New Yellow Flash

Chapter 9

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto; Kishimoto does.

"I must admit, Uzumaki-san, I am greatly surprised you would seek me for your training. May I ask why you should specifically ask for me?"

"Tsunade baa-chan said you were the best wind user for teaching me. You can call me Naruto, by the way."

"Ah yes, my apologies. When you've been in my position for so long it becomes almost impossible to drop the formalities Uzumaki-san." Naruto had Tsunade arrange to have Danzo deliver a message asking for the man to assist in his training at the training ground early in the morning today and the man had almost immediately returned with a reply in the positive. The mysterious nature of the elderly adviser was something that discomforted Naruto slightly, regardless of how he had been treated thus far; after all, here was someone he had never heard of who was an adviser to several Kage all while being the most accomplished wind user in the village according to Tsunade. "I must admit, I am somewhat surprised she would recommend you to me. I do not believe it a secret that she despises me."

"Well, she knows that you never supported her getting the position and are not a fan of her but I suppose she still recognizes your abilities."

"Fair enough; I would be willing to admit that, though she may not be fit for the position of Hokage, she would be valuable as the head of medic-nin and training ninja who may not be suited for other positions. Anyway, forgive me if I strayed away from the point. I am sure you are very busy these days, especially with the Kage Summit coming up in the Land of Iron shortly." It was official now, and not really a tightly kept secret, that there would be the second Kage Summit in history in a matter of weeks in an effort to lower tensions. It seemed now that all of Konoha was preparing itself for war, even as it rebuilt itself. Priority was now given to any areas that would offer a military advantage, with economic motives taking second place especially as the market district was mostly rebuilt. Residential life was in shambles, however, and it seemed like it would stay that way for quite a while longer.

"I guess but I'm not really going to be doing anything; just standing beside her as a guard." Tsunade had been very clear that he was expected to behave as a guard and only as a guard, not interjecting no matter what was said. His input was going to be his appearance and nothing more. For some reason, that was not enough to ease his nerves about what the Tsuchikage and Raikage would say about him at the meeting.

"That is understandable; after all, a Kage Summit should truly be between the Kage. However, I do believe her taking you is a strong sign for the village that we will not back down. A very sensible decision, surprising for her I would say. I would not be shocked if she were taking you for some additional, alternative reason that only she knows. Anyway, allow me to delay no longer. Please describe your issue with fuuton."

"Right. I started learning how to use my wind element not too long ago, before my fight with Kakazu. I really only had one goal in learning it: adding wind chakra to my Rasengan. At first I thought I succeeded but whenever I use the jutsu it hurts my hand and arm. Tsunade told me not to worry about attempting the jutsu any longer because it could cause permanent damage to my ability to mold chakra. However, I know that there has to be a reason that it is not working. Something that Tsunade and Kakashi missed."

"Ah, so, I would guess then that Tsunade would not know the exact reason you sought my aid?" The man developed a very slight smirk on his face that vanished almost as quickly as it developed. Naruto guessed that the man was somewhat happy to know that there was some dissension between him and the Hokage that the elder did not support.

"She does not know it's about the Rasenshuriken" he said, somewhat embarrassed that he was keeping it a secret from her but he knew she would worry about it too much if she knew. He would tell her after he had perfected it, assuming that it was possible. He also suspected that maybe, just maybe, Tsunade did know he was working on it but based on her prior diagnosis he would have expected her to protest more.

"Very well; now then, perform the jutsu as much as you are willing."

A small part of him was feeling kind of nervous about performing the jutsu due to Tsunade's warning; sure, it was easy to use it when it felt like a necessity to get something done like destroying the Kanabi Bridge but this was different. Naruto created a shadow clone who stood beside him as Danzo kept a watchful eye over both of them. With no further hesitation he created a Rasengan in his right hand which his clone began adding wind chakra to as he worked to keep it stable. The power began to build quickly as a roaring sound filled the air. A familiar burning sensation began to stir in his hand causing him to wince ever so slightly.

