Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto

A PUNK'S LIFE

BY: ADOREDRA FAL'NAELRA

CHAPTER ELEVEN: WIND

LAZY RIVER

Naruto stared down at the leaf resting innocently on the grass from his kneeling position. His bent head dripped sweat from the mid-summer heat onto the leaf and Naruto's enemy number one. He hated how it looked up at him as if nothing could be wrong in the world. It looked up at him as if it didn't mock his very existence. Naruto snarled at it.

A wood cane made from ancient Hashirama wood crashed into the back of Naruto's head. Naruto couldn't stop himself from snarling back up before realizing his place and looking back down subserviently. His mood must be really bad if he even as much as almost snarled at the honorable Shimura-sama. As the true commander of Root, the man literally held Naruto's future in his hands. In other words, this geriatric fool had his balls in his hand and wouldn't hold back from smashing them into pulp like one of those oranges from the latest Fire colony.

He had big balls.

"Forgive me for my insolence honorable Shimura-sama," Naruto said still facing the leaf.

But his balls weren't that big.

"A calm body, a calm mind, a calm soul are all the ingredients needed to make a true ninja," the partially mummified man said. Naruto had a strong inclination to believe he had an Akimichi as his other teammate based off of the dude's continuous use of food metaphors. "And you have none of them."

"Hai, Shimura-sama," Naruto said with no sincerity. If he heard it once, then he had heard it a million times. His body did not do calm. His mind did not do calm. His soul did not do calm. Naruto could make the wind like a tempest around him, but he couldn't so much as cut a stupid leaf.

"Don't get smart with me boy," Shimura-sama said. "You might have a lot of chaotic power, but it is all useless if you can't focus it. I'm telling you to focus the wind in your chakra to cut a simple leaf. What are you going to do when the Hokage actually asks something of you? Curse at it all day hoping the work will finish itself?"

Naruto had to admit that his hard working personality had a selective nature in that it only applied to topics he had passion. Unfortunately, wind nature chakra did not give him any passion. When the Headmistress' letter reached the aging councilor, he stuck his scarred chin into Naruto's personal affairs. His first order of business reneged Naruto's Sealing Arts Division summer application. Naruto made his first mistake by confronting the commander of Root on the matter.

Thus, here he knelt in the grass with a leaf in his hands in the mid-summer heat. He could be working on mastering his Sealing Arts. He could be improving his chakra reserves and chakra control. He could be pumping weights or doing sprints to improve his physical prowess. Instead, he worked on his elemental chakra nature that would - at best - work to help his destined Uchiha teammate's mastery of the fire release. Naruto felt sick at the idea. All of this precious summer time being wasted for a spoiled son of the main Uchiha line.

Feeling the towering man's gaze on the back of his head, Naruto's nuts tightened up into his body. Naruto took steady breaths pushing to the side his fated Uchiha teammate and accepted his wind affinity. Then, he transferred the thoughts he originally he had about being a master of water to being a master of win. After clearing his head, he focused solely on the feeling of the breath leaving and entering his nose. Then, he stretched his body's senses to focus on the touch, taste, smell, sound and vision of the wind around him.

After the appropriate amount of time to get acquainted with his asshole of a brother, the wind, he took those feelings and searched for them inside of his chakra. The vast ocean of his chakra diluted these senses, but Naruto continued to search. As usual, he found the sharp and violent feeling he associated with his assumption of wind, but he ignored it this time. He needed to find the quiet in the storm. He thought along the lines of the eye of a hurricane or tornado that one of his science classes taught about in a lecture over natural disasters.

He continued the search throughout his chakra system. He ignored the gravitational pull of the dark flame in his navel that frequently distracted Naruto's efforts and tainted his mind. He searched through the vast currents of chakra that swirled throughout his body like a whirlpool. He needed to find the center of the whirlpool, but the very same currents pushed him away.

