Chapter 2: Lack of Teamwork
Perhaps missing the meeting with my team would not have been so bad.
Sasuke as a teammate wasn't as bad as it could have been. He had basic competence, so I didn't need to worry about him, though I certainly couldn't trust that block of ice and bile to watch my back. Fortunately, with shadow clones, I hoped never to need him. Certainly, my hope for making lasting bonds and true friends on my team was dashed. Especially given that Sakura was my last teammate.
Sakura was actually my first friend. In our first year in the academy, I rescued her from some bullies, and knowing that everyone hated me, asked her not to tell anyone that I was her friend. I was actually quite cunning about it, paying her with real money for teaching me how to read and write properly, and making it seem that it would be too embarrassing for me if anyone were to learn about it, so she mustn't tell. It lasted for a month before word got back to her family, but having a friend had been one of the highlights of my life. The betrayal also taught me not to try again. It was quite the painful episode, especially since I missed her enough that I hurt myself by trying to get close to her again for another three months before giving up.
On the plus side, having Sakura on my team meant that I'd have a real chance to arrange for her to die painfully, I smiled brightly at the oblivious girl as we waited for our sensei to arrive. And waited, and waited, for hours. I spent the time constructively, alternately walking around the classroom on my hands (including jumping on chairs and desks) and juggling shuriken, ignoring the looks of derision sent my way from my two teammates. There was only so much time, and wasting it by sitting behind a desk instead of training was simply stupid.
Finally, almost three hours after everyone else left, with the clones done dispelling in the day's first wave of experience, the door opened. I didn't bother to look, having graduated to jumping up and down on fingertips alone.
"Ahem, my first impression, one of you is crazy and the rest of you are lazy. Meet me on the roof in five minutes," he said. The clone I'd hidden near the entrance dispelled, and I learned that our jounin sensei was a tall man with silver hair who wore a mask, with only one eye exposed. He'd disappeared in a body flicker, a low level jutsu that allowed for quick travel via high speed. He'd only used a single hand sign for it, the ram, and while not an Uchiha with an active copy-wheel-eye, the jutsu stealing Sharingan, I decided to see if I could copy it merely from learning the hand sign used. After all, I'd had little more to go on with most of the jutsus I'd learned in the past, and with the swift release bloodline, speed was in my blood. I also healed incredibly fast and perfectly, which was either another bloodline, the influence of the Kyuubi sealed in me, or possibly both. After all, demons were apparently the source of bloodlines.
I followed the others to the rooftop, wondering what being on a team would be like and if our sensei would actually teach us anything. Would he, like the teachers in the academy, make sure I didn't learn anything right? Or possibly just not teach me anything? With the speed I was learning what jutsus and exercises I had access to, it would not be long before I'd need more study material, and there wasn't really much of anything on the forbidden scroll I could learn that I hadn't already learned. Make that anything at all, I pursed my lips in disappointment. I'd need to be a sealing master with perfect chakra control, possess multiple elemental affinities (or at least training) and be a high level medic to learn everything on it, and there were several jutsus and seals I simply did not want to and had no intention of ever learning.
There was a brief moment of awkward silence once we joined him on the roof, before he rose to his feet and said, "Okay, it's time to start with introductions."
"What do you want to know?" Sakura inquired, brow furrowing in deep thought. It was telling the the kunoichi of the year didn't even understand what an introduction meant.
"How about your likes, dislikes, dreams of the future. Hobbies and stuff like that," he waved his hands.
"Why don't you start and show us how it's done?" Sakura suggested, nibbling on her lower lip in a rather fetching manner. She might have been as flat as a board, but she had a rather pretty face.
"Oh, me? I'm Kakashi Hatake. I have no desire to tell you guys about my likes or dislikes. Dreams for the future...? Well, I have a lot of hobbies. Now it's your turn, from the right," he pointed at me.
"I'm Naruto Uzumaki. I like ramen and I dislike hateful and lazy people. When I dream about the future, well, I always forget when I wake up. My hobbies are training and pranking," I added after a bit of thought. I had no intention of sharing my actual dreams, as I was quite certain he'd frown on the one that had Konoha burning away slowly to ashes, along with everyone in it.
