The sixth day of training dawned on Konoha with clear skies and glittering morning dew.
It was in the early hours of the day, while the village was still asleep, that Sasuke Uchiha got up. In less than half an hour he was done with his morning routine. Brusquely, he opened the sliding window.
"I'm off to training ground twenty-five."
An ANBU appeared not an inch from his face.
"Noted," the agent said curtly.
Sasuke turned away without comment and quitted the house in a jog. It wasn't until an hour later that he stopped to properly breakfast in a nearby stand.
"Ahhh… Sasuke-san!" an elderly lady greeted. "I'd ask what brings you here at this ungodly hour, but I know by now that you're an early riser!"
Sasuke nodded. "I've been running," he contributed.
"Indeed? Then you must be famished! Come, I'll treat you to some dumplings."
"That won't be necessary. I brought change."
"I insist!"
When the meal was done, Sasuke nevertheless placed a pile of coins on the counter. He grabbed the dumplings and inclined his head.
"Ja." And then Sasuke took his leave.
TWISTED
It was around that time when, in a deep part of the forest of death, two viridian eyes shot open.
Stretching blearily, Sakura took a moment to simply sit there and think. Yesterday hadn't ended very well. After struggling to eat bits and pieces of a slightly charred snake (Sakura hadn't dared touch the head in case she accidentally poisoned herself), Sakura had ambled about the forest pointlessly. She'd looked for shelter of any kind, but there was nowhere she could truly feel safe – not from the wind and less so from wild animals. In the end, she'd had to settle for the top of a tree, where she fortunately still was.
Unfortunately, she was also still hungry. With only thoughts of breakfast clogging her mind, Sakura heaved herself over the tree. Chakra landings were something Kakashi had ingrained into her while they were still at Wave, and if that brutal training of his hadn't been enough, what came next sure was. But as she fell toward the forest floor, Sakura realized that something was off. Something was different. She was plummeting down much too quickly! Her body was diving headfirst, yet her mobility was nonexistent!
"The armor!" Inner shouted. "Take it off!"
"I can't fucking undress in midair!"
Screaming never helped, and neither did screaming at yourself. Paradoxically, it was that which helped ground Sakura. Suddenly, she knew what to do.
"KAWARIMI!" The familiar hand signs stretched across her fingers without conscious thought, and now she was that much closer to the ground, her feet where her head had just been.
"Oof!" In the following second, Sakura found herself sprawled across the forest floor.
"Note to self: armors are heavy…" Sakura grumbled. She was thankfully fine, as the kawarimi had halved her falling distance. Who would've thought that such an elementary jutsu could be this useful? Sakura smiled to herself. She'd tried to hunt earlier, but even her good accuracy wasn't enough to take the forest's clever birds by surprise. Yet now she knew exactly which technique could.
"Hunting with kawarimi, huh?" Sakura smirked to herself. "This almost feels like one of Iruka-sensei's assignments…"
Inner was already cracking her knuckles. "Now where are those feathered chickens?!"
TWISTED
While Sakura flailed around in a heavy armor, struggling to catch innocent birds by their necks, Sasuke was struggling with his own demons in training ground number twenty five.
He needed to concentrate…
His eyes closed behind the headband covering them, his ears strained. Without allowing himself to hesitate, Sasuke kicked a long, wooden tree-trunk which was attached to a rope, and then another. Like a child's swing, both logs careened away from him, but then flopped right back.
Just as the first trunk was about to hit him, Sasuke stepped aside. The second, however, came unpredictably rushing forwards faster even than the former, ramming into Sasuke's stomach like a bull mid-charge.
Wheezing in pain, the teen coiled into himself.
He'd have to keep practicing. Dodging, he'd learned, was essential.
"Timing…" Sasuke grit out. "It's all about… timing."
TWISTED
"Timing. It's all about timing, Naruto! Geez, what were you thinking, stopping to eat ramen of all things?"
"I already said I'm sorry, okay!"
"Sorry won't cut it!"
Asuma, Kurenai, Choji and Shikamaru watched silently as Naruto and Ino cussed at one another back and forth. Finally, Kurenai lost her patience.
"Are you two quite done?"
Both blondes turned toward her sheepishly.
"Sorry, Vampy-nechan!"
Kurenai rolled her eyes.
"She's doing you a favor by coming," Asuma cautioned.
"We wont do it again, promise. Isn't that right, Naruto?" Ino began pulling at his ear.
"Ow! Yah, ow! What she said!"
"Ready for whatever Naruto's memories hold in store today?" Kurenai asked everyone.
They all nodded, and Kurenai's finger henceforth went straight to Naruto's forehead, right below the hitai ate.
Soon, they found each other in a clearing at a foreign forest.
