Chapter Thirteen.
Naruto Uzumaki - Part 7.
(Naruto's Childhood - Part 4: Childhood's End - Part 2.)
7h of March 1914 - Hidden Leaf Village , Red Light District:
Three years and a bit later, a thirteen-year-old Naruto was returning home from pranking the village with Mirai and Aiko. He wanted to get caught and test himself, so he was wearing his bright orange jumpsuit.
Over the last few years things changed with Naruto, he was taller and somewhat more skilled. Sure he had problems when it came to chakra, seeing how none of his teachers were willing to teach him much more than the basic chakra control exercise where he had to place a leaf on his forehead and use his chakra to keep it there. But the real issue was that his chakra control was non-existent. No matter how much he tried, he couldn't control his chakra, and his teachers wouldn't give him the time of day to show him what he was doing wrong or offer advice on how to get better.
Then again, he wasn't suspecting much from them, they had never really helped him in the past. On the contrary, they would try and make sure he failed somehow, either sending him out of the classroom for some made up reason, allowing others to steal his school work or let people ruin it.
He was much stronger than most students, but as a ninja that meant nothing if you couldn't use chakra properly. Which is why he wasn't a ninja now. He had a chance to become one last year, but he failed two of the three exams. The exams were made up of three tests: written, taijutsu and jutsu, where you had cast a basic ninjutsu or genjutsu or break a genjutsu. Last year he had to create three perfect Clones, but his were weak and ill-looking so failed that part of the exam. And seeing that he also failed the written part of the exam, he couldn't become a ninja that year. He was hoping he could do better this year.
He just wished he had someone to help him, especially with his control. But everyone seemed to hate him for no reason, and he still had no idea why.
That doesn't mean he was weak, over the years he had gotten stronger, faster and better with taijutsu. He kept up his training within his own underground training facility and in the bamboo grove, where he was still doing his aerial manoeuvrability and rock lifting. He was now able to lift boulders eight times his own size and dozens of times his own weight. And yeah, this training damn near killed him a couple of times, but nothing was accomplished without some blood and sweat.
His weighted training outfit helped with it, and he didn't think he could have accomplished it otherwise, because he probably wouldn't have the strength to do this. It made him stronger than other children of his age, and maybe a few adults too. Speaking of his training outfit, when Hana and Tsume had given it back to him, along with a few spares, Hana had changed the looks, saying that she wanted to update it. She thought the old ninja outfit looked outdated and Naruto needed something more recent.
So now the outfit was a sleeveless turtleneck top and black cotton pants, black leather fingerless gloves that went up to his elbows and black tabi made of heavy, tough material with rubber soles. Naruto had to admit that it was somewhat cool looking. Hana even told Naruto that over time he could add to the outfit to make it his own, either to help make him a better ninja or make him stand out. That was something Naruto was interested in, but over the years he couldn't think of anything to add, so he was wearing his orange jumpsuit over it.
There was a new feature where he could release how much strength he wanted to use. Before, most of his strength was restricted. He was stronger than most, but he never used all of that strength. But now the new outfits let him use as much as he wanted.
So during the weekdays when he was at the academy he would keep his strength at a minimum, making sure not to break something or someone by mistake. But during the weekends and the holidays, he would play around and test a different amount of strength. To be honest though, without someone to spar with him, it was difficult to guess how much he should use on a person.
Other than Hana and Tsume, Naruto didn't want anyone else to learn about what he could do, because he was afraid of what they might think. They could him more of a demon than they already do, or would try to stop him from getting stronger. He already suspected this was why his teachers didn't want to help him. So, for now, he would only use about five percent of his strength when sparring with another student.
Over the years though, he slowed down his physical training, he had other skills he wanted to train and his exercises took way too much time to justify keeping the same pace.
His pickpocketing and lockpicking were good, as they helped with his stealth, silent movement and skill to blend into crowds, and it helped that he no longer wore his orange jumpsuit all the time. He came to realise that it made it too easy to be caught. So the only time that he wore it was during his time at the academy or when he wanted people to notice him, normally when he was pulling pranks. Most of the other times, he only wore the outfit that Hana and Tsume had given him. Unless he went into shops where people paid attention, no one noticed him. Sure the village knew that he was the one to pull the pranks, but because he never got caught (unless he wanted to) and never left any evidence, he never got punished.
