It was a peaceful, misty morning, and Utakata had decided to enjoy a rare day off from training by relaxing and read a book at one of Kiri's few parks.
Or he was trying to, anyway.
His eye twitched as a certain figure hovered at the edge of his peripheral vision, practically radiating excitement. He hefted the book a little higher, focusing his gaze on the page intently. The blob moved closer. Utakata pointedly ignored it. The figure now hovered behind his shoulder, strands of stringy brownish-green hair dripping into his line of vision and trailing onto the page. He just moved the book slightly so it wouldn't obscure the words.
Then a snake suddenly plopped down onto the book.
"WHAT THE HELL!?" he yelped, dropping the book. Sute leaned forward with a giggle, gingerly extending her hand towards the reddish-brown serpent which proceeded to slither up her arm.
"Hello Utakata!" she greeted.
"Is that a mamushi!?" Utakata sputtered, scrambling back from it.
"Yep!" Sute confirmed cheerily. "Say hello, Mushi-Mushi!" She raised her arm towards him and the snake lifted its head, flicking its tongue at him.
"You have horrible taste in names," Utakata deadpanned even as he leaned away. "Seriously, what the hell!?" Sute just laughed, plopping onto the bench next to him.
"I got him during the patrol yesterday!" she explained, gently rubbing her thumb over the snake's head. Apparently it seemed to enjoy it since it tilted its head in flow with the motion. "Aww, just look at him, he's just a widdle baby. So cute!"
Utakata had no words. Of course Sute would find the most venomous snake in the Land of Water adorable, she'd probably find the freaking Rokubi cute—"Wait, that's a baby?" he blurted, gawking at the foot-long serpent.
"Yep. Thanks to chakra enriching their genes, the Kiri mamushi tend to grow up to three feet in length!" Her eyes actually sparkled as she said that, and on that note so did the freaking venomous mamushi.
Not for the first time, Utakata found himself wondering why he'd chosen to be friends with this insane girl.
Then he realized that he essentially had no other options, and felt his shoulders slump in dismayed resignation. "Good for you," he replied emptily, his voice ringing hollow even to his own ears. If Sute noticed the vast void that had suddenly consumed his soul she didn't let on, too enthralled in cooing at the snake like it was a kitten or puppy.
After five years of friendship with the semi-psychotic girl, Utakata had come to accept that Sute had her quirks. At fourteen, the girl could hardly be described as "feminine". While her face had lost most of its baby fat, her figure leaned more towards androgynous than feminine, with a slim build and relatively flat chest. Her brownish-green hair had grown even longer and stringier, the uncontrollable mass of seaweed-like tangles tending to droop into her face and obscure her features if she didn't tuck it behind her ear.
Sute had come to embrace this "seaweed monster" aspect of her identity, not even bothering to try to tame her hair anymore, partially because it was damn effective at scaring her enemies. During their spars in the bogs of Kiri, she looked like a damn swamp monster. Speaking of which...
"So Uta, any chance I can convince you to have a friendly little spar?" the she-demon asked, plopping onto the bench next to him. Utakata leaned away from her as she slung her arms over the back of the bench, closing his book with a slight grimace.
"You're not planning to use that, are you?" he asked warily, eying the snake clinging to her arm, and she offered him a friendly smile that sent chills down his spine.
"Of course not," she assured him. "I plan to save this guy's venom for foreign missions. The Kiri mamushi are only local to the swamps around Kiri, so it'd be a pain for foreigners get their hands on one to produce an antivenom. Besides, I actually like you," she added with a casual shrug. "This stuff? It's gonna hurt like a bitch. I'm not putting you through that."
Utakata paled, and remembered the other reason he was friends with Sute: it was safer being liked by her than hated.
It was well known in Kiri that Utakata was Sute's preferred partner for sparring. Mainly because not many people were willing to fight her.
To be fair, her fighting style did include a lot of broken bones. And poisons. And torn-off noses and ears. Utakata had become her go-to sparring partner by default because of the fast regenerative powers the Rokubi granted him. Had he been a normal person, his body probably would have been screwed beyond repair by this point. When it came to taijutsu Sute still struck fast and hard, going for the most savage and brutally effective attacks possible.
Of course, when ninjutsu got added to the mix her style changed up a bit.
