A Different Choice
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Naruto x ?
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Author's Note
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I wonder if any of you can guess who this manga character is I added. Here's a hint. Thematically a Shinobi but not from the Naruto's series.
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Story Start
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With his clones further overlooking the training of his team mates Naruto continued looking into the situation. Further investigation showed that there were steps Gato took to horde the water supply of the island.
A combination of taking on various cheap construction contracts to build a massive wall that would border the island as well as many thugs use as his guards.
Naruto could only theorize that he might have either bought off bandits or leased criminals from lockup for a hefty fee to make up his forces and let them do what they please short of killing people indiscriminately. After all dead citizens meant less money for Gato to squeeze tax money out of them.
Naruto continued his mission of information gathering. Arriving to one of the large towns he took notice of the condition of the dying land. What looked to be a once flourishing settlement thanks to the water was slowly dying out.
Per usual he was taking down note of how many thugs were employed in the town, what they carried, all the useful information. He would need to know how many kagebunshin to create, the time to deploy them, and how to avoid dragging civilians into the fight. He would have to formulate a route through each of the settlements and move at a speed faster than information could be sent and eliminate each and every unit.
There was also the matter of getting his hands on Gato's money. He would need access to bank accounts. Passwords. Everything. Just killing Gato would be a waste without getting everything he could out of the man. That also includes information on his cronies.
As Naruto continued looking around he caught sight of something interesting. It was a crowd of people gathering around someone.
The person was a young woman, petite in stature with straight dark hair draping below her shoulder in the style of a ponytail. She also had fetching deep purple eyes, but it was not her looks that caught his interest, but what he felt.
He moved closer and that's when it happened. Blinking to existence were vibrant prismatic butterflies.
Was it some kind of Genjutsu? If it was it was a powerful one to instantly trigger when one was in a certain range.
However, instead of becoming completely mesmerized like the rest of the villagers surrounding her appeared to be, he instead smiled warmly and watched as she performed a dance while directing the butterflies using her hands.
She looked to be roughly his age and despite wearing the worn down rags like everyone else had a pleasant aura about her.
Once the performance was over those who had gathered around dropping one cent yen and even some five cent yen coins in her jar and the crowd began to disperse.
Not too soon after a group of men walked up to the young woman who was counting the yen pieces.
"Hey! You girl!" It was a group of three men. One stout one with a short well-trimmed beard, another was average height with messy blond hair, and the last one had black, greased hair. They were all wearing old and worn out looking military outfits that belonged to civilian officers. While most war or combat between nations were primarily taken up by shinobi it was not unheard of for loyal citizens to join none shinobi based units or make up the army in nations where hidden villages were either small or minor using technology to make up for their lack of chakra and jutsu.
The one with the greased up hair seemed to be the leader with the he was doing the talking. "Got you some nifty tricks there huh? Well looks like no one told you the rules."
The young woman looked up at him with an expression mixed with apprehension and annoyance.
"See we're the peace keepers in this place and if you want to set up in this town you got to pay a fee like everyone else. Now I'm willing to overlook this if you pay up."
That was when the one with the messy blond hair spoke up. "Now we're willing to forgive you this one time if you fork over seventy percent of your earnings."
A scowl of disgust formed on Naruto's face. His fingers already cracking as he flexed them and closed his fist. They were going down.
"Did you hear us girl. Say something." The lead thug demanded grabbing the girl by the shoulder.
Big mistake.
The next second anyone knew the man was stumbling back, wailing and screaming clutching his hand which was now missing several fingers.
"You little bitch!" The stout man shouted as he and the blond haired man brought out katanas.
That was when she took on a stance and Naruto caught the flash of something.
A tanto.
They both charged to which the girl skillfully blocked the first, slip under the second katana and slid her blade into the stomach of the stout man. He began screaming and stumbled back onto the ground clutching his side.
The blonde began quivering and let out a wail. "You…you'll be sorry. I'll get boss Gato and he'll have your head." He took off fleeing leaving his comrades on the ground.
All the while the town's people were looking on. When some of them came out Naruto expected them to check up on the girl. What happened next though showed just how much the people feared Gato.
"You stupid girl what have you done!"
"You killed us all!"
"Gato's men are going to torch this town for this!"
"Leave! Leave before we suffer for what you did!"
They continued to jeer similar comments. The girl though, a bitter look flash in her eyes, but nonetheless the girl said nothing, gathering up her little jar and began to leave.
