The Groundhog Exam
Chapter Thirty Eight

by Lionheart

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"Today is a day for deeds of greatness!" Tsunade called out from atop the Hokage monument. Turning around, she addressed her army of fellow wives and their shadow clones. "Are you ready?"

"YES!" came the responding roar of fifty throats raised in unison, chisels held aloft. A breeze gave the assembled girls' hair a stir.

"Forward!!" The granddaughter of the First shouted, pointing over the cliff.

With a roar, they surged ahead, Tsunade in the lead, racing off the top of the mountain to run down the face of it, feet sticking to the side.

In a rush, all of the other Hokage's faces got chiseled off only to be replaced by Naruto's grinning image at twice the former Hokage's size and his name carved out in loving detail below it, along with the caption "Happy Chunin Day!"

"WHY??!?" Sarutobi pled, after he'd pulled his face up out of his hands over the appalling nature of this stunt.

"Well," Tsunade drawled out casually. "We'd decided to celebrate Naruto's birthday for him today, and cakes are just overdone."

----

"Did you see that? He's going to come out from around the tree now." Even as Naruto said it, it happened, just as he described.

"Yes, I see it." Anko told him, holding her own set of binoculars on the far distant Orochimaru fight. "You've got his reactions pretty well pegged."

"I ought to. I've been fighting him long enough," the blond snorted, holding up a set of binoculars himself trained on the distant fight with Team 7.

"He's just toying with them," Shizune said, peering through her own pair, where they all waited on the vantage point.

"Hardly surprising. He is a Legendary Sannin," Kurenai said from where she was posted nearby, also looking through optics trained on the site.

"We're not invulnerable," Tsunade corrected. "Look for weaknesses. He's got some, although fewer than I would've expected."

"Couldn't Jiraiya still take him?" Anko adjusted her dial focusing knob just a tad as the fight moved farther away.

"He didn't succeed the last time I bribed him to. It was more of a stalemate, although that would be a good fight to watch again," Naruto spoke from his own place in the Spotter's Gallery overlooking the typical, everyday fight between Orochimaru and Team 7. "You learn more about what he does when he's serious when Roachy-chan is feeling pressed."

"Like those stories you told us of those times when you turned the forest into a war zone?" Shizune asked.

"Yeah, those." Naruto confirmed. "Although I wouldn't recommend them. It got pretty ugly, and no safe vantage points to watch from, what with the smoke and the fire and everything."

"I'm not surprised," Kurenai muttered, seeing as how Anko was too caught up in observed the specific details of the fight they'd been watching to speak on her own just then. "From what you describe, you have several thousand chunin effectives - your clones at the level you were then. Then you turned the entire forest into a trap, anticipated Orochimaru's every move, and still got beaten. It deserved to look like a war zone."

"Well, that was it." Anko put down her optics. "Sasuke got sealed again with that awful mark. Better move on to studying that thing."

"Not just yet." Naruto held out a hand to give her pause.

Instantly her interest perked, and she licked her lips, noting that he still had the set of binoculars he'd been using up on his face. As she raised her own once again, she inquired, "Oh? Something special planned?"

"Yup," was his response.

"Husband darling," Tsunade's voice became sweetly threatening. "Share!"

He chuckled. "A new approach."

An explanation became unnecessary as they saw the results for themselves unfolding out on the field.

"Ouch," Shizune muttered unnecessarily.

"So, how's the 'Thousand Gaaras' approach to fighting Orochimaru suit you?" Naruto asked them all a moment later.

"Short," Anko snarled, lowering her glasses again, face disgusted. "I've never seen the old bastard run away that fast from anything."

"You taught the demon container from Sand how to use our Shadow Clone technique?" Tsunade mumbled out, surprised. "How? When did you find the TIME? He's not in these resets, is he?"

