Just as a head's up, while I know a little bit about forging and have actually put a hammer to metal before, it was only as a vague hobby that I quickly put down for reasons that are obvious if you know me.

So I don't actually really know proper forging stuff, most of what I'm saying sounds right to me and seems to be right on the internet but isn't actually something I've done myself, so if something is wrong, please bear with me and maybe hit me with a friendly PM just giving me a head's up about what's wrong so I can look into it and fix it.

TY in advance ^.^

Chapter 15


Arriving outside of Terumasa's, Sora wasn't quite sure exactly what the time was since she couldn't use a Jutsu to find out and didn't have any other time-teller, but she knew she was early by at least ten minutes.

Sure, Terumasa had told her to be there at 6 sharp, but as she wasn't able to see what time it was, she decided being early by a reasonable margin was better than being late. Plus the nearest training grounds were too far away to be worth heading to, so she couldn't just go to one for checking the time. She wondered whether maybe she could get an appeal of some kind for using that Jutsu outside of a training ground, since it had no combat application and anyone watching her would see and stop her before she could use an actual technique, at least she assumed so based on how fast her parents were able to move.

With some time on her hands, Sora pulled out a notepad and pencil from her pocket and flipped it open, then leaned against the wall as she continued brainstorming ideas, things she'd need and what she could do and play if she managed to seriously get into making music. Most of it was really fucking dry, stuff like how she would need to acquire or make and learn all the different instruments that she would need, and then she'd need to find a way to actually play them when she was playing something else and singing.

Since it had only been a day, she hadn't been able to find a single thing out about recording, but she wasn't demoralised by that fact. Considering the technology level of the Elemental Nations, she doubted she would be able to find such a thing so easily. If it came down to it, she would just copy or make songs that only used a single instrument, though that would mean sacrificing a hell of a lot of songs that she really wanted to let other people hear.

Then she recalled, just idly, the time when she met her mother for the first time. She had that weird clone, the one that could actually touch people. Surely...if that clone could touch people it could also touch instruments. If she could use that, maybe she could have them play instruments? But then that clashed directly with the fact that she was a...civilian.

Straightening up, Sora very hastily started writing down her thoughts. If she played her music on training grounds, she wasn't breaking any rules. It was a Jutsu, and so she could use them in the training grounds but not outside. Leading onto that, she started thinking about other things. If she did that, she could even make an amusing challenge of having people guess which one was the real Sora, since the clones would be identical to her.

Though, if they couldn't sing then it'd be an immediate giveaway, she didn't know the limitations of the Jutsu her mother had used after all. But that immediately solved her issue of wanting to play music and sing songs on her own. Trying to get other people into it sounded annoying, she wanted to just play music on her own, so if she could do it with clones that would be perfection.

Smiling, she started to write down ideas that now incorporated that technique, she could be her own stage crew as well if she so chose. Her chakra pool would be a limitation, but since she wasn't planning to get into any fights her Vitality, Strength and Agility could take a backburner seat compared to her Wisdom and Intelligence stats. That way she'd be able to afford the technique and the probably egregious cost with a bit of time, patience and training.

From her side she heard the rattle of metal, and a moment later the lock that held the gate down was released, allowing Terumasa to raise it from behind, exposing the shop door and window to the world. "You're a little early, that's good. Come in." He waved her in, pushing open the door and heading through the shop to the counter, Sora trailing along behind him. "Have you ever done customer service before?"

"No, I never have. I know the basic gist of it, as anyone else would, but I've never sold things to people." Terumasa frowned, palming his stubble-covered chin as he looked her up and down. Honestly, she wasn't sure exactly how well she'd be able to handle it, especially if particularly aggravating and obnoxious customers were to enter. She had a pretty short fuse after all.

After a few seconds Terumasa picked up one of the bundles of kunai on a nearby shelf. "We'll do a mock-sell then. I'll 'buy' these and your job is to sell them to me. Got it?" Sora nodded, after which he came up to the counter and planted the kunai down, looking straight at her without saying another word. Blinking, Sora glanced at the kunai and saw their price, then repeated the cost to him, upon which he instantly shook his head. "There's something critical missing here." After a second longer he tapped his forehead, leading Sora's shoulders to droop.

Of course, regular civilians couldn't just buy kunai casually, it was a shinobi tool, civilians had no reason to buy them. How could she miss something so stupidly obvious when it was literally staring her in the fucking face? "Sorry. So, if someone has no hitai-ate then should I ask them about it, or refuse to sell unless they provide one, or what should be the situation here?"

Terumasa nodded at her as she spoke. "Questions are good, if you aren't sure of something don't forget that I'll be in the forge all day so you can peek your head around and ask me directly. If someone comes in and isn't wearing a hitai-ate or a Chunin or Jonin vest, you ask them to show shinobi identification. By law we cannot sell anything in here to anyone that isn't a Konoha-nin, no matter how influential. Some shops can do so, and civilians can go to them for their purchases, ours is solely a shinobi supplier. If someone comes in and isn't a shinobi, we do not sell them a single thing. Got it?"

