Chapter 12: A Dozen of My Closest Friends

~III~

Naruto hated bunshin jutsus.

By the start of the third Academy year, he had improved his chakra control to the point that he could cast a successful "normal" bunshin jutsu so long as he made a minimum of twenty copies. They were no longer sickly and pale or incapacitated due to irritable bowel syndrome. It was frustrating to no end that he still needed such large numbers as he was required to make three, and only three, for the final test. Worse was the fact that he knew what the issue was since he and Tama-chan had discovered it last year while he was learning some of the camping jutsus that were so very helpful during the survival test.

It didn't matter that he had mastered substitution and (what the academy called) transformation jutsus to the point they were both seal-less and almost traceless. Without those damnable bunshins, he'd fail to pass again so he continued whittling down the amount of chakra used for that by improving his control.

For good measure, he also learned the D-rank body flicker jutsu in the genin-slash-Chunin section of the library to the same level. It was supposed to be short-range – about one hundred meters - but, by overloading the jutsu with chakra, he could flicker up to a thousand meters fairly easily. He had the hardest time under five meters, but he presumed that was due to his issues with chakra management. It would improve with everything else.

Flashback no Jutsu

Naruto was a bit more cautious this time as he approached the tee-peed pile of dry kindling. His face was still a touch red from the last attempt and his smoldering shirt would have to be replaced tomorrow. He hoped his eyebrows would grow back before class.

With deep breaths to clear his mind, he began to slowly exhale trickling as small a stream of chakra to the index finger of his right hand, his index finger and thumb touching at the tips trying to build up pressure before he released them with the snapping of his fingers. After barely waiting for a two count, Naruto flicked his finger while poking his hand in between the sticks of the twig pyre. The gout of flame that erupted from his digit tore into the base of the wood and, now trapped by the mini logs, exploded in all directions between the stick fragments and straight up through the apex of the pile in a blast of flame.

Tamami sighed while he doused his eyebrows and flaming bangs for the fifth time that night. "You're still pushing too much chakra through the jutsu." She flicked her finger and a tiny five-centimeter flame lit at the end of her index finger. "It should look like this."

With the flame thrower shooting two meters from the end of his still lit finger, all Naruto could do was groan in frustration and try again. He was really starting to hate the smell of burnt hair.

Tamami extinguished his finger first by using another camping jutsu to compress water from the air.

Flashback no Jutsu – KAI!

Naruto was improving but he needed more time to practice or he needed to be in two places at once. He just didn't have enough time to devote to chakra and elemental control exercises with his schedule.

Then he remembered the notes on the Kage Bunshin and nearly face-palmed himself. According to the author, Kage Bunshin were much sturdier constructs that had the capacity to relay experience back to the original caster because of the imprinted chakra brain – they could learn and, by doing so, help you learn. Oh, it did nothing for muscle development due to being a purely chakra-built construct but reading, studying (frankly any cognitive development skill), spying, and even chakra or elemental control exercises were all under the purview of the Kage Bunshin. He could literally be in two places at once, or more.

Kage Bunshins divided the chakra of the usher up among the number of constructs created. While useful, it proved hazardous if you tried to make too many, hence the reason why it was dangerous to, and forbidden out of the reach of most shinobi below Jounin level.

There were many reasons why each village had varied shinobi distributed in each rank tier and chakra capacity played centrally into a lot of that. While not as big an issue for Naruto (ten percent of his chakra still put him in the chakra ranks of most Jounin and some Kage or low S-ranked nins) it was enormously taxing. Taking into account that the average Kage Bunshin could last up to eighteen hours (according to the notes), the amount of chakra in Naruto's Kage Bunshin meant they stayed around a lot longer.

When I say, 'a lot,' I mean ridiculous amounts.

The first time he successfully made a batch, they lingered for over four weeks. This was great for Tamami and her chakra or jutsu training. It was horrible for their food budget - one Naruto was a lot to feed, ten Narutos was detrimental and should be illegal in most nations and, while made of chakra, the clones exhibited all of his habits, including an addiction to ramen in all its forms.