"No, he's not. I haven't found a way to use our link to get any guys riding out the resets with us yet," Naruto frowned. "I had to befriend him, then use our Time Dilation illusion to teach him. It turns out demon containers have a natural advantage with the technique. He can create almost as many clones as I could when I was just starting out."

"I still can't believe you took one of the most cherished secret techniques of the highest level Sharingan and made your own version of it," Kurenai mused under her breath. "That's just so above what I'd expect... And then to revise it into a TRAINING tool!!"

She resumed shaking her head.

Several others shared looks. Nothing shocked a true expect like learning a newbie to their trade just broke one of the rules. She'd known about that for months now and still couldn't entirely get over it.

"We could beat him," Hana declared firmly. "Caught in between the Thousand Gaaras, our own couple Thousand Narutos, Jiraiya and Tsunade, we could pin and beat Orochimaru."

"Yeah, but Konoha would be wrecked in the three-way summon battle," Anko corrected bitterly.

"Might be good to do it for practice a few times, however," Tsunade gloated. "I need to learn more of my former teammate's newest tricks, and I won't do that well enough by standing off at a safe distance with binoculars. A few resets where I fight him, learning to predict his moves while he won't recall mine, are one good way of starting his eventual takedown."

Of course, she wasn't influenced at all over how Naruto rewarded her for things like this. No, not at all!

She licked her lips in anticipation of such rewards to come, however.

----

Sakura and a Naruto were both kneeling over Sasuke's feverish and shaking body in a shallow cave made by tree roots when it happened.

"Na..." Sakura cleared her throat painfully. "Naruto? Do you think, maybe after we get out of here, you could take me out?"

He'd been a complete gentleman with Hinata, after all. That lunch date they'd been on together had been very cute.

Surely it couldn't be too bad?

He'd learned by hard experience that most forms of gentle turn downs only made her try this harder, so he repeated. "Sakura, I asked you out once a day, on average, for six years. That's two thousand, one hundred and ninety requests for a date, and each time you turned me down was worse than the last. Sorry, but I'm not interested."

"Oh."

Just as the pink-haired genin began having her personality crisis, Tsunade, the Legendary Medic, and the kunoichi's personal heroine of the sannin came charging out of the brush, Anko, the lead examiner for this test, and several other kunoichi right behind her.

Instant hope bloomed in the young girl's breast. "Oh! You're going to help Sasuke?! Oh! Thank you!"

"Sorry, kid," Tsunade told her shortly, cutting the pinkette off before she could really start gushing. "That seal is deadly. We're only here to study it so we can develop a cure for others later. The Uchiha isn't going to survive this, but we can do research to save others later."

As Shizune started to slip into her supporting role, helping out her legendary teacher, she still provided brightly, "Well, at least Naruto was able to tell us several of the more important details, like that the ink is all poison based!"

Orochimaru was a snake freak, and snake's inject their poison by biting, so he'd willingly chosen to bite people to provide those cursed marks.

"Yeah, but the seals have already compressed," Anko rubbed her own throat where her mark lay idle. "It's going to be a bugger to decode them all, even with all of the information he already gave us."

Sakura just shrank into the background, feeling miserable and sorry for herself.

----

"Sorry, kid," Tsunade told her shortly, cutting the pinkette off before she could really start gushing. "That seal is deadly. We don't know half of what we need to cure it successfully yet."

----

"That might just be possible, kid. But don't get your hopes up," Tsunade told her shortly, cutting the pinkette off before she could really start gushing. "This is one of the most complex, chakra-invasive techniques yet devised by a very cunning mind, and a legendary genius. It's taken more work than you know to be able to do this."

"And you'd be surprised at how much of the foundation work was done by Naruto, your teammate," Shizune added on her own.

----

"Well, that's it. A successful test," Tsunade gave off a sigh of relief as she rose up, stretching the kinks out of her back and arms. Below her, the mark had faded off of Sasuke's shoulder and his fever and trembling had subsided. "He's going to live. We should be able to remove the marks now at any stage of completion."

