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…

"So what exactly are you going to teach me that only I can learn?" asked Naruto as he stretched his arms, cautiously sneaking a glance in Sasuke's direction. Though the blond could no longer see him, it had been clear to him that the Uchiha's interest had been peaked.

"Well, how about we approach this another way. What do you want me to teach you?" asked Jiraiya, before seeing Naruto's grin and adding, "Except a 'badass' Jutsu."

Naruto's smile faltered, "I… uhh… what were you good at again, old man?"

"Well, people do say I have a way with seals," Jiraiya said, emphasising the last few words as he stole an obvious glance at Naruto's stomach.

"So… like exploding tags?" asked Naruto awkwardly, unsure of what the Sannin was trying to tell him. He was positive it was one of those "underneath the underneath" things that Kakashi loved to talk about.

"Yeah, but you could probably learn a lot more about them from a textbook than me," replied the pervert.

"I don't remember much about our lessons on seals," admitted Naruto shamefully as he bowed his head. "What's so cool about them?"

Jiraiya sighed. "Many things, but somehow I don't feel that they're your true calling. What I was trying to point out was that I know a lot about the seal on your stomach and how it works with your little friend."

"I guess I'll call for you if he ever breaks free?" asked Naruto weakly, clearly still not understanding what Jiraiya was hinting at.

"I probably wouldn't be able to do too much in that scenario, since I'm not the Fourth Hokage, but have you ever noticed your little friend lending you a bit of a hand when you've been in a pickle?" asked Jiraiya as he realised that it was possible that Naruto had never interacted with the Kyuubi before. The kid, like most Shinobi his age, had lived a pretty sheltered life up until now.

"I've never met him before, but somehow I don't think he'd be friendly, big rampaging monster and all that," said Naruto.

"Do you mean that you've never experienced anything… special that maybe might not have occurred if not for the Kyuubi sealed in your gut?" asked Jiraiya as he raised an eyebrow. It was still possible but the little test he'd had before made it quite clear that Team Seven were no team of rookie Genin, and any Genin worth their salt had been in a life threatening situation before.

"Well there was this one time… it's a long story and I can't remember much of it, but I thought that someone had killed Sasuke," recollected Naruto. "We'd been having this really long and difficult fight with this insanely fast person called Haku, and I went berserk - like really crazy. Kakashi said it might've been the Kyuubi, but I guess I forgot about it since that was a while ago now and because of everything that's happened since then."

"Sounds like that might've been the work of it," said Jiraiya thoughtfully as he stroked a non-existent beard. "Anyway, my point is that you are supposed to be able to draw out the Kyuubi's chakra… I'm guessing that you weren't the type to pay much attention in class, but even you should know that such chakra is hundreds of times more potent than regular chakra."

"So do you want me to try and use a Jutsu with it or something?" asked Naruto, thinking that demonic Shadow Clones didn't sound like too bad an idea.

"No," said Jiraiya bluntly. "At least not any of the ones you know now, I'm sure doing so would end in one of two situations: Either the Jutsu would fail to work or you would be unable to mould such… thick… chakra properly and it would backfire and explode on you."

"Probably don't want to find out which, then," quipped Naruto as he cringed slightly, thinking about the implications of the latter.

"Exactly. Now as for what I was trying to say earlier, if I could get you to draw on this raw, potent chakra, you could do some interesting things. While I've got a few ideas, there's one thing which comes to mind first," said Jiraiya, as he grinned a little. "Surely you've heard of the many ventures of Jiraiya the-"

"Gallant Toad Sage," Naruto said as he waved a hand dismissively. "Yeah, you wouldn't shut up about that the entire trip back to Konoha; what's your point?"

"Well, you're no fun," pouted Jiraiya before taking on a more serious approach. "That last bit, 'Toad Sage'... what do you think that might mean?"

"You've got warts on your tongue?"

Jiraiya made a half-hearted attempt to scowl, "It means that I hold the summoning contract of the toads. Has that got you interested?"

"I guess they'd be useful for eating up flies on a hot day," laughed Naruto. "But unless I want to lick someone to death, what on earth would I use a toad for?"

"They're not frogs you brat, there's a difference," huffed Jiraiya. "I guess I won't let you sign the contract then after all."

Naruto's demeanor changed slightly, he knew a little bit about summoning contracts - they'd interested him when he thought that people would blow each other to bits with large, scaly dragons… however he'd lost said interest soon after when he learnt that a turtle was considered a rare summon - but he hadn't expected the perverted sage to offer him one. He had thought Jiraiya was thinking more along the lines of using them for training, but that evidently wasn't the case. "Okay, fine, fine, I'm listening."

"Good," Jiraiya smiled a little, eager to launch into the peculiar theory he had. "Summoning contracts require chakra, sure, and it requires a little bit of control over said chakra, but you aren't required to mould it like you are with regular Jutsu. What I'm thinking is that, if we can get you to access this supposedly potent chakra, we can have you get a feel for it while also giving you access to the best summons out there."