In his senses, the leaves moved downwards with gravity, but at the same time the leaves moved with the wind, not against the wind. He had been moving against the wind in a sense. He had just been finding the first or second or third feeling of the violent wind nature in his chakra system and tugging it out and throwing it at the leaf through his hands. Maybe elemental chakra didn't react properly through Naruto's bullheaded attempts to just get this insanity over and back to sealing.

A thoughtless chuckle escaped his lips as he entered the slipstreams of the violent and hostile nature of his internal whirlpool. He followed the stream in relative bliss despite the absurd speed of the winds. The sensation reminded him of the few times he went tubing down one of Leaf's lazy rivers. A shame he didn't bring a six-pack for this ride. The inherently violent chakra winds didn't buffet his senses this time, as the wind naturally pushed or maybe pulled his body forward.

It almost felt like wind blowing through his hair, but he couldn't tell from what direction. Without a doubt, Naruto had never felt this way before in his life. He could get lost in this internal whirlpool he just discovered despite a week of stubbornly just yanking at it like a child. Deciding to see how far down the rabbit hole he could go, he stayed on the jet streams of his soul.

The further we went down the tube; the faster the rapids dragged him. The whirlpool transformed from a violent lazy river to the motion of a stopper being pulled in a near empty bathtub. He supposed he could also represent the sensation as a toilet flushing but that would make him the turd, and Naruto didn't want to be the turd in the metaphor.

He started to struggle in the rapids trying to keep his head above water. A thoughtless chuckle escaped him again. The sensation reminded him of the early middle school memory where the Inuzuka bully introduced him to the swirlie. He maneuvered his metaphysical body in the swirlie to keep his head above water and felt his chakra pass him by over and over. He supposed he was the turd in the metaphor.

Suddenly but not in a jerky motion, the slipstream deposited him in a void of nothingness as he let the momentum continue to push him in gentle circles. Slowing down, he stretched his out-of-body but actually in-the-body senses out from the void to embrace the maelstrom of wind that existed hidden in his chakra system. He felt like an explorer in one of those Fire colonies that he watched in the cinema every now and then.

If he had to guess, the maelstrom and the dark fire in the pit of his navel probably struggled against the ocean of chakra in his body causing his poor chakra control. Thus, he had his large chakra reserves, maelstrom of wind and the dark fire all working against his chakra control. His previous chakra control exercises most likely only took into consideration his large chakra pool and not the two sources that created dissonance in his system. Maybe he should tackle these problems afterwards, but first he had a task to do.

In the void, he thought about what the next step should be to get the pure elemental chakra to rip the leaf in between his palms. His previous attempts involved ripping out a piece of the maelstrom and hoping it would do the job. He had a week of experience to realize that would not be the case. If a piece of the pie didn't work, then maybe the whole pie would work. Naruto realized his attempts at figurate speech could use some improvement.

Using his normal chakra, he pulled from the quiet lake that the maelstrom deposited him into just recently. He pulled, but he didn't pull anything. Switching tactics, he pushed the eye of the storm outwards but nothing happened. The feeling reminded him of lifting weights that didn't budge because he lacked strength. Surely, the problem didn't come from his inability to pull or push strong enough in his chakra. He discovered during learning his Clone technique that pulling or pushing his chakra harder made the technique backfire in a vast haze of chakra smoke.

He needed to pure wind chakra that materialized itself as a maelstrom in his body somehow. What if he just continued the whirlpool to his hands to cut the leaf. He latched his chakra to the tail end of the river that emptied into the still lake. He started to drag the wind chakra but met immediate resistance as the wind rejected his attempts to manipulate it. It did not give into his knee-jerk reaction to tug the wind

He tried to remember the sensation of the wind outside of his body. What would he have to do in order to make that wind go where he wanted? If he built a tube with a giant funnel on the outside, then he could get the wind through that contraption. Naruto gave it a thought before dismissing it. He wouldn't really do that inside his own body, or could he? He thought again on the matter and envisioned moving all of his regular chakra out of the way as if parting a sea and allowing the wind chakra to flow through the artificially created tunnel in his own chakra system.