Like most Mist ninja Sute's most commonly used nature was water, but even then she still lacked a good deal of mastery over it. Utakata had the advantage here in terms of technical skill—the Rokubi had water as one of its natural elements—which meant she'd have to count on her creativity if she wanted a chance at winning.
Take today's spar, for instance.
Swimming through the swamp, Sute allowed her senses to stretch outwards as her eyes closed against the murky water, a small bubble of air floating around her nose and mouth to allow her to breathe. Below, she felt algae tickling her stomach through the skintight fabric of her shirt, her bare arms brushing the leafy tips with each movements. Above her she could feel each individual ripple of water, the placid currents lapping against the multitude of partially submerged trees that populated the swamp.
A single, light footstep touched down on the surface, barely rippling. There.
Her mouth curved into a devious smirk as she swam upwards, the water currents shifting in tandem with her to pull the algae and seaweed towards her and twist it around her body. She burst from the water with a roar, the thin algae film coating the surface stretching and melding with her form to give an illusion of the water remaining whole while still rising.
Utakata spun to block the ferocious swipe of her kunai with his bubble blowing pipe, the blade clashing against the steel pipe with a loud clang. He jumped back and pressed it to his lips, blowing a small flurry of fast-moving bubbles her way. Sute ducked under the water once more before they could hit her, the surface algae smoothing over while the seaweed fell back to the bottom of the swamp. As she swam away she could hear muffled explosions from the bubbles hitting a tree behind where she'd been standing.
Thinking fast as she slowed down, she closed her eyes and began flashing through hand seals. Her chakra steadily saturated the surrounding water, the currents slowing as she altered the water's viscosity to become thicker and more slime-like. Above her the surface remained stagnant and still as ever, the algae film hiding her from view and leaving him none the wiser to the change.
Utakata apparently had started to lose his patience, because she felt the ripples of bubbles crashing into the swamp water. Sute smirked and then pushed off for the surface, the thick water taking extra effort to swim through but also slowing the bubbles' progress. She dodged them and exploded into the air with a glorious splash, finding Utakata hovering above the water inside one of his bubbles no doubt reinforced with chakra.
As she surged towards him she rushed through hand seals and some of the swamp water rose with her, coating her arm and taking on the shape of a spinning spike around her fist as she aimed a sharp punch at him. The dense water-spike collided with the bubble and it exploded, the resulting shockwave sending her plummeting downwards while Utakata flew back and caught himself on a nearby tree. Her back hit the swamp but instead of crashing through the surface the water bounced under her like jello, her body slowly sinking inwards and giving her ample time to leap to her feet.
She could see a look of surprise flit across Utakata's face at the unexpected reaction from the swamp and didn't waste the opening his surprise gave her, flashing through another set of hand seals. Three whips of water shot from the swamp's surface, all three swinging towards him and slicing through nearby trees. Utakata cursed as he jumped out of the way, the branch he'd been standing on sliced to shreds by the sharp streams. Gritting his teeth, he raised his pipe to his lips to launch another attack.
However, before he could blow it twitched, and then the pipe suddenly flew out of his hands. Sute smirked as it landed directly into her open palm, smiling smugly at the shocked teenager. "So, how many spares of these do you have?" she called in a sing-song voice. Utakata just kept looking between her and his empty hand before scowling, recognizing the unspoken threat for what it was.
"I yield," he allowed grudgingly, and she smiled as she nodded in acceptance. Utakata scowled as he jumped down to the water, the surface barely rippling at his landed and strode over to her. Sute extended the pipe towards him gingerly, and he scowled as he snatched it away. "How did you do that?"
"Easy, chakra threads," she replied cheerily, waving her fingers with a grin, and he did a double-take as he saw beads of chakra form on each tip.
"Chakra threads? Like, what the puppeteers from Suna use?"
"Yeah," Sute confirmed with a nod. "I figured they can technically attach to anything, so it was worth a shot."
"Since when have you been able to make those?" he questioned warily, and at this point Sute paused.
"That's... kinda hard to answer," she admitted thoughtfully. "I only really got them down in the last year, but I've been working on them on and off since I was, oh, five or six, I suppose."