"I believe I have seen enough" the man said, causing Naruto to allow the jutsu to dissipate and for his clone to dispel. "You see, there is actually a very simple explanation as to why performing this jutsu would currently be harmful for you. I must admit, I am surprised that neither Kakashi nor Tsunade realized it. Perhaps the unusual nature of shadow clones or their unfamiliarity with wind chakra misguided them. Tell me, what would happen if one of your clones were to use a jutsu against you or if you were to substitute in front of one of your own jutsu? Would you be physically harmed by the attack?"

He had never really thought about it before but supposed that there was no particular reason the answer should be no. "Yeah, I guess so?"

"Correct; you see, once chakra has left the body, it is unfair really to label it as that person's chakra. It knows no loyalty and can harm anyone, be it the jutsu user or their opponent. It is easy to understand the theory behind what you are attempting: your real body creates the Rasengan and maintains stability as the shadow clone adds wind chakra to the jutsu. By doing this, you are dividing the responsibilities between two selves and making the jutsu much easier to perform. This is misguided due to overlooking the ability of your own chakra to harm yourself. When the clone adds wind chakra, most of it is undoubtedly going into the jutsu however there is a residual amount draining into the opened tenketsu of your hand. This is what is causing you to feel pain from its use. Of course, there is a chance that this interpretation is incorrect but I believe it perfectly fits the uniqueness of the situation as well as the pain you are feeling."

"That makes a lot of sense" Naruto said, usually not delving too much into chakra theory but understanding the way Danzo described it and believing it to be a plausible description. "Do you think there's a way to fix it?"

"It should be simple enough. The issue arises from the fact that you are attempting to use a shadow clone to add chakra into the jutsu. Therefore, you need to eliminate the clone from the process. I would guess that you need to use the shadow clone due to not being proficient enough in wind jutsu at this stage. Tell me the extent of your wind training."

"Umm… Kakashi had me split a leaf and then had me work to keep a waterfall split. Then I worked on the jutsu."

"Interesting; that does build your ability to utilize wind chakra. I wager that you should simply become more accustomed to using wind chakra in jutsu in order to develop a more natural feeling for your affinity. It is a bit overambitious to make your first jutsu in learning your affinity an S-ranked one that even your father had not managed to perfect in his life time. Your training has taught you some measure of control and exertion though has not prepared you properly for routine usage. If you would allow I will teach you a basic wind jutsu that should prove quite useful."

"Really? That'd be awesome!" he said, his eagerness at possibly learning a new ability outweighing whatever caution he had held thus far in his interaction with Danzo. Having it help him learn the Rasenshuriken in some way was definitely a very nice bonus.

"Very well. I shall show you all the hand signs this once though I am capable of performing it with merely one." The man's one hand slowly went through the signs which Naruto could recognize as being Tiger, Ox, Dog, Rabbit, Snake. "Wind Style: Great Breakthrough" he said calmly, moving his one hand ever so slightly and sending an extremely powerful gust of wind toward the nearby trees, leaving deep cuts in their trunks and causing a few to bend in the direction of the attack. "This is a very simplistic wind jutsu, but it is capable of dealing quite the blow when infused with enough wind chakra that is sufficiently controlled. I am not sure if this shall be enough to correct your problem of using wind chakra but it certainly will help."

"Right!" Naruto said, with a nod of his head and a renewed feeling of determination now that he had a very clear goal directly in front of him and a desire to master the new challenge put forth. He created fifty shadow clones who were prepared to begin attempting to learn the jutsu as quickly as possible. "Thanks a lot Danzo-sama" he said, thankful to the man for his help thus far.

"No problem; you would not mind too much if I watched the training for a while? I am quite curious about this training method." That was interesting; could there be any harm to it? Essentially, he was agreeing to allow Danzo to spy on him but it's not like the man could learn anything useful from it. After all, the shadow clone training method was exactly as described: using shadow clones to train. There were no additional hidden nuances that would be learned from observation. So, there was no real harm in assenting.

