Tale of the Setting Sun
Chapter 3: "Dream and Determination"
"And the winner is...Sasuke!"
As the watching students cheered, Naruto, lying flat on his back, looked up at the sky. It was a nice day, he thought, with only a few clouds in the sky. After a few seconds passed, dredging up the last of his willpower, he clambered up to his feet, ignoring how sore his body felt. Brushing the dirt off of his pants, he walked to the edge of the wooden platform and leaped heavily down.
"The next bout will be between...Sakura and Ino!" He heard Iruka call out, and two squabbling girls jumped up to the platform.
"Nice one, Naruto," a boy called out. Without responding, Naruto passed him by, but not before he heard the boy add, "You lasted almost ten seconds up there!"
The children standing near them laughed, and feeling the tips of his ears beginning to burn, Naruto abruptly picked up pace and ran back inside the Academy building.
His footsteps pounded loudly through the hallway, and even though he knew he should be practicing how to run without making a sound, he couldn't bring himself to care. The door to his classroom opened with a clatter, and straining on his tip-toes, he grabbed his bag from his cubby near the end.
Naruto knew it was wrong to leave when Academy wasn't even over, but the only thing they were doing for the rest of the day was the one-on-one taijutsu fights. No one would notice him gone...except maybe Nogi and her friends, anyways.
Just as he neared the open doors to the front exit, Naruto heard the sound of adult conversation, and skidded to a halt. His heart pounding in his ears, he looked right and left, looking for a place to hide. As the sound grew closer and closer, he chose the first thing he'd noticed, dashing into the niche between the door and the wall.
"...the students coming along?"
"They're very promising. We're conducting this year's first taijutsu tournament today, and they're all performing excellently."
Naruto's eyes widened, as he recognized Iruka's voice. Hadn't he just been back at the arena? What was he doing here now? Had he noticed Naruto was gone?
Unable to put aside his rising curiosity, he put an eye to the crack of the door – and then seeing the person beside Iruka, he felt his heart skip a beat.
The Hokage was standing right in front of the very door he was now quivering behind.
"Ah, Fugaku's younger son is in your class, no? Quite precocious, isn't he?"
"Actually, while I'd hate to see him go, I think that if he continues to perform as well as he is doing now, transferring him to a more advanced class wouldn't be out of the question."
"They are brothers after all..." the Hokage chuckled. There was a short pause, as the Hokage seemed to be surveying the Academy building. For a horrifying instant, Naruto thought that the elderly ninja's gaze had paused on the sliver of his face, and had to fight the urge to run. But then he turned away, and Naruto felt some of the feeling begin to return to his face.
They resumed talking, but began to move away in the direction of where the other children were, and after a short while, Naruto finally came out from his hiding spot.
His head turning back and forth rapidly to survey the empty lot, Naruto ran as fast as he could, only coming to a stop when he reached the cover of a patch of trees. Panting, he rested for a few minutes against the trunk of a cherry blossom tree.
Two weeks had passed since he'd joined the Academy, and Naruto had quickly learned that it wasn't just basic ninja knowledge that he was behind in. Many of the other students were from clans or had ninja relatives, and they had been training since well before joining the Academy. It was all Naruto could do to keep up with the daily physical exercise, and he was completely out of his depth when it came to actual taijutsu. While the other children were flipping through the air and flowing from one stance to the next, Naruto was still struggling to follow along without landing flat on his back. He desperately needed more instruction, but Iruka only had so much time to spend on him before he had to move on to the other children.
Iruka had told Naruto and the few others who hadn't ever received training before that they would catch up soon, but lately, he hadn't been able to bring himself to even look up at the Academy sign.
He'd sworn to become Hokage, but the way he was now, he thought he'd be lucky to even graduate.
If only, Naruto thought. If only he had someone outside of the Academy to teach him. Then maybe he wouldn't be so behind...
He shook his head wildly. Jumping up to his feet, Naruto smacked his cheeks with his hands. If he had time to feel sorry for himself, he thought, he might as well spend it practicing.
Drawing himself up to his full height, he turned to face the tree he had been leaning against. Emptying his mind, he felt his body relax. Adjusting his footing and planting them firmly into the ground, he curled his hands into fists the way he'd learned in class – and then he punched his right fist into the empty air. Then, drawing that one back, he punched with his left fist. Right. Left. Right. Left.
Over and over, Naruto punched repeatedly into the air, pushing his body to remember the motion – until suddenly, he realized with a jolt, that several hours had passed: The sun had set, and the temperature had dropped.
He was rummaging through the bushes looking for his bag, when he heard the sound of footsteps and froze. Reacting on instinct, for the second time that day, Naruto ducked, trusting the shadows to complete his concealment.
To his dismay, the footsteps stopped at a place not too far from where he was hiding.