"Wait. Five or six?" Utakata's visible eye widened in surprise, his jaw dropping. "That's at least eight years. How did that take you so long?" Sute frowned, but she supposed his surprise was a bit endearing in a way. True to her supposed genius status Sute tended to pick up on most jutsu and techniques faster than average, so he probably didn't expect her to struggle with something for eight years.
"You may not have noticed, but I actually have very large chakra reserves for a normal person," she responded dryly, raising an eyebrow. He clamped his mouth shut at that, looking a bit taken aback, and she had to snort and roll her eyes. "Seeing as you have big reserves too, surely you've noticed that the more chakra you have, the worse your control is."
"And creating chakra threads require around fine chakra control," Utakata surmised, and she dipped her head in affirmation.
"Exactly. When I was a kid I was always looking for ways to work on improving it, especially after I decided to learn iryo-ninjutsu, and chakra threads seemed like a great exercise. Just making them requires a lot of precise control, let alone controlling them the way puppeteers do." Shrugging, she added, "I didn't really have anyone to teach me how to make them though, so I didn't spend much time on it. I finally managed to make some during my second deployment, but even then I couldn't really do much with them. I only got to a point where I could start thinking about weaponizing them about a year ago."
"I must admit, it's definitely unconventional," Utakata mused thoughtfully. "Same goes for changing the water's viscosity. I've only seen people do it to preexisting bodies of water two other times, usually they keep it restricted to water created by their jutsu."
"Probably because it uses up a lot of chakra," Sute suggested dryly. "Won't lie, I'm not going to be up for another spar after this."
"Fine by me," Utakata said with a lazy shrug, and the pair started heading for shore. "You're incredibly sloppy and repetitive when it comes to ninjutsu. Your current style also won't hold up in other environments. You need more variety in your arsenal."
"Says the guy who surrendered because he lost his bubble wand," she retorted wryly. Utakata didn't even appear phased by the jab, just shrugging his shoulders with a fluid grace that screamed disinterest.
"Bubble ninjutsu works fine for me most of the time. I usually kill people before they get close enough to take my pipe."
"I didn't need to get close," Sute sang, wiggling her fingers with a smirk. Her ever-emo friend just scoffed and rolled his eye.
"I'm serious, though," he continued. "You're good at improvising, but that won't always be enough. Your poisons and fuinjutsu are fine, but you need to work on your ninjutsu more, especially if you want to become jounin like you say."
"I know," Sute sighed, shoulders slumping in defeat. "I'm trying to learn some more. I'm working on convincing Kisame-senpai to teach me this doton jutsu that lets you basically swim underground." Doton: Subterranean Voyage had been one of Kisame's more memorable techniques from the anime, even if she hadn't known the name then. When he'd demonstrated it for her she'd recognized it from his fight with Team Gai at the start of Shippuden, when the Samehada protruding from the ground like a shark fin.
Speaking of which, Kisame still didn't have the Samehada. Slightly worrisome, but Sute was pretty sure she hadn't broken canon yet. She remembered her friend from Doctors Without Borders once mentioned Kisame had taken it after killing the previous owner, though she hadn't gone into specifics to minimize spoilers. It had come up when she'd shown her a picture she'd saved of the previous generation of Swordsmen, though the memory of the image itself had grown too hazy to be relevant in this life and only came to Sute much later.
"Earth, huh?" Utakata mused. "That's superior to water, so it might be hard for you to learn. Unless..." He paused, a quizzical expression sliding over his face as he looked at her askance. "Hold on, is water your natural affinity? You seem to struggle with it quite a bit... Have you ever been tested?"
Sute paused at that, tilting her head to look at the sky through the thick canopy above them. A rueful smirk played on her lips as she watched the leaves blow in the wind, the sun peeking in and out of sight behind them.
"I have a water affinity," she responded, and hopped onto shore before continuing on her way. Utakata stood still for a moment but she soon heard his footsteps resume, the taller boy trailing after her in contemplative silence.
"Then maybe I can help you after all," he commented. "I know this one water jutsu, Wild Water Wave..."
Sute sighed as she trudged down the street, now thoroughly exhausted. Despite her low reserves from the intense spar, Utakata had made her drill that stupid water jutsu for nearly two hours before finally acquiescing to her demands to go home so she could have some time to recover before her hospital shift the next day. Under normal circumstances she would have left earlier, but Utakata was just so damn smug. She had pride, dammit!