Illusionary versions of Kakashi, Sasuke and Naruto were crouching on a stretch of ground, Kakashi as always with a book in hand. Reality-Ino opened her mouth, presumably to ask about the team's missing member, but closed it as soon as Kakashi began to speak.
"Sasuke, Naruto. If you want me to take your training seriously, I need you to do something important for me first."
"What? What? What?" Naruto jumped around excitedly.
Kakashi tucked a crumpled paper out of his pocket and unfolded it gingerly. It looked like a plan or map of some sort. "Easy." His smile was angelic. "Sakura-chan set up some death-traps earlier. I want you to test whether they work."
"HEEEH?!"
Kakashi didn't let either of them complain, for he added: "Starting now." And pulling out a kunai, he cut a tiny wire which hadn't been visible before.
"You're not giving us an option?!"
While yelling, Naruto and Sasuke belatedly scrambled for cover. Meanwhile, Kakashi laughed at their expense. "Of course I'm giving you an option – just one option. But don't fret my little pupils, I'll consider this little chore over with as soon as you make it into the house."
"What do you mean, the house!?" Naruto shouted. "That's half a kilometer away!"
Kakashi replied by chipping off another wire, which propelled a shower of sharp pines their way.
"Pines. Seriously?" muttered Sasuke, picking one up dubiously.
"Seriously," said Kakashi. A third wire was cut, and something grey and liquid fell right upon them. "FIRE BALL JUTSU!" Kakashi yelled. The pines caught fire in the blink of an eye – a raging fire. Naruto made a startled leap back, while Sasuke dropped his pine as though signed.
"Are you trying to calcine us?!" Naruto yelled in a panic.
"Who knows." Kakashi shrugged.
"The question is…" Sasuke smirked. "Who taught you such a big word, dobe?"
"Shut up, teme!"
"As if, Bibiri-kun."
"You wanna taste my fist, HUH?!"
From his perch on a tree, Kakashi looked down at them condescendingly.
"Are you planning to argue all day? Out of curiosity."
Startled, Naruto and Sasuke turned back to face him.
"Let's go!" shouted Sasuke, setting a course toward the house. "And don't sidetrack me this time, dobe!"
"Not a chance, teme! You're the one who's in my way, believe it!"
Kakashi, on his part, disappeared.
"Where'd he go?" Naruto yelled.
"He'll try to ambush us with one of Sakura's traps," Sasuke grit out. "Now move it!"
TWISTED
"What kind of training is that?" Ino raged.
"So that's how Sakura learned all those complex traps…" murmured Choji.
"The question you should be asking," Shikamaru said, "is why an elite jonin allowed a genin to set them in the first place." His eyes narrowed. "This kind of situation isn't a drill. If, as Naruto said, Zabuza is – was – still alive, then why did Kakashi implement such a lax security? Why let Sakura do it?"
"Sakura's traps did great!" Naruto defended. "Besides, she improved upon them! Sensei made us do the drill until the traps were so good that we were stuck going in circles for hours!"
"You mean he made her re-arm all the traps repeatedly?" Kurenai asked, looking startled. "Only someone who knows their knots can do that without screwing up – it's a hell of a lot of work."
Unbidden, another memory surfaced, in answer to their question.
"I'm gonna get a drink!" Illusion-Naruto yelled. He and Sasuke were both in a clearing this time. In the background, Sasuke was trying to chakra-climb a tree with only his legs.
"Fine, get lost, dobe," replied Sasuke.
"Well I won't lose where it counts, teme!" Naruto bit back by way of leaving.
Cheerfully, he went to get the aforementioned drink from the house. What he wasn't expecting was to hear muffled voices.
"…you can dodge this snare in four different ways," Kakashi was saying flippantly. In the clearing up ahead, Sakura was ducking her head; she looked close to tears, Naruto thought. "Worse yet. Are you trying to kill our client?" Kakashi went on. "This wouldn't even trick a civilian, Sakura-chan."
Sakura's face was creepily blank by that point. No more tears then. Illusion-Naruto, who had hidden behind a bush to eavesdrop, looked like he was about to jump out in Sakura's defense.
"Sakura-chan? The traps are waiting." Kakashi informed, playing the impatience card for once in his life.
Sakura's suddenly irritated look said that she hadn't missed that little detail either, but she nevertheless did as Kakashi asked and set to re-inventing the traps for the whole area, her head bent over the paper.
When Naruto returned from taking a dump and drinking water, Sakura looked like she was about to finish scribbling in a piece of paper. Her eyes as sharp as daggers, she thrust the plan at Kakashi. Naruto (and all the new onlookers) held their breaths as Kakashi eyed it.
"Now that that's been taken care of," he concluded breezily, "find all the loopholes in it."
Sakura gaped.
"Well?" He arched an eyebrow. "I'm waiting." Kakashi even waved the plan around casually.
Sakura, on her part, looked ready to throttle him.
So did Ino.