"This looks like a great place to talk, doesn't it, Izumo?" It was Iruka again, and compulsively, Naruto stepped back even further into the bushes' shadow.
"...sure?" It was an unfamiliar male voice this time. "What'd you want me for?"
"I was just thinking – it's a pity the Konoha Archive Library is closed to civilians, isn't it?"
"What? Of course it is. We wouldn't want sensitive village information falling into the hands of just anybody."
"But it's not just that, right? There's the jutsu section, with scrolls on taijutsu, genjutsu, ninjutsu..."
"Well, yes. But civilians would just hurt themselves without formal instruction."
"But if that section was open to – say – Academy students, that'd help them with their studies, don't you think?"
"Are you feeling okay, Iruka?" The voice sounded annoyed. "Of course it's open to Academy students. Not that my little sister seems to care..."
"Oh yes, I forgot! They'll need an Academy instructor's permission for more advanced-level scrolls, but basic and fundamental scrolls are freely accessible to students. The Konoha Archive Library sure comes in handy. Don't you agree, Izumo?"
"What in the...wait...this is Kotetsu, isn't it?" said the other voice suspiciously. "Was that supposed to be your impression of Iruka? I'm right, aren't I?"
"Uh...ahaha yeah, you, you caught me."
"Absolutely terrible, man."
"I'm a bit rusty, I suppose."
"Rusty? That doesn't even cover it. Iruka doesn't stomp around like that, he kinda walks with – with his hips moving like this."
There was a rustling sound.
"Uh...like this?"
"Yeah, exactly! Spot on. See, you can do this..."
The voices faded away.
After a few minutes, his heart still thudding in his chest, Naruto finally jumped out. It'd been nerve-wracking hiding the whole time, but he couldn't believe his luck at coming across such a vital piece of information – the Library! That was it!
His mind racing with the possibilities, Naruto rushed home. If he had stopped even for a minute to retrace his footsteps, he may have found the conversation rather odd, as though performed for his benefit rather than a truly organic dialogue; instead, he turned in for the night extra early, practically flying under his bedcovers in his excitement. As tends to happen however, he found himself watching the glow of his alarm clock for half the night, willing time to speed up to whole while, and when he finally woke up the next morning – not having even realized when he had fallen asleep – he bustled around his apartment getting ready, with more energy than he'd had the entire past week combined.
That day's Academy lesson was thankfully conducted indoors, with a primary focus on reading, writing and math, and as soon as classes were over, Naruto was the first one out the door.
He'd seen and passed by the entrance to the Archive Library before, of course; it was near his home, built right under the Hokage monument. But the sign had always looked so official, and the long doors too foreboding.
Climbing up the stone stairway, he hesitated before the entrance. Reaching out with a hand, he pushed the doors, and despite their size, they opened silently.
Inside, a bored-looking chūnin was sitting behind a black counter, and beyond that – Naruto felt his eyes widen as he saw a huge expanse of bookshelves, with tomes and scrolls crammed into every open space from top to bottom. There was even another stairway that led downstairs, to a whole other floor of bookshelves that stretched from wall to wall.
"Pass?" the chūnin grunted, not looking up from the book in his hand.
Naruto froze. His hands tightening over the strap of his bag, he looked down at his toes, wondering if he'd misheard Iruka (or Kotetsu, he supposed).
"I..." he started out. At the sound of his voice, the chūnin looked up, and as recognition flitted across his face, for a second, Naruto thought he was going to yell at him to get out. But to his surprise, the chūnin put down his book and scribbled something on a piece of paper, before ripping it out and giving it to him.
"Here's your Academy student pass," he said. Naruto hesitantly reached for it, wondering wildly whether the chūnin would snatch it back at the last second with a sneer. But his fingers wrapped around the paper, and the chūnin let go. He returned to his book.
Slowly, Naruto turned around, looking out once more at the bookshelves.
"First floor only," the chūnin added in his bored voice. Nodding, Naruto shot off before the chūnin could take back the pass.
With his head wrapped in his scarf, he'd sneaked a few times into the public library before, but that had held nowhere near the amount of scrolls and books that he saw here. And it was far quieter here: There weren't any bored, mischievous children parked here by their parents, or feeble old women yelling at the librarian that their dog was missing.
Naruto came to a stop before a bookshelf marked "Academy Level," and craning his head back to scan the labels on the scrolls, he let out a slow breath. He'd learned the characters for 'Taijutsu,' 'Ninjutsu,' and 'Genjutsu' just a few days ago – and they were all here. Spotting a stool nearby, he dragged it over and climbed on top.
On the very first shelf, the very first scroll was 'Taijutsu for Beginners.' Naruto reached out and pulling it out, was surprised to feel how heavy it was. Gingerly, he unfurled the thick paper – and let out another shaking breath at the sight of the detailed illustrations. His gaze raced from each stance to the next, taking note of each individual adjustment of the feet and hands...
