Disclaimer: I own nothing but the general plot and OCs

no editing so good luck with that.

English speaking is underlined like this

A reminder that I know fuck all about fighting or martial arts. Apologies if what I wrote has zero basis in anything approaching reality.

Also I know I said Sonaru would meet Tenzo or Genma this chap or last, but I promise it'll happen next chapter. I'm fairly sure I know which person it'll be.

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Chapter 28 - A Kick To The Teeth Is Good For Some

At 5 foot 2 inches in my original body, constantly struggling not to let my weight dip too far under seven stone, and growing up permanently drastically smaller than the vast majority of my age mates, I learned that if I was going to get into a physical altercation I had to know exactly how I was going to end it before I had even begun. I had to put my opponent down fast, or make the fight not worth the effort for them by making it clear they'd walk away with far too much damage. Fear and psychological tactics were my go to weapons, as someone who had not been fit or practiced enough for the speed and reflexes to challenge a larger opponent. Other people larger than me had the luxury of throwing their weight around in a fight to prove dominance, unlike me. My strikes had to be aimed to do real damage or I was fucked. There was little concept of honour in the way I fought - I couldn't afford to be that generous.

I hadn't struck out in blind anger at someone since I was a temperamental young child - if I made a move to physically lash out, it became apparent that I was willing to take it as far as I needed and knew exactly what I was doing. It made my peers highly wary of my anger or even my strong disapproval, but thankfully not frightened of me - I was not prone to anger strong enough to motivate more than words from me, and I generally didn't care enough about other people to intervene with more than words either.

I could count on my hands the number of times I had personally physically hurt someone on purpose past the age of eleven - the thing was, so could other people because when I did so, the incidents had a tendency to sear themselves into their memories. I wasn't sure what it was exactly that made my acts of violence so disquieting to them. Perhaps it was my tendency to amiably warn people exactly what I was going to do if they didn't desist whatever action was bothering me, before striking as fast as I could and then retreating while they were still in shock.

Perhaps it was the fact that it always became apparent afterward that I had calculated which authority figures could be approached to make me face the consequences and exactly how I would wriggle out of them if they were told. My utter lack of remorse or sympathy for their resulting pain or suffering, but also my lack of desire to brag. I walked away unruffled by the violent encounters. Maybe my willingness to cripple them if they came after me came across in my demeanour, maybe my general lack of grudge and immediate openness to let bygones be bygones if I knew further encounters were inevitable disturbed them.

Maybe it was something else. I didn't know, and I'd never asked. All I knew was that it only took a while of exposure to me in a relaxed setting, before people generally had me pinned as someone who was willing to kill if I deemed that to be the most advantageous route forward, but still found themselves disarmed and charmed by my polite, slightly cheeky, quiet and mostly non judgemental interactions.

This all suited me fine, in the life I had been living -one in which I was a part of a society that condemned killing and murder, where I could potentially live my entire life without facing a deadly threat, where I didn't need to be physically up for killing a bigger stronger man with my bare hands, where perhaps the most responsible choice for someone like me (who was far too tempted) was to not allow myself to reach a point that I knew (physically and intellectually) how to take someone out by myself at a whim and get away with it, where the best way for me to continue to function as a citizen in said society was to give myself no choice but to avoid situations in which I could morally accept killing, by not allowing myself to be physically up to par.

I had to accept that not even too deep down, a part of me was viscerally satisfied that I had been reborn into a world in which killers were dime a dozen, and aspiring to be one of the best at it was perfectly okay according to this society. A large part of me was morbidly curious at what I would become with such a constant ability at my fingertips.

Admittedly, I knew very little about the art of fighting. I had picked up some nuggets of information here and there in my time with DFB and Gai, but it was actually surprisingly little considering how often I hung around when they trained. It was like sitting next my dad and mother for years and years as they drove - I definitely picked up the bare basics of driving a car, but that in no way translated to me being able to actually do it myself.