Before Naruto could master the exploding bunshin, he had to fix the regular Kage Bunshin. Since these constructs had his knowledge and use of jutsu, he put them to work (with Tamami's help) solving the riddle of chakra control and elemental proficiency while Tatsua worked his real body into the ground. In the end, it became a simple math problem.

They first had to quantify the problem of consumption and began with "one-tenth of Naruto's chakra is a metric butt-ton for anyone else." That established, how does that equate to a normal shinobi casting the jutsu? So, Tamami learned it and created her own, which lasted a little over twelve hours before dispersing in a cloud of smoke. Furthermore, the bunshin construct's use of chakra depleted its "life force" faster, causing them to expire sooner, something good to keep in the back of their minds. Beyond even that, they learned that one Kage Bunshin was roughly twenty times more powerful than a regular Bunshin since Tamami used the same amount of chakra for a Kage Bunshin to cast a normal bunshin jutsu and created twenty of the ghost-like clones.

Taking the twenty-to-one potency of Naruto's chakra (a rounded off guess based on the camping mishap), they assumed that his use of chakra could be easily compressed if the amount to create twenty of his normal bunshin could be shaped into a chakra construct to create a single Kage Bunshin. They would be considerably weaker and would expire sooner but should still be able to meet their intended function.

Using those numbers, Tamami estimated that her Taichou should be able to create up to five-thousand-four-hundred normal Kage Bunshin shells, without using Kyuubi's chakra, and still keep ten percent of his enormous chakra reserves. They just had to fix the jutsu construct first.

The number was staggering but the implications were that it could be applied to anyone that knew the jutsu. After presenting her findings, she convinced Naruto to create six Kage Bunshin clones, set the first five to working on elemental affinity training she'd discovered in a library tome, then took the last construct to work on her theory.

They eventually constructed a stable "shell," or a bunshin made out of a set amount of compressed chakra and, in the process, discovered two very interesting facts.

Fact One: They found out that what they considered "normal chakra users" could not use the "hollow shell" construct to much effect. Tamami's clones, depending on activity, could only last between thirty to sixty minutes. For short, simple tasks or sparring matches, this was usually sufficient. For very complex, labor-oriented task or for their intended purpose of espionage and or information gathering on troop formations, this variant didn't fit the bill…unless you were either already deep into enemy territory or you were Naruto and your equivalent chakra usage at the same ratio gave your clones nineteen hours of life under full transformation. Once the Kage Bunshin mastered this shaping technique and could replicate the action, it popped itself with a cloned kunai and the knowledge replicated not only in the original but also with all of the remaining clones working on elemental affinity. There were limits, however.

Traditional shadow clones were limited in range based on the power of the user since they were linked by a very fine lifeline of chakra. Break the line and the construct "died." The Hokage, for example, could push clones throughout most of Konoha, the tether transmitting information back to him flawlessly. The standalone clones Naruto created had much greater range but tended to become spotty the further out they traveled, some even failing to relay any experience at all over several hundred miles.

It seemed like bits and pieces of the information would get lost in transmission or the information replay would skip sections like when the movie at the theater became tangled in the projector and slowed or sped up randomly jumbling the words and images on the screen. If Naruto wanted reliable, or decipherable, information from his clones, he needed to be within one hundred miles. Anything beyond that was a crapshoot.

The force and information-related implications of this jutsu were still rather enormous.

First of all, Naruto had an army of clones at his disposal, at a moment's notice, capable of using all of the skills and jutsu he had learned to date. If he never summoned the full Kitsune army to serve him, impressive in and of its own right, he was an invasion (or defending) force unto himself. He was a force multiplier of one. They never needed to rest and could think, react, and plan independently. They were portable, fully trained, fearless, and most of all, deadly. Their ability to use Naruto's extension, reinforcement and elemental skillsets only made them deadlier since that all made them harder to kill than a normal Kage Bunshin even if it reduced their lifespan to a third. A Kage Bunshin in a fight only needs to be effective long enough to distract, disable, or dismember and that doesn't normally take five hours to accomplish.