"I don't get it," confessed Naruto, having followed Jiraiya up until a certain point. "Why can't I just use my own chakra? I mean I've got a lot… more than Kakashi-sensei, I think."

"That you do, brat," Jiraiya nodded. "But what you don't understand is that you're used to moulding chakra, not just releasing a huge amount and letting your blood pretty much do the rest. It's different… and also, think of your chakra as a huge flabby muscle. Sure you've got potential and your muscle is big, but Kakashi's is healthy and defined - well used."

"I'm still confused," said Naruto. "I use Shadow Clones all the time, why isn't my 'Chakra muscle' healthy or well used?"

"It's one of the drawbacks to being a massive bank of Chakra," said Jiraiya. "You rarely reach into the depths of your chakra, and as such, your 'muscle' isn't well defined, because like with any regular muscle you must push it to its limit in order to keep it in good shape. Anyway," he shook his head, "I'm probably getting too technical for you to understand, so don't worry about it at the moment. Just listen to what I'm telling you to do for now and you'll be able to summon toads."

"Right," Naruto nodded, grateful for the man's ending summary as he had really gotten lost long before the man even began talking about moulding chakra.

…

Hinata's eyes narrowed as she watched Naruto talk to the older man. It hadn't taken long for her to recognise the man as Jiraiya of the Sannin, particularly because the man seemed to boldly proclaim just that every few minutes, but what exactly was going on? Naruto seemed engrossed but at the same time, he still seemed lost. Completely different to the lessons they'd had back in the academy with Iruka-sensei where the blond usually expressed disinterest.

It was strange; she couldn't recall a time where he had behaved in such a way with a teacher. There was respect visible in his body language but that seemed to contradictory to his almost-constant shouts of "Pervy Sage!"

She still felt rather horrible but watching the boy had helped ease the feeling of uselessness that had been flowing through her veins for the past few days. Though the small surge of confidence she had experienced was like a tiny, lit candle floating on top of a vast ocean, threatening to be extinguished at any second, she had almost gathered the courage to go up to him and apologise for the events of the day that'd preceded. That hadn't worked out too well, and the second that she stood up, she found herself ducking down behind the cover of the bushes once again.

It wasn't too surprising that she was too useless to have the confidence to even walk a single step, but she was beginning to get used to it. Perhaps if she was just that little bit stronger...

...

"You're just leaving me to go read your perverted book somewhere," stated Sasuke looking at his sensei. Despite the last couple of hours having been highly repetitive, he knew that it would have helped for the long run. If he had to hazard a guess, he would estimate that he could do an eight seal jutsu roughly between a quarter and a half a second faster now. While it didn't seem like much in his head, he was well aware that it took less than a second for one's life to end and, in a battle between ninja, even the smallest of time periods helped.

"Actually, I was going to ask Kurenai whether or not your former classmate Kiba would be interested in sparring with you tomorrow," stated Kakashi. "Considering that he'll be competing in the finals in roughly a month, I assume he'd be looking to push himself against some good competition. If you're not interested, however…"

"Just go," said Sasuke, dismissing his sensei nonchalantly. In a puff of smoke, the older man left the area while the black haired teen ran his fingers through his hair. It wouldn't take much to have the Inuzuka clan member scampering back to the kennels, but this was as good a time as any to test out some of the new things he had been taught throughout these training sessions. He imagined, had his father still been alive, that the head of the Uchiha clan would have been disappointed that he hadn't progressed as fast as his brother had. Had these thoughts crossed his mind when he had been given his headband signalling him as a Genin of Konoha, he would have been infuriated. Now, though, it was barely a passing thought. Every day he progressed that little bit further, and he wasn't comparing himself to his brother nor the rest of Team Seven. Then again, why should he?

Before his mind could delve off into how he and Naruto were two sides of the same coin, a wave of memories came through as he turned his head to see Sakura walking towards him, a white cloud indicating that his shadow clone had just dispersed. Before he could truly begin to piece together just what'd happened, Sakura spoke up.

"Your clone was ruthless, you know," said Sakura as she wiped her cheek with the back of her hand.

"You wouldn't want me going easy on you now, would you?" said Sasuke with an air of confidence which irked his teammate slightly.

"It would have been nice for me to actually have landed a hit instead of playing the dodge game for the better part of two hours," said Sakura, putting her hands on her hips, doing her best impression of an angry mother. "I tell you what, though, I could do with something to eat. Shall we see whether Jiraiya and Naruto are finished? Knowing Naruto he's probably hungry."

Sasuke merely replied with a shrug of the shoulders as the two of them began to walk across the clearing, side by side. They didn't really need to see the blond in particular to know where he was, the mass amount of white smoke filtering through the air indicated that his shadow clones were bursting one after the other. The reason, however, wasn't really clear to either of them.