"What about your ambition to be Hokage?" Sakura piped up.
"What about it?" I looked at her quizzically. It wasn't like I didn't have a lot of experience in looking stupid.
"Next," Kakashi pointed at Sasuke when the silence stretched.
"My name is Sasuke Uchiha. There are tons of things I dislike, and I don't really like anything. As for my dream… I have an ambition. The resurrection of my clan and to kill a certain man."
Sakura's dreamy face at the utterance was almost enough to make me laugh out loud. Perhaps the purpose of Kakashi's mask was to avoid having people read his expressions.
"Okay. And finally, the girl."
"I'm Sakura Haruno. The thing I like is… well the person…," her eyes slid over to Sasuke. "Should I say my dream for the future?" her cheeks reddened. "Yatta! I dislike Ino-pig! My hobby is…"
"Okay, that's enough of that. We will start our duties tomorrow. First, we are going to do something with just the four of us. A survival exercise."
"Why is training our duty?" Sasuke inquired, and Sakura's voice rose, "We did enough of that in the academy!"
"I'm your opponent, and this isn't normal training," he gave a laugh.
"What's so funny, sensei?" Sakura asked, looking pissed.
"Your reactions will be. You see, out of twenty seven graduates, only nine will be chosen as genin. This training is very difficult, and the failure rate of the exam is two thirds."
Okay, he was right, their reactions were pretty funny. As for me, I wasn't entirely sure that I wanted to pass the exam, as the idea of fighting for Konoha left me sour. In addition, our would-be sensei seemed lazy, untrustworthy, had no respect for us… did I really want to be stuck with him? And the two annoying idiots? On the other hand, was there a real possibility of him not passing the team with the Last Uchiha? And my dream was to be a ninja, how could I accomplish that without passing? I contributed my own grimace, if a trifle late.
"Ha, you should your faces. Anyway, see you tomorrow in training field seven at eight. Here, see this printout," he handed us a page. "Bring all your shinobi tools. Oh, and you might want to skip breakfast or you'll throw up."
Just like that, he was gone with a swirl of leaves, the tell-tale sign of the body flicker. I waited for Sakura and Sasuke to leave, snickering quietly as he ignored her request for a date, before jumping off the roof, reinforcing my legs with chakra and flexing them just right, something one of my clones had managed by panicked accident during awareness training when another clone poked him on the back, startling him into falling off a tree branch he'd clung to. Just five hours of training with four hundred clones, and I was already reaping benefits. They'd taken proper care to have every group dispel in intervals of at least a minute, and I figured the next batch could wait half that much, since that was about how long it took to incorporate fifty hours.
I was on my way to Ichiraku's to eat some Kami-blessed ramen, walking slowly and thoughtfully, when the fifty library clones began dispelling. Once they did and the memories settled in, I hit my head against a tree-trunk a couple of times, ignoring the whispers of "Crazy demon".
One of the books my clones had read through in the library was "Nutrition for Physical Fitness and the Developing Body" and it turned out that ramen was probably part of my problem. I needed a more balanced diet, it appeared, with… yucky vegetables and more fruit and fiber and other weird stuff. I popped out a clone to buy some writing material and go prepare the weekly meal schedule the book recommended. More than that, a number of clones had read about edible plants, poisonous plants, agriculture and hunting. There was no reason to buy anything when my clones could hunt, gather, tend fields and cook. It probably wouldn't be as good as instant ramen at the start, but if I learned to cook well… I didn't expect anything I made to be as good as Ichiraku ramen, but since I only had the money to stop there thrice a week, I had no intention of eating less of that divine food.
Besides plants and food, my clones had also boned up on geography and some history. Geography would be useful for missions, history for learning from other peoples mistakes and what worked. I didn't read very quickly, so my clones didn't either, but I had learned the memory tricks ninja used, so what I picked as useful was memorized and would always be there when I needed it, from the description and illustration of five simple snares used to catch small game to the appearance and uses of belladonna.