"Sure; gotta warn you that it might be pretty boring" he said, rubbing his neck as he witnessed all his clones around him being unable to create more than a slight gust of harmless wind. Definitely a big let down to go from Danzo bending trees to barely being able to create a gale, but oh well, such was the process of learning a new jutsu. Out of nowhere, he saw a man of some sort appear next to Danzo and hand the man what appeared to be tea; the man then disappeared and Danzo sat cross-legged on the ground, sipping the supposed tea. Trying to not let that distract him, he joined his clones in learning the new jutsu, determined to get it mastered within a day.

Three hours, and several hundred shadow clones later, he lay on the ground panting and covered in sweat. Truly, the jutsu had been rather easy to get a basic handle of but was somewhat difficult to control its power instead of letting it spread in too wide an area to be useful. Still, the more he practiced the wind jutsu, the more he was able to do damage. The progression was easy enough to see: from a small gale, to an obvious burst of wind, to scratching the tree line, to controlling to an extent the width of the attack and thus its concentration, and finally, to leave deep cuts in the trees. The more chakra he put into the jutsu, the more damage it seemed to do; however, at some point, it became clear that putting more chakra was having reduced benefits and became wasteful. There was still room to improve; first, he would focus on being able to use it with merely one hand-sign, then he would focus on finding the best way to be able to bend the trees back as Danzo had done.

"I've seen my best shinobi, the true elites, take approximately five days to reach the point in mastery that you are at in three hours. Your training method is extraordinary, Uzumaki-san."

"Hah, yeah, thanks" he said, sitting up and catching his breath. "It sure takes a lot out of ya though; think I'll take an hour break for lunch and then get back to it." Maybe it was not as intensive as his Rasenshuriken training had been but it was exhausting in its own right. Thankfully, this one felt a bit more rewarding due to the ability to really feel and see the progress quickly; with as many clones as he had practiced with, there was a decent chance at least that he had killed a few trees in that nearby treeline. Although, now that he thought about it, the best thing to do would probably to have clones work on the Great Breakthrough after lunch while he personally used the Hiraishin a bit and tried to get a bit of the nuances down such as lowering the chakra usage and being able to control his location within a few feet at the destination.

"If you don't mind my asking, what drives you to train so hard? If you believe that the Nations should be at peace then what use is your strength in such a world?" He had the idea that Danzo was genuinely curious but that the question was intended to make himself think of an answer as opposed to making the adviser convinced of anything. That was fine by him; ever since the fight with Pein and that sudden nomination at the council meeting he had been thinking a lot more about the reality behind being Hokage, why he wanted it, and what he would do with it.

"I guess it's kinda simple to me. I need to be as strong as possible in order to protect as many people as I can. I know that the path to peace is not easy, and maybe I don't know what obstacles will be on that path, but I need to be as prepared as I can be. The goal is not only to be at peace but to build a lasting peace, just like Jiraiya hoped."

"But how can there be a true peace when there is so much worth fighting for? Glory, honor, money, family, village, friends, loyalty? Are not all these things something which could drive a war?"

"Peace has to be seen as the most beneficial option; it needs to be ensured that, in any case, preserving peace is better than the alternative." Sure, he was not exactly sure of how that was going to be done yet, but having a basis for it in his mind was much more than he used to have. "Obviously there will still be obstacles but so long as the benefits outweigh everything else then the majority will favor peace." Now he decided to switch it up and ask Danzo a question instead. "You mentioned earlier that you saw your best shinobi take longer to learn the jutsu. Were you a sensei or trainer?"

"Uzumaki-san, please, there is no need to be so indirect with me." Of course, trying to play politics with an experienced adviser was perhaps a step or two out of his reach. Danzo seemed to have read through the question as if he had not even tried to disguise it and he had the distinct feeling that the man knew very well what he was trying to ask. It felt like they were playing a game with each other, wherein Danzo tried to get information from him and he tried to get information from Danzo, but right now he felt a little outmatched.