As expected, she still did not have a natural knack for water release. Sute still despised the glorified-spit aspect of most water jutsu, and Wild Water Wave seemed only marginally better than the Water Bullet. It produced a rainbow, which... okay, even she had to admit that was pretty. But still, she didn't like doing it, and that made it even more frustrating trying to learn it. Which meant she made more mistakes.
"I should've just left earlier," she grumbled irritably, kicking at a small pebble in her path. The sun had already started to set, the air taking on that late-evening gold tint that seemed to only be magnified by the faint fog that constantly swathed Kiri. Time had passed quicker than she'd expected, and she still needed to work in the greenhouse before she could go to bed. Tomorrow she had an early start at the hospital, the first of seven straight days of twelve-hour shifts.
A chilly breeze blew past her and she paused to shudder in it, gnawing her lip before picking up her pace a bit faster. When her house finally came into view she decided to save some time and just hopped over the fence instead of walking all the way to the gate, lightly tapping the wall to apply a liberal dose of chakra to disable the security seals before doing so. Her paranoia had always been high in both lives, and the possibilities provided by fuinjutsu in this one had not helped the matter.
From there it took little time to circle around to her greenhouse, applying a liberal dose of chakra to disable the security seals around the door as she passed. Pleasantly warm air greeted her while she reactivated the seals behind her, the air just a bit dryer than the constant fog that hung over Kiri. Kicking off her shoes, she grabbed a watering can and went off to start her rounds, tending to the various poisonous plants and flowers she'd accumulated over the years.
Moist soil crunched beneath her bare feet as she skipped along the stepping stones set up throughout the greenhouse, seeping through the cracks between her toes only to be washed away by stray droplets from her watering can. She paused next to a Venus flytrap, patting the teeth-like tips on the leaves with a fond smile and watching it close around her finger.
"Sorry, not a fly," she giggled, gently pulling her finger free, and sighed contentedly before turning to the plant on the opposite side of the path with a frown. The Naruto world had its own unique variation of water hemlock, one of the most toxic plants in North America in her old world. However, this world's variation was a bit harder to grow than the naturally abundant weeds she remembered. The white blossoms looked pathetic and wilted, the delicate petals brown and curling around the edges.
Sute just glowered at the dying plant in disgust, her cold eyes making her stance on its desire to die perfectly obvious. "You just have to be difficult, don't you," she grumbled. Technically, she could just get it from the swamps outside Kiri proper, but it would be infinitely more convenient to have her own personal vein. Water hemlock was one of the few poisonous substances she'd worked with in both lives, and she had three different poisons she liked to make with it.
She growled irritably as she clasped her hands together, her fingers knitting together as if praying. "I swear, if you weren't so useful—"
She cut herself off as she heard the tingle of bells, snapping her head towards the door. Someone had triggered one of the silent alarm seals set up around the property's perimeter. Eyes narrowing, she parted her hands and slowly rose, nonchalantly picking up her watering can as she began casually making her way back to the front. As she neared the entrance her eyes flitted towards the windows briefly, but she failed to notice anything unusual through the misty glass panes.
Pausing to bend over a tall, leafy fern, she casually glanced at the row of bells strung along the ceiling, and then nearly dropped her watering can in shock. The seal on the third one glowed bright red, signaling the seal connected to it had been the one that activated. Except—that was the third one. Triggering that one would mean bypassing either the seal set up on the fence enclosing the Ringo family property, and then the one attached to the underground perimeter set just outside the main house—
And entered her poison lab.
She dropped the can and took off at a sprint, flaring her chakra to disable the security seals around the door just long enough to burst through and race for the house. Slamming the door open, she grabbed the wooden bokken left next to the entrance—an old habit carried over from her last life, though she'd had a bat back then—and darted towards the room containing the seal, chakra seeping from her bare feet into the floorboards. Then she froze midstep, her anger vanishing to be replaced by silent shock.
