Naruto SI

Working Title: Chakra and Ninjas – Oh My!

Chapter 10: Progress

2016-01-02

Controlling chakra is much like manipulating a muscle that you never realised you had before - nearly impossible, but with a lot of effort you could slowly but surely begin to use the newly-discovered muscle. The difference between using a muscle and getting a feel for chakra is that it seemed that chakra, or Naruto's chakra at least, was that an unused muscle never developed the strength to work, which is why it is so hard to use it in the first place. On the other hand, if your muscle is already developed when you discocer it, it is much easier to use, case in point, me looking down at my twitching pectoral muscles, slightly underdeveloped as they were.

I was beginning to suspect that Naruto's chakra was special, as even the smallest controllable amount of the esoteric energy would shred any material that I attempted to push into it. This ultimately led me to realise that his chakra 'muscle' was much more developed than that of a child his age's should be, leading to excerises that should be challenging to a young child being absurdly easy, if not too easy for him to perform.

Slowly but surely, after a few hours of practice and with the darkening sky overhead, I finally managed to not shred the stick that I was using in place of the all-too-fragile leaves that littered the ground. Only jumping up in success made me realise how painful my stomach had grown after hours of neglect, but a quick frown banished that pain to the back of my mind. I looked around myself, taking in with a rather savage glee the splinters littering the forest floor around me, picked up my jacket and shirt, and left.

Around an hour after beginning my practice a vicious idea struck me - if simply pushing chakra into a leaf, stick, or even a stone would shred, burst or shatter it respectively, what would happen to a person?

Most people would abandon that line of thought rather quickly, but I slowly walked up to a tree and 'flexed' my metaphorical 'muscle'. The results were amazing. After a brief urge to indulge in a gleeful cackle of 'SCIENCE!', I carefully took note of what had happened. Upon puching some of my concentrated chakra, which was basically just alot of normal chakra that I had bundled together instead of having to work with the smaller quantities - almost like how people use kilograms and tons in place of grams and milligrams for large quantities - there had been a slight delay before…

Boom.

It shattered from the point of contact as if the chakra had the physical force of rapidly expanding gas, or in other words, a bomb. I theorised that the chakra took a brief few milliseconds to accumulate on the surface of the tree before losing its coherency and rapidly expanding outwards to join nature. The fact that my hand was still producing chakra repelled the chakra that was expanding, forcing it to only expand in the direction of the tree, leading to a large crater, or even simply breaking a small tree completely.

I suppose that ninjas would ordinarily achieve such control over their chakra that the amounts that they used to stick leaves to their foreheads or run up a wall, as Naruto had observed, would be so small that their expansion would leave little to no effects.

Eventually, after much hypothesising and experimentation, I had simply moved on to pushing chakra into a dead stick and slowly reducing the amount that I was using so that it didn't explode. All in all, I was pretty satisfied with the results of my 'training' by the time that I had finished, and now, walking home with a contented little grin, I pondered what to have for supper. There were only a few hours left of the day, so I would have to get my school work done as well.

While eating my meal, I realised that I would have to excercise with Naruto's body as well, if only to prepare for being a ninja. Truthfully, I had doubts about being completely obedient to anybody, but I would see what it was like being a genin before actinv on my suspicion, but… My thoughts were flying all over the place, as usual, and in my head I put together a quick excersising plan for myself: a couple push-ups, a couple sit-ups, a couple squats, a couple calf-raises and a few pull-ups at night, and running to school in the morning. I was only a child right now, and while I disliked the boredom of exercising, I was willing to do it… Just not for hours on end.

After about an hour and a half of studying and writing excerises, I proceeded to begin with some push-ups after stretching. By the time that I had finished with my very small circuit, I felt exactly the same as I did when I started, so I did it again, with the same results. A third time made me notice that it was easier to do the exercises than it was the first time, so, with a confused frown on my face that was gradually rising into a maniacle grin as I realised what was happening, I did the circuit a fourth time, adding a few repetitions to every section.

My grin was positively cheshire by the final pull-up from my doorframe. I had forgotten conpletely about the time by that point, and my stomach's cries for food were similarly forgotten as I ran through a fifth set of excercises, the possibilities endless to my mind.

Somehow, Naruto had a healing factor. I wasn't sure if it was limited to his muscles, or if it was unique to him, or even if it was just a quality of chakra, but as I walked to the kitchen drawer and pulled out a knife, I vowed to find out. The pain of cutting myself wasn't too bad, but what occured afterwards was simply amazing - the small cut along my palm began healing right in front of my eyes, leaving behind naught but a slowly fading scar as the minutes ticked by.

"This is insane." I told myself aloud, "This is insane, and the potential is ground-breaking." My voice was eerily detached when I said that, but being in the kitchen pulled my attention to the rapidly growing pain in my stomach, and I remembered that logically, healing factors required great amounts of food to fuel the process. A quick glance at my clock told me that I should have gone to sleep fifteen minutes prior, so I quickly inhaled some fruit and some meat, before showering and going to bed, this latest discovery keeping a grin on my face even as sleep took me.

The next two days continued much in the same vein - Wednesday we had physical subjects in the second half of the school day, and Thursday we had chakra-related subjects. By Thursday evening I had managed to get a stick to stick to my skin, excuse the pun, although I still shredded a leaf at the barest touch of my chakra. An inspection of my body showed a rapidly improving muscle tone as well, with definition appearing over the course of those two days. I had also started seeing flickers in the corners of my vision, on rooftops and in alleyways, as well as constantly feeling like I was being watched, but I tried to ignore it.

I still looked over my shoulder ever few seconds while in public, and going to the forest was rapidly becoming uncomfortable, but by this point I had decided to approach the Hokage about it. Naruto had a good relationship with him, and and he at least acted like he cared about my well being, so as I prepared to go to the Academy on Friday morning, I made a note to go and visit him in the afternoon.

I also remembered that Fridays were apparently revision days, with the first half being spent going over the theoretical subjects covered in the week, and the second half consisting of sparring. I wasn't excited for it, per se, but I did want to see how well I fared against superpowered child soldiers in training.

AN:

Mabye somewhat rambling, but I was bored and produced this.