Second, once you considered his formidable stealth, trapping, transformation, and infiltration repertoire, they by default become the ultimate spy, assassination, or infiltration asset. If a method for replenishing their chakra ever became viable, they would make the perfect long term undercover asset under the direct control of their caster. The ramifications for an absolutely loyal and completely disposable spy network with instant information relaying capabilities? *shudder*

Third, Kage Bunshin were the ultimate multi-tasking tool. Once the chakra consumption and life-span (read ramen consumption issue) had been solved, clones became the ultimate training tools. Now hundreds of clones could be replicated to work either individual projects (if they were small enough) or in groups, which increased the pace of learning and their overall effectiveness.

Naruto put that to immediate use having a cell of one hundred clones working on the Bunshin Daibakuha jutsu in some isolated woodland area far beyond Konoha's walls. With each clone able to make another ten clones to experiment with, the exercise yielded positive results by the end of the day and, just like that, his Kage Bunshin developed another very useful tool for Naruto's ninja tool bag.

Fact Two: The second major discovery arrived at the end of the day when Tamami discovered an unintended benefit to a Kage Bunshin being dedicated full time to elemental affinity, particularly earth elemental affinity. The training technique described in the latest library book required the practitioner to find a spot replete with the element in demand, the rockier the better. Once situated comfortably in a meditative pose, chakra was released in tendrils, like the roots of a tree, down into the soil as far as possible with the intent being to feel out different types of ore and categorize the elements by type. This probing would further refine the user's control and enable the categorization, consolidation and (ultimately) extraction of those elements to the surface under the control of the earth chakra user.

This type of practice was used by shinobi in Iwa to mine, landscape and pursue other geological endeavors. Really talented chakra users could also modify different crystalline matrixes converting one element to another (compressing carbon enough could create diamonds but a fine touch was needed to make the diamond matrix structure stable). So, it was a surprise when the clones returned late in the afternoon as their chakra was about to fail and the clone assigned to earth affinity exercises set his note-taking scroll onto the kitchen table just as he exploded in a cloud of smoke. Inside were his notes with a newly inked storage seal at the bottom.

When Naruto unsealed the scroll his breath immediately escaped in a high-pitched whistle. Laying on the scroll were seven piles of common elements, coal, iron, tin, copper, silver, gold, and chakra metal, all in nuggets the size of his head. His mind immediately flashed to a conversation in Higurashi-san's forge over the only bar he'd seen of the metal as the elder blacksmith went through its highly-desirable properties, which contributed to its highly-inflated value.

Chakra metal naturally lent itself to chakra conduction through lower levels of cellular contamination than say high-grade steel, making it a very highly pursued commodity in weapons manufacturing.

The bar in Higurashi's delivery was a refined block half the length of his forearm, two-thirds as wide as the same, and ten centimeters in height and that block was worth ten thousand Ryu to the right buyer. Gram for gram in volume it was forty percent lighter than high-grade steel, twice as strong, and shined with a bluish tinge to the milky-blue metal. The color was distinctive and appealed greatly to the noble classes indicating a weapon of distinction. The block Higurashi had was commissioned by a wealthy noble in the capital city, so Naruto couldn't get to work with it, but now he had ten times as much in the same high-grade metal.

Naruto would make clone mining a regular occurrence after that discovery.

The grizzled blacksmith did let Naruto work alongside him while crafting the noble's blade, a ceremonial dagger that would be later encrusted with jewels before it disappeared on some mantel as a trinket to be dusted periodically. As he learned, chakra metal is a fickle mistress and difficult to work, however, Higurashi used a unique set of molds, using Doton jutsu, to press the metal into shape once it reached the right temperature. Beginning with coke instead of the normal charcoal provided better heat control. As for shaping and refining the metal, it had to be hot and pliable without fracturing while Higurashi worked the details with brass hammers and chisels of increasingly smaller size. Naruto's skillful use of Katon jutsus also helped to reduce working time and kept a more even heat to the forging process, something Higurashi liked and appreciated a great deal.

Working the metal was arduous but the shop's quality never lagged. As thanks for his help (another pair of talented hands is always helpful), Higurashi paid Naruto five-hundred Ryu from the dagger's profits, offering to let the boy help in an ever-increasing number of projects, especially since Tenten never liked smithing preferring instead to work on her personal weapon stash. With Naruto, Higurashi had found a true apprentice.

