Wakfu Way of the Ninja
Chapter Three
"Well, I'm glad all three of you showed up," Kakashi said the next morning. Yugo and Naruto glared at him, and even Hinata seemed disappointed in his conduct.
"You're late!" Naruto accused.
"Am I? Well, it's such a nice day, I decided to take the scenic route."
"The scenic route?" Naruto demanded. "For five hours?"
"It's very scenic. Now, you only have until noon to finish my test, but we can keep talking about this for the next twenty minutes if you want."
That shut him up.
He held up two bells. "The objective is to take one of these bells. If you don't, you get tied up to that pole over there and you miss lunch."
"Oh, so that's why you told us to skip breakfast!" Yugo accused.
"Yep."
"But breakfast is the most important meal of the day! I will never trust anything you say ever again!"
"Very good, Yugo. You just learned the first rule about trust."
"What?"
"Don't do it," he explained. "Now, there are no rules of engagement, nothing is forbidden. Use whatever tricks, jutsus, or weapons you can, because if you hold back, you will fail."
"But we could hurt someone like that!" Yugo protested.
Oh no, what a nightmare! "I think I can handle a couple of rookie genin."
"Yeah, right!" Naruto said. "You couldn't even dodge that eraser!"
Kakashi rolled his eyes. "That wasn't an attack. That was a childish prank of a hopeless loser crying out for attention. Now, when I say, 'start,' I want you to–"
Naruto pulled out a knife and charged. "I'll show you, you creep!"
Touched a nerve, have we? Kakashi made a mental note to belittle the kid further if he ever needed motivation. Until then, he flipped Naruto onto his back and pinned him to the ground. "Now, what are you doing? I didn't even say 'start' yet."
"Yes you did, twice!"
He smiled at that. "You're attack was obvious, clumsy, and slow, but you were trying to kill me, so how can I say this? I think I'm starting to like you kids." He hopped off of Naruto and let the kid get up. "Now, start."
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"One Thousand Years of Pain!"
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Naruto didn't know how long the test had been going, but it was long enough for him to end up dangling upside down by his ankle for like a hundred times. And of course, each time that happened, all his kunai fell out of his pouch so he couldn't even cut himself free. He saw Yugo and Hinata come into view.
Yugo grinned as he looked up (down?) at him. "Hey, Naruto. Need a hand?"
"I got this," he growled. He felt dizzy from all the blood rushing to his head, but he got himself into this mess and he'd get himself out of it.
"What you got is thirty minutes," Yugo said. He threw a shuriken at the rope Naruto hung from, dropping him to the ground.
Naruto untied the rope at his feet and got up. "Thanks, but I had that! Also, why are you helping me? This is a competition, remember?"
"I thought so too," Yugo said, "but then I ended up buried up to my neck in dirt, giving my time to think. And I realized that if you have to beat a jounin to become a genin, then something's messed up."
"Yeah, but he outranks us," Naruto said. "He can get away with being a jerk and give us this stupid test."
"But what if he's not testing us?" Yugo asked. "What if he's teaching us?"
Naruto's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?"
"I saw most of your fight with Kakashi, and I'm betting that he gave you some advice during it."
"Yeah, he told me not to let your enemy get behind you, because if you do, he'll do terrible, terrible things to your–"
"Right, I overheard that part. Did he tell you anything else?"
Naruto thought back to his fight. He had been focusing on hitting the arrogant jerk who had pulled out his book just to show him that he didn't need to take him seriously. He had gotten close–so close!–but that was just Kakashi toying with him.
"He also told me to think before I act, and not to take the bait if it's obvious."
Yugo nodded. "Sounds useful. How about you, Hinata? Did he tell you anything?"
She nodded. "Kakashi-sensei told me that...that if I defeat myself before I start fighting, then I've already lost."
"Perfect!" Yugo said. "That means we have a chance."
"I'm not sure that's..." Hinata stared. "If you say so."
"What did he tell you?" Naruto asked.
"He told me to stop holding back and use everything I could."
"And that's why you decided to come back and try to use the two of us?" He hated being used. It was like Mizuki all over again
Yugo shrugged. "It was an obvious hint."
