Alright, here's a disclaimer and a warning. First off, I don't own Naruto. Second, this fic portays Naruto as being smarter than he was in the anime/manga. I did this for a few reasons, mainly just because I hate how much of the focus of the first part of the story focuses on Sasuke and how great he is, all you Sasuke fanboys/girls are gonna have to deal with some minor Sasuke bashing if you read this. Also, I will try to update as frequently as possible, but I can't make any guarantees. This will be a Naru x Saku fic eventually, though I'm not gonna pair them up right away because I want to follow canon slightly and because relationships at that age are wrong. Anyway, let's get this going...
The Gift Chapter One: Awakening
Naruto found himself in a sewer. This wasn't the first time he had ended up in a sewer, but he had never woken up in one before. Water filled the halls to about ankle level and the pipes lining the wall glowed in an unnatural way. Pondering the oddness of the sewers, Naruto started trying to find his way out. After about a half hour of wandering, Naruto was beginning to get really annoyed.
"Where the hell are all the ladders!?" Then he heard it. It sounded like breathing, a deep guttural breathing. Wary, Naruto started walking in the direction the noise was coming from. Another ten minute walk found the boy at a large gate with a piece of paper in the middle. Naruto had no idea what the paper said, he couldn't read yet. Naruto walked toward the gate but stopped as two large, red eyes opened on the other side.
"YOU DARE STAND BEFORE ME!?" The creature said.
"W-who are you?" Naruto asked, scared but not willing to back down.
"I GO BY MANY NAMES, BUT MOST CALL ME KYUUBI, THE GREAT NINE-TAILED FOX DEMON, STRONGEST BIJUU TO EXIST." Naruto stared wide-eyed at the demon. Then all of a sudden, Naruto smiled.
"Will you be my friend? If I had the strongest demon as my friend I'll bet that all the people will stop hurting me." This actually left the demon speechless, no one had ever asked him to be their friend, let alone a human. He quickly came to his senses though.
"NO, I WON'T BE YOUR FRIEND," Naruto's face dropped "BUT I WILL GIVE YOU A GIFT." Naruto looked at him curiously as a red glowing substance started leaking through the gate. Naruto couldn't move as the youki neared him, as it reached his legs, as it swallowed him.
-- Two Years Later
Naruto's eyes opened as he woke. He had been dreaming of flying, which had been occurring more and more frequently. As he sat up though, he plopped down onto his bed from a good foot up. Confused, Naruto just wrote it off as a side-effect of his dream. Glancing at his clock, Naruto's face paled.
"Crap! I'm gonna be late for school!" With that, Naruto quickly threw on his clothes and rushed out the door.
--
Naruto gathered chakra like he had been taught that day in the academy. Using the correct hand-seals, he called out the name of the jutsu.
"Bunshin no Jutsu!" A dead-looking Naruto clone appeared on the floor next to him. "CRAP! Why won't this work!?" Letting the bunshin disappear, Naruto plopped onto the ground and got into a thinking position. Sitting there, pondering, he tried to understand what he had done wrong. He gave up after a few minutes and groaning he laid back to stare up at the sky. He just didn't understand, everything else he had been taught so far he had picked up extremely easily and could perform flawlessly. He could escape from being tied up in seconds flat, he memorized all of the taijutsu katas and he could mold the chakra exactly like he was supposed to (he assumed).
Letting the wind blowing through his hair and against his skin calm him, Naruto drifted off. He found himself in a place he had only seen once before, in front of a large gate.
"WHY HAVE YOU COME TO ME?" The voice on the other side boomed.
"I don't know, I was having problems getting a jutsu to work right and I just kinda passed out I think."
"USE THE GIFT"
"What gift?"
"MOLD THE ELEMENTS IN."
"What's that supposed to mean?" But Naruto had woken up before he could get an answer. Naruto was more than mildy freaked out by the recurrence of the gate that he hadn't seen in over two years and the mention of this gift. Maybe there was something more to this than just dreams though. Naruto closed his eyes again, trying to grasp the idea of "molding in the elements." He felt the wind blowing on his face and decided to try and mold the wind. Standing back up, he molded the chakra necessary for the clone and then reached out and tried to pull the wind into it. Naruto could feel the chakra flowing much easier as it all came together and when he called out the name of the jutsu he became surrounded by clones of himself.