Shoulders slowly going slack, she slowly continued to the spare room she'd converted to a poison lab long ago, placing one hand on the thin paper door and sliding it open to stick her head inside. The room looked undisturbed from her last visit, her notebooks still scattered about the tables and the seals locking her chemical cabinets still glowing and active. In a terrarium in the back corner she could see Mushi-Mushi coiled along a thick branch, looking rather content as he bathed under the dull glow of a light bulb.
Frowning, Sute flipped on the lights and stepped inside, absently setting the bokken on a table as she passed it. "What the hell?" she muttered as she moved towards a hanging scroll on the far wall, lifting it to examine the seal hidden beneath it. The kanji had a faint red glow to it, signaling someone had entered the room recently, but there'd be no way to get inside without crossing at least one other seal in her house.
She breathed through her nose and clicked her tongue, letting the scroll fall back in place. "A false alarm, huh," she muttered darkly, her eyes flitting towards Mushi-Mushi. "I'm guessing you won't be able to tell me if it was or not."
Of course the snake didn't respond. It was a normal Kiri mamushi, totally incapable of speech, and it wasn't like she was Orochimaru.
Sighing, Sute just strode towards the terrarium and picked up a scroll lying next to it, unfurling it and swiping her thumb across the surface to unseal its contents. A frozen mouse popped out, and she lifted the lid of the tank to drop it inside. Mushi-Mushi's demeanor changed swiftly, the serpent slithering off the branch and descending into the leafy foliage that populated the tank.
Sute left the snake to stalk its "prey" and turned her attention to the table, checking over her notebooks to make sure none had been disturbed. One had been left open to a page detailing care instructions for Mushi-Mushi in the event she suddenly had to leave Kiri on a mission. The main reason she'd taken the snake to meet Utakata that morning had been to gauge his potential as an emergency snake-sitter. Useful notes for Utakata, but hardly interesting to an intruder. The other books looked untouched, thankfully, but she wouldn't let her guard down just yet.
Quietly closing the book, she grabbed the bokken and clutched it tightly. Kenjutsu still didn't really come naturally to Sute, but since the war's end she'd trained with the remnants of the Seven Swordsmen enough to have a decent grasp on the art. Naturally she'd covered the wooden blade in seals, strengthening the material and making each blow that much more powerful. Not good enough to justify taking it into the field, but if someone had broken in it would fulfill her needs fine.
Eyes lingering on the array painted along the blade, she then nodded to herself and glanced briefly at the terrarium. Mushi-Mushi had yet to pounce on his "prey," still busy stalking in preparation to "ambush" the dead rodent, but she didn't feel like waiting to watch the show. She still had to check the house and the rest of the security seals, and after that she had to go back to the greenhouse and finish watering all the plants.
The thought dampened her mood considerably, her mouth pulling downwards in irritation. "Dammit, I better not need to reconfigure these things," she grumbled, heading for the door and flipping off the light.
As she closed the door and trudged through the halls with a sour glare, she failed to notice the shadowy figure hidden in a tree just outside the long window lining the hallway, a single red eye watching her stalk out of sight from behind a striped mask before disappearing in a swirl of air.
Busy chapter. Fun fact: this is basically a Frankenstein chapter, where I had a lot of these scenes as snippets from different chapters before merging them together. This underwent a LOT of rewrites. I'm not 100% satisfied with the sparring match, though it does work a bit better than it did originally. The main point of this chapter is to give everyone an idea of how Sute's advanced over the past three years. Still has some struggles with water ninjutsu, but she's creative about it.
And also, yes, that IS Tobi watching her at the end. For reference, he's wearing the mask he had in the flashbacks to the Nine-Tails Attack and his meetings with Itachi. On that note, it just occurred to me this is my second story where Obito is secretly stalking the main character.
So last time I asked about potential summons, and I was honestly blown away by all the responses! Everyone had so many ideas, I even learned about animals I've never heard of before. (Did you know there's another category of amphibians called caecilians, which look like snake/worm hybrids? Also, pine martens are a thing, and the word "sable" probably comes from the animal sable.) It's seriously been awesome reading all your thoughts on what animals suit her best, and I'm now basically off the fence and will probably give her a summoning at some point. I'm currently leaning towards two options suggested by readers, though it'll be a while before summons will appear.
Anyways, as always, thank you for reading! This chapter was a bit messier/busier than I usually like, but I think it turned out pretty well. I'll see you next week!