I. Concerning the Ninja Arts

4. Genjutsu

i. Mental Mastery

c. Dispelling an Illusion

"Hey, Tobirama-sensei!"

The white-haired Senju turned to face his pupil, Hiruzen, and the boy's two teammates, Homura and Koharu, watching him with barely contained enthusiasm. Like they were expecting him to do something incredible at any moment. "What is it?"

"Lord Hokage said you would teach us how to dispel genjutsu today!" Homura chirped.

Tobirama sighed, inwardly cursing his brother for sticking him with all the teaching duties. "Okay," he said, turning to face Sasuke's brat. Quickly forming a series of hand-seals, he trapped the boy in his darkness genjutsu.

One of the most important skills for any well-rounded shinobi to possess is the ability to dispel illusions. There are a few ways that this can be accomplished. The most efficient method is to disrupt one's chakra, as genjutsu works by controlling the chakra in the target's nervous system to create mental-sensory constructs. Disrupting one's chakra can be done in any number of ways, though the two most basic are to either briefly suppress your chakra or to generate a spike in your chakra levels. This is generally sufficient for breaking out of lower-level illusions, but more skilled ninja will quickly and violently fluctuate their chakra levels. By doing so, the enemy will have difficulty maintaining their "grip" on your chakra and be forced to let go.

Young Hiruzen, seeing naught but an endless expanse of nothingness in all directions, fought back the urge to groan. Tobirama-sensei always used him in these sorts of demonstrations.

Koharu watched her teammate just standing there, transfixed, with growing apprehension. She and Homura had been told not to interfere with Hiruzen, but who knew what was happening in Sarutobi's mind? She was about to go in and help him when the boy formed a hand-seal.

Inside the illusory realm of darkness, his eyes closed and hands forming a ram seal, Hiruzen was focusing on his chakra like he had been taught. Rapidly alternating between surging and suppressing his chakra with a cry of "Release!", he attempted to buck the presence of his teacher's influence, but to no avail. Tobirama was a skilled ninja, and he did not believe in going easy on his students.

"Nice try, Saru, but that was not sufficient. What would you do if I were an enemy, and had trapped you in that illusion so I could kill you with no trouble? I know you can do better than that," to Hiruzen, his teacher's voice seemed to reverberate in the infinite blackness of the genjutsu in which he was trapped.

Koharu and Homura, however, were not privy to this exchange. All they saw was their teacher drawing a kunai and stepping towards their teammate.

With that said, there is no guarantee that this will always work. For example, if the enemy is exceptionally skilled in use of the spiritual Yin element or they trap you in a particularly powerful or devious genjutsu, then you may very well find yourself unable to dispel the illusion. But, assuming you have teammates with you, then it is possible for them to free you from the enemy's genjutsu by one of two possible ways: launching an attack on the individual using the genjutsu and break their concentration, or by sending some of their chakra into your system to dispel the illusion. Both are usually effective, though they may not always work.

Looking to one another and nodding, Homura and Koharu split up: Homura rushing towards Hiruzen and Koharu jumping in to head off Tobirama-sensei. Tossing down a smoke bomb, the young kunoichi threw a salvo of shuriken in his direction before quickly changing her location. She heard the clangs of metal against metal, indicating that her sensei had parried the projectiles. This time she tossed a couple of kunai before lobbing in another smoke bomb to keep her cover from clearing and changing her location again.

This time, however, she did not hear the sound of her sensei deflecting the throwing knives - instead, she heard the telltale splush of water falling to the ground before a large hand tightly grabbed her left shoulder.

She did not look behind her to see who it was.

She already knew who it was.

Instead, she stole a nervous glance in Sarutobi and Mitokado's direction. As she had feared, she saw her sensei fighting the boy. He was only using taijutsu along with the occasional ninja tool - though not his Sword of the Raging Thunder-god. She did not know whether this was because he was going easy on the lad or because he was a water clone and thus incapable of using chakra. Whatever the case, Homura was nonetheless still losing badly.