Tenten, in the bargain, found eye candy to help pass the time in the store.

Looking at the payload on the table one last time, Naruto figured he had more than enough metal to make the punch-knives and matching tanto floating around in the back of his head. Tomorrow he would send out another Kage Bunshin, so it could pick up where today's clone left off at, and then an army of Kage Clones to take geological samples looking for more rich veins to harvest. There was opportunity here.

With a strong hug to Tamami (he liked the way she squished against him as his face was finally high enough it nestled snugly between her breasts and not below them), Naruto popped off a Kage Clone to clean up the ore and headed off to the shower. He was happy enough that he didn't even get weirded out by the already naked Kitsune women that followed him.

Naruto wanted to enjoy the rest of his Sunday off. Seeing as his morning had been successful with his clone endeavors, he scooped up Tatsua much to her pleasant surprise and slung her over his shoulder with a gentle pat on her shapely rear. The shocked Kitsune squeaked out a surprised moan then reverted to her chibi form to better snuggle around his shoulders. With a quick peck on the lips to Tamami (and a shifty pat of her right cheek), he strode from the apartment wanting to take in the pleasant day.

With no clear destination in mind, he invariably found himself at Ichiraku's and the smiling faces of Teuchi and Ayame as the former dished up a bowl of pork ramen and the latter nuzzled his cheek in welcome, much to the jealous displeasure of the few customers already leering at her firm backside.

Naruto ignored their sour faces and dug into his first bowl. Tatsua chirped happily as she hopped her way to the stool next to him when Ayame lowered a plate of grilled beef strips for her to nibble on. With paws on the counter and face happily chomping away, the happy kit chirped and trilled as her bushy tail swished back and forth. She was beginning to really like the ramen girl.

'Taichou, can we make a harem and include Ayame-san?' she chirped through the seal.

Naruto tried hard not to choke on the steaming noodles he was trying studiously to inhale as he listened to the family pair chatter and joke about recent events.

'No! She's like a sister! A MUCH older sister!'

The chibi kit huffed once and dug into her snack and a disappointed chirp.

Amidst the happy conversation with the shop owner and his daughter, Naruto noticed a mild itching between his shoulder blades. Lifting his head from his bowl and swiveling around on his stool, the blonde student lowered his face until he could see under the hanging banners marking the establishment. What he saw made him pause in his chewing.

Standing in the middle of the street was a brown-haired female wearing a Chunin flak vest, the front unzipped enough to show the top of her appreciable cleavage and confirm no mesh shirt or tee shirt underneath. Form hugging shorts covered her lower half to about mid-thigh with a storage belt around her waist to hold shuriken, kunai and presumably other objects of war. Dark combat sandals and a bracer on her left arm rounded out her ensemble. Her long hair was held back in a ponytail except for two strands framing her face. What really caught his attention, other than the three dogs at her feet intently watching the fox kit next to him, were the two red triangles on her cheeks just below her non-slitted eyes, a trait he thought common in all Inuzuka given the few times he'd seen Kiba with his mother Tsume.

Their eyes met and the girl seemed… conflicted. Not wanting to start drama on his peaceful day out, Naruto slowly turned back to his meal and resumed eating. At some point, the older Inuzuka woman came to a decision because she slid into the stool on his left side, away from the Tatsua, and turned so that she was facing him.

Naruto inhaled deeply marking her scent as Tatsua had taught him, something that caught the nin-ken kunoichi by surprise. When he swallowed his mouthful of noodles, he turned to her and she started at the deep blue of his eyes and the golden slits making his pupils very foxlike.

"Can I help you, Inuzuka-san?" He had to pause when he heard Tatsua hissing angrily behind him, his head whipping around to see one of the dog triplets sniffing her cautiously.

"Souta! Leave her be! Same goes for you two." The identified nin-ken slinked to his master's side and laid flat on the ground, tongue lolling nearly to his paws.

Teuchi and Ayame had paused their work to observe what they hoped wouldn't be a nasty encounter. When it seemed like things had quieted, they reluctantly went back to the grill.