He had heard that if ninja stopped practising their skills they could get rusty and it could create problems later, so he would pull a prank every so often. And it wasn't like he was going to stop his morning and evening exercises, he just wouldn't do the rest of his other training as often.
It didn't mean that he was going to stop training altogether though, he had other things he wanted to train, like this Ki training and fuinjutsu, among a few things he wanted to work on.
Not long after visiting Hana and Tsume about his kitsunes and his training outfit, Naruto was walking around the village when he spotted a boy about a year or two older than him training.
The boy had shiny black hair that was quite long and fastened in a braid, round eyes with prominent lower eyelashes, and very thick eyebrows. He was wearing a white, short-sleeved kimono-shirt with a martial arts belt and dark pants. He was balancing on a log, using only his thumb. Seeing this got Naruto thinking. He realized that he too needed to work on his balance. So for the next few years, Naruto worked on his balance whenever he could, be it on logs, tree branches or on ice in winter, anything that he needed balance for, he would train to balance on that surface. He had gotten pretty good at balancing on all sorts of surfaces, it was really rare for him to fall now. He didn't take his training as serious as the boy he saw, but he did practice some of his taijutsu moves. This was so he would be ready to fight anywhere should he need to.
During the years Naruto began to read up on wilderness survival and weapon care and training with a katana and bow. It was something he'd wanted to do for a while, but it was forgotten in favor of his other training. He was reminded about it when Hana told him that he should look into wilderness survival, as she and her team had to do a few missions where they had to deal with bandits, and they would be out in the wild for days or even weeks. They had to rely on themselves and what they found in the wild to survive, and she said it would be for the best if he would read a few wilderness survival books to help him.
This lead to Naruto's dislike for reading. He had problems with it, and unless it interested him, Naruto tried not to read. Whilst learning wilderness survival piqued his interest, Naruto didn't feel it was as important, so it took him longer to learn. He knew the basics, seeing how he lived off the land before the Hokage helped him out, but reading up on it wasn't something he was enjoying. Instead, he listened to what Hana and her mother said about it when he visited them.
During one of his talks with Tsume, she mentioned that whilst bo-staff training was all good and all, he should try and train with either a bladed weapon or a the wild, he would sometimes have to kill an animal as part of a mission, for either food or to collect the pelt or other parts a client might want from an animal, so knowing how to use both a blade and a bow would be useful.
He thought about placing a blade at the end of his staff, but that would mean altering his style of fighting to avoid cutting himself, which would be dangerous and take too much time. So he decided to use a different blade. Sure he could rely on his kunai for close combat, but that would mean he would have to get even closer to the target to get a hit in and that meant the risk of getting hit was even greater. While he would still need to get close to fight with a longer blade, he wouldn't have to get in as close. So he decided to would learn to use a long bladed katana. He started out using a bokken, which would have to do until he was able to get hold of a cheap katana that he could use.
Now that he decided to learn to use a katana, Naruto knew he would have to get books on kenjutsu to learn the skill properly. It would be so much easier if he could learn from another person, but he knew that nobody would be willing to teach him. Hana and Tsume were unable seeing how they and their clan used kunai in favor of katanas when in close range blade fighting. But two were able to give Naruto a few books to learn from, and he also found a few second hand books. Over time, Naruto believed that as a self studied student in kenjutsu, he was somewhat decent. Sure he could improve, but he would need actual teacher to help him, something he didn't have right now.
As for the bow, sure he could work with both kunai and shuriken as he could throw them and regain them easier, but the problem was the range and force of impact. With kunai and shuriken they depended on how hard you could throw them, but with a bow you got the extra strength depending on the make. Not only that, but with a bow, you could use seals to make both it and the arrows so much better. So he decided to learn how to use the bow too.