"But there are still only two bells," Naruto pointed out.
"Sure, there are two bells, two lunches, but three posts. We could all end up tied to them if we don't work together."
"And after we get the bells, then what?" Naruto asked. "Do we then try to stab each other in the back as quickly as possible?"
Yugo looked at him solidly. "After we get the bells, what happens to us will be our decision, not his."
Naruto met his eyes, and nodded. "Well, even if it ends up being me getting sent back, it will be worth it to show that stupid jerk a thing or two. I'm in."
Hinata stood up a bit straighter. "Me too."
"Okay," Yugo said, clapping his hands together. "We have twenty minutes. Before we come up with a plan, we need to know what each other can do. Naruto, you go first."
"You've seen what I can do. Shadow clones.
"Limits?"
"I don't believe in limits."
"Hinata?"
"I can use the Byakugan," she said. "It grants three-hundred-and-sixty degree vision and lets me see chakra and through most illusions."
"That sounds useful. Limits?"
"I used up most of my chakra in my fight with Kakashi. I won't be able to sustain the Byakugan for more than two more minutes."
"Then we'll need to work fast."
"What about you?" Naruto asked.
"I can make portals." He drew a circle with his chakra and a portal appeared. "You've seen them before in the academy. I can have two going at a time, and I can open them up fifty feet away and keep them open for a few seconds, but further or longer gives me trouble. Now, what do we know about Kakashi?"
"He lies," Naruto said. "He told us to be here at five and skip breakfast; he wasn't here till ten and we shouldn't have skipped breakfast."
"He is skilled in hand to hand combat and illusions," Hinata said.
"Ninjutsu, too," Yugo added. "He'd rather outwit us than overpower us. He could hurt us, but he doesn't."
Naruto gave him a flat look. "My anus disagrees with you." There was nothing funny about One Thousand Years of Pain.
"He could kill us, but he didn't."
"Fair enough."
"Does he have any weaknesses?" Yugo asked. "I didn't even manage to land a hit on him."
"Me neither," Naruto admitted.
"Yes you did," Hinata said. Both turned on her, and she shrank back a bit.
"When?"
"Y-yesterday."
"Yesterday? What, you mean with that chalk eraser? That doesn't count, Kakashi didn't even...consider it an attack." Naruto's eyes widened and he grinned slowly. "Hinata, you're a genius!"
Her face turned pink. "I...what?"
Naruto looked at a clock in the distance. They had fifteen minutes left, but he didn't think they'd need more than five. "Okay, I got a plan."
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Kakashi stood in the middle of a field, reading his book. That made him easy to find, but impossible to sneak up on, and, if Yugo was right, their "sensei" wanted both. Naruto wanted to charge up there and beat the man to a bloody pulp, but Kakashi hadn't told him to stop holding back, or to believe in himself. He told him to think.
And so Naruto thought. He thought through the whole thing.
He charged up to his sensei as though ready to beat him to a bloody pulp and stopped in front of him. "Okay, Kakashi, you jerk! You may have made a fool out of me before, but now it's my turn! Prepare for a secret technique that not even the Hokage could handle!"
"That's nice, Naruto," he said, turning a page.
Naruto fumed, then he put his hands together to form a hand seal. "Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!" A dozen shadow clones appeared around the field.
"Hm, shadow clones," Kakashi said. "I think I've seen those before."
"Yeah? Well how about this? Naruto Secret Technique, Harem no Jutsu!" The shadow clones matched his hand seals and reappeared in a puff of smoke in the form of a dozen naked women making seductive poses and giggling.
"Not bad," Kakashi said, barely glancing up from his book. "If the whole ninja thing doesn't work out for you, you could always get a job at a strip club."
Naruto's jaw dropped. "That's it?" He dropped the transformation, but didn't dismiss the clones. "That's your only reaction? The Hokage passed out from just one of these!"
"Was he reading a book at the time?"
"No."
"It's hard to be distracted by naked women when you have a book to read."
"What sense does that make?"
Kakashi shrugged. "I'll tell you when you're–"
The clones drew their knives and threw them at him. Kakashi hopped out of the way and landed on the other side of them. He didn't look surprised, or even impressed, but when he landed, his foot stepped into a portal.