"Yatta!" Naruto yelled as he started dancing around, overjoyed that he had gotten the technique to work even if the means had been a little unorthodox. Releasing the technique as he had been taught, Naruto decided to try pulling something else into the clone technique. Again making the hand-seals, Naruto felt the earth beneath his feet, imagining the earth mixing with his chakra. Naruto completed the technique, called out the name, and watched in pure bliss as more clones popped into existence in front of him. As he released the clones this time though, he noticed clumps of dirt falling and holes in the ground that hadn't been there when he started. "Why were there so many though?" Naruto didn't ponder this for long because in the end he could perform the technique and that's all that mattered.
--
Naruto sat, leaf perched on his forehead, frustrated as all hell. They had been taught this technique in order to refine chakra control, but he was having difficulties getting it to work. Naruto knew that this meant his chakra control was not nearly as precise as it should be, this was why he didn't try any shortcuts for this like he had with the bunshin jutsu. He had to tough it out and get this technique down and he was more than willing to give it as much time as it needed.
--
Naruto panted as he let up punching the post in front of him, maybe 5,000 punches with each hand had been a bit much, but it was time to move on to 5,000 kicks with each leg so he didn't stop to think about it. When those were all done he settled into a very rough taijutsu stance. He could perform the taijutsu they had been taught at the academy flawlessly, but that taijutsu wasn't going to cut it. So he had decided to make his own form of taijutsu. This decision had come when he had been paired up with a certain Uchiha in taijutsu practice and it seemed as though the Uchiha taijutsu, also not academy taught, was meant to be used to read the moves of your opponent and react accordingly. Going off that basic concept, Naruto decided that it would be better if he made a taijutsu form that existed primarily to find openings in your opponents stance, mainly through countering, and acting on them.
Facing an imaginary opponent, Naruto started his kata. Blocking an imaginary punch, Naruto pretended to slap the first away which caused his opponent to shift and leave an opponening which Naruto took, planting his fist in his false-opponent's rib-cage. Again falling back into the stance, Naruto blocked a kick to his lower abdomen and then used the leg that had been blocking to hook under his opponent's leg and flip him onto his back before planting an axe-kick to his chest. Going on in his kata, Naruto performed many blocks and counters he had developed. What he was most proud of though was the fact that he was working on not telegraphing what he was going to do through his movements. He had decided shortly after the completion of his first kata that the second one would put the use of his non-telegraphed movement into an offensive kata rather than a defensive one, but he still had work to do on the first kata before he would be happy enough with his mastery of it to move on. The second kata, he knew, would be much harder to develop.
--
Naruto continued to work on his second kata, but he had no idea he was being magically watched from afar. Sitting in front of the Hokage's desk was a man in typical jounin attire with the exception of an odd mask covering his face from the nose down and his hitai-ate was slanted across his face, covering his left eye and effectively making him a cyclops. Both he and the Hokage watched Naruto through the kage's crystal ball.
"He's a genius, 9 years old and developing a form of taijutsu? That's entirely unheard of!" The cycloptic man exclaimed.
"Indeed, Naruto could be called a genius, but not a typical genius. You see, Naruto develops all of the ideas on his own, yes, but he only gets to the point of mastery that you currently see through ridiculous amounts of hard work. He pushes himself to the point of exhaustion every day. If only he put this much effort into this studies, he would be head of his class no problem."
"Even better than the Uchiha?"
"Sasuke is impressive, to be sure, but he doesn't put nearly as much work into what he does. Unfortunately, because of his clan's old status, he expects power to be handed to him rather than earned."
"I see. Naruto is definitely exceptional. Sensei would have been proud."
"I couldn't agree more, the way Naruto has pulled through everything he's experienced in life, endured through beatings and verbal molestation and yet still wants to protect this village more than anything is extremely admirable. His reaction to all he's been put through isn't much different than Minato's own childhood, even if he did have it easier. Orphans always get held to much lower standards than others. Neither of them have ever been huge proponents of pity however."
"I think we can expect great things of sensei's son."
"I think that expecting anything else would be vastly underestimating him."