With a minimum of four hundred clones working day and night, I wondered briefly if I was going to feel old in a few weeks, as I received more than a year's worth of memories every single day. Ayame noticed that I was distracted, one of the ramen bowls almost cooling before I slurped it up, but was easily convinced that I was worried about tomorrow's graduation test, which I actually should be worried about, however far it was from the top of my list of concerns.
Praising the ramen with a bit more vocabulary than usual, I complimented Ayame on how pretty she looked with her cheeks pink, slapped enough ryo to cover the meal and a bit more from the sadly depleted gama-chan, my frog-wallet, promised to see her again in a couple of days, and ran off before Teuchi could react. Her father could be a bit crotchety as times, but Ayame was a sweetheart.
Reluctantly and slowly, I made my way back to the apartment, popping off a few clones to look at the inventory of shinobi-supply stores to see if there was anything I could use. There was no putting it off, I needed to finish reading the scroll. Surprisingly, the remainder wasn't that bad. A lot of it was Mokuton jutsus of the Shodaime Hokage's wood-release bloodline, then advanced water techniques of the Nidaime Hokage, some of which were rather gross, as well as tricks and shortcuts for water mastery. It turns out that blood is a liquid that really advanced water techniques could affect, for some really unpleasant results. More interesting was the blood clone, which was almost as good as the originating shinobi, depending on the amount of blood used, and there was also a sneaky water jutsu that somehow affected the water in the head, similar to sea-sickness, disrupting the target's sense of balance and causing dizziness and nausea. There was also notes on some nasty poisons and their antidotes, and a really frightening seal called the Mouth of Oblivion, which opened a tear to otherwhere and sucked someone unfortunate to some unknown place postulated mathematically - the notations were utter gibberish, the speculation outlandish. Something about tears in the space-time continuum and relativity jumps, reality mirrors and limit breaks. The nature of existence was apparently too complicated for me to understand. A much easier and very much lesser example provided under the notations was a stasis containment seal for human prisoners or dying comrades, to hold them for direct and immediate delivery to the hospital or the nearest medic-nin.
Finally done with that work, I made a clone to practice making a blood and chakra sealed storage seal, so I could hide my copies of the scrolls in a few safe places no one else could get it out of. Remembering my earlier speculation about mastering the body flicker, I made another five groups to go and try it, then started pondering about how to find sources for more information. I had a feeling that I'd master everything I reasonably could and drain the library in a month, at the very most, so I needed a source for more jutsu scrolls, sealing books and advanced chakra exercises. There was ANBU headquarters, the Hokage's private library, the libraries of clans and individual shinobi families and jounin… and the hospital. I remembered reading that medical and genjutsu required the most chakra control, so the hospital would be good for that, as they presumably had training courses and manuals. There was also nothing wrong with actually learning the medical jutsus, especially if I could figure out how bloodlines worked and how to copy them. I put that on the list of goals, having not just a great clan, but a kickass clan with lots of bloodline abilities. Speaking of clan libraries… the Uchiha were best known as the greatest jutsu-thieves in the elemental nations, and there was just one Uchiha left to guard that treasure trove - I hoped. Tomorrow, I'd sneak some insect clones on him with minimal chakra signatures and investigate. For now, I sent two groups off to scout the hospital and see what they could come up with, as I suspected that the other sources were beyond my infiltration abilities, secure behind seals I could not overcome - as of yet.
There was also the matter of money. Now that I was a genin, there was no more orphan stipend. Kakashi probably wouldn't take us on many missions, and most of the money would go to him in any case. Even with clones getting most of my food, I had no choice but to spend some money on rent, ninja tools, scrolls and sealing ink, Ichiraku and so on and so forth. I knew exactly which stores refused to serve me and which overcharged me only to provide me with bottom quality goods, having methodically tried all of them without shifting to an innocuous form, and checked out every new one as well - with every intention of continuing that practice. There was the moral question of stealing, and I found that I didn't really have any objection.
After swallowing my qualms, more about the dangers involved in getting caught, I popped two teams of clones, each to pick one rich target that hated me in turn, and fleece them of anything and everything they could get. The personal storage seals would also be useful for holding my money and more important possessions, naturally.
