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Chapter Seven: Childhood's End

I'd sail across the ocean

I'd walk a hundred miles

If I could make it to the end

Oh Just to see a smile

Xx-xX

To say that Naruto was disappointed by the standards of the academy would be quite the understatement. Naruto hated the slow pace of learning in the academy, more so because he already knew all the things they were going over, while he knew that the reason he hated it so much was because he had studied more than most people if not all the people in Konoha, it failed to dampen his anger at how boring his classes were.

It had gotten to the point that he had started working on his personal project in whatever capacity he could instead of paying attention to the classes, this led to several incidents were Iruka or Mizuki or both scolded him for not paying attention, which at the start he apologized for and told them he already knew what they were teaching, but after the fifth time in two days it had happened, he had raised his voice and told them in no uncertain terms that when they decided to teach something useful that he would pay attention to what they taught and that they should focus their attention on the students that needed or wanted their help instead of him.

This had earned him four scolding's, the first had been from Shizue when she had found a note in his home state he was misbehaving and antagonistic towards the instructors, which had led to Hiashi and his wife followed by Tsume scolding him, he had tried to plead his case, but they had not given him any chance to.

Naruto had the following day been called to the Hokage's office, where he had once more been told of for his behavior and been told to focus on his lessons even if he already knew most or all of it and found it boring.

Naruto had with this episode experienced the first time where he felt that the adults in his life was being unreasonable towards him and not allowing him to justify himself due to his age, due to his anger Naruto had not spoken a lot with the adults and even avoid dinner with them for a week following the scolding's.

During that week Naruto had decided to simply send a clone to the academy since he still found the lessons useless and refused the waste his own time on it when he could be working on improving himself or learning something useful.

After that week Naruto started eating dinner at the Hyuuga and Inuzuka homes again, but apparently it was clear to the adults that something had changed in the relations between themselves and Naruto, though Naruto only found out he had not hidden it as well as he had hoped when Tsume sat him down one day for a talk.

''Naruto, as you probably know, I don't like to beat around the bush so I'll just come out a say it'' Tsume started as the two were seated across from each other in the kitchen of the Inuzuka home ''Clearly something has changed between you and the adults in your life since the incident with the academy, and I would like to know why and what you think could be done to change it, cause it is clear to us that something has changed''

Naruto first looked away as the pushed down the anger that surfaced when he felt like he was being spoken down to, taking a deep breath to settle himself he turned back towards Tsume and looked straight into her eyes ''I find it kind of ironic that you now want to listen to me and have me explain myself so to speak, since when I wanted to do so, you weren't interested in listening to me'' Naruto said only the slight frown on his face hinting at his state of mind.

Tsume's eyebrows raised in surprise which was also visible on the rest of her face, Naruto just continued to stare at her, the frown on his face lessening over time until his face became neutral.

''While I at the time did not know that the others had scolded you as well, I still stand by what I said'' Tsume stated her voiced raised slightly before continuing ''You do not have any parents at home to help guide you between what is wrong and right, and as a child, like all children you need that guidance to turn out well adjusted for society''

''I am more than well aware of the fact that I do not have any parents, thank you very much. But you are making a fundamental mistake in your assumptions'' Naruto said he voice increasing in volume as alongside Tsume's

''Oh yeah, and what is it I am making a fundamental mistake about, cause from what I can see you are acting like a petulant child'' Tsume said anger starting to be visible in her voice and on her face, and not only due to the volume of her voice going up.

''You are assuming I am still a child, I haven't been a child since I realized what the looks all the villages gave me meant, since I realized that I was nothing to this village but unwanted, unloved, hated, despised, do you have any idea what it does to a person at the age of four that the general consent of those around you is that the world would be a better place if you just died or disappeared? That your mere existence could drive people to such feelings? That even though you try your best to not let it get to you and you do your best to focus on the few people that accept you, but the knowledge and feelings are always there in the back of your mind gnawing away at your happy moments? To then have all the adults in your life refuse to listen to your attempts to explain why you reacted in a certain way because they see you as a child acting out!''

Naruto ranted angrily, with tears running down his cheeks yet he still refused to look away from Tsume, who ended up looking away when Naruto finished, she now had tears in her eyes herself, after a few seconds she seemed to make a decision as she stood up, picked up Naruto and sat him on her laps while hugging him to her.