This wasn't right.
Naruto wait until they were a bit out of town before approaching the girl. He had to admit she interested him a bit.
"Hey! Stranger-san! Wait up!" He called out to the girl who stopped in her tracks.
With that she answered icily,"What do you want?" Her disposition from the events that just happened was no surprise.
"I don't approve of what the people of that town, motivated by fear or not. Listen I know how shady that is, a stranger approaching you and all, but you have talent. Were you trained in the use of chakra?"
Her hostile expression hadn't changed. She also wasn't answering.
"Look, if you want come to Hisoka town; my team and I are doing a mission and well…" He should have put more thought into what he wanted to say. "I really didn't plan this out," he said sheepishly rubbing the back of his head. Despite his attempts to seem disarming the girl had not once let down her guard. "I'm…my clan name is Uzumaki, ask around that town if you're trying to find me. I know I'm not coming off as the most trustworthy person, but I hate to see anyone with talent not use it, so yeah…bye." With that the girl turned around and continued on without saying a word.
Naruto fought back a sigh. 'Great. That was really good my convincing skills are top notch.' He was going to have to work on that in the future.
0000
Back at Hisoka Town, Wave
Sasuke was in the midst of standing on a lake while balancing a leaf on his fingers. Right now he could only walk on water and needed more chakra control practice until he could run across water.
With the copy Naruto left behind to supervise the training was with Sakura. "Alright Naruto-kun what am I learning today?"
"Kage Bunshin." He answered as she gave him a look of surprise.
"Until you build up your reserves massively it would be for the best you only use this technique, while I or Kakashi-sensei are supervising you. Now this technique is different from other clone techniques as they are corporeal copies that can bleed and will disperse after a strong enough hit, but they have advantages that the others don't have.
For one they can perform any elemental technique and not just the technique which element their composition is made out of. When dispelled chakra left over is sent back to the user and the reverse holds true. Chakra can be sent to them to extend their time or reinforce them.
The most useful aspect is for them to send information back to the user when retained. Which is useful since the number of clones can multiply the amount of experience gained is in correlation to the number of clones used.
Now I'm going to show you the hand seals. Once you get sufficient mastery over the technique you'll only have to concentrate on it and use the clone hand seal."
It took Sakura all of ten minutes before she could perfectly mimic Naruto and as expected she could only make two clones. To get the most out of them one was a scroll on Iryo jutsu while the other was water walking.
With the day almost over he called over his two team mates for one more lesson.
"Alright you two I have one more thing I want to show you." He said as he ruffled through the pockets for the slips.
"I don't know if I can learn anything else today Naruto-kun." Sakura was exhausted, and would have liked nothing more than take a nice hot bath and go to sleep.
"Paper Uzumaki?" Sasuke was not impressed by the two slips he pulled out.
"Well Uchiha-san for your information these slips are the tools to help you two learn a skill most shinobi don't regularly start to learn until they start training to become Jounin."
That got Sasuke's attention. Sasuke didn't know whether to be annoyed by how effortlessly the blond seemed to make him look dumb or happy at how useful he was. "You got my attention."
"We…and by that I mean you two are going to be learning about your elemental affinities."
"What good would that do for me? My affinity is fire." He was an Uchiha. Uchias were fire. Enough said.
"But are you yourself an Earth affinity or do you simply believe because that's the element your clan was known to be attuned to? Just let me finish."
"Elemental affinity?" This piqued Sakura's interest as the most affinities were discussed were in passing nature during the academy's history lessons.
"Indeed chakra-chan. Hence why I have been getting you two to focus so much of your time on chakra control exercises. Manipulation of your element is difficult and the best use of it requires high level manipulation. In other words at your current levels you can do the basic, Sasuke has the chakra but not the control and your problem is vice versa Sakura-chan for any manipulation beyond the basics. "
Sakura couldn't help herself, "Why did you never show aptitude like this when we were at the academy? You could have easily gotten the top scores."
"I had no interest of showing off Sakura-chan. I wouldn't make a good shinobi if everyone knew what I could do." He answered with a chuckle. "Geography. Cooking. The Bingo books. Business management. You name it and Kazuma-oji had it drilled in my head. Being the last two of our clan its his utmost desire to see it revived and he has essentially poured all his hopes into me."
"But…but to put that much pressure into one person." Sakura's expression turned into one of concern.