Sora nodded resolutely, watching as Terumasa put the kunai back on the shelf. "The same goes for every item in the store. If someone wants it, they have to be an active shinobi, retired shinobi are similarly not allowed to purchase from here. Academy Students are not allowed to buy from here either, but that's because they have to buy their equipment from the academy, so their purchases can be monitored and blocked if they try to buy something they shouldn't."

Listening carefully and using one of the later pages in her notepad to take plenty of notes, Sora absorbed the information Terumasa gave her like a sponge. Every item had a price tag attached and the price would not be one ryo above or below that. No discounts, not for friends, family, fiancée's or anyone else. Any thefts would be reported to the Konoha Military Police Force and they would investigate it, every 1,000 ryo earned he would take to the safe that was somewhere in the forge room, not that she knew where, and she would earn a fixed wage of 200 ryo an hour, working for eight hours a day from 7 until 3, doing on four days a week, though when she asked if she could work longer he laughed and told her that so long as she was able to stick it out for a week she could work longer if she wanted to.

He wanted her there at 6 because he wanted to train her in managing the shop, making sure she could actually handle it, instead of wasting an hour that could be used actually having her run the store. Briefly she wondered why he was so quick to trust her, but quickly put that thought away because honestly, there were too many factors. Just the fact that she had said she was an ex-kunoichi meant that if he told the KMPF that fact and her appearance, they'd be able to track her down extremely easily.

Not that she harboured even a single thought of doing that, whoever was watching her would take her down before she could even get out of the front door.


"And I'm telling you that we don't have a veteran's discount."

With her chin on one hand and her elbow on the counter, Sora leaned to the side to avoid the spittle that flew her way as the man in front of her spoke. "This is how I am treated for thirty dutiful years serving a village which my sons are still serving to this day? Now listen here brat, you give me that discount, or you won't like the result." In response, Sora stuck her little finger into her ear and twisted it, raising a solitary eyebrow at him.

"No, I think you won't like the result if you do anything. I'm sure the police would just love to hear a preliminary report about how you verbally abused me and then threatened to do something I wouldn't like. It'd sure go down well if then a few days later the shop just happened to catch on fire, or I just happened tgo end up being injured by someone." She said calmly, still resting her head on her hand as she watched him.

After a few seconds, her brows came together as he laughed, removing her head from her hand as she questioningly looked towards him. "That's good. Hey Terumasa, looks like you found a girl with a backbone this time!" As he spoke, Sora realised that he was probably a deliberate test, and idly wished she could use her Byakugan as she then heard Terumasa enter from behind her. "And right-on, reporting what I said straight to them would make sure that if anything happened, you'd have that report already filed that they could use to enter me as the primary suspect." He reached out and patted her on the shoulder, then from his pocket he removed a hitai-ate.

Sora rang up his order and put her hand out, to which he deposited a handful of ryo for the brace of senbon he wanted to buy, then took those senbon and stepped to the side, leading her to watch as he moved to clasp hands with Terumasa then followed him back into the forge, probably to talk about her. Putting the ryo away in the till, Sora pushed it shut, then planted her hand back on her chin as she continued writing on her notepad.

During the day previously and the times when there weren't any customers in the shop, she was diligently planning out what she wanted to do, making sure she covered every facet that she needed to cover. Since the world had nothing like what she had planned, it meant both good and bad things. It was bad because the start was going to be rough since she would have to create an audience all on her own. But it was good because there weren't any direct interferences like laws that could get in her way.

Honestly, after looking at what she wanted to do more deeply, she realized that it was a lot simpler than she expected to pull off, but would require more raw effort and time just simply in getting people interested in what she was doing. If she was back in her own world it would be the other way around, it would be faster and less effort to get herself set up, but would also be a lot more complicated, she'd have to organize a hell of a lot of stuff to do it.

And so that was how she passed the time. Any time a customer entered the shop she would put her notepad and pencil to the side and be an attentive store...person to them, and when they left, she would keep on writing. When it hit midday and the clock in the shop chimed, Sora heard footsteps from behind her as Terumasa came out from the back. "Alright, that's enough out here, go and make me a kunai." Nodding, Sora slipped past him and into the forge, putting on a leather apron from the wall rack then tying her hair back in a ponytail as she did so.

Immediately she headed to the bookshelf that she had been curious about all day yesterday and today, reaching out a hand to poke them one after the other.


Forging Basics - +1 level of crafting below level 10 - Read?

Forging For Dummies - +2 levels of crafting below level 20 - Read?

Advanced Forging - +5 levels of crafting below level 20, +2 levels of crafting below level 30 - Read?