"What do you reckon he's learning?" asked Sakura.

Sasuke couldn't help but pause at that as he tried to come up with a reasonable answer. Apparently, this was something that only Naruto could learn, which frightened the Uchiha slightly. Did this mean that he was going to be taught how to do some over-the-top jutsu due to his sheer chakra reserves, or was it going to be something that was more centred upon a creature that may or may not reside within the blond-haired teammate.

"I don't know," said Sasuke slowly, for the simple reason that he couldn't give a worthwhile answer. There were theories and possibilities but if he had never been given full blown proof by this stage, he wasn't going to shout out his ideas like a preacher on the sidewalk. Soon, however, he hoped to have the answers he was after.

….

To say that having watched the blond continuously beat the living daylights out of himself was entertaining would be an understatement. Whenever the herd of Naruto clones dropped in number, the blond was ready to summon another batch without taking a dent out of his reserves. That being said, having repeated such a high scale jutsu on a repetitive basis did eventually wear the boy out - a lot later than the Toad Sage had originally thought it would - and the teenager was a heaving broken mess kneeling in front of the elderly man.

Jiraiya's eyes narrowed slightly as he heard the rustling of a few nearby leaves. A glance to his right confirmed that they had an uninvited guest with them, and it didn't take long for him to recognise her as the Hygua heiress - the very reason he had been brought back to Konoha.

He had half a mind to just let the girl continue doing whatever she was doing - she didn't appear to be harming anyone - but the fact that he was going to teach Naruto to use the Kyuubi's chakra dissuaded him. The chakra was too dangerous to be practiced around random bystanders, and he was sure that Naruto would never forgive him if he allowed the boy's secret to be revealed without his permission.

With a sigh, Jiraiya realised he had one of two options: Either avoid using the Kyuubi's chakra for the day's session, or somehow scare off the little girl, but something in the back of his mind told him that the latter was a bad idea. Perhaps it was superstition, but Orochimaru had marked her, and from his talk with the Sandaime, he had gathered that she was far from emotionally stable. Deciding to humour the little nagging voice, he figured that it wouldn't be too much of a problem if he got Naruto to summon a toad. It would be good for the boy to get a feel for what the whole thing was about anyway.

"So, you do know what a summoning contract is… right?" he asked, more to not give away that he had discovered the Hyuga's presence than because he doubted Naruto.

"Yeah," replied Naruto. "It's this thing you sign which lets you summon a certain kind of creature into battle, but the neat thing is that you normally sign it with an entire species so there are many different creatures which you can summon."

"That's a good lesson to learn from the get-go," nodded Jiraiya. "Although summons are commonly used for battling, they have a variety of other uses. They make loyal and dedicated messengers which is probably my favourite way to use them, but they're also great for cooperative battling. To be honest, I guess it depends on which toad you're summoning; there are a couple of medic-toads too…" mused Jiraiya.

"So they can be used for a lot of things, got it," nodded Naruto, eager to get on with signing the contract. He could figure out all the small details later.

"Alrighty then, you're about to become one of the only people in the world who have gotten their hands on the toad contract," said Jiraiya as he bit on his thumb, using the small amount of blood to summon a toad while he flashed through the hand seals. A small puff of white smoke appeared, and a rather large toad croaked loudly as it took its place next to the perverted man.

"This here is Gama," said Jiraiya as he gestured to the large toad beside him with his thumb. "Perhaps one day, you'll be summoning him as you pass down this very contract to someone else."

Naruto frowned as he glanced at the ugly… thing. It wasn't quite the battle toad he had expected, but he thought back to the Toad Sage's previous words and realised that perhaps this toad's purpose wasn't combat. "So what does he do?"

"Apart from being an awesome companion," Jiraiya struck a pose, which the toad copied to Naruto's amusement, "Gama holds the summoning contract. You see that scroll in his mouth?"

"You mean that you're allowing it to just chew on the summoning contract?" asked Naruto in amazement, unsure if he wanted to sign what was undoubtedly going to be a sloppy piece of parchment that was slathered in drool.

"Relax, he's only safeguarding it, and besides one of my toads wouldn't be dumb enough to take a bite out of an important contract like that," huffed Jiraiya as he crossed his arms. As he let out a sigh, Gama's tongue extended and presented the scroll to Jiraiya who took it before tossing it to Naruto who quickly caught it. "Open it."

"Alright," said Naruto as he laid down the scroll before spreading it across the stones in front of him.

"Those names are of all those who have been able to summon Toads in the past," declared Jiraiya as Naruto looked at the names in front of him. He imagined if he had paid some sort of attention in History class back in the academy he could have known some of the first people who had made the contract with the toad. "Instead of writing out your name with ink, you'll need to write it with your blood."