I almost jumped when a clone physically returned, dropping a bag with on the kitchen table with a loud metallic clink, and dissipated. The memories returned with the answer to my question about increasing physical abilities - chakra weights and a special harness to distribute the strain, freshly stolen from right under the nose of one of the more unpleasant storekeepers. These were the special and most expensive type, small and thin discs of chakra conductive metal carved with seals, that grew heavier the more chakra you channeled into them - with no real upper limit that was practical for others. Taking off my jumpsuit, I put the harness on, and then the light black silk and chain-mesh armor garments the clones had also stolen, very carefully putting the smallest amount of chakra I could into the weights, directing it into the harness, which supposedly 'knew' exactly what balance of weight would be most beneficial for me.
Moving around was quite difficult at first, which was the purpose of it of course, and I had to channel chakra to my limbs to walk off to the training ground seven, then to my chest to keep my breathing from being disrupted by the increased weight on my lungs and heart. For the rest of the day, I went through the Dancing Leaf forms and katas, the academy taijutsu style which I'd learned well despite the instructors' attempts to sabotage me, sparred with clones and ran a few laps around Konoha, stopping four times for a clone-fetched meal, working through digesting two rounds of memory feedbacks. It was very dark by the time I got back to the apartment, but I made sure to set the timer before a quick shower. More exhausted than usual with the new and much harsher training regimen, I dropped off to bed, making a mental note that I needed a better mattress.
Waking up very much refreshed, I ate a lavish clone-provided breakfast, sealed up a few sandwiches for later snacks, got dressed and refreshed the clone contingent, increasing the number to an even five hundred. Before sleeping, I'd had a clone let all the others know not to disrupt until I woke up and let them know it was time to dispel, and prior to making another bunch, I tested out the improvements in my capabilities.
To my surprise, body flicker was now within my capabilities. Oh, I needed to concentrate to avoid going the wrong way or running into a wall or a tree, and I was a long way from mastering it, but I could actually do it with a couple of seconds' concentration. Furthermore, I'd absolutely mastered the leaf cutting exercise for wind, the crinkling for lightning and soaking it for water. The fire and earth were showing some advancement, with a bit of scorching and drying out, so I sent a couple of groups off to finish each. I didn't really know what the next raw elemental manipulation exercises were for wind, lightning and water, so I made up my own. For wind, I sent a couple of groups to cut through a rock this time. For water, I sent them to a stream to raise and compress some of the water into recognizable shapes. Lightning had me thinking for a couple of minutes, until I decided to simply copy the wind exercise, trying to drill through a rock or a piece of wood with lightning chakra, as well as charge and withdraw the charge from a battery and try to light a bulb and not burn it out. I sent off four groups for each, excited at the thought of learning actual elemental jutsus after the exercises became easy. Again, I sent ten groups off to practice chakra control, but using a new exercise since I'd run through all those I already knew, and they didn't require any effort so would no longer be of use - this time trying to use chakra threads, the ones I read about in the history books which dealt with the shinobi world wars, where the mention of Suna's puppet masters intrigued me. Controlling weapons at a distance without wires sounded cool, and maybe I could also write seals using them at a distance. Calligraphy was going well, and I sent four last groups to perfect it - it was good enough now for the common, easy seals, but a last bit of practice wouldn't do any harm. Awareness training had been a wild game of fun, so I sent ten groups off for that, adding traps to the mix, and another ten for taijutsu practice. However annoying it was when a clone accidentally burst and I got distracted by the sudden influx of memories, I noticed an actual improvement in my close combat ability - seeing the mistakes I was making and correcting them helped, and having sparring partners was also incredibly better than just working on my own.