Metallurgy - +10 levels of crafting below level 25, +5 levels of crafting below level 50 - Read?

Advanced Alloys - +10 levels of crafting below level 25, +5 levels of crafting below level 50 - Read?


As she read each tooltip, her surprise grew and grew.

The first books were great, at least until she looked at the others and realised just how ludicrous they were. Sora glanced at her own crafting proficiency, and saw it sat firmly at level 7. Reading the first three books would put her up at 15, and so reading either Metallurgy or Advanced Alloys would put her right at 25. So, instead, she ignored Forging Basics, reading each other book in sequence. When it came time to read Advanced Alloys, she was at 24, which meant she got the full 10 points, putting her up at 34, a frankly insane jump in crafting ability. It was then that she realised a fact she had been neglecting. If books were such good sources for proficiencies...wouldn't libraries literally be power-farms for her?

Taking her notepad, she made a quick note to visit the library, then turned her attention to the forge. Terumasa wanted her to make a kunai? Before it would have been a bit of an awkward and poorly-weighted kunai, but now that she had gorged herself on the proficiency increases from those books, she was going to make a kunai that could knock his socks off.

First off, she added some bituminous coal to the forge and worked the bellows, using her in-built strength to do so with ease, raising the temperature of the forge greatly. Then she picked out from the plentiful metal around the room a piece that would best suit her needs, grasping it with a pair of tongs before placing it into the forge. She worked the bellows with one hand, watching the metal keenly.

As soon as it was the right temperature she pulled it out, grabbing a hammer from the counter as she laid the metal on an anvil, then began to hammer it, turning the metal over and over and over again as she hammered. As it cooled, she put it back into the forge and heated it up again, repeating the process several dozen times as she forged the metal into the vague shape of a kunai, except a lot bulkier.

Thanks to how simple a kunai was she didn't have to really worry about making bevels or anything like that, she just had to hammer it into roughly a rhombus shape at the widest part, leading up to a point, with a tang that would become the handle and a ring on the end. Once she was satisfied with the shape and the dispersion of metal, she annealed the metal a few times, then when it was cool she sanded down the rough portions, examining the kunai-shaped block of metal closely.

Once that was done, she filed the weapon down until it truly resembled a kunai, then placed the metal into the forge once again, heating it up red-hot before dipping it vertically into a nearby channel of oil, holding it in place for a full minute before removing it. Checking the weapon over to make sure it hadn't cracked, Sora wound some heat-resistant ninja wire around it and rigged it up to hang above the forge, directly over the residual heat, tempering it at just the right temperature. She would need to leave it there for a full hour at minimum or else the weapon would be obscenely brittle, so while she was waiting she poked her head out into the shop. "Hey Terumasa-buchou, I'm tempering that kunai, do you want to take a look or want me to work on something else?"

The man turned to look at her for a moment before checking the clock. "So soon? Hmm, I'll have a look. If it looks good you can start working on the other orders. You hold down the counter." Sora nodded, taking off her apron and hanging it up as he stepped past her and into the back room. Hopping up to sit upon the chair behind the counter, Sora debated whether or not to take her notepad out again, but figured it wouldn't take too long for him to check her work, and she was right, he came back in a few minutes later. "Looks good, you can get started working on the list that's on the wall. Pick whichever you want out of the top ten ones, those are the ones that need to be done first. If you finish them all somehow then you can start on the next ten."

Nodding again, Sora headed back into the forge, getting straight back to work.


"-an? Sora-san?!"

Blinking, Sora looked over at the door, and upon realising that Terumasa was stood there she quickly switched off her music with a thought. She'd ended up turning it up a few times as time passed, and so it was loud enough that she hadn't heard him. "Yeah, what's up? I finished that list, the last few pieces are just tempering over the heat right now, all they'll need is a bit of sharpening and putting together and they'll all be good to go."

The man looked at her, then looked at the wall where the list was, then back at her. "You finished the list?" Sora nodded, upon which he raised an eyebrow. "That list was the work for this week, not for today." Sora blinked, then gestured at the table behind her which was covered in mostly finished weaponry. Some of the weapons were still missing grips, handguards or other parts, but the regular metalwork was all finished and she had put together everything that she was able to do. "Right...okay, spill it. Forge-welding and flux are all you know how to do and use, what a joke. Soon as you got into the forge you just couldn't help yourself could you?" His tone and the amusement on his face made it clear he wasn't angry, he just thought it was funny that she had 'revealed' her skills the instant she was actually allowed to forge something.

"Well, if I came up to your door and told you that I could do all this, would you have believed me, or would you have laughed at me then slammed the door in my face?" Terumasa laughed at that, then took out a bundle of ryo from his pocket held together with bands and tossed it to her. Looking at it, she realized quite quickly that the bills in the bundle were all one-hundred ryo, and she looked up at him questioningly.