When Hana learned of this, she showed Naruto how to take care of both his his blades and bow and how to make arrows if he ever ran out. This led to him learning how to take care of some other weapons too.
He also worked on a few other things, like Ki Training. This wasn't as easy as Naruto had hoped it would be, as from what the book that he got told him, he had to see the energy around him. This was a ninja village and most of the people here had chakra and the book told him he had to look for life force (or aura, as the book called it), which everyone has, but the colours were different for each person. Helpfully, the one of the books had diagrams showing the full Chakra Pathway System, so at least he knew what to look for.
But most people who lived in a Hidden Village had chakra, and for those who could see them, chakra pathways, which were blue. It was harder to see the aura of a person. The book said that each individual produces chakra to some degree, so even for those who can't use chakra, you would see a small amount of it in their aura.
From what the book told him, he had to be blindfolded and think of nothing at all, let his mind go blank. For someone like Naruto, this was very hard, as his mind often wandered. Meditating helped, but for this to work he would have to do it somewhere where he would be close to people, and therein laid the problem. There would be sounds and scents all around him, distracting him. Not only that, but with many of the villagers hating him, and with him being in the public, blindfolded and in a state of meditation, he feared what would happen to him should someone decide to act on their hatred for him.
For this reason, Naruto reread the first half of the first book once again carefully, to see if he could do this another way. He was thankful that he did, because he found out that it also worked with forest animals. Most animals had very little chakra, so finding their aura would be easier. Whilst this way was easier, many used the other way as they didn't live near a forest.
But Ki training was safer, it didn't mean that it was easier. Getting into the state of meditation was easy enough, but the problem was sensing the animals. He found it hard to block out everything. It was like trying not to think of a pink elephant but that's all you can think about. He had to get close to the animals, to make it easier to sense them. But that meant extra scents and noise from the animals, something he didn't have to deal with before. He was thankful that none of the animals around him were hostile.
It took Naruto a few months before he could begin to sense anything and he was shocked when he did. While he was still blindfolded, he was able to see images of the animals surrounded by strange lights - their auras. The images weren't as clear as when he used his own eyes, but he could tell what animal was what.
But when he looked at Mirai and Aiko, he could see red chakra. Naruto suspected that they had red chakra because they were created by the Nine-Tailed Beast that attacked the village all those years ago.
Now that he knew how to sense this energy and see the auras, the next step of his Ki training was to use this energy. This was harder than sensing, the book said that he had to gather the energy within himself, where he could either use it to enhance his body or use it as a weapon. This was called Ki Absorption and Ki Channeling.
The problem was that over the years of learning to sense and use Ki, he was barely able to absorb enough energy to do anything. He thought that this would be one area he could be good at and that he could use Ki to become a ninja, but it didn't seem to be. But it didn't mean that he wouldn't try and use what little he could muster, so he had to decide what he wanted to do with this energy. There were abilities like invisibility and flight, but the books said it took a lot of energy to use these skills.
As Naruto looked through the books though, he found that he could use a bladed weapon like a katana or an axe to cast some powerful Ki attacks over time. Sure he could use a kunai, but the books said that longer blades worked better, because smaller blades, like kunais, would break if you channeled too much ki. So when channelling Ki into a weapon, until they had some training, it was best to start with something like a the long blade of a sword or the thick blade of an axe. Once you mastered the skill of channelling Ki into a weapon, then you could start channelling Ki into something like a kunai or a shuriken.
Not only that, but he was able to channel Ki into the blade in the last few months and was able to use some attacks.
During his Ki training, Naruto finally started to work on Sealing. Naruto wasn't expecting much from this, seeing how it was the hardest skill to learn, but surprisingly enough he found he was somewhat good at it. He was no master or expert, but he thought he was more skilled than the average ninja. After mastering calligraphy, he began to think about how he could use Sealing with his own style.
From what he read, most people who knew Sealing decided to work on what would fit their style instead of specialising or mastering the full potential of the skill. Naruto would love nothing more than to master the skill himself seeing how useful it could become, but with everything else he was working on, he didn't have the time to do so. So he figured he would use it in pranks and such, and later he could make traps. If he had time, or the ability to create more of himself, he would try and master it. Maybe after becoming a ninja.