That was enough for training purposes, and I renewed the two groups which focused on theft. They'd been very cautious, but had made some interesting discoveries. I also sent a group to copy the medical texts I'd located in the hospital, another group to keep overwatch over myself, and another two to practice the body flicker. Three more groups went off to the library, two to work on food and future food sources, and one to gather poisonous plants. My clones had only skimmed through the medical text for the shinobi med-nin program, but apparently it was possible to gain immunity to poisons through repeated exposure. I didn't think I was ever going to use poisons much in combat, seals were more my thing, but immunity to every poison I knew of was bound to come in useful, if not life-saving, and the knowledge of how to make poisons was unlikely to be wasted. If nothing else, I could teach others, and tell them how to acquire immunity - and provide them with the theory of its use, even if I didn't have the practice. Carrying antidotes around with me in stasis-locked storage seals was another good idea. With a sudden epiphany, I sent another two groups to check out the academy library. I was still a long way from perfecting the basics, and maybe I'd find some insights there.
Done with that, I ran off to the training ground, with the weights a bit increased from yesterday, as I planned to increase them every day. Not having anything to do other than train or prank meant that I did a lot of both, and since I'd promised the old man I wasn't going to do more pranks, only training was left. I was also eager to get more money, as the clones haunting the ninja supply stores had found more than just weights - there was also something called resistance seals, which increased the air's resistance to your movement. Using them increased your speed - unfortunately, the garments bearing them were out of reach financially, at least for the moment. Strength and speed were two things I couldn't train with clones, unlike reflexes and muscle memory.
I arrived at the training field a minute before the time Kakashi mentioned, and was hardly surprised when neither Sakura nor Sasuke offered me a greeting or made a comment about my new clothes. Ignoring them in turn, I worked on a chakra exercise I'd thought up on the way, taking a coin and making it roll over my hands and eventually the rest of my body, making it stick and move by using chakra. Metal was much harder than a leaf, and I already knew that using chakra was easiest through the hands, having completed the tree-walking and water-walking exercises mentioned in the wartime academy books. It was one of the reasons I got away from even jounin sometimes after a prank, none of them expected me to be over water or up on a treetop or a building's roof. Focusing chakra on just about every inch of my body took a lot of concentration, especially as I did it while running around the training ground with the weights on. The coin kept falling off, but I kept at it, making sure to run in the trees out of sight of the other two - I didn't need their heckling, the work was annoying enough as it was. When I managed it easily with one coin, I'd increase the number - or rather, my clones were going to. Surprisingly, I learned that the most difficult place to focus chakra through wasn't the feet, it was the crotch - there were some unpleasant tingles down there when I used too much chakra.
After a couple of hours, I stopped to eat a few sandwiches, biting my lips at the entreating looks Sakura sent me and Sasuke's dark gaze, accompanied as they were by the rumbling of their stomachs. Wordlessly, I simply went back to the exercise when I was done eating, a dispelling clone from the perimeter overwatch letting me know our Sensei was there - as did Sakura's loud shout of "You're LATE!" booming forth as I joined them.
"Good morning, guys. Now then," he placed an alarm clock on a stump after offering a nonsensical excuse for his arriving late, "this is set for noon. Your mission is to take these two bells from me before noon. Those who cannot get the bells by noon will get no lunch. I'll not only tie you to one of these stumps, I'll also eat right in front of you." I could tell that he was smiling, even behind the mask his posture was unmistakable. The sound of my teammates' empty stomachs rumbling was surprisingly loud.
"You only need to get one bell," he added. "There are only two, so one of you will definitely be tied to a stump. Oh, and the person who doesn't get a bell fails, so at least one of you will be sent back to the academy. You need to be serious about it, you won't succeed unless you come at me intending to kill."
"But you'll be in danger!" Sakura protested, and I managed not to nod agreement. His arrogance wasn't exactly baseless, even with everything I had I doubted I'd be more than an annoyance, unless he was totally careless. Still, this was the perfect time to try exploding clones, and the overwatch clones' most important task was to use the replacement jutsu with me if I was ever in danger. It was the best I could do until my awareness training bore more substantial fruit, and even then, shinobi could mask their chakra and intent. Several layers of defense against an ambush were definitely the sort of thing that would save lives.
"No need to worry, I am a jounin," he answered lazily, picked a pornographic novel out of his pouch, its orange cover distinctive, and started reading. "Well?" he asked without looking up. "Time is passing, you know."