''I am sorry'' She whispered softly, Naruto could hear a voice trembling slightly, so he decided to return the hug, the two sat like that for a while before Tsume spoke again.

''While I am clearly not perfect, no one is, I will try my best to always listen to you if anything comes up in the future, but I would like to ask you to come and find someone to talk to when things bother you, it doesn't have to be me of cause but I will always be willing to lend an ear, but you should also know that if you don't tell me, I won't know, after all, I am not a Yamanaka''

Naruto gave a small chuckle while nodding against her shoulder ''Please don't share this with anyone else'' Naruto said and even to himself he sounded vulnerable at that moment.

''I promise'' Tsume said before planting a kiss on the top of his head, getting a small smile out of the blond ninja to be.

Xx-xX

It was not until half a year into Naruto and Kiba's time at the academy that they started teaching practical lessons, on those days Naruto decided to suffer through spending a day at the academy on the off chance his clone got hit hard enough to dispel it.

To the surprise of many of their classmates, though not Kiba and Hinata, Naruto dominated that physical aspect of their training, just like he had come to dominate any test they were given on the lessons they took, even Iruka found Naruto a challenge due to his unorthodox fighting style.

Naruto's domination of the class work had earned him the ire of several of the civilian students along with a black-haired Uchiha who was convinced that his clan made him superior to those around him, at least his arrogance gave others that impression.

Though Naruto would never admit it, he took a lot of pleasure in seeing his friend if not brother Kiba proving fast enough that he was now performing as well as the Uchiha, Naruto had even found a way to motivate Kiba to take some of the more literary aspects of his education more serious by rewarding Kiba with tips or tricks he could use to improve his performance against the Uchiha when the two was made to practice with each other, which happened frequently since Kiba and Hinata were the only other students physically around Sasuke's level of skill and physique.

Iruka had taken to rope Naruto into helping his fellow students since Naruto had proved himself good at facilitating his fellow students' improvement, though this also caused some sparks in the class since only the children of Konoha ninja did not bristle at Naruto when he tried to help them.

The class had actually gotten to a point where the two halves did not play well with each other, and the civilian students hard formed cliques that tried to bully non-civilian students with superior numbers, it had even gotten so bad Naruto and Kiba had overheard Tsume curse about insufferable civilians with no knowledge of reality.

Iruka and Mizuki had tried several times to try and bridge the gap between the two student bodies, but the civilian's children remained unwilling to associate with Naruto, while the children of non-civilians were unwilling to break up relations with Naruto, looking down on the civilian children and in turn their parents for the skewered opinion of Naruto.

It was not only in Naruto's class there was a divide between the people of Konoha, but Naruto had also noticed that there were more altercations between Uchiha clan members and non-members, or at least he saw a lot more happen. He saw one at least once a week and it was clear to Naruto that the rift forming between the Uchiha and the rest of Konoha was not being mended as the Uchiha had started to mainly interact with the rest of the city as its police force, a police force that seemed rather prone to escalating conflict rather than solving it peacefully.

But while Naruto did spare these situations some consideration he did not see anything he could reasonably do without putting himself in a compromised situation and that was not something he was currently willing to do, given that even any decent Chuunin, of which Konoha had an abundance, could take him out.

Instead, he kept his focus on his work into discovering as much about chakra as he possibly could, he had managed to progress rather well on his thesis, at least in his own opinion.

He had worked out that chakra changed qualities depending on which state it was, so while chakra was technically capable of performing techniques no matter its state, at least in his tests of having used the different state he could get his chakra into and performing his wind technique and clone technique along with his chakra control exercises, he had found the closer the state his chakra was in compared to what he wanted it to perform, the less chakra was needed, so when he tried to perform his Air Bullet, a technique that created a ball of condensed air. With his chakra in wind nature state compared to healing chakra state, there was a huge difference in performance and the chakra needed to perform the technique.

He had also found that chakra, which was a mix of two different sources of energy or power, that being mental and physical, took of different aspects depending on how much each source made up for the creation of the chakra, Naruto had learned that Healing chakra, benefitted far more from drawing on the physical aspects than the mental aspects of the energy which had come to no surprise for Naruto, though he found that his shadow clones performed the best when they got an equal distribution of both.

This was something Naruto had to keep in mind because he noticed that for the most part, the Kyuubi was releasing physically charged chakra into his system, so he needed to balance that out by drawing more on his mental energy.