"If you love the village so much, why would you train shinobi and have them operate illegally? Don't you think that's dangerous?"

"Why? Because some missions are too risky for the Hokage to send valued ANBU on or it'd be too catastrophic if the shinobi was caught and revealed to be working for Konoha. My Root would take these missions instead and, should anything have gone wrong, Konoha would not be connected. Dangerous? How so? My shinobi were trained from a young age to know one thing: loyalty to me. So long as they were loyal to me, they were loyal to the village and, if they were not loyal, they were eliminated." The man's voice remained perfectly calm, as it almost always seemed to be.

"Don't you think some of the missions are too dangerous for all the time it takes you to train them? Orochimaru could have easily killed Sai when you sent him to make your offer."

"Perhaps; however, it was our only chance at getting to Orochimaru. I believed we needed to make a move as the time-table Jiraiya provided for when Orochimaru could transfer bodies was reaching its end." In theory Danzo had essentially confessed to treason by practically admitting his program was still in place but Naruto had to admit that there was some truthfulness to what Danzo was saying; after all, if the snake had somehow managed to acquire Sasuke's body, which everyone else seemed to believe would happen though he knew the Uchiha would find some way out of it, then it would have been supremely dangerous. Much more dangerous than Sasuke being a stuck-up idiot.

"I still do not think it was worth the risk." He said, knowing a bit more about Sai now and thinking of him as a teammate made it impossible to agree with sending him into such an overwhelmingly dangerous situation with very low chances of success. What, exactly, were the odds that Orochimaru would believe Danzo then agree to a meeting where he could be ambushed or whatever it was Danzo planned?

"You are aware that, as Hokage, you will send people to their deaths on a regular basis? Even in times of peace there are bandits, missions, missing-nin, and many other things that we cannot predict."

"Of course; obviously it's not an easy burden to bear but I prefer to be the one doing it so nobody else has to. And, if I'm the one wearing that hat, then I can be assured that every shinobi that dies on these missions was as prepared as they could have been, that proper precaution was taken, that the right shinobi was assigned to the job, all that stuff. I'll have the responsibility and I'll take it seriously." Death was a hazard of the shinobi lifestyle; if it wasn't that serious then they would not have mentioned it going as far back as the academy. For as long as someone knows of shinobi's existence they will know of the dangers of their career. All that said, when he was Hokage, he was going to do his best to minimize as many needless deaths on missions as possible.

"Tell me, Uzumaki-san, are you acquainted with the Hyuuga Affair?" Danzo was rather talented at bouncing from one topic of conversation to another that did not necessarily seem related but that Naruto knew was in some way.

"Yeah, Neji told me about it. His father was killed and sent to Kumo because they were mad that Hiashi killed their diplomat when he tried to kidnap Hinata." He could still think back to the hateful way that Neji had first described it, all those years ago, and to their brutal fight in the Chuunin Exam that he was barely able to pull a victory in. The Hyuuga had changed so much since that fight that sometimes it was hard to believe it was the same person.

"Correct; now, I want you to tell me: would you have sacrificed Hizashi?"

"No way! They tried to kidnap a clan heir then called for the death of a clan head. I would never have let us sacrifice Hizashi or Hiashi."

"Are you sure? We still had not recovered from the effects of the last war, people wanted peace, we had a chance to secure it at least with Kumo. Our shinobi were exhausted and had suffered many casualties over the preceding years; to not sacrifice Hizashi could have been the beginning of the next large war. There was no evidence truly that the Kumo-nin had attempted to kidnap Hinata aside from the testimony of the Hyuuga Clan; at least, that's how the other villages would have seen it."

He thought about it a bit more. On the one hand, it was obviously wrong to have sacrificed one of their own shinobi after a foreign-nin had done something so terrible as to try to kidnap one of the village's children; on the other, it had been able to keep them at peace for all this time. "Yes, I am sure. Kumo was undoubtedly tired of war as well whether or not the Raikage was willing to acknowledge it. I think they took a risk, got caught, then bluffed their way out of it."