Sakura and Sasuke quickly moved out of sight, as I tried to make a grouping of exploding clones, pushing a lot more chakra than usual into them as I did with the regular shadow clones, deliberately staying in the open. With the first explosion, I grinned at the successful jutsu test and made more and more of them, until I actually felt the drain, using the body flicker to get out of sight. My clones would get the bells, and with almost an hour, there was time enough for a stop at Ichiraku for ramen. I made a clone to let the guys know where to deliver the bells, and had them on my belt before the first heavenly bowl was ready.
I was happy to find that Ayame and Teuchi were receptive to amending their recipes when I mentioned the book on fitness and nutrition requirements, and we talked about new ramen taste tests until a clone let me know that there were only a couple of minutes before the timer rang. I also learned what Kakashi had done to them, taking out Sakura with a D-rank genjutsu and burying Sasuke up to his neck in the ground, chuckling softly as I made my way to the training ground.
The timer rang, and a couple of minutes later Kakashi dragged the two from the woods. Sakura looked like she'd rolled around on the ground, and Sasuke was somewhat roughed up, clumps of earth sticking to his clothes. Kakashi, on the other hand, looked like he'd walked out of an inferno, all blackened and decorated with soot, the exposed skin red and raw, clothes almost burned off, limping and favoring his right hand, with several wounds obviously made by kunai. He looked particularly amusing with his hair mostly burned away. Obviously, my exploding clones had done some damage, and they'd used the shadow kunai jutsu to some effect.
"Hey there!" I rang the bells in my hand as those on Sensei's belt disappeared in a puff of smoke, "Do I pass? Huh, just kidding," I swung them around, enjoying the chiming sound, and tossed one each to Sasuke and Sakura. Not having anything else to say, I simply turned my back to them and started walking away.
"Where are you going?" Kakashi demanded in a weird tone of voice.
"You said the one without a bell goes back to the academy, right?" I was getting bored with his nonsense.
"But you got both bells," he rebutted.
"Well, that was then. Now they have the bells, so I'm gone. Have a fun team!" I turned back to leave.
"You pass!" Kakashi announced loudly. Kami, for a shinobi he wasn't much of a liar. As though there were any two-man genin teams in Konoha, really. I was ashamed it took me that long to realize it.
"How the hell did you get the bells?" Sakura shouted. "You're the dead last, Sasuke should have gotten the bells. You cheater!"
"Thank you for the compliment, Sakura," I nodded graciously.
"Hn," Sasuke shot me a darker than usual look.
"That wasn't a compliment, loser!" she shouted yet again.
"Any ninja worthy of the name would take it as one," Kakashi interjected. "Shinobi fight to win, not by any rules. Cheating is expected and condoned. Now, I need to visit the hospital, we'll meet tomorrow on this training ground at eight. Later!" he waved at us before flickering away. Stepping out of Sasuke's line of sight - Sakura was already asking him for a date - I flickered away myself, heading home and popping out a clone whose almost immediate demise spread the news that I'd passed the test and was hungry.
Surprisingly, the clones who'd gathered and prepared food did a pretty good job of it, and when they popped, I realized that what I was eating was the ninth attempt - they'd taste-tested the prior ones and this was the very first feast that was more than merely edible. There was an awful lot of precise work involved in cooking, it turned out, but it was almost frightening, how quickly I was improving. The gathering of edible plants and hunting for meat was something even I managed to learn during the academy, though I had some ways yet to go before I was efficient at it. The spices, however, I'd had to buy - but I realized that I didn't mind. After all, soon it would be their money financing my shopping sprees.
There wasn't much more to the day. I worked myself hard with the chakra weights, driving myself to exhaustion. A pair of clones had to carry me home, but I was very satisfied. Everything was going even better than expected, I was improving with remarkable speed, I could almost feel the increased strength and better chakra control with every breath. Tomorrow I'd see if the shadow-insects left with Sasuke had found anything, and I was determined to learn and master all the war-academy jutsu and techniques in a single week, in addition to everything else I was working on. Small, discrete and achievable goals, each a marker on my way to being the best of them all. Despite the fatigue and the aching muscles, I went to sleep with a smile.