These revelations had also helped immensely with his chakra control, to the point where he now had a functional self-restoration technique, it effectively flooded his entire system with healing chakra, which he for a lack of better wording programmed to focus on restoring his body to optimal status.

The best thing about the technique was he could draw heavily on the leaked chakra from Kyuubi for this since he only needed to change the state of chakra since it was already heavily tilted towards the physical aspect of chakra.

Xx-xX

Naruto could not help the smile on his face, he had just gotten Hana to teach him how to do the replacement and transformation technique that the academy taught, though he was not supposed to be learning it for at least another year.

All it had taken was a promise to help her figure out what her elemental nature was and afterward a way to train it, which was why Naruto quickly took put a small piece of paper and presented it to Hana, instructing her to channel chakra into it.

The paper turned to dust a crumbled away ''It would appear you have an affinity for earth, earth is the best element for defensive techniques both for personal protection but also the negation of wide area techniques, its weakness is lightning nature which focuses on penetration power, while it is strong against water nature'' Naruto explained before he gave the basic instructions for training earth nature which involved turning a leaf to stone.

Naruto happily joined Hana in the training since he was curious as to how earth nature felt, but even after a week, with Hana having shown some progress, Naruto had proved unable to grasp it exactly only getting the leaf to turn slightly harder, but he had not been able to feel exactly what state his chakra took on when doing so.

When Kiba had found out what Naruto had taught Hana he had asked, repeatedly until Naruto agreed, to find out what nature affinity he had, turned out he had a fire affinity, leading Naruto to teach guide him to making embers appear in his leaf until the entire thing was burned.

When Tsume had found them for the first time sitting in her yard practicing their affinity, she had at first thought they were doing chakra control exercises, but when she found out they were practicing their affinity, she had first sputtered for several seconds about brats doing stuff to advanced for them, before giving a hearty laugh and telling Naruto not to go to overboard in what he taught them, to which he had responded that he only knew two techniques, one which fit neither Kiba or Hana's affinity and the second which neither would have any use for given its heavy chakra requirement.

''At the rate you are going kiddo, you will end up graduating from the academy before Hana'' Tsume had replied with laughter in her voice, while Hana sputtered slightly with indignation, which turned into a pout when she remembered she was being taught something normally not learned until far later into one's ninja career by Naruto, at least that was what Naruto assumed happen from the half pout half glare he was sent by the older girl.

Xx-xX

Naruto was currently panting lightly from the effort he had put into the part he had just had with Hinata, the girl had improved at an astounding rate, even her parents were impressed and pleased by the grown of their eldest daughter, Hinata on the other hand was lying on her back on the ground drawing deep breaths in order to try and stabilize the rapid breathing.

Both children were covered in sweat, and had a few forming bruises, though Naruto quickly took care of his own but triggering this self-healing technique, giving a sigh of relief as it took away the aches and pains he was feeling from their spar.

He walked over to Hinata and kneeled beside her before he started healing her bruises, the girl blushed slightly as he moved he hand around her body hovering barely an inch over her clothing and skin, though she too gave a sigh of relief as his treatment took away the discomfort she was feeling.

''Thank you, Naruto'' Hinata said, ever the soft-spoken girl.

''You are very welcome Hinata and thank you for the spar. At the rate you are improving you will be beating me before new year'' Naruto said giving her a happy smile.

Hinata blushed slightly at the compliment before giving Naruto a happy smile at the praise ''I don't think I would be improving so fast if you had not told father you thought a more flexible variation of the Gentle Fist would not fit me more'' Hinata replied getting a bashful look from Naruto.

''Even if I suggested something I thought would suit you better, it is your hard work and effort that has led to your current skill'' Naruto said before giving the girl a pat on the head, which had her blushing slightly again.

''I see you two are enjoying your time together, how did your spar go?'' The voice of Hiashi called out drawing the children attention.

If Naruto did not know better, he would have thought the older male had a glint in his left eye, but with a mental shake of the head he cleared that thought away

''It went very well, your daughter is very gifted at her current style and her hard work shows through with the amount of improvement she is making'' Naruto said, getting a nod of agreement from Hiashi.

''Well the two of you better come along, dinner will be ready soon and afterward, I would like to continue our lessons Naruto'' Hiashi stated before turning to walk back towards his home, the two children swiftly followed him both giving verbal acknowledgments.

End of Chapter Seven

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