Naruto began to shake, and not trusting himself, he carefully rolled the scroll back up. His eyes felt hot, and he had to remind himself that ninja didn't cry. But it took all the willpower he had to force back the tears, and only when his eyes were completely dry did he allow himself to open the scroll up again.
He knew, now. These scrolls would be his teachers. His parents. His friends.
One year later...
"The next bout will be between...Naruto and Nogi!"
A girl wearing her hair back in a ponytail stepped out nervously onto the wooden platform. The platform, which had been smooth and unblemished at the beginning of the year, was now scarred with numerous marks of past fights, serving as a reminder of how far they had come since then.
Opposite her, a young boy with red hair leaped lightly onto the platform, making only the slightest sound as he landed. He stood relaxed and comfortably, with his hands hanging in front of him. His name was Uzumaki Naruto.
Nogi hated him.
At first, it'd been fun just because he was so easy to make fun of with his stupid hair, and she never got in trouble for picking on him, because nobody else liked him either. When her papa came home late smelling of beer and yelled at her mama and told Nogi to pick up her "damn" toys, there was nothing that made her feel better than running outside and taunting him with Funa and Yasu.
Naruto never said anything back, but he never cried either, so it was easy to pretend that he wasn't – well – one of them.
He was weak too: Nogi always relished her matchups against him in taijutsu, and always used extra force than necessary when pushing him down to the ground, even though she always got in trouble with Iruka.
But gradually, at some point over the year, Nogi had suddenly found that he wasn't quite so easy to push down anymore. His awkward movements at the beginning of the year were gone, and one day, he even managed to connect a kick. It was stronger than she'd expected, and she was sent flying off the platform.
Her friends were immediately at her side helping her up, but when she looked up, Naruto was already getting off the platform, without a second glance at her.
Nogi hated him.
It was now the end of the year taijutsu evaluation. She lowered into her preferred starting stance, a compact and defensive one that still gave her enough maneuverability to jab out and go on the offensive in an instant. She hadn't fought against Naruto since he'd kicked her, but she knew that she couldn't underestimate him anymore. The only one who seemed to be able to knock down the boy nowadays was Sasuke, and well, nobody beat Sasuke.
"Begin!"
Nogi tensed up, readying herself. But to her annoyance, Naruto didn't move. He just stood there, watching her with a blank look on his face, and after a few seconds, she couldn't hold it in anymore. His red hair taunted her, filling her with anger, and she charged at him. Her hands were outstretched, and she threw herself forward – when he stepped aside. She felt something smash down on her back, and grunting in pain, she fell flat on her face. Before she could get back on her feet, she felt Naruto kick down on her side and shove her off the platform. She landed roughly with a loud thud, and coughed as a cloud of dirt erupted around her.
"The winner is Naruto!"
Nogi forced her sore body to turn around, and seeing Naruto's back as he walked off the platform, she felt hot tears begin to form in her eyes.
She really hated him.
After the year's evaluation, when Iruka took Naruto aside and asked whether he wanted to be transferred to an upper-level class, he answered 'yes' without a second's hesitation. Instead of being in the top of his class, as he was now, he would probably have to return to being in the bottom-most rung again. But Naruto didn't mind. He knew that with patience and hard-work, his teachers would guide him once more.
"I'm glad it worked out," was Iruka's last remark to Naruto, though he didn't quite understand what the chūnin meant.
That winter, Naruto spent even more time in the Archives than before, determined to get an early start on his studies. And finally when springtime came and the Academy opened again, he found himself standing before yet another class of strange faces that looked back at him with sullen eyes. Steeling himself with a blank look, he prepared himself for yet another year of insufferable snickering and taunting.
However, to his surprise, his new classmates were slightly different. They were older than him, being nine or ten years old, and he found that to some extent, they had grown out of the ignorant cruelty of their childhood. They were at the age when they began to think for themselves instead of blindly following what their parents told them to. But at the same time, nobody approached him. Naruto wasn't an outsider, but he wasn't one of them. He was just...something that sat beside them in their classroom and sparred with them outside.
Well, that was fine with Naruto. He'd gotten along just fine without any friends in his first class, and the newfound peace in his current class was more than enough for him. He had his teachers in the Archives. They taught him and kept him company. And even more than that, they were his friends, and Naruto didn't have to hide anything from them.
Naruto had two secrets that he'd never told anyone else: The first was that he felt two types of chakra running through his body. Of course he couldn't see any of it, but if he had to describe them in terms of how they felt, he'd say the first one felt yellow, and that the second felt red. He had never tried directly using the second chakra; he'd found out early on that so long as he focused on his yellow chakra, he could easily direct it to gather wherever he wanted. The red chakra was much wilder and much more stubborn, and sometimes disrupted his chakra, making his ninjutsu fail. After some deliberation and several headaches, he had put aside his red chakra, focusing instead on controlling his yellow chakra.