--
Naruto sat at Ichiraku's having decided to take a celebratory break from training for the one thing he loved more than anything—well, maybe less than Sakura-chan—else, Ramen. It had taken him a year, but he had completed the last two katas for the basic form of his, as of yet, unnamed taijutsu. He had expected it to take a long time, it had taken him three months to make the first kata, but he hadn't expected it to take him 7 months to complete his third kata which combined the ideas of the first two.
Naruto felt an overwhelming sense of pride in his achievement. After all, how many academy students could say that they created an entire new style of taijutsu? And to add to this, he had several exciting ideas to add to his style. Over his time training, Naruto had started to become aware that he had partial control over the elements thanks to the "gift" he had received. He had spoken with the Kyuubi on a few different occasions now, and he fully understood who he was and what that made Naruto. No one knew that Naruto knew what he was yet, mainly because Naruto didn't know who else knew and he didn't want to receive any more negative attention. Through prodding a very annoyed, extremely violent demon, Naruto had learned that his gift was to be able to control the elements by pumping his chakra into them, which would stack very nicely with his elemental affinity when he learned exactly what that was and meant. He could use this gift to do a great many things. First and foremost he could use it to enhance normal jutsu. By taking a fire jutsu and pushing it with chakra-laced wind, Naruto could make a devastating fire. The thing that excited him most though was combining this into his taijutsu. Using wind-chakra Naruto could make a deadly kata that used wind to cut his opponents, using fire-chakra he could add a burning effect to any blow he landed. The only limiting factor was his current inability to control more than one element at any given time. He knew from the Kyuubi that this would eventually work itself out though.
--
Naruto was really excited, today was the day he was going to become a real ninja. He had failed the exam twice already—because of his inability to perform a standard bunshin until just recently—but this time he was prepared. He was still dead-last in his class but it wasn't because he couldn't do better but because he chose not to. One thing that Naruto hated with a passion was being treated inferior, but he was used to it by now so he decided that he would take that rather than make others feel inferior, even if he was better than them. To be completely honest, Naruto wasn't very good with math and the normal academics, but he was better than some. Through this method, he had found that people paid more attention to you if they thought that you were inferior to them and he craved attention. So as Naruto sat down in class, he noticed several people give him pitying glances. He also noticed several people being extremely nervous, both covertly and overtly. Naruto had grown to be extremely good at reading the emotions of others, he had been forced to really in order to avoid people who would do him harm. As Iruka called out names though, all other thought left his mind washed out by the pure excitement he felt. He knew that there wasn't a single technique that they had been taught that he didn't have complete mastery over and he was extremely confident. As Iruka called on the class emo (every class has to have at least one) his excitement could barely be contained. Uzumaki was the name directly after Uchiha after all.
When the Uchiha came back—to much female swooning—with a cocky smirk on his face and a hitai-ate on his forehead, Naruto jumped to his feet. He made it to the door just as Iruka walked in and gave him a smile.
"Alright Naruto, come on." Naruto followed Iruka to the testing room and was all smiles. He knew for a fact that he was gonna blow everyone else out of the water. "Ok Naruto, in order to graduate you need to make at least one perfect clone of yourself but you aren't limited to just one." If possible, Naruto's grin got even wider. The two teachers watched as Naruto made the correct hand-seals and then shouted.
"Bunshin no Jutsu!" On completion, the rather large examination room became full with exact copies of our orange-clad ninja, completely flooring Iruka and Mizuki. As Mizuki sat with a devastated look on his face, Iruka called Naruto over. When Naruto reached Iruka, the young man smiled warm-heartedly at him.
"Close your eyes Naruto." Doing as instructed, Naruto closed his eyes. Shortly after, he could feel the goggles that had been given to him for his birthday several years before by the old man being taken off. After a short pause Naruto could feel something else being tied onto his forehead. "Open them," Iruka said and Naruto listened. He looked at the face of his now hitai-ate-less sensei and smiled. If Iruka knew how much the gesture meant to Naruto he didn't say anything. Iruka quickly picked up a new hitai-ate from the table and secured it around his own forehead before leading Naruto back to the classroom. "How about I treat you to ramen tonight in celebration?" The man said to the boy he considered a younger brother."
"Yatta! Today's the greatest-ttebayo!"
A/N: I figure that's as good a place to end this as possible. Next chapter will be at least team assignments and the survival test. Reviews are always appreciated and flames are always ignored. If anyone has any constructive criticism or ideas that they think might be good, let me know.