His speciality was sealing tags. While everyone wanted to do some fancy skills with fuinjutsu, he wanted to try and design different tags to use. The idea came about when he bumped into Hana after a rough day at the academy where they were learning the Body Replacement Jutsu, and Naruto moaned about how he hated the class, saying that he didn't see the point of it. Hana admitted that not many people do. In fact, once they learned the basics of the jutsus they learned at the academy, they don't bother to use them much in the real world unless they had to.
She believed that it was stupid. Sure, only knowing the basics of the jutsu was all they needed, but if they mastered the Body Replacement Jutsu, they could become nearly unstoppable. The basic Body Replacement Jutsu was them to replace themselves with logs, as it was easier to do, but she asked Naruto a question he never thought of. Whilst on missions, where would he find a log to replace himself with? It would be good for him to master the jutsu so he could it in different situations. So that's what he started to do, train to use the Body Replacement Jutsu with different items. He would have liked to use it in different situations, but he didn't have anyone to help him train other than Mirai and Aiko, and there was a limit on what they could do.
Back to the tags, seeing how Hana said that he should try different ways in using the Body Replacement Jutsu, Naruto started to think why people didn't try and use tags in different ways. Other than Explosive Tags, there were two other tags that he knew of from the books, the Barrier Tag and the Sealing Tag. The Barrier Tags formed a barrier to protect everything inside the area, while the Sealing Tags were used to seal the entrances of tombs and caves, and to lock a storage seal in order to prevent people from just taking whatever was inside. The only way you could prevent the seal from taking effect was if you could stop the sealing process before it was done, otherwise removing the tag seems to be extremely difficult through normal means, and there were few people that knew how to do it the simple way.
But as he thought about how Hana told him how he could use the Body Replacement Jutsu in different ways, Naruto began to wonder why they haven't used the Tags in different ways. They only had three Tags, why couldn't they have a few more? Why not a smoke bomb tag, or something to trap them so that they couldn't move? Naruto knew it would take time to do this, so he tested his skills in making Tags by creating tags for pranks.
His first few tags were basic pranks, ones that he had done many times before. Paint bomb tags where it changed a person's clothing, stink bomb tags to make a person smell, sticking people to their chairs, a tag that made a surface slippery, even a tag that made a person itch until they removed their clothes. Small stuff that he had long since surpassed, but he was starting out and didn't know what he could do with tags.
Then one day he decided to create a tag to make the person's clothes invisible, without the person realizing it. He wasn't sure if he could do so and it took a few months to create, but when he tested it out, it was funny as hell.
He had to use the Cloak of Invisibility Jutsu to hide until his target got near, and when they passed by Naruto he would place the Tag. His target had no idea what happened, he had no idea why people were giving him strange looks, laughing at him or covering their and their children's eyes. It took a while before someone called him a pervert for going around naked. But the target argued about this, saying that he was wearing clothes, and the argument got so bad that the ANBU had to come and take the man away.
Naruto learned that they found the Tag and removed it from his target, but they never knew who created the Tag, nor who put it there. Well, they might have suspected it was him, but the thing was they had no proof. And these pranks were ones that he didn't want to be connected to, he didn't want people to know that he was able to do such a thing.
Another Tag he created was a quicksand like tag, where a person walked in a ten-foot area of the tag and sink up to three to five feet into the ground. It took a while, but after a few months of trial and error, he was able to reliably create the Quicksand Tags. He had fun trapping a few people.
Naruto didn't only use tags for pranks, but he was trying to create tags that could help him in a fight, like flashbangs, smoke screen and sound tags. Right now, he was trying to create two that would help him greatly on missions. The first was a proximity alarm tags so that he could be alerted if someone entered his camp while he was sleeping. He knew what he wanted to do with this one, some sort of sound tag that triggered when someone passed by it.