Tatsua lowered her hackles enough to scarf down her last piece of beef and scuttled back onto her perch around his neck, her angry eyes taking in the much larger dogs next to the Inuzuka woman sitting very closer to her Taichou. The tip of her tail flicked irritatingly in a very cat-like fashion.

Inuzuka Hana smiled at the interaction between the boy and his fox. It explained his spicy-earthy scent mixed in with the fox's own. A sudden urge grabbed her, and she leaned forward just a bit before taking in a deep whiff of him, her eyes glazing over slightly as they reopened showing an increased dilation of her warm pupils.

Naruto noted that her deep brown eyes had a measure of warmth he had not seen in either Kiba or the clan matron. Too bad he could neither trust nor befriend her. His rivalry with Kiba made that a certainty at the least.

"You never answered my question."

Hana blinked forgetting for a second what his question was. "Oh, I wanted to… apologize." She appeared to be having difficulty focusing. Two of the dogs at her feet began to whine and sniff at her with concern so she turned to them and hissed, "I know, Sora!" He noticed the woman's fingers gripping her thighs tightly.

Naruto smiled thanking Kyuubi once again for his overly abundant youki-enhanced pheromone production. If things turned ugly, it just might give him a second or two to escape mostly unharmed.

However, if she was to become sexually aggressive...

"Apologize for what? As far as I know, you've done nothing to harm me."

"As the next heir to my clan, I am responsible for the actions of my clan and we, the Inuzuka, have wronged you." His eyes darkened at the memory of a certain Inuzuka not in his academy class.

"There is nothing you can do to make that right." His anger continued to smolder but the golden slits in them faded away to reveal round pupils of inky midnight.

Hana found herself being drawn into those deep eyes, her body burning with the heat blossoming in her core. Sora chuffed at her and she barely stopped her left hand as it slowly began to reach out for his whiskered cheek. The boy noticed with his eyes but didn't shy away from her. 'What is wrong with me?'

"Is there no way to make peace between us?"

"Do you know what Pagu did during the attack on me?"

His question shocked her since no one in her clan actually spoke of what happened, not even to the heirs; it was what they called a "baring of the soul," a closed-door discussion with Tsume and the eldest of the pack in one of the Inuzuka's oldest traditions.

The Inuzuka Clan Head, be they male or female, entered a very special location set deep in the clan's pack lands, a place sacred to all Inuzuka. It was so sacred that to enter without an invitation was to invite punishment under the brutal Hundred Claws, punishment - a passing Fang Over Fang attack on the violator from ten separate Inuzuka clansmen - which more often than not ended in the death of the trespasser.

Once there, the Council of Elders stripped bare to the loincloth as a symbolic gesture to prove they bore no ill will and the meeting was conducted while the location was sealed up and subjected to sauna-like conditions from the central hearth filled with stones kept heated through low-powered Katon jutsus.

The oppressive heat was to symbolize solidarity with the pain of a victim wronged by someone of the clan as they sweated through the ceremonial discussion. It was also tradition that while under the roof of that sacred place no untruth could be spoken otherwise bad karma would affect each and every member of the Kabul.

It had been almost fifty years since the clan last needed to hold such a meeting, much to her mother's shame. Hana, even as the heir knew nothing of what was discussed in that conclave only that it centered around the pup staring at her with those piercing blue eyes, the same pup waiting for an answer to his question.

Hana shook her head no, choosing to wrap her arms around her own waist to keep them and her hands under control; she could feel the bruises forming where her fingers had dug into her thighs.

"He was the one that found me while I was trying to escape the mob chasing me, a small child. He waited until I decided to make a break for my home then stabbed me in the back with a kunai, the blade piercing my right lung from behind and knocking me to the ground. I was six and malnourished at the time so it wouldn't take much to knock me over."

Everyone in the small stand winced, even the ones that hid scowls when he came around to eat.

She knew why he would attack him like that. Pagu most likely wanted to incapacitate him but not kill him – he wanted to prolong the boy's suffering. The realization made her wince a second time.

"It gets worse. Once the small mob gathered, he made it his personal responsibility to make sure I couldn't escape again." Naruto was running a finger along all of the major joint sections of his body, switching hands as he switched sides. Everyone realized after about the fifth "slice" that he was showing places where his attackers were severing tendons and ligaments so that he couldn't run or defend himself.