In an open field, they couldn't sneak up on him, but they were close enough to the trees so Yugo could hide and still throw portals.
Kakashi should have fallen over or through the portal, but even off balance, his left foot seemed to stick to the ground and he pulled his right foot out–with Yugo holding onto it with one hand and holding a knife with the other.
He brought the knife down onto Kakashi's foot, but Kakashi grabbed his wrist and threw him aside. Yugo caught himself in another portal and shot himself back, feet first. Kakashi blocked his kick with one hand, but when Yugo threw his knife at him, he couldn't block with the other without risking his book, so he had to dodge.
By then, Naruto's clones had surrounded him again, and they threw shuriken at him in unison just as Yugo jumped through a portal and attacked Kakashi from above. Surrounded on all three sides, there was no way he could dodge.
But Kakashi dodged anyway, somehow, substituting himself with a small log.
"Where is he?" Yugo yelled out.
Hinata, who had been approaching them during the fight with her bookoogoo eye thing going on, however you pronounced it, pointed into the distance. "There he is!"
Kakashi was walking casually away from them. He looked over his shoulder with an innocent look on his face. "Who, me?"
"Get him!" Naruto yelled. This part he didn't think through, but they had less than two minutes until Hinata's abilities wore off, and then they wouldn't even be able to keep track of the guy.
Kakashi sank into the ground like it was made of water. Yugo yelped and jumped onto the shoulders of one of Naruto's shadow clones.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm pretending the ground is lava until we find out where he is," Yugo said. "He used this exact same attack when I fought him on my own to leave me buried alive."
"He's right there!" Hinata called out, pointing at the ground between them. Then she yelped and jumped back as Kakashi popped out of the ground right next to her. Kakashi put away his book and pulled out a smoke bomb. When the smoke cleared, there were two Hinatas facing each other with matching expressions of surprise.
They fell into matching stances and attacked each other with identical fighting styles.
"Okay," Yugo said, trying to remain calm. "This plan calls for some immediate improvisation."
"I agree," Naruto replied. Improv always came more naturally to him than planning things out anyway. He couldn't tell which Hinata was the real Hinata and which one was Kakashi, but he wasn't sure he needed to. "We should beat up both of them. It's the only way to be sure to get Kakashi." And Hinata could take a hit, right?
"Bad idea."
"Do you have any good ones?" Naruto demanded. "We don't have any time." He didn't look at the clock, but he was pretty sure Hinata's two minutes were up, and they hadn't planned on having her fight in the first place.
"I'm thinking," Yugo said. "How well do you know Hinata? Have you seen her fight before?"
Naruto shook his head. "Before yesterday, I don't think I've ever heard her talk before. But I have to say, she is really good. I mean, she's keeping up with Kakashi and everything!"
When he fought him, Kakashi didn't even bother looking at him, saying that he was so clumsy it didn't matter if Kakashi was reading a book or taking a nap. And for the most part, he was right. But now, with Kakashi copying Hinata's appearance and fighting style, the two of them made it look more like a dance than anything else.
The style didn't look like anything they taught at the academy. They struck with their palms open and deflected each other's attacks at the wrist. Just watching it was mesmerizing.
Then one of them stumbled.
"He's that one!" Yugo called out.
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Yugo jumped through a portal and zaaped across the field. He should have waited for Naruto to catch up, but he didn't know how long Hinata could keep going or how long he could keep track of which one Kakashi was.
No, what he should have done was stab Kakashi's foot when it was on his side of the portal, but instead he held back, exactly what Kakashi told him not to do, and let the man see him before he attacked.
He reached the two of them and attacked the one that didn't stumble.
Kakashi, with his shorter Hinata arms and legs, didn't have the same reach he had when they fought before, and with Hinata on one side of him and Yugo attacking through portals on every other side, he couldn't keep blocking forever.
"Why are you attacking me?" Kakashi demanded with a perfect imitation of Hinata's voice. "We're on the same team! Attack him!"
Then Naruto came running with his small army of shadow clones, and Kakashi jumped into the crowd, dropping the Hinata disguise and transforming himself into Naruto.