"You just did a week's work in an afternoon, makes it clear that even if you end up not being able to handle the store side of things, having you back here working the forge would be more than enough to make you worth keeping. So, that's a month's pay in advance right there, 25,600 ryo total. Call it a gesture of trust if you want." Nodding, Sora considered the bundle of money before tucking it away in her pocket. "And hey, if you feel up to it you can work Fridays as well, earn another 1,600 a week. But for now, go home, and I'll see you bright and early tomorrow, alright?"

Nodding once again, Sora said goodbye to Terumasa and exited the forge through the back-door, heading along the side of the building and out onto the street. With a quick final glance at the front of the shop, Sora made her way home. 25,600 ryo, all in one big lump sum. Evidently, Terumasa really valued the skills she showed if the trust he was showing was any indication.

She wondered if perhaps the reason he was hiring wasn't just to find someone to man the store but to maybe even take over the shop itself? But no, thinking more about it, it didn't seem like he intended to groom her into a successor, it seemed more like she was a really valued employee but nothing more. Of course, there'd be plenty of time later for him to settle on making her a successor, but if that was the case she'd have to let him down, since now that the idea was in her head, she really wanted to at least give music a chance.

Lazily stepping up the stairs, Sora dug out the key from her pocket and unlocked the door, stepping inside and spying her mother sitting down at the table with her head practically buried in documentation. "What is all of this?" She asked curiously, walking over as her mother turned around the smile at her. Taking a glance at the papers, Sora saw that most of them were written in different languages, or possibly encoded.

"These are my new job. Most of these are Kirigakure documents, confidental stuff, and my job is to decrypt them. Some of these I literally can't make heads or tails of, but I can make out enough of them to make a job of it. Not fun, and not what I wanted to do, but hey, I'm only going to be doing it until we get a place of our own, then I can drop this and find something better to do." Nodding, Sora gave her mother a hug, then from her pocket she took out the roll of money, placing it on the table. "This is..." Her mother started, picking up the money.

"That's my advance from my new job. 25,600 right there and then. Apparently my new boss really appreciated me." As soon as she saw her mother's gaze darken she sighed. "And no, not in whatever lecherous and disgusting way you might be imagining. I surprised him with the fact that I can actually forge metal and may have been a bit of an overachiever in completing a week's worth of work in just one afternoon. Besides, the man has a wife who could literally pop her head in at any second, you really think he'd be so stupid to make a move on me with his wife directly above the shop? Plus, look at me." Sora gestured at herself, making her mother roll her eyes as she reached out to pat her head.

"The world is a disgusting place Sora-chan, some people might like you like that, even if they really shouldn't. You know what to do when you encounter a person like that?" Sora blinked, shrugging afterwards. "You give them a good, firm kick between the legs." Caught a little by surprise, Sora couldn't help but laugh at the mental image of her mother being hit on by some greasy bald guy, and summarily kicking them in the nuts so hard they went into the air. Her mother laughed as well, pulling her into her lap and planting her chin on top of her head. "So, aside from that, you have a good first day?" Realising that her mother truly wanted to know and wasn't just making small talk, Sora began to tell her of her day, a smile on both their faces.

And, for the first time, Sora felt truly happy to have been given a second shot at life.


So. Much. Fluff!

I can't help myself, I feel like I'm stuck in a mindset where children are adorable and families are happy. Maybe it's because I've been out of education for long enough to forget how annoying younger kids can be, but I was watching The Equalizer 2 and all I could think about during the scenes with children was that they were so utterly adorable.

Idk, maybe I'm pregnant and hormones are fucking me over, I don't understand my own brain any more -.-


Name: Sora Metami

Level: 34

Age: 12

Experience: 546/34,000

To Next Level: 33,454

Title: Civilian - +100% increase to civilian-based proficiencies, -25% decrease to shinobi-based proficiencies

Health Points: 2,100 (100 Base HP + (Vitality x Strength)

Regeneration Rate: 70/minute (Health ÷ 30) (Severe or noticed injuries can be chosen to retain scars)

Chakra Points: 2,084 (100 Base CP + (Wisdom x Intelligence)

Regeneration Rate: 69.46*/minute (Chakra ÷ 30)

Strength: 40 (Each point increases melee damage by 1%, adds 1 slot to inventory)

Vitality: 50 (Each point raises poison resistance by 0.1%, reduces need for sleep by 0.1%)

Agility: 50 (Each point increases top speed by 0.1m/s, increases weapon proficiency gain by 1%)

Wisdom: 32 (Each point decreases chakra cost for techniques by 0.1%)

Intelligence: 62 (Each point increases experience gain by 1%)

Luck: 10 (Each point increases the chance of something lucky happening by 0.01%, decreases the chance of something unlucky happening by 0.01%)