"Hmph, so you would presume to say that the Sandaime Hokage and his advisers made the wrong decision on the matter even though you were not there to see for yourself the state of the village? Ravaged by the Kyuubi, lost without its hero the Yondaime?" The man seemed to be the slightest bit annoyed at this point but Naruto had made up his mind. Perhaps, in a way, it could be justified as one man being willing to sacrifice himself to save the lives of others within the village but something about that did not sit right with him. There was just something wrong about a shinobi who had trained his entire life for combat and had started a family to die in his own village to appease another, whether or not the man had been accepting of it.

"I can't support allowing a shinobi of this village with a family to sacrifice himself because another village asked. Whatever would have come of it is acceptable, I would have taken responsibility because that's what a Hokage should do. Make the right decisions, not the easy decisions, and bear the burden of their aftermath knowing that he did the right thing."

"I wonder what Hiruzen would have said, hearing you say such a thing."

"He would have understood, I think; maybe, somehow, he could have convinced me otherwise but I don't think so." Really, it did not seem like something Jiji would have even considered but he supposed that it was soon after the Kyuubi attack and maybe that had more to do with it than he would have thought.

"You do continue to impress me, Uzumaki-san" the adviser said with a slight expression on his face that he could somewhat interpret as what would be a smile for Danzo. Needless to say he was surprised by the man's reaction; he had been under the impression that he was taking a position opposite to the adviser's and that he had genuinely annoyed the man with his stance. "Your eagerness to hold on to your morals is interesting; normally, I would even consider it naive, and yet, there is a certain practicality in your understanding of the position of Hokage that makes it not be such. I do think I am beginning to understand why my Root program never turned up a viable candidate."

"Huh? What do you mean?" Naruto had imagined that Danzo wanted his Root shinobi to be the perfect subordinates and to support the Shimura to the position of Hokage, not that Danzo could have ever intended them to possibly have the position.

"Ah, forgive my wandering mind. I must have misspoken in my old age." Naruto did not believe that for a second though he got the strong impression that Danzo did not actually expect him to. "I must be returning to my duties now Uzumaki-san; perhaps it would be agreeable to hold another training session at the same time in a week? I expect by then you will have already grown bored of the fuuton jutsu you learned today."

"Yeah, that sounds good. Thanks for the help." The man nodded, before turning around and walking away.

It had been a productive training session, though not entirely for its original purpose of helping him to correct the Rasenshuriken, which was not to say that Naruto was not grateful for the man giving him a new hope that he could master it someday. Yes, he was definitely thankful for a new jutsu and for having an idea about what he had been doing wrong but there was far more to the training than that. He had learned a fair bit more about Danzo and his thought processes though it felt like nothing more than the adviser wanted him to know. Additionally, it made him think more about the position of Hokage and the kinds of things he would do once he got that hat. It definitely seemed like any future training sessions with the Shimura were going to be very interesting and probably involve a bit more than elemental training.


A/N: Here we are, another chapter focusing on Naruto and Danzo! Now, if you're curious as to why my Danzo is "so different from canon", here's the reason: Basically, for some reason, in the Anime, Danzo is pretty much depicted as being straight evil and the cause of so many of Konoha's problems that I personally do not think make sense to blame on him. I'm not trying to make him an all-around great guy or anything, but I want him to be a character as opposed to just "Super evil, responsible for everything wrong with the world person'. That said, if you think that this version of him is extremely different, keep in mind that he is only showing the part of himself that he would want Naruto to see. There'll be plenty more about him in the future, rest assured.

I hope you all enjoy this chapter. Next chapter will be the Kage Summit which, well, there's going to be a lot of politics but I think you'll find it interesting.

As always, thank you for reading; feel free to follow, favorite, review, or simply continuing on!