"Again?" Naruto demanded. "Seriously?"
Hinata gasped for breath, too exhausted to tell them which one Kakashi was, so she threw a knife at him.
The Naruto clone that Kakashi disguised himself as caught the knife and grinned back easily and turned back into his taller, masked self. "Well," the jounin said, "it was worth a shot."
"Get him!" Naruto yelled, and all the clones threw knives at him, far too many to block. Kakashi jumped backward, and in midair, his trajectory was easy to predict.
Yugo opened a portal right next to where Kakashi would go, reached through it, and pulled out a pair of bells. When he landed, Kakashi looked down at his belt where the bells had been and looked at Yugo, and seemed, despite himself, to be impressed.
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"We did it!" Naruto yelled. "Ha! In your face, Kakashi! You'll have to make your test way harder than that if you want to get out of training us!"
Hinata wished she could have joined in the celebration, but her head hurt so much, she felt it might explode. Exploding her head seemed like too much work, though, so she fell to her knees instead. Chakra exhaustion was something that she would never get used to.
"Hey, Yugo," Naruto asked. "How'd you know which Hinata was really Kakashi?"
"The real one stumbled," he said.
Oh, she thought. She wanted to sink into the ground in shame. Kakashi had perfectly imitated her own clumsy imitation of the jyuuken, her clan's unique fighting style, but not even a jounin could predict her infinite capacity for error.
"See," Yugo continued. "If Hinata hit Kakashi, that would dispel his transformation, so we'd all know it was him. If Kakashi hit Hinata, then we'd see that she didn't turn into Kakashi, so we'd still know it was him. Hinata couldn't hit him, so she dropped her guard to bait Kakashi into hitting her. He didn't fall for it, but since the real Hinata wouldn't have had any reason to ignore that opening, that meant that the other Hinata was fake."
"Wow!" Naruto said. He turned to her, a bright smile on his face. "That was really smart, Hinata! Way to go!"
That...that wasn't it at all. She had allowed herself to get distracted when she heard Naruto talking about her. She wasn't nearly as good at focusing as a Hyuuga should be, and hearing someone say actually nice things about her was so overwhelming she lost her footing.
But looking up and seeing Naruto smiling at her like no one had ever smiled at her before, she lost her resolve and mumbled, "Th-thank you."
"Also," Naruto said, pointing a finger at her. "That was way more than two minutes."
Her spirits sank and she bowed her head in shame. "I-I'm sorry. A warrior should know her own limits, but I...I..."
"That's nonsense," Naruto said with a snort. "Like I said before, I don't believe in limits."
Hinata felt dizzy. She didn't have nearly the fortitude to handle such an emotional rollercoaster.
"Hey, Kakashi!" Naruto called. "I'm surprised you haven't taken your book out. You barely put it away during the fight."
"Yeah, but I don't want to miss this," Kakashi said. "This is the best part."
"What do you mean? We just passed your test."
"No you didn't. You need a bell to pass the test."
"What? But we..."
"Yugo got a bell, but the rest of you only have five minutes left."
And the rollercoaster continues.
"What? But...you...I..." Naruto clenched his fists and pointed a finger at Kakashi. "You're a jerk-faced son-of-a-jerk, you jerk!"
"I bet you always got called a brown nose at the academy."
"All three of us worked together to get those stupid bells!"
"And one of you three is going to get sent back to the academy."
"Your rules suck."
"Yup. And you only have five minutes to vote someone off the team, or fight it out, or whatever."
Fight it out? She didn't trust herself to stand, let alone fight. And for five minutes, with his portals Yugo could keep out of her reach even if she were refreshed.
Yugo looked down at the bells as though he held all their fates in the palm of his hand. And, in fact, he did. "Let's talk about this. How badly do you guys want to be genin?"
Hinata looked down at the grass. How badly did she want it? As much as life itself. If she returned home, stripped of the forehead protector that bore the emblem of Konoha's ninja, that would be the last straw for her father. He'd never look at her again and dismiss her as the eternal failure she was.
Of course, even as a genin, she had little to no chance of gaining her father's approval, but she thought back to her first fight with Kakashi.