Naruto folded his arms behind his head and rested on a tree. "Nah, it was fine. I cheated." He admitted as Sakura sent him a skeptical look. "Kagebunshin Sakura-chan remember." He pointed out as the pink haired girl began to blush. How could that have slipped his mind. "In any given day I can go through weeks if not months of information over the course of a day. Kazuma-oji literally spent a year figuring out, writing down, and planning everything out with his own use of Kage bunshin, before literally spending the next few years instructing my kage bunshin nearly day in and day out until it was permanently etched into my memory. That's why we live in a modest house. All that money went into getting scrolls and whatever he could find on subjects from foreign nations, that was the real killer for our budgets. Exporting and shipping from other nation."
"So in other words you're a walking library?" Just how much did Naruto know.
"To be fair if you can use a technique like Kagebunshin why wouldn't you exploit it? But I wouldn't say library. Even that method has the dangers of the mental feedback. Its only been until the last year or so that I could handle the feedback of mass dispels or a backlog of days information. It took years of meditating and having my kage bunshin dispel in shifts and mastering the technique and varied mental commands until I can use it like I do now. Its only been these past few months that the sheer information gathering and training gains I have been receiving can be considered monstrous as I still not only had to memorize and commit the information to memory, but wait until not only was my mind developed enough for the information, but my body physically trained up enough to start putting a lot of what I've been learning to use. Anyway we kind of went off track of what I started talking about. Anyway what we have been doing has been about increasing your control and stamina as well as setting you to the path of physical conditioning.
That's where we come to the physical nature of things is what happens when we use elemental jutsu which changes the physical form of our chakra. The using part is easy, but the manipulation is difficult in this training method because each element is different in how you handle it. Which is why most shinobi only ever master two elements and even then its more accurate to say master one and is proficient in the other. The time to practice and master multiple is more time than people are willing to put into it unless they have a Kekki Genkai that makes them highly attuned to one or more element. That in a nutshell is elemental composition.
Now spatial recomposition determines the power and scope of the jutsu. Both are necessary to not only mastering your element, but leading you down the track of creating your own jutsu." Naruto extended his hand forward and pointing two fingers outwards. A strong force of wind gathered around him causing his clothes to begin to flap. "Futon: Bisecting Blade!" Naruto swung his arm vertically through a tree as a long and thin compressed blade of air slashed through the spot he cut. The tree soon fell over with a resounding crash. "My bisecting blade, tuned enough to where I want to leave a superficial cut or with enough chakra cut through stone itself. Though it relies on both my chakra and my own physical strength and mastery of arm movement to generate the speed and precision to follow through. How I manipulate it takes the technique anywhere from C-rank to A-rank. And that my friends is…"
"Right, right we get it. Train us already!" One would think it was Sasuke's birthday and it was time to open his presents with the way his eyes lit up.
"Alright calm down." He hand them both the slips. "Concentrate your chakra into them. If the papers turn to dust your element is Earth. Fire if it blackens and wind if it splits in half. For Water it will moisten and crumple up if its Lightning." He explained as he watched the two poured their elements into the paper.
Naruto was faintly surprise when Sasuke's paper had started to blacken only to immensely crumple up. Though Sasuke more than Naruto was surprised.
"Seems like you have a major Lightning affinity with a minor fire affinity."
'Lightning. I will have to learn Lightning Jutsu. Does…does Naruto know any Lightning Jutsu?'
"I would go with Kakashi-sensei if you want instruction in Lightning jutsu Sasuke-san. Lightning is one of my lesser used elements."
Sasuke nodded. Useful information. Perhaps he had been too quick to dismiss his team as useless and holding him back. Naruto was proving his merit and even Sakura was improving. She no longer fan girled him and she was actually training. That made her league above all the rest of those gold diggers that pestered him and were trying to get in on his Uchiha name.
Sakura's paper on the other hand moistened slightly before it turned completely to dust. "Wow Sakura-chan you have affinities for Earth and Water, though the water one is there slightly." He paused upon receiving the feedback of one of his clones dispelling. "Looks like we're done for the day. Tsunami-san has finished cooking dinner."
Sakura was relieved while Sasuke was disappointed.
He wanted to learn more about his element. He could see it now. Striking that man down with heavenly retribution using lightning. Oh this was giving him more creative ideas than simply using fire jutsu.
As they were making their way another one of Naruto's kagebunshin had dispelled. 'Perfect' he thought. It was time to go pay a certain missing-nin a visit.