The other one was more difficult, he wanted to create a beacon tag. He wanted to place some tags around a village, settlement or area to map it out and show him the people moving about in that area. Besides being unsure on how to make it in the first place, he didn't really know how to see what they would display either. This was one tag he wasn't sure he would be able to create, but he wasn't going to give up on it just yet. It would be far too useful to have, if he could create it.
Naruto's other training consisted of Darkness Training. This one came to a surprise to Naruto, as this power came from Mirai and Aiko. It happened about a year ago. When he was meditating, the two suddenly bit him and purred some of their chakra into him. When he opened his eyes, he saw an aura of darkness surrounding him. Not knowing what was going on, he went to Tsume, which he was starting to see as the only reliable adult around.
Tsume explained that sometimes a kitsune with elemental powers can give a human some of their power, as long as they trusted said human. Naruto was shocked and amazed that these young kitsunes would trust him so much. After treating them for this gift, he started to learn how to master this skill. The first part of his training was to manipulate the shadows around him.
He could have gone to the clan who was renowned for shadow manipulation, the Nara Clan Naruto believed they were called. But the problem with that was that the clan had to use their own shadows for their jutsu, but this skill he gained could use not only his own, but any shadow, as well as the dark, so he didn't think that the Nara Clan could help him.
It took about three months for him to be able to manipulate the shadows around him, making it so that they would move how he wanted them. The next step was to solidify the shadows so they could be used as weapons and such. This took a bit longer, seeing how, like learning to manipulate the shadows, he had no idea how to do this and he had no one to turn to and had other things to be doing. But once he got it down, he spent the next few months seeing what he could do with it and learning how to fight with this new power.
The ability to solidify the shadows was something he liked, as it was thanks to this that he had gotten better in taijutsu. Mirai and Aiko wanted to help him in his training, so they created small, solid beings, that had a life of their own, sending them out to watch those who were good at taijutsu and learn what they could. Then they would come back and teach Naruto what they had learned, which in turn made Naruto better at fighting. Naruto was thankful for this and gave them extra treats.
In the last few months, Naruto started hearing a few words when it was just him and the two kitsunes. Naruto thought he was going mad, but one day when he was talking to Hana about this, she said that it was most likely Mirai and Aiko trying to talk to him. The Inuzuka Clan, for instance, could understand their animal partners, whilst the rest of the villagers only heard barking and yelping. It was a mental link that happened when animals and humans lived together and trusted each other. Whilst he couldn't understand them clearly at the moment, he knew it was only a matter of time before it happened and he couldn't wait for it.
Regarding Naruto's personal life, when he learned how to sense people with Ki, he sensed that he was being watched from time to time. It took some time, but he learned that they were ANBU, spying on him. This upset Naruto a bit, he wasn't sure why or how long they had been doing this. More importantly, once he found out about them, he realised that the ANBU members wouldn't step in to stop the villagers when he was getting picked on.
Because of this, Naruto decided to prank them. The hard part was finding the ANBU Headquarters. It took a while, needing to use his black outfit and using the Cloak of Invisibility and Body Replacement Jutsu not to get caught. But once he found the Headquarters, he poured itching powder on all ANBU and their training clothes. To make sure that they didn't just put it in the wash to get rid of it, he added itching powder to the washing powder. After a bit more searching, Naruto found their masks, and used bright spray paint on some and glitter on others. Some he dumped syrup on, and covered them with feathers.
While they couldn't prove it was him, they knew, and to prevent him from doing it again they kept an even closer eye on him. They would follow him everywhere, day and night. Whilst Naruto didn't like this, it helped with training his stealth, and he kept trying to outsmart them, to escape their watch.
Next was his love life. A few years ago he started to be interested in girls and wanted to see if he could find love and see what it was like. But the problem was that he didn't know who to ask, as most of the village hated him and the parents wouldn't allow their daughters to date him. But still, from what Hana told him, there were some girls who liked to go against their parent's wishes.
With that information, Naruto decided to see if he could find one of these girls, but he had no idea how. He did have one girl in mind that he wanted to ask, but the problem is that she was from a ninja Clan Family. He knew that, if he tried to date someone from a Clan, the Heads and Elders of the Clans could become a problem for him and would either try to run him out of the village or kill him. So he decided to try and date a civilian girl.