Likewise, Naruto analogized the situation to when his apartment had the main door opened, and the emergency exit door open. The long hallway that stretched through the ground floor turned into a giant, howling wind tunnel of sorts. Maybe, he could try to create such an effect by opening 'both doors.' The problem, of course, came to light when Naruto couldn't even really identify what the 'doors' represented in his chakra system.

The problem never changed in that Naruto needed to cut the leaf with his wind chakra, but first he needed to get the wind chakra to his hands so that he could manipulate it from there. While a simple task in theory, the practice proved quite difficult. Naruto struggled and tried a variety of different tactics of pulling, pushing, moving, suggesting and guiding the wind chakra through the sea of his regular chakra with no tangible success. Some tactics moved it more than others, but in the end the wind chakra always reverted back to the gravitational pull of the maelstrom inside him.

In one of his attempts to just do anything with the elemental chakra and see what happened, Naruto discovered that his chakra system didn't act in the two-dimensions of the x- and y-axis. There existed a z-axis that he didn't even think about despite his foresight declaring such a feature as obvious. In the textbooks and lectures, the material always presented the chakra system as a flat picture with the important chakra points, the eight gates and which chakra locations to focus for specific types of abilities.

Inside the chakra system, however, proved to be a living-breathing animal similar to one of the autopsies of the dead frog. The veins and arteries had a height, a minimal height, but a height nonetheless because the experiment involved taking measurements of every feature. Naruto felt the need to palm his face. The teachers and textbooks always related the chakra system to the circulatory system of the body, so of course the chakra pathways always compared to as veins and arteries just for chakra would have the same dimensions as the circulatory system.

He lifted, pulled and pushed the ending stream of the tornado to meager success before it snapped back into place. Naruto moved his senses back to the eye of the storm before trying the other direction. He moved his ethereal body through the bottom dragging the wind nature behind him while cutting a path through his regular chakra.

He found success as his body swam through his pathways with an unnatural fluidity as the wind chakra remained connected to him. Never letting go of the chakra, Naruto moved through the twists and the turns of his chakra pathways. He felt his senses within his own body in a contrived and odd fashion to navigate himself up his torso and down one of his arms.

In an equally odd feeling, he exited the main chakra point in his right hand dragging the wind chakra with him. Upon hitting the leaf, he dispersed his senses and returned to his natural state of awareness. Naruto opened his eyes and opened his hands to the leaf in his palms. A small hole the size of Naruto's chakra point in his palm almost penetrated halfway through the leaf's thin membrane.

A smile blossomed across Naruto's face as he jumped up from his kneeling position screaming, "Yatta!"

'I can totally do this now!' Naruto thought in exuberance. 'And to think I thought badly about wind natured chakra. I can do this all day!'

Naruto felt the passion for mastering his wind affinity swell through his body. Looking up, he took measure of his surroundings. The waxing moon hung partially in the sky as the night creatures continued their symphony. Naruto looked behind him to see no crippled geriatric and frowned. He didn't even leave a note.

He must have really lost a significant portion of the day, while he toured his own chakra pathways. It must have lasted quite some time because he started practicing right after lunch at Root. Getting up, he felt and heard his stomach roar in upset at being ignored. Patting it in apology, he headed towards of the late night diners hoping he could get a decent meal.

The smile didn't fade from his face despite losing track of time. He had work to do. He needed to figure how he would split the elemental chakra in equal halves and travel at the same speed down both arms to then release the same amount of chakra. Once in his hands, he needed to then properly disperse the chakra through the proper chakra points to release the chakra in such a manner as to cut the leaf in a straight line just like Shimura-sama demonstrated every day.

'It's going to be a long summer,' Naruto thought as he now understood how perfecting one's wind nature took a lifetime of theory, meditation and practice.