wasn't sure why but for some reason he had been about to weigh the pros and cons of going, its not as if the bandits could beat him, he had left two shadow clones to gather supplies as he went off towards the supposed bandit base.
Hopefully, they were would put up some semblance of a fight, being tortured-annihilated by Jiraiya made him wonder how strong he really was sometimes. But he hoped they weren't too weak or it wouldn't tell him anything except that maybe he should bring popcorn and have his shadow clones take care of it.
Akeno slipped another fork into her sleeve. This wasn't the first time she had stolen supplies and this certainly wasn't going to be the last, if she could help it.
As she helped set dinner for the slaves, she noticed that some of the younger ones looked especially malnourished, and made a mental note to visit the food supplies briefly before she left.
Their jailors had gone out again, leaving only moderately strong bandits behind. Even if they were just patrolling the area it would be tantamount to suicide if she tried anything by herself. If not for the...'seals', Akeno would've electrocuted them until they're eyes melted out of their sockets, but in her opinion they deserved worse.
She had been waiting for an opportunity to use her powers now that she had a way of getting around the seals effects.
Specifically, it was her lightning power, because of the seal it contained and kept a tight lid on any energy that leaked above a certain threshold but with the fact she wasn't using chakra, it affected her a lot less.
There were two issues she still hadn't been able to resolve. One, there were still too many bandits and two, none the slaves would rally behind her, it was actually more likely they would attack her and hope that nothing bad happened to them when their 'jailors' came back to dole out punishment.
They weak rats constantly lived in the shadows scampering to avoid being seen, she would've been repulsed had not she known that some of them had lived their entire lives like this.
Their eyes devoid of any hope.
Some had been born into it.
Akeno shook her head, it was better for her not to think about those depressing things and focus on the task at hand.
Fifteen Guards were still too much for her to handle alone.
But it was still a lot less than how many were usually stationed, and it was unlikely she would be faced with such an opportunity again.
That is until another girl walked up to her, the same one she had awoken to see all those weeks ago, or weeks...it could've been years, and sometimes she felt it truly had been.
Time wasn't something one kept track of, you scratched the wall for each day that passed and hoped you wouldn't get punished. Just worry about eating, sleeping, and working.
The girl stood in front of her, and Akeno noted with a hint of approval that she had a hidden rebellious look in her eye. Nothing so blatant as outright defiance but enough.
"You have a plan?" she stated, though it sounded like a question.
"I can take out five of them for sure, but the rest will surround me if I move don't move fast enough," Akeno told her without her ever taking her eyes off her, since as much as she respected the slight strength she had, Akeno knew it was foolish to trust anyone here.
And as such didn't tell her 'ally', she had enough power to take down ten without a sweat. The other issues were the seals, which caused paralyzing agony when activated, and restriction of one's movement. They also tracked where one was.
So the only way to truly escape was to gouge out the seals or kill the seal's masters. She had opted for the first one at first, but then realized she would probably bleed to death as the seals also interfered with her other powers and so she couldn't heal.
It wasn't like anyone would help her here, unless she had extra food hidden away somewhere to bargain for she would be left to die.
"So what you need is a distraction," said the blue haired girl.
Akeno slowly nodded.
Naruto sighed. This was the third time, this week. Jiraiya hadn't let up after finding out he had gone after bandit groups on his own, though after hearing what his disciple had to say.
He was reluctant to admit, that he had done well.
Naruto henged and kept it that way through the entirety of the fight, and never spoke during the entire time he was there. Not only that, after he saved the prisoners the bandits had kept, he sold all the loot and gave the money to the prisoners so they could start again. Not only escorting them to safety but keeping making sure no one followed them.
Not only that but he had managed to interrogate the bandits without ever speaking, how the brat kept a tight lid on it...until he decided to innocently mention increasing their training by two-fold.
The rapidly paling blond managed to blurt out how he tied the bandit on his stomach and used a combination of waterboarding and the good ol' Tap Left On Technique. Which was a fancy way of saying that he made water slowly drop onto his head at regular intervals. When enough time would pass, they would start to deafen the person, driving them close to insanity.
The bandit then sung like a canary.
.
A large unassuming building, many would pass off as another mail delivery service, but the dump around the back providing cover for shady business said otherwise
Jiraiya pointed, "Alright kid, you're up."
"Alright."
"Calm down and listen-Wait, what?"
"I know you're going to go do your 'research' again, so don't hold up on my account."
Jiraiya just gaped. The brat always complained about action-less missions, said they were 'boring as all hell'. What made him change his mind? A faux tear came to his eye as he realized maybe the kid was growing up, heh.
He was a great Sensei.
.
Meanwhile~
Naruto snickered to himself as he thought of all the ways he was going to majorly prank the place. Jiraiya never noticed as he leaped off into the shadows of the alleyway.
The question was how he was going to prank them, and he wanted it down thoroughly, something no one would notice until an outsider told them otherwise.
AH! That's it! He was going to place funny sayings and jokes over any letter that looked important.
He sneaked in through the third window on the second floor. Silently landing on the wooden floor he noted how quiet it was.
That's strange, shouldn't there be people running back and forth. It is a mail delivery service, these are usually busy if I'm remembering what Jiraiya told me right.
He made his way to each room and found them all empty. Checking the dust, he found it recently disturbed people had been here recently.
The question being: where are they?
It turned out they were holding a meeting.
In the basement, which happened to be ten floors underground.