Left wrist.

Right wrist.

Left elbow.

Right elbow.

Left armpit.

Right armpit.

Left knee.

The invisible slashes kept coming as the boy worked his way down to his lower extremities ending at the back of his heels and the Achilles tendon.

Everyone realized after about the fifth "slice" that he was showing places where his attackers were severing tendons and ligaments so that he couldn't run or defend himself.

By this time, Teuchi and Ayame had stopped moving as did the few remaining customers. The horror on all their faces evident as he retold the incident, more so for the store owners as they never head the details before. Naruto always refused to speak of it hiding his pain behind a mask of fake smiles. For once, he had lowered the mask and they were dreading the pain of his secret life.

"While the others hit, kicked, or stabbed me, he cut every tendon he could find. He wanted to make sure I wasn't going anywhere and that they could take their time murdering me. When he ran out of things to sever, he began stabbing vital organs until, I'm told, the ANBU finally arrived to break it up. I don't know for sure since I passed out halfway into the assault."

He leaned forward in his seat just enough to pull her now tear-stained face back to him, her soft brown eyes meeting his deep blue ones with a flinching start.

"Your clan promptly took custody of his punishment so that the village authority could not reach him. To this day, I have no idea what's become of him or whether or not he's even remorseful for what he did to me when I was a defenseless six-year-old boy," Ayame and several others gasped in shock, "…but if he's treated like the others that attacked me he's probably unharmed and being heralded as a hero."

A warm pair of arms wrapped around his body and Naruto turned to his left to see Hinata crying into his neck. She was later joined by Ayame who was glaring darkly at the Inuzuka heiress.

"You tell me, Inuzuka-san. Do you think there can be peace between us?"

The three dogs at her feet were actually hanging their heads in shame. Hana was a sobbing wreck, her face in clear shock and disgust at what she just heard. It's not often that an Inuzuka calls another in their clan an animal and not mean it in a complementary fashion but that was clearly running through her head.

She rose amidst her own sniffles and bowed deeply to the blonde before staggering off in the direction of her clan compound, her nin-ken slinking off with their tails tucked away.

It was clear to her now that the Inuzuka had much to atone for.

~III~

Naruto's life wasn't one horrible mistake or tragedy after another. With his recent bunshin discoveries, you could argue that life was becoming almost bearable. One morning, he even got a chance to pay back the mangy Inuzuka and his mutt.

Seated outside under the group's usual tree, Naruto had finished a test early before the lunch break and went outside to enjoy the sun with Tamami. He'd plopped down under the branches while waiting for the others to finish and could smell the Inuzuka circling around behind him. It was never difficult to smell the Inuzuka.

Naruto motioned for Tatsua to take her perch on his neck just moments before "Gatsuga!" rang out from the trees behind them. The spinning duo hit the ground and a massive cloud of dirt shot into the air, the ground next to the tree shredded with their attack. Thinking they'd crushed the boy, Kiba felt the technique hit something solid but there was so much dust he couldn't be sure. It was as he and Akamaru were looking for their rivals that two pairs of hands reached up from the soil and yanked them both down into the earth until their heads were the only things left above ground. Blinking in confusion, Kiba began to curse when the sound of water falling on his hood led to a warm liquid running into his hair and eyes. The whimpering next to him told him that Akamaru had not escaped the same fate and it didn't take the nose of an Inuzuka to figure out what the warm liquid was.

"Dynamic Marking!" Naruto gave it his best Kiba imitation with the assistance of another clone before jumping down from the tree and going back inside while clutching his sides.

Kiba was mortified. Not wanting to be embarrassed in front of Hinata kept him from calling out to his classmates for a helping hand. It would take ANBU to free him on one of their routine patrols. They were not happy either about digging the urine-flavored Inuzuka and his yellow-tinged nin-ken out of the ground.

His sister, Hana, thought it was hilarious.

~III~

A/N: A little humor to lighten the payback and angst. Also, I adjusted the metal from the mining adventure to chakra metal vice Titanium. It was a simple fix and allowed me to work more on the next release for "No More," which should be done by Wednesday.

~Ja Ne!