The first thing I learned, was that there were three different types of learning to fight. There was competitive fighting, which was more like a sport, and was the sort of martial arts I knew about; where the goal was reaching the next level and winning that trophy or medal and frankly I fucking hated. That sort of rational behind doing things had never appealed to me, I didn't like learning music in order to get to the next grade, I didn't like swimming in order to compete, I didn't like fighting in order to get the trophy. Dedicating myself to something for that had always felt... hollow. The victories felt paltry and pointless, the practice felt pressured, the journey wasn't treasured. It felt like a race to the top and had been the reason for me quitting a lot of those hobbies and refusing to start others.

The second type was learning purely to survive and win in battle. It was brutal, and deadly. The best teachers had the most survivors, and that was basically that. Well, no, it wasn't, there was more to it than that - it explored fighting on a deeper and more serious level than competitive fighting because you knew your life depended on it. But it was certainly as much a tool for survival as it was a way of life.

The third way was the one that appealed to me the most, and it was the spiritual aspect. The third method of fighting took the second one and then, in my eyes, morphed it into something beautiful. If the second one was a way of life, the third was a Way of life. It was a Path, where on the journey you were guaranteed to transform fundamentally, where you learned about yourself, your mind, your spirit, your body, as well as how to fight. It was a way of learning which never had an end, and mastery was only the beginning. I had always wanted to learn something to that depth, to the point that it became part of my identity. I had always visualised living like that as the best way for me to leave the depression that repeatedly haunted me and the anxiety I persistently carried behind.

DFB explained to me, that most of the time, it was what gave the clans such a great advantage over the others, outside of blood limits. Most clans had something approaching a Path, having turned the shinobi arts into something with far greater depth. Certainly, some were more inclined toward the spiritual aspect of learning how to fight, and some more toward the more brutal battle fighting of the second type, but generally the clans had a mixture of the two. In contrast, non clan kids were stuck with learning the stripped bare, simplified methods of fighting purely to survive in life or death scenarios.

The Hatake clan was often an even mixture of the two, according to DFB, however because each individual had such unique and bespoke training, within the clan itself there could be a lot of variation from person to person. For a long time, DFB had leaned more toward fighting in order to thrive in battle than toward anything spiritual, but shortly after he reached Jōnin, he began to take a look at adding something with greater meaning into the way he approached being a shinobi.

I knew, from what he had told me, that a lot of this included adopting what he knew of Uchiha Obito's spirit into his own methods of being a shinobi, in order to emulate and honour him. I also knew I wanted to do something similar - not because I gave a shit about Uchiha Obito, but because I loved DFB and I wanted to be like him as a shinobi. I wanted to honour what he honoured, and protect what he loved. DFB tried his best to live by Obito's words 'those who break the rules are scum, but those who abandon their comrades are worse than scum.' I would do my best to do so as well... except maybe less the first part because I really couldn't find it within myself to give much of a fuck about the rules, beyond following them so I didn't get into trouble I couldn't get out of.

My words to live by were something more like a mishmash of what my Mother had taught me, and DFB's own - 'Those who learn how to follow the rules also learn how to break them, and those who abandon their comrades are worse than scum.'

DFB and Gai knew me well enough that they didn't need me to tell them that I was looking for a Way of life - a Path, more than I was looking to just survive and get promoted and be awarded accolades. I wanted fulfilment, rather than recognition. I needed not to just live a life filled with goals, and plans to reach those goals- I needed internal equilibrium. I needed to work towards a point of inner peace and sustain that. I knew that I needed that spiritual aspect if I wanted to leave behind my depressive tendencies.

From day one, it was apparent that I was far more of a novice than I even thought. Apparently I didn't know how to do anything right. Including the most basic shit.

"My beautiful blossom, what do you think the most important thing to ensure you're proficient in to begin with, before you even begin to practice katas?" Gai asked me, in a manner that told me I was definitely going to get the question wrong.

"I don't know... my balance?"

"Of a sort, but not the balance I assume you're referring to," DFB eye smiled as he cut in, "your internal balance is the most important shinobi art to work on first. This is achieved through breathing."

"Special breathing?" I asked uncertainly.

"Afterward, we can work on your posture," Gai added with a beam.