He settled on going after someone a year or two younger himself, and he picked a nine-year-old Sakura Haruno to ask out. She wasn't the one he would have liked to ask out, but even with her huge forehead, she was cute with her pink hair, so he decided to try. He had hoped that being older than her would make her want to date him, seeing how he heard that women loved to date older men, and thus she would forget all the rumors about him.
But that wasn't the case. Because he was dead last and a prankster, she wanted nothing to do with him. Not only that, but like most of the girls in the village, other than the older generations, she was Sasuke Uchiha's fangirl. Naruto didn't know what was wrong with them, to be so interested in the young Uchiha. He acted as if he was better than everyone else, looking down on everyone. He had this emo feeling about him too. Naruto didn't know what was wrong with him, because the female Uchihas were way more sociable, even if they still had problems.
What Naruto didn't get was why Sasuke didn't seem to be interested in any of the fangirls. From what Naruto understood, those who are capable to use chakra seem to mature faster than normal people. Naruto was considered a late bloomer, but then again, he didn't have girls throwing themselves at him and he was training as much as possible to get stronger, and most of the village hated him. But if he had girls throwing themselves at him, and if he wasn't hated, he would have noticed them sooner and would be dating by now. It was as if Sasuke had no interest in girls at all, and Naruto had to wonder if he was gay, because some of them were hot.
Either way, for the following year Naruto tried to get Sakura to date him when he wasn't busy with school and training, but with no luck. She kept hitting him for no real reason and keep calling him an idiot, so Naruto decided that enough was enough and stopped trying to go out with her.
Naruto thought there was no one else out there, none of the other civilians caught his interest. That was until he met Yakumo Kurama a few months ago. A young girl with long brown hair, one side straight and the other in a braid. She also had brown eyes. Naruto would often see her wearing a pink kimono held closed by a pink sash with two pockets on the front. She also wore violet baggy pants and red mesh armour underneath her kimono and legs ,along with orange sandals.
Naruto meet her as he was running around the village, she was painting the Hokage Residence and its surrounding area, it was a great painting too.
Over the last few months, Naruto learned that Yakumo was a kind but shy sort of girl, who was born with a weak body. Whilst she could move around and do things that a civilian could do, she was unable to perform the physical activities required of a kunoichi. She was upset by this, as it was her dream to become a great kunoichi one day, even if she didn't have the body to do so. So instead she had been painting.
Yakumo wanted nothing more but to be a ninja so she could reclaim the fame that her clan once had. Naruto learned that at one time the Kurama Clan used to be the driving force of the Leaf Village and they had much influence, just like the Uchiha Clan, and it was all because of their clan's kekkei genkai - mastery over genjutsu.
But their influence had been dwindling for many years. They hadn't produced a single Jōnin and Chūnin rank shinobi or kunoichi as of late, mostly due to a lack of talent. To add to that, none of the clan members had the clan's kekkei genkai, in fact, Yakumo was the first person in many years to manifest it. Because of this, as she was also the daughter of the Clan Head, all their hopes of regaining the clan's fame and influence were put on her shoulders.
Yakumo didn't mind this, seeing how she wanted this too, but the problem was her body. It was too weak to go to the Academy and so she couldn't reach that dream. For years she thought that she would never be able to become a ninja, but over the last year or so, she heard about a young boy, Rock Lee. Unable to use ninjutsu or genjutsu, but great at taijutsu, and hoping to become a ninja who only used taijutsu. Inspired by this, Yakumo believed she could become a ninja by simply concentrating on her genjutsu skills.
Naruto helped Yakumo in her training, teaching her how to meditate to help her with her genjutsu. Over the months together, Naruto began to fall in love with Yakumo and a few weeks ago he told the Heiress of the Kurama Clan how he felt. He was happy to find that she too had feelings for him, but wasn't sure if he felt the same and so didn't say anything. This was when Naruto got his first kiss, something he enjoyed and did many times after.