Experimentally struggling to see if she could break free of her teacher's grasp or possibly land a blow on him, she found that, no, she could not. And in response to her struggling, the maybe-clone of her instructor pinched the base of her neck with his free hand and sent a pulse of chakra into it, temporarily paralyzing her.

Koharu hissed when she collapsed onto the ground, her body limp and unmoving. Shortly after that, she heard Homura yell -try as she might, she was not facing him and could not turn her head what was happening- before he landed next to her, his glasses snapped and the lenses cracked. This was why she kept telling the boy to get a pair of military-grade BC-glasses to wear when on duty, no matter how hideous he claimed they made him look, but the boy was irritatingly obstinate. He was going to go broke one of these days if he had to constantly keep getting new glasses every time they were lost on a mission or broken in a spar.

But if the enemy is too strong or in such a position that they cannot be assailed and will not let anyone get near you, or you are alone with no back-up to rely on, then there is one last way to break free from a genjutsu. By deliberately inflicting a real, physical wound upon yourself, you can cause a surge of adrenaline and endorphins through your endocrine system. This, combined with the sudden pain, can shock you out of virtually any illusion you may find yourself trapped in. However -for obvious reasons- this should only be done as a last resort for when there is no other way to dispel an enemy genjutsu in a life or death situation.

Frustrated with his repeated inability to dispel the absolute darkness genjutsu his sensei had trapped him in, and too proud to simply admit defeat, Hiruzen grabbed a kunai from his pouch and stabbed his hand. The effect of this, he would later muse, was rather like having several gallons of freezing water dumped over his head while half-asleep to jolt him into awareness: sudden and unpleasant.

The first thing he heard upon having his sense freed from outside control was his sensei swearing.

"Goddammit!" he groaned, "Hashirama will never let me hear the end of this. 'What did I tell you, little brother?'" the man said in perfect imitation of his older brother's tone and mannerisms, "'I have warned you hundreds of times that your "hidden tests of character" were bound to backfire and get someone hurt one of these days.' Damnit, Saru," he sighed, eying the boy's hand with obvious exasperation, "Why did you have to go and do something so foolish? I was just about to release you from the genjutsu."

Hiruzen stared blankly at his teacher, trying and failing to hide his confusion.

Tobirama shook his head before explaining: "The point of this exercise was not to test you on how to break yourself out of an illusion, Saru, but on how to break a teammate out of one. And your teammates actions showed that they clearly understood what to do and how to do it (even if they did ultimately fail to actually do so). They put your well-being in the face of a possible threat ahead of my instructions to not interfere. If they had simply stayed where they were and done nothing, that would have been equivalent to leaving you behind, trapped in an illusion with the risk of possible harm or death befalling you, in favor of completing the objective of a mission. But they did not do that, and did all they could to save you, so they passed," he said, giving the two, who were lying in a heap on the ground, a proud smile. They were not amused, if their caustic grumbling was anything to go by. "Now come Saru, we should really take you to see a medic."

Hiruzen shrugged and was about to pull the kunai out of his hand,when he glanced down and saw that he had actually stabbed the implement a bit more than an inch THROUGH his palm, with the tip of blade sticking out from the back of his hand. At that considerably-more-gruesome-than-he-had-expected sight, he swooned and fell unconscious in the middle of the training grounds.

He did not awaken until two days had passed.

Eh, I decided to include a short story along with the usual since I got struck with a bit of inspiration. You probably shouldn't expect to see this sort of thing too often in this fic, but I might do this whenever I have a good idea for a story to go with a given subject. As to whether or not, in the context of the fic, this is actually in the Third Hokage's book... I'm not really certain, myself. If I decide it is, I'd pretty have to limit myself to characters and scenarios the third could actually know of and write about for these little intra-fic fics. If I decide it isn't, then I could use a much wider variety of characters in these demonstrative mini-fics, but then they might seem more out of place.

Ah, whatever. Let me know if you like what I'm doing with this, or if I should stick to one-shots and multi-chapter fics that I pretty much never finish due to fickle attention span and ever-shifting interests.