"The amazing thing was Naruto almost had it right all along," Shizune agreed. "He was right in that the key was in dissolving those poison-based inks. He just didn't have the experience to be able to do that despite all of the many self perpetuating hooks they had into the body's chakra system."

Anko had already stripped to the waist and turned around, facing her own cursed mark to the Slug Sannin for removal. She tried hard to conceal how desperate she was to have it gone, and didn't succeed very well.

Seeing Naruto looking on like nothing was happening as the bare-chested women was getting treatment, Sakura darted forward and covered his eyes with her hands. "Naruto! You shouldn't look when a lady isn't decent!"

The pinkette then stared in disbelief as the crowd of jonin and other very senior ranking kunoichi all broke out laughing, as if she'd told a joke!

And Naruto! How DARE he laugh at her so?!!

----

"I'm going to have to learn to do that myself one of these days," Anko told her husband with gratitude as he removed her cursed seal just after waking her up, following yet another reset.

The boy answered her with a glad shrug. "Since one of the foundations of Clan Kitsune is crosstraining, I figured you'd want to eventually."

"I know all of the younger girls are learning it," Anko returned, putting back on her top - or actually, the new one he'd brought, rather than the see-through mesh one she'd used to tease Konoha for years with something almost but not quite indecent.

Kid was a fantastic tailor, and she had no reason to tease anymore. She'd bagged the guy those in the know agreed was the best male ever to grace Konoha with his presence - and they meant that quite literally!

"Hardly surprising," Naruto conceded. "Most of them grew up idolizing her. I'd take any change I had to learn whatever the Fourth Hokage wanted to teach me if he suddenly showed up in my life."

He meant that as rhetorical, but Anko caught his arm and spent a moment seriously considering it. She looked him dead in the eye and asked, "Why wouldn't he?"

Naruto laughed, scratching the back of his head with his free arm. "Because he's dead?"

"Yeah," she returned, nodding sagely. "And so are the First and Second ones, too. But that doesn't stop Roachy-chan from bringing them back to fight the Third."

That stopped the blond boy, and he had to consider that some more, but his most intense wife was already pressing home on her newfound point. "Okay, that technique he uses puts them under his absolute control, but since when have you EVER copied a technique and stuck within the absolute limitations?"

Naruto's jaw dropped open. Then slowly, as it closed, his eyes began to gleam.

Anko began nuzzling his cheek, asking, "Do I get a reward for being a good girl, now?"

His responding grin was infectious.

----

Hinata sat up from the place when she'd been laying, covered in a vast network of seals boosting the medical jutsu just used on her, a glad smile spreading wide over her face as she looked first at Naruto, then the Slug Sannin, who returned her a very tired smile.

The lavender-haired girl's foxlike ears twitched in response to a noise too faint for most to hear, then the furry tail unfurled from out behind her, and the former Hyuga heiress' dainty whiskers twitched.

"CUTE!!" A half dozen of her fellow wives descended on her in a rush to hug the stuffings out of the newly accessorized damsel.

----

Kurenai had taken to covering for the girls, 'revealing' each reset to the other jonin that she'd created a study group for them to improve their social and ninja skills.

Of course, what they really did was have pajama parties at her house, with furry bits hanging out in brown, lavender, and blonde hair while Naruto did a complete set of new measurements over everyone so they could have new outfits suited to their temporary foxy bits.

Yes, temporary. The medical designed seal arrays and the bloodline transfer techniques were exhausting even for Tsunade. So until Naruto could do them all by himself they couldn't afford to do this for all of them every reset, and the jutsu-applied foxy bits, like all physical changes, vanished in between unlike his own self perpetuating chakra inspired ones.

Still, they were all so excited to have them, they did this fairly often. And Naruto was learning VERY quickly under Tsunade's inspired tutelage, how to be a much better medic than he'd been - with an emphasis on bloodline transfer techniques for now, because very soon they'd be wanted to share out those wonderful Hyuga eyes as well as his foxy bits, and Tsunade herself just couldn't take the strain of so many massive, chakra-intensive rituals so close together.