Nodding, Naruto started to get to work as Jiraiya looked over his shoulder to where he knew Hinata was watching from the shadows. He hoped that he wouldn't get punished from this little stunt but the only person in the village who could actually do something against him was his old sensei. While it would undoubtedly be painful, it was something he could live with.

...

Upon nearly walking into the clearing, Sasuke and Sakura were surprised to find that they weren't the only ones who were intruding in on what their teammate was doing. "Hinata," said Sakura with a hint of confusion, causing the Hyuga to 'eep' at having been caught.

"Umm… hello..." said Hinata, doing her best to simply not run away from the confrontation. While she had seen Jiraiya's attention shift towards her from time to time, she had thought that he was merely speculating that somebody was there and that she hadn't been caught as of yet. To have been caught out in this regard was pretty embarrassing.

The two members of Team Seven knew not to really push any boundaries with what their friend was doing there, as it was fairly obvious in it's own right. Yet they were also aware of just what was lying upon Hinata's neck, and knew that they had to be careful not to mention anything in regards to what had happened. For a handful of seconds, they simply stood there in an awkward silence. Before a shout of annoyance burst out from the clearing.

"Want to come with us to offer our support to Naruto?" asked Sakura, breaking the silence between the three of them as Sasuke had seemingly walked into the clearing, interested in seeing what was going on.

"I… I'd like that," said Hinata as she took timid steps to get out into the open with Sakura by her side, the pink haired girl doing her best to be there for her friend.

...

"Seems we have company," said Jiraiya, pointing over his shoulder to where Naruto's teammates stood along with the Hyuga heiress.

"You guys," said Naruto slowly as he looked at his friends, thankful that the dismal little tadpole had vanished back to the place it had been summoned from.

"We're here for you," said Sakura, holding her hands behind her waist with a genuine smile upon her lips.

"C'mon dobe, show me just what you can do," said Sasuke with a smirk.

"Do...do your b… best Naruto-kun," said Hinata, still getting used to being out in the open.

"Concentrate and do it again," instructed Jiraiya, to which Naruto nodded before turning his back on his allies and began to mould chakra. Yet, their presence there brought out a flurry of thoughts that had Naruto stand in silence for a few moments. During the battle against Haku, could he have prevented Sasuke from becoming a pincushion if he had been able to summon a worthwhile toad to fight alongside them, or would he merely have wasted his chakra failing miserably over and over again until both Sasuke and Sakura had died? Could something similar happen the next time the team was on the road and his own lack of skill got them all killed?

"Fox," Naruto said softly under his breath. "I don't like you and chances are you don't like me but there will be times when I'm going to need your help. If you're going to be helping me, though, I need to know just what you're capable of, so why don't we show these guys just what you can do?"

For several seconds nothing happened, but then a deep laugh sounded off in the back of Naruto's mind before a huge amount of chakra surged into his system. As power seemed to surge out of the blond-haired boy, Hinata couldn't help but activate her Byakugan, allowing her to see the chakra that was circulating through Naruto. Instead of the normal chakra she saw, this was malevolent and dark and she couldn't help but lift a hand to her shoulder as she slowly realised that perhaps she wasn't the only one standing there that bore something twisted and evil.

The hand movement didn't go unnoticed by Sakura and Sasuke and they wondered just what it was that Hinata could see with her bloodline active. Before they could ponder further on this topic, their teammate flashed through several hand seals before slamming his palm on the ground. "Kuchiyose no Jutsu!" shouted Naruto before everybody found themselves lifted high into the air. When the smoke dispersed, it was revealed that they were standing atop a giant toad.

"Impressive, Kid," said Jiraiya, impressed. It seemed that if Naruto was able to put his mind to something, then there was no predicting how far he could go. The toad whose head they were standing upon wore a black kimono and held a sasumata in his hand, while a giant shield was strapped to his back.

"Whoa," said Sasuke as he realised just what had happened, Sakura seemingly as well as she squealed about how disgusting what she was standing on was. Running a hand through his hair, Sasuke recognized that his sensei had been right in how this was something that only Naruto could do; at least for now, until his own chakra reserves peaked.

"Naruto-kun," said Hinata, amazed at how well Naruto had been able to mould this dark chakra and do something so extraordinary. She had been told over and over again that she shouldn't use the seal upon her neck, but if she could replicate his actions and do something so amazing, would it then be worth it?

"Whoa," said Naruto as he finally realised just what he had accomplished before the whole toad shook slightly from side to side, making everybody wobble a bit. "The hell!"

"Sorry, I'm kind of clumsy," apologised Gamaken, still wondering why he had been summoned when there was apparently no battle going on. All he could see in front of him was a Jounin of Konoha wearing a mask over the lower part of his face and a headband over a single eye, who seemed to be completely lost as to what was going on.

…

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