"Special... standing?"

So that was how I spent a couple days sitting with DFB and Gai as they corrected my breathing- breathing from my stomach, maintaining calm even breaths. Essentially I was meditating. I was forced to become aware of my breathing, and exactly how much I breathed and when, during my movements. Using various breathing techniques, DFB slowly talked me through concentrating my thoughts and focus on my chakra coils, from there becoming aware of it through my pathways, its movements and size, with greater and greater clarity, cycling my awareness throughout my entire body to see with detail where the chakra was and how it moved. I did this sitting, and then standing, and then during balances that reminded me of yoga, before they decided I could be taught to breathe correctly during katas.

At the same time, the way I stood was corrected every moment DFB or Gai saw something wrong, which was frustratingly often. Whilst they took to the breathing exercises with a calm patience, they were unapologetically demanding about my posture. I was corrected constantly. Admittedly it did lead to mild grumbling from me once or twice.

"What do you mean, it's important to stand properly? This coming from Mr Slouch? You can't be telling me you stand correctly when you permanently express how few fucks you could give with every square centimetre of your posture... oh you've got to be kidding me, you do? How? How could you have possibly perfected standing correctly to the point that you've learned how to screw around with it and still get it right? Agh why did you let me learn it wrong in the first place, you bastard."

Whilst the posture thing aggravated me, because I had to be aware of it all the time to get it right, I knew eventually I wouldn't have to even think about it, and it would just become a part of my every day life. The breathing too, I would eventually subconsciously just incorporate into the way I naturally breathed, however according to DFB, it was an area that I would always be able to improve on.

Breathing was to help me achieve a clear, calm mind. It was to help me block out pain, or add force to a strike, or focus in the middle of a fight, or magnify my awareness, or direct my attention internally with great detail.

That such a simple, taken for granted action could be so important a building block for excelling as a shinobi surprised me. According to DFB, academy kids were taught the bare basics of breathing techniques, but only some clans knew just how useful it could be and how far it could help even the most experienced Jōnin.

"What do you think the Nara are really doing when they insist on napping? They're definitely procrastinating most of the time, but they're also meditating. Breathing. Directing their focus internally. Thinking. Or maybe clearing their mind of thoughts. Different Naras do different things," DFB informed at one point.

After doing those exercises I always felt light, clean. Like my mind and my spirit had been groomed and honed.

Still correcting my posture at times, we finally approached something resembling fighting. It was more challenging that I had thought it would be, because like hell Gai and DFB allowed me to stop exercising in between it all. Between breathing and learning how to bloody stand right, I was still being worked to the bone whenever they could manage it.

Learning how to maintain a new form, with the appropriate amount of energy and force, forcing my aching legs and arms not to let me down, made me feel like I was constantly underperforming. Just because I was mentally not crying inside anymore, didn't mean that I wasn't still physically done in. It wasn't as bad as when I had first started, I knew that, but each time my body showed signs that it was recovering faster and easier, DFB and Gai kicked it up a notch to remove that.

After quitting martial arts when I was a child, once I realised I was eventually going to be made to compete at weekends which had a good chance of coinciding on the few days every other week I was supposed to see mother, I had never given too much thought to the different styles.

As a result, I didn't know how what existed in my old world compared to what I was being taught. DFB made it very clear to me from the start, that although I happily ignored the existence of other two year olds, he had noticed that I was still smaller than them. I didn't need him to explain to me further that I was destined for another life as a slim short ass. That became a problem when it came to generating the sort of physical power that other people twice my height and twice my width would be capable of when I was fully grown, let alone giving me something I could work with as a pint sized - if frighteningly proficient - toddler.

My posture and alignment when fighting became that much more important, in order to pack every single bit of force I could into my strikes. When fighting another person, without ninjutsu or genjutsu, I was told that I was going to have to get far closer to my opponent in order for them to be within my reach. The good thing about this was that once they were within my reach, I would be too close for most other opponents, and their strikes would either have far less force or not be able to get me at all. The bad thing, was that when I was in the other person's strike zone, there was a solid chance that one good hit would knock me the fuck out, or even kill me.