So it was have Naruto do it, or no one.

Still, the girls were all picking it up just as fast. Naruto had loved Tsunade out of her hemophobia, curing the root of that ill, where she'd lost the last man she'd ever loved to gory injuries, by granting her enough love so that the trauma of that far distant memory was no longer attached to so great a loss.

Or, to explain further, she'd linked the sight of blood to one of the greatest and most devastating losses in her life, and she'd been unable to move on for years, or even fully practice her medical abilities.

Time heals all wounds. Nobody, no matter how dedicated, can feel just as bad about a traumatic experience thirty years later as they did on the day of. It can still cripple them, but it no longer has the power it once did unless they choose to let it do so.

But you can't stay hung up on how miserable and unhappy you are if you are too busy having a wonderful time!

Naruto was an explosion of energy. He was unstoppable, and between the massive sensory overload of his S-rank massages (according to Anko), the food, the clothes, and all of the exciting things to do developing the new clan and sharing in the discoveries they'd made...

Tsunade wasn't so empty inside that the ghosts of her past had power over her as they once did. Those long gone shades and empty memories of a pain from long ago simply couldn't stand the light of entering Naruto's life.

And he loved her. Love was important to women in a big way. She could still futility try drawing on that empty reservoir of the long dead memory of a man who'd once loved her, or she could accept the flow from the one who did now.

It was so easy she didn't even have to consciously make the choice. The bad memories that had once been haunting her packed up and moved out, as there simply wasn't room for them in her life anymore.

So, no longer held back by that ball and chain of past trauma, she started to BE that Legendary Sannin and medic she'd once been, rather than the drunken gambler she'd become in the interval, and all of them were better for the change, as with that switch she became a more excellent teacher, and all of those girls began to pick up her skills.

Especially Shizune.

Kurenai mentioned that she found it very interesting that the new Kitsune clan appeared to be positioned to become the prominent illusion and medical experts of Konoha, along with alot of minor talents and skills, especially when that was the furthest thing from Naruto's original purpose of being cool fighters.

----

"What are you doing?"

Shizune stopped what she'd been doing. "Uh, learning how to deliver a calf? Hana wants us all to pick up studying veterinary science as soon as possible. She says that it's just as important to keep our clan protectors alive as it is to know medicine for ourselves."

"And how do I resemble a cow?"

"Uh, size mostly." The girl trembled.

"Actually, I more closely resemble a barn you might keep a cow in than a cow. And speaking about things inside, can you do something about your arm?"

Suddenly realizing what she'd been caught doing. Shizune pulled her well-greased arm out with a wet 'Slurck' and began stammering apologies. "Oh! I am so very sorry! You see, the book says that in order to deliver a breach birth on a large animal you've got to slide your arm into the birth canal, and..."

The Kyubi sighed, cutting her off. "Oh, forget it. Let's put it down to this: you're a vet, and I'm an animal, and chalk it up to one of those unpleasant medical experiences no one likes to talk about. At least you were the only one to see my humiliation."

"Well, from what they'd been telling me. They've all done this before using you as a model. I was just catching up." Shizune admitted shyly, with a blush, before realizing that might not be the most comforting thing to say.

"Oh, they have, have they?" The Kyubi asked with narrowed eyes, then sighed. "You've got the scent of my master all over you, so I cannot kill you, in spite of how much I'd like to. Tell me, what ELSE has he been up to?"

"Oh, a few things," Shizune stepped away from the cage, hurriedly wiping the grease off of her arm. "I'll go and get him so you can discuss it."

And with that, she darted away from the Kyubi enclosure - a very nice gilded cage set out on the garden lawn of the mansion in his mind.

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Author's Notes:

Anybody see that one coming?