Sadly though it didn't last, as two weeks later, Yakumo's parents were killed in a fire and she was put into protective custody until the killers were found. Naruto was unhappy about this, but he understood, they wanted to protect the new Head of the Kurama Clan. So until the killers were found, Yakumo had to disappear for a while. Naruto was heartbroken, he was going to ask her to be his girlfriend. He hoped that she would return soon.
Yakumo had been gone who knows where for two weeks now. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon, and Naruto was taking it easy. The Genin Exams were coming up and he wanted to get ready for them. He had no intention of failing this year too. He was going to do his best to pass, but he feared that he would fail the written and chakra part of the exam.
He'd pulled a prank today, painting the market district in his bright orange outfit, looking to test his escape skills when he would inevitably be spotted. He knew he would be called to the Hokage later on, but he didn't mind it, happy to have escaped his pursuers in record time. Now he was coming back to his apartment when he bumped into someone. "I'm sorry about that, I didn't see you there." he apologised as he came back to the real world.
As Naruto looked up at who he bumped into, he saw that it was a pretty girl with bright red hair, who looked like she was in her late teens. She was wearing simple traveling clothes, consisting of a dark red vest over a black shirt, black pants tied to her shins with bandages, and black sandals. Despite being obviously trained, Naruto couldn't see any kind of Headband. Weird.
"No worries, I was to blame, I was standing in the way." the redhead replied. "I was wondering what sick people do such thing." she continued, grimacing at his door. Looking at it, Naruto realised that someone had written insults all over it. For the fourth time this week.
"I have no idea," Naruto admitted darkly, "I just wish they stopped doing this."
"So you live here?" she asked, curious. Was she an outsider?
"Yeah I do," Naruto told the teen with a deep sigh, "I just don't know why they do this though. I have done nothing wrong." He really didn't know, and he hated it. What did he do to this village? If it wasn't for having nowhere to go and the want to prove them wrong, he would leave this damn village.
"I'm sorry to hear that," the red told him sadly, "do you need any help with cleaning up?"
"Are you sure?" Naruto asked in shock. Nobody had ever offered before. Hell, nobody had even pretended to notice.
"Yes, I am." the red head told him kindly. "I just moved into the village last week, and from the little I have seen and heard, you seem to be an ok person. They have no right to treat you the way they have been."
"But you don't even know me." Naruto told her, confused and a little bit suspicious.
"But I would like to," the older teen told him, "if you want to, that is."
Naruto was unsure about this. One one hand, new friend, on the other, why would someone, who had just met him, want to be friends him. But as he looked down at Mirai and Aiko, they were rubbing their heads against her legs and he could get a few words from them, telling him that she was okay. So after a few moments of thought, Naruto decided to take the risk. "Okay, I would like that, my name is Naruto Uzumaki." he introduced himself politely.
"And my name is Akane Kyūshū" Akane introduced herself before she and Naruto began to clean Naruto's door and windows.
To be Continued!
Author's Note:Here ends the next chapter of Ninja Overlord - Part 1, I hope that you have enjoyed the chapter. I would like to thank Ibilliss for Beta Reading this chapter for me. This is the last chapter of Naruto's childhood, so I hope you like it and how I've made Naruto powerful but not too powerful, I hope. Before any of you say that I've made Naruto too powerful so that no one else can defeat him, I disagree, he is still a child and so still be defeated.
Now you might be wondering why I have added Yakumo into the chapter, the reason is simple, she is the key for me to add Kurenai Yuhi into Naruto's Harem. Now, will Yakumo live or die? The honest answer is I don't know, both works and I can use both to my advantage, only time will tell what'll happen to her.
So you know, before I start writing the next chapter, I'll be editing chapter eight and nine so that they become chapter thirteen and fourteen, and they fit to what I have added in these last few chapters.
Now as you read this, I would like ideas as to what Sealing Tags Naruto could create, I have a story where I can get some ideas from: Naruto: Curse of the Ryugan by Thayerblue1 - which the writer is okay with me using them as long I give him credit for them. But I want some other ideas too, so he'll have more tags to use in a fight. I hope you can help me here.