Disclaimer: All Characters belong to Misashi Kishimoto.

"Normal Speech"

'thoughts'

Fast Forward three years: Naruto & fellow students are in their final academy year.

It is chaos, yes, Naruto was sure that is the right word, chaos. His life is chaos & Naruto relished in it. He was just going with the flow as long as he liked the outcome & saw any opportunity to enjoy it. Make no mistake, his life was not sunshine & butterflies at all, he still received those disdainful glares from the villages but now some of them were turning into confusion while some didn't knew how to act altogether. It was going great amidst this chaos & Naruto only wished there were no rude surprises down the road.

Naruto's creative mind found Hiashi's advice when they first met, simple & confusing. They were vague sometimes while sometimes Naruto found them surprisingly straightforward. He met with Hiashi a few times, three or four times, in the past three years. The man is actually a pretty important guy, very important actually. He didn't mince his words & talked with directness which Naruto really liked. Unlike Old-man, the Third Hokage, he comes out with everything straight, you like it or not, or rather Naruto liked it or not. Diplomacy serves you good if you're a clan head, but Naruto found he was one of the few people who interacts with a 'no-bullshit' Hiashi. He questioned Hiashi why is this the case, Hiashi reasoned he has full faith in the trust he placed in Naruto, Yamanaka cannot probe Naruto's mind because of his unique circumstances & whatever he told him wouldn't necessarily damage Hiashi, if Naruto ever decided to turn on him, of which Naruto assured him with every ounce of conviction & seriousness he could muster, that it will never happen even if he has to put his life on the line, when Hiashi wouldn't release his dead eye stare, Naruto added another statement to his argument

"Unless of course, If there are legit reasons for doing so, like you turning on me first."

Hiashi got a little smirk on his face. 'Naruto can't afford to be stupid & naive, especially in this world.'

"Well then Naruto, I do hope you investigate those reasons before acting."

Naruto grew up alone, in a shinobi village where a major part of populace didn't liked him very much. Consequently, he was forced to grow up quickly, understand how the system works. Obviously, he brought up his deductions of how the system works & Hiashi either validated or corrected his learning with his own. All in all, Naruto at the age of just 13, understood how grim the world actually is & how these 13 year-soon-to-be-genins have a bleak future if they don't grow up & acknowledge the danger.

Naruto's life was a little different of course. He was playing 'Shinobi' on a higher difficulty level. He had no protection since early childhood & even where things were supposed to be nice, like Konoha, his home village, it was not the case. Naruto understood it & acknowledged it, & Hiashi knew Naruto did, hence the trust he had in Naruto.

Hiashi had grown to like the boy, but he didn't show it, he just let himself be 'Normal'. He didn't hide anything & didn't tried to soften the impact of his words, if he didn't wanted to tell him something, or rather couldn't tell due to 'external' complications, then he flat out says so without trying to manoeuvre his way around it. He liked the simplicity by which Naruto took his words, no drama, unlike his public persona. Naruto has certainly grown, or rather, was forced to grow quickly. They talked about everything, village politics, relationships between various villages & lands, clans. The only subject they haven't talked about is Jinchuuriki, but Hiashi knew no matter how much the Hokage tries to conceal it, Naruto was bound to know, sooner rather than later. Although it was quite a high risk bet, but Hiashi was confident that Naruto had enough rational to think & talk carefully about the subject when the time comes rather than go on a rampage. 'Yes Hiashi, maybe you meeting him have averted that fate, hopefully Naruto's early maturity will help him see his situation more clearly.'

Now back to Naruto's life. The personality he put out on the show in public was that of a jester, a helpful jester to be specific. He pranks people from time to time but they are all light hearted which can be reverted with a little effort, which is guided by him. He offers to help the victims without telling them that it was him who was the prankster. According to Naruto, all the prank victims deserve it. But in the end he offers them help, or guides them on how to revert the changes. Most of ignore him of course but take his advice without acknowledging it. But Naruto had learned earlier, don't hold any expectations for anyone. So he doesn't mind in the end, he gets his little silly revenge but with an added bonus, some of the people that do acknowledge his gestures of help often end up changing their disdainful behaviour a little bit toward a neutral behaviour. Though Naruto guiltily admits that it's kind of manipulative, 'But hey, Hiashi-san told me that their hate is misdirected so it's not like they have a valid reason to hate me!'

Academy is another interesting story. As ususal baised instructors are ready to put Naruto down every chance they get, the only beacon of hope is Iruka-sensei. Iruka had an eye opening incident with Naruto early on when Naruto was around 4. That incident made him realise his prejudice for something Naruto had no control about & as a fellow orphan Iruka felt a strange kinship with Naruto. Iruka tries to make sure that everyone from staff to children hold no bias against Naruto & Naruto appreciates that. With biased teachers teaching him incorrect forms, katas & wrong jutsu techniques, Naruto resorted to learning from experience, including other's experience of course. He watched every spar very attentively & tries to drag out his own fight in hope of learning his opponents' style, so now after 3 years his Taijutsu style is rough mixture of form of Uchiha, Hyuuga & other clan forms whose forms he managed to dissect. But this crude mixture of style was very ineffective against any better than average opponent. Apparently, every distinct style was based on some core strengths & switching between the styles or rather, combining elements of distinct styles would leave many holes & gaps that any decent opponent will be able to exploit, more often than not, Naruto's spar ends with a crushing defeat for him. But sometimes that unpredictability of his style would earn him a bonus victory when the opponents wrongly anticipate his moves. He knew he lacked a proper taijutsu base, so Naruto has been asking Iruka's help in his free time to cover the ground, 'Maybe with a good foundation I will be able to incorporate those various elementary things that I've picked until now into a much more cohesive style? Hmm.'

Ninjutsu was an entirely different matter, as per Hiashi's advice Naruto began experimenting with chakra 3 years back. The start was not promising, as literally nothing was happening & if Naruto didn't die of chakra exhaustion then he was sure he will die of boredom. But one day, Naruto had a eureka moment when he began channelling chakra while practicing taijutsu drills & voila strange things happened! Feeling a surge of controlled energy in his limbs he struck a wooden post & it broke into splinters 'Woah! What the hell!' But Naruto didn't knew about a certain fox in his body so he wasn't able to deduce that it could've been that bijuu chakra that enhanced his capabilities.

"So I've seen almost every shinobi using elemental jutsus, fire, water, earth…come on, anything, turn this chakra into those elemental forms!"

Naruto was frustrated at the lack of elemental chakra, but he at least knew how to augment his strength & capabilities to a little degree 'I should master this, so that at least I'll have something to work with when I'm in a fight.'

Iruka helped out again, showed Naruto how to properly channel the chakra through his hands & feet & how to channel it for a jutsu.

"But those three academy jutsus are still a priority Naruto, don't forget to work on you Bunshin(Clone) jutsu!" he warned after addressing Naruto's queries.

But still Naruto worked to get ANY elemental touch to his chakra based techniques, 'How awesome it will be if enhance my capabilities using elemental chakra or better yet perform elemental techniques without any hand signs at all' Naruto didn't knew any technique or had any know how to create a hand-signs based jutsu from scratch so his best bet was to create a technique which requires no hand signs at all, 'How hard can it be? I already know how to augment my strength using chakra' …it was very hard.

But finally after two years, his efforts actually resulted in a major breakthrough.

"Oh my god! WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST DID!"