They were in the darker part of the forest, and he had opened with a genjutsu, which itself was an insult considering her family's bloodline. When she saw through it, she knew that if she fought Kakashi on her own, she'd fail, but she fought anyway–and she failed, just as she knew she would.
But before he defeated her, he said to her, "You're not a bad fighter, and you have sharper senses than most kids your age, but if you defeat yourself before you even start fighting, then you've already lost."
And later, Naruto echoed the same idea much more simply when he said, "I don't believe in limits."
That was so opposed to the Hyuuga way that burned the fates of their children into their foreheads almost as soon as they were born, it was practically heretical. And Hinata latched onto that idea as though all her hopes and dreams depended on it.
And in a way, they did.
"I can't fail," she whispered. "If I get sent back to the academy, my f-father will..." Her voice caught in her throat. "He has very high expectations."
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Naruto ran his fingers across the leaf symbol of his forehead protector with his eyes closed. How much did he want it? Becoming Hokage was his dream, he'd wanted it since he first understood what it meant, and becoming a genin was the next step on that journey.
But it was more than that. He stumbled along his way more than once, failing the genin exam three times before passing. But Iruka-sensei had promoted him to genin, and given him his own forehead protector to wear as his own!
Iruka-sensei believed in him. He was the first person to ever believe in him. And no one–jounin, sensei, or even the Hokage himself–was going to take that away from him.
"Iruka-sensei promoted me to genin," he said. "I'm not going to let him down."
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Yugo looked down at the bells. I hold their fates in my hand. That's the last thing I wanted to happen.
Naruto had something to prove; he always did, he was Naruto. And Hinata, well, it sounded like she had one of those dads who lived vicariously through their kids to make up for all the opportunities they botched.
But what about himself? How badly did he want to be a ninja? He could learn jutsus and fighting styles without even trying, but what he wanted to do was travel. Every day at the Crunchy Gobball, he met customers from all over the world. Some were merchants, others were people who wanted to hire a team of ninjas, but they were all from some far off land that Yugo could only read about.
None of them had heard of the town Emelka or the country Amakna where Alibert had found him, but if he became a ninja, he'd be able to travel anywhere.
But was that what being a ninja was all about? At the start of the test, Naruto had tried to kill Kakashi, and Kakashi had responded with open approval. When Yugo had fought Kakashi the first time, he had avoided using knives or anything that could injure him.
Kakashi had grown frustrated, and after he grabbed by his ankle and pulled him down into the ground, burying him up to his neck, he said to him, "It doesn't matter how strong or fast you are, Yugo. If you hold back against an enemy, you'll only put yourself and your team in danger, so either come at me with everything you got or go home."
Yugo deliberately interpreted "everything" as "everyone," but what if Kakashi meant something else? If he met an enemy in real life, would he go straight for the kill, or would he try to take him alive?
Yugo shook his head. He knew the answer to that, and suspected that it wasn't one Kakashi wanted. He knew being a ninja wasn't about seeing the world, but if it was about acquiring the detached, logical, insane philosophy of Us and Them, dividing the world into friend and foe, then that wasn't a path he could follow, nor was it one he wanted to.
"Okay," he said brightly, and he tossed the bells to his teammates. "Being a genin was lots of fun. I'll have to try this again next year."
"What?" Naruto said. "What are you doing?"
"I'm getting demoted, apparently." He turned to Kakashi. "Hey, if I'm not a genin anymore, then you're not my sensei, right? That means I don't have to let you tie me to that pole while everyone else eats lunch." He was hungry from missing breakfast, and he hated being tied up.
"But you can't just quit," Naruto whispered. "You...you can't..."
Naruto and Hinata looked at him with expressions mixed with shock, surprise, denial, and a bit of gratitude. It's not like I'm dying for you. "It's no big deal, really," Yugo said. "I know my dad will still love me no matter what I do, and I can spend another year at the academy and still make chunin before too long. But it was fun. The three of us would have made a good team."