I had to be quicker than them, I had to have faster reflexes, I had to be better at dodging, I had to be more flexible, I had to be more relentless. Once I learned to augment my strength with chakra I was going to have to practice control like nothing else in order to be as effective as possible in strengthening my body to take more damage and give more as well.

As it was, DFB and Gai drilled me not only in katas, but in grapples, and holds, they made me repeat drills over and over again in kicking and punching specific areas they marked out on bags. I learned how important it was to have control over the distance between myself and my opponent, as well as how in doing so I could control their movements. Weight and balance and fluidity and physical connection were all so important, as I learned about not only my own movements, but other people's. It was fascinating.

If I had to take a guess, I would say that I was learning a sort of mixture of something resembling Wing Chun, but with something involving more grappling and getting incredibly physically close to the other person, as well as something more aggressive and forceful in some of the kicks and strikes. It was the speed, and blocking at the same time as striking, whilst maintaining a fluid yet steely core, that reminded me of what little I knew of Wing Chun. It was still different though, in where the strikes were aimed. I knew this was probably because I was being taught to aim for very precise pressure points, alongside places that did the most damage.

That was where the second type of fighting came in. There was a brutal, unrelenting edge to the methods I was being taught that were obvious in their use to cause death for another. It was not just a beautiful art form I was learning, I was learning how to kill and I felt it with every theoretical scenario, hold, strike and movement that DFB and Gai took me through.

There was no time to even attempt to grow an ego, or feel powerful-had I been so inclined -with the knowledge of what I was learning to do to other people though, because what I was almost immediately reminded of in a very up close, personal and repetitive manner, was that no matter how good I may or may not think I was getting DFB and Gai and every other sod out there could fuck me up in less than a second.

I was not left stood there repeating Katas, and having an instructor correct my stance or posture and move on, I wasn't learning non contact martial arts in a health and safety conscious class, I was not practicing with a sparring partner who was around my level. DFB and Gai were leagues ahead of me, probably always would be, and didn't see any reason why they should ever give me anything approaching a win when I hadn't dragged it from them with force. To put it bluntly, I got my ass handed to me. Again, and again and again and again. The amount of times by back hit the dirt, or my stomach, or my butt, or occasionally my head... I was fucking covered in bruises before long.

Any pride, or ego, or fear I might have been carrying round about not wanting to be beaten, or fail, or look bad, well that landed in the dirt too. I had to learn to scrape myself off the ground looking like shit, wipe the dirt, or sweat, or spit, or on the sometimes lucky occasion snot, off my face and carry on.

If I hadn't been somewhat inured to the pain of intense exercise already, the bruises I was left with would have left me completely unable to sleep. As it was, I was too physically shattered to do anything but fall into bed already half asleep, and blearily allow myself to be dragged from it the next morning.

The most annoying, and yet best thing about both Gai and DFB - particularly Gai - was that they knew so goddam much about Taijutsu. Every time they thought I was getting too familiar sparring or planning against a specific style and even mentality behind fighting, they switched it up on me. I got to fight against multiple different techniques without needing to find multiple different opponents. Whilst I knew I would no doubt get an even greater range if I still went out to search for others, I got more variation than any other person first starting out in Konoha. That didn't make it any less frustrating when I had gotten used to a punch in coming and went to block it, only to find out it had been something else entirely because they had switched styles, and got whacked in the stomach.

None of this was helped by the fact that even creating a style that would work for me if I only grew to the bottom of people's chests was still fucking difficult when I was only just taller than their knees. Needless to say, I suddenly understood why DFB and Gai had focussed so much on exercises that required me to jump high, and climb. I became intimately acquainted with blocking strikes above me, jumping to hit and kick at ridiculous heights, speedily using opponents like climbing frames and having no shame in aiming below the belt. Literally - because standing on the ground I couldn't reach higher than that. Turns out there were a surprising number of ways to incapacitate a man from just over two and half feet of height.