The second secret was that when he nudged his red chakra, a curious black seal appeared on his abdomen. It looked similar to the symbol on the shoulders of the ninja uniform, with squiggly lines coming out like the rays of a sun, but there wasn't much more Naruto could decipher about it. After all, in the Academy, they hadn't learned anything beyond the bare bones of fūinjutsu, let alone anything about putting seals on a person.
The implications of there being a seal on his body were initially chilling; why was it there, who had put it there, and what was it sealing? Was it perhaps the source of his red chakra? To his disappointment, there was nothing useful on the subject of advanced fūinjutsu in the Archives, and when he tried to reason it out in his mind, all it did was give him a headache.
Thinking about it rationally, Naruto would have expected himself to do everything that he could to figure out the seal. And yet, strangely enough, he felt no compulsion to do so. On the contrary, he found the topic of the seal even slipping from his mind, sometimes to the point that he had to stop and think about what he was looking for in the Archives. It was a strange thing. But aside from the occasional headache, it didn't seem to affect him in any tangibly negative manner – nor was there anyone he could've asked about it in the first place.
In the end, after several weeks of frustration, he put it aside for good and stopped thinking about it at all.
And so, the months passed. Every morning, Naruto woke up early and, after his routine sets of pushups and pull-ups, as recommended by a body-training scroll, he practiced building up chakra by walking up the walls of his apartment. He also began to spend his mornings meditating and concentrating on feeling the flow of his chakra running through his body.
It was hard to believe that there had once been a time when he didn't know what chakra was: It was the spirit of his very self circulating throughout his body.
In the afternoons, Naruto attended the Academy and learned about chakra and hand seals, mastering basic techniques. He studied how to set traps, how to disguise his own presence, and how to eliminate as much sound as possible from his movements. He learned how to detonate explosive tags remotely with chakra, and could release himself from all basic genjutsu. He was smaller than everyone else in his class so he didn't win quite as easily as he had before, but he made sure none of his losses were in vain. Instead, he learned how to weave in and out to confuse your opponent, and how to use his opponents' movements and body weight against them.
And in the evenings, Naruto hurried to meet his teachers and friends in the Archive Library. In return for his loyalty, they granted to him their secrets, teaching him the lore of how jutsu worked, of how one used hand seals to manipulate how much chakra one used to fuel a technique. He learned that while the Academy taught them the traditional way to use seals and jutsu, a true master of ninjutsu could perform a complex jutsu with just a single hand seal.
Naruto had become such a frequent visitor at the Archives, that eventually, the chūnin had stopped paying such close attention to him. He didn't want to lose their trust, but sometimes when he thought it was safe, he slipped out of the Academy section and went into the higher level jutsu shelves. It was there that he discovered that a technique called the Kage Bunshin (Shadow clone technique) existed, which's usefulness far outstripped that of the simpler version they learned in the Academy. Determined to master it, he slipped it back with him into the Academy section. Then, he quickly read through the instructions, hiding it behind a scroll about the applications of water jutsu in agriculture.
Reading through it, it became readily apparent as to the reason why they didn't teach it at the Academy: Unlike the illusionary clones, the shadow clones took up substantially more chakra – it was an amount that the typical person couldn't afford to expend. However, in his experimentations with his different types of chakra, Naruto had come to realize that his chakra reserves far exceeded that of any ordinary ninja's levels. And so, with extensive practice in the forest, he was eventually able to successfully summon several shadow clones.
Furthering his studies, he also began to read about chakra theory. He read about chakra affinity, and from a test with special chakra paper, learned that he had affinity for the wind element. From then on, following the rather cryptic diagrams provided in the scrolls, he began to experiment with molding his yellow chakra, observing how its properties changed depending on how he manipulated it. When Naruto first succeeded in changing the form of his chakra into being as sharp and thin as possible, and then released it, he found himself being blasted off of his feet as a strong gust of wind exploded in the area around him. Though it was exhausting, it was also exhilarating, and Naruto resolved to add elemental manipulation to his daily exercises, determined to master it.
In this manner, three years slowly passed.
When Naruto was ten, he graduated from the Academy at the top of his class and was put into Team 7 with two other genins: A girl named Mayu Kamizuki and a boy named Rai Hagane. Mayu, a small forgettable girl with brown pig-tails, was timid and seemed entirely too afraid of Naruto to talk in his presence. Instead, she hid behind their other teammate Rai, a tan dark-haired boy whose face was somewhat marred by a scar that ran strikingly across his left cheek. Neither seemed altogether pleased about being in the same group as the village pariah.
Their jōnin teacher was the renowned shinobi 'Copy Ninja Kakashi.'