Naruto bit his lip, and for a moment it looked like he was about to start crying. "W-would we?" he stuttered. "I don't know. I've never been on a team before. Is this how it's supposed to work? When I learned how to make shadow clones, I was excited, because I thought I'd be able to do all the things I couldn't do by myself, like tag and soccer and hide-and-seek. But after this, after working with you and Hinata to bring down Kakashi, I...I guess there are some problems I can't solve with shadow clones."
He gripped his bell tightly in a fist. "But I can solve this! Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!" Another Naruto appeared in a cloud of smoke...with another bell. The clone handed Yugo the bell, and Naruto turned to Kakashi with a feral grin on his face."
"Three of us, three bells, in your face, sensei!"
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The bells were never the issue. Kakashi had decided to pass the kids when they first started working together, but they were doing so well, he decided to keep going to see if they actually managed to take the bells anyway. He was holding back, of course. If he wasn't, then there were some jounin that wouldn't be able to live through the test, let alone pass.
But they didn't disappoint. They were genin, and more than skilled enough for the rank, but most importantly, they worked as a team.
Of course, the price of teamwork was sacrifice, but the closest analogy he could give them to dying would be to send them back to the academy, and the sort of kids willing to work together despite that was exactly the sort of kids he wanted under him.
"Okay, then," Kakashi said. "You all pass."
"All three of us?" Hinata asked. "Thank you, Kakashi-sensei."
"Ye-ah!" Naruto yelled, jumping in the air. "We did it!"
"Huh," Yugo said. "So now what?"
"Now I explain what that test was about."
"We already know what it was all about," Naruto said. "You were trying to weed out the weakest of us so you'd only have to train two of us."
Kakashi shook his head. "No, I was trying to teach you about teamwork."
"Teamwork," Yugo said flatly. "You tried to teach us teamwork...by turning us against each other."
"Yup."
"What the heck is wrong with you?"
Kakashi sighed and shook his head. "Are you familiar with the Inverse Ninja Law?" He looked at them. "No? None of you? What are they teaching at the academy? Basically, it says that while we are the best solo operatives in the world, our synergy is a joke."
Naruto raised his hand like he was back in class. "What's synergy?"
"Teamwork."
"Then why didn't you just say teamwork?"
"Fine. I'll make sure to keep my vocab down to two syllables or less from now on."
"What's a syllable?"
Kakashi gave Naruto a flat look. "Okay, that one's on me. Moving on–"
"But what's a–"
"Moving on. I wasn't much older than you kids when the last Great Ninja War happened. Hundreds of Konoha's greatest ninjas charged into battle side by side, and they were slaughtered. Any one of them alone was practically a god, but together, the kept on tripping over each other and getting in each other's way, and the whole thing was about as horrifying as it was pathetic."
Kakashi didn't like giving lectures, but he needed to bring the point home.
That's why we split you up into four-person teams," he continued. "Two or three ninjas can usually work together, but many more than that and it gets messy. And even then you keep on finding groups that take turns to fight their opponent one on one instead of working together, which is, well, dumb."
Kakashi looked at them, and he couldn't tell if his students were contemplating the wisdom of his words or zoning out. That was the problem with lectures. He should stick to object lessons.
"Well, that was the test," he said. "You all passed, congrats, I'll see you all tomorrow for your first mission."
"What time?" Naruto asked.
"Whenever I show up. It will be sometime in the morning. Probably."
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A/n You know, in all the Naruto fanfics I've read, I really haven't seen many people go into a lot of detail with the bell test. I think it's because when Naruto is ridiculously overpowered, he passes the test without even trying or gets another sensei altogether (because Kakashi is a lazy schmo who doesn't really teach anything), and when the story is closer to canon, it skips over this test because nothing new happens. (I skipped through the parts where they fought Kakashi one on one because it was about the same as the canon. For the Wakfu fans who aren't familiar with Naruto, you probably missed the ten thousand years of pain joke...and that's really for the best.)
It seems like Kakashi gets a lot of hate in the fandom for being a bad teacher, but in his defense, he was skilled enough so he never needed a drill sergeant, and judging how the only person in the show who became a carbon copy of their sensei was Lee, I think that he considered his duties to be more supervising and team building than anything else.
Anyway, thanks for reading. If you see anything that you think I should change, let me know.