Practicing Shuriken and kunai throwing was honestly a welcome break from Taijutsu. Whilst breathing and stance was still an enforced part of it, it was something I didn't need to rely on feed back from DFB and Gai to have a guess at how I was doing. Fairly quickly, I noticed that the sneaky toy makers of Konoha had designed most of their toys made for throwing to be the same weight as either the standard Kunai or Shuriken found in most shops in Konoha. There were obviously various shapes and sizes and weights of throwing weapons found, but the most common ones weighed the same as the balls I had been throwing around for months.

The only down side that I had forgotten about being such a small person with teeny tiny hands, was how uncomfortable and difficult it was to hold something that was designed for someone with much larger hands. I constantly felt like they were a moment away from slipping out my fingers, and at first fumbled far more than I expected. Throwing weapons, I could at least say were a clear skill of mine. I started five feet away from a large board, just trying to get the blade to pierce the wood, and within a week I was easily standing five times that, hitting a much smaller round target and always hitting within the five inner rings.

Truthfully I wasn't entirely surprised. I had once told DFB that I'd never seen a deadly weapon, and I'd meant it at the time. I had also completely forgotten about the throwing knives my dad had made me practice with over and over and over again, until I could hit the target close to the centre every time. One summer when I was six he just came home with a set of throwing knives, and without any reasoning at first, told me I had to learn how to throw them accurately. Learning how to throw kunai had brought the memory rushing back to me, of standing in the heat, unhappy and wanting ice cream, with my dad standing behind me, making dissatisfied noises when I couldn't even get a single blade to stick in those first few days.

I had cried multiple times at his frustrated and harsh criticism. To my displeasure, he had refused to let me quit, and threatened me with everything from standing out all night till I got it right, to never letting me see my mother again if I didn't learn how. It wasn't until a year later and I tentatively griped at him for making me do something I thought so pointless, that he told me I could complain all I liked but he had given me a method of protecting myself that allowed me to maintain a distance between myself and the other person.

"You're so small and delicate little Queen, and you've got a big mouth on you. I don't spend time with gentle guys, but some of them sure as hell have fragile egos. I need to know you have a way of keeping them from going for you if one of them loses their heads for a moment. If that happens, you nail one of them with a throwing knife, and I promise you the rest of them will shit their pants and back off."

"What about you? Won't you do something if that happens?" I'd asked, not relishing the idea of being made to put myself on firing line like that against bigger older stronger men. He'd given me a strange look in response, knowing his answer but unwilling to admit it.

"You have to learn to protect yourself," he'd told me after a pause. I suspected then, that dad would not protect me from the real threats out there to a child, but it was one thing to suspect he wouldn't protect me from other people, and I found out not too long afterward, that it didn't prevent the feeling of deep hurt and shattered trust when it actually happened.

Nevertheless, he had been right in one thing, I had to learn to protect myself. Whatever his intentions though, he had never been good at teaching me how to do that, other than by throwing me in the deep end. DFB and Gai's dedication to getting it right in ensuring I could thrive never ceased to soften me toward them.

Even when they knocked me to the ground, or thrashed me in shogi and Go, or made me exercise till I collapsed, or ate my cake in front of me for failing to lie successfully, or kept me up when I just wanted to sleep scribbling ideas for a seal, or woke me up at sunrise to run for miles, I knew everything that DFB and Gai did was filled with loyalty and love and desire for me to protect myself - not so that they didn't have to worry about me, but so that if they ever weren't there to protect me I wasn't vulnerable without them.

It was a difference that meant the world to me; dad had known he wouldn't stand up for me so he'd wanted me to be able to rely on myself, whereas I could be the best shinobi in the world and Gai and DFB would still stand between me and danger.

I hope I gave a vague idea of the sort of strengths and weaknesses Sonaru will be facing here, and how Kakashi and Gai are hoping to make up for that. They don't want her to have to rely on Genjutsu or ninjutsu to supplement a weak and small body.

What sort of chakra nature do you want her to have? What do you think she'll focus on in terms of shinobi arts?

Also, I hope this all made sense, I always worry a bit when writing about something I'm not strongly informed in.