"What a hypocritical asshole! What is Sakura, his maid? That's no way to treat your student!"
Somewhere else in the village, Kakashi sneezed. Also somewhere else, Sakura coughed, just as she was about to pounce on a bird.
The bird flew off.
"Damn it all!"
Mastering a long-distance kawarimi would take a while.
TWISTED
Sasuke had been training for over two hours when something odd happened. Or rather, someone odd happened upon him. The abnormality was an old man who dressed like a cross between traditional garb and ninja, topped by red warpaint on his cheeks and a bush of white hair that was completely in disarray. Did this old man have heroic delusions or something? Sasuke snorted. He looked thirty years late for the job.
In vague reminiscence of a fly buzzing in the background, the oddball began prowling around Sasuke's quiet corner of the training ground. Or… quiet it had been until a short while a go. A group of kunoichi had joined Sasuke's spot not too long ago in order to do yoga and flexibility stretches. Truth be told, Sasuke had been about to leave in search of a quieter spot, though then he reasoned to himself that any seasoned shinobi should be able to deal with whatever was thrown his way, more so if it was a bunch of girls stretching in the background. They weren't even that noisy – and neither were they nosy, for that matter, so Sasuke let it be.
Until this creep appeared. Sasuke didn't know whether it had anything to do with his sensory training, but the man's undesirable presence behind some shrubs was hard to miss.
Personally, he liked to take pride in the fact that he could deal with quite a lot of harassment without it getting to him, but something about this – this pervert – irked him in a way only Naruto had achieved before.
"You, stop spying on those girls," Sasuke called out loudly. The yoga girls turned around with surprise, all eyes fixing on the oddball behind the bushes.
"Now you listen here, brat!" The man marched out of the bushes, and before Sasuke knew it, seized his ear roughly and started pulling at it. "That's not how you talk to – eh?" His lecherous gaze had fixed on the yoga girls, who were staring at him unabashedly. "Hello, ladies," he said suavely.
The yoga girls fled.
With a scowl (Sasuke couldn't believe the weirdo had managed to grab his ear) Sasuke tore himself free of the man'd grasp.
"See what you did, kid?" the bush-person lamented. "This is what fellow members who contribute to society get for trying to work! Disrespectful children: hehe, what a joke! Did you see that lost opportunity? The research… you okay, kid?"
Sasuke realized that some of his contempt for this bushman must've seeped through his gaze, or in this case, dark glower.
"I am not a kid, old man." He jutted his chin out. "I don't need to prove myself to you."
"Ah, sure, sure, get lost, kid. You're hot stuff, of course you are." The man made a shooing motion, as though Sasuke might be a cow he needed to herd in the right direction.
Sasuke clenched his jaw. "Perhaps I am hot, perhaps I could blow a fireball at you right this moment."
"Oho, now I'm sacred, kid."
He kept saying kid! Sasuke was certain the man was just doing it to annoy him.
"Shall I demonstrate?" He asked, narrowing his eyes. Of course, Sasuke had no intention to blow the fireball into the man's face, but Sasuke wasn't above power displays. And this sick pervert deserved everything he got. Sasuke had no patience for the likes of him.
"You think you could hit me, kid?" The man cackled to himself. "How cute! Do you even know who I am? I am… the Toad Sage!"
And Sasuke was snorting in his face, big deal.
"Argh, kid, show some respect to your elders!"
Once again, the Toad Sage moved before Sasuke could process it. This time, he grabbed Sasuke by the scruff of his neck and hauled him into the bushes he'd previously camped behind.
Shocked, Sasuke gathered himself. He'd been dumped in bushman's bush. Wait. He'd been thrown. What kind of elderly person had strength like that?
"Reveal yourself!" Suddenly, Sasuke had an idea. "I know your end game, old man! Or should I say: spy? Your pretending to perv on those girls was only a ploy… you were actually waiting to get me alone," he growled. And kill me.
Sasuke's stance tensed.
"Ahaha! Did you just say I was peeking on you? No offense, kid, but I prefer boobs."
Sasuke opened his mouth to say something. Closed it. Turned around. Turned back.
"Hn. After behaving so suspiciously, you're trying to tell me that you are only a standard pervert?"
"Excuse me? I'm no such thing!" His nostrils flared. "I'll have you know I am an ULTRA pervert! Write it on your forehead, kid."
Sasuke frowned. Who exactly was this – this perverted bushman? And why was he so strong? Was he an enemy? Or was he an ally?
A/N
So. Turns out I did manage to update. Cheers.
Anyways, things are still pretty wobbly in regards to scheduling… so no promises for next week.
If any of you happen to be lusting after more original content by my dashing self (yeah right!) you're welcome to check out my story: Harry Potter and the Sorting Gone Wrong. I think it's pretty self explanatory, with the focus being on character development. Surprised?