Naruto X

AN: I like to imagine I'm being sneaky with how I'm going about things, but I'm pretty sure some of you have already figured me out.

PAGE BREAK

It was one thing for Naruto to fight eight mavericks, it was another entirely for three random individuals to steal different parts of Zero and attempt to rebuild him for their own purposes. A new objective in mind, Naruto was going all out to try and retrieve Zero from these new threats.

However, they were on another level that Naruto had never encountered before. The one known as Serges had a platform that dropped landmines and gave him a barrier that his buster gun couldn't fully break through, and when he would jump in the air, he would fill the room with a bunch of bullets that Naruto was hard pressed to dodge.

Then there was Violen, while the maverick stood still in most of his attacks, his wrecking ball with spikes for a tail was nasty, did lots of damage and deflected all of Naruto's attacks. The maverick would rarely shoot bullets from his fingertips but Naruto found those easier to dodge.

Finally there was Agile. This one used a sword, moved incredibly fast, could deflect attacks with the sword and created giant walls of energy that flew at him just by slicing the air. Naruto almost defeated him on the first encounter, but he was having trouble dodging the energy blasts.

Grumbling in anger, he chased after them repeatedly and wasn't giving up. No matter how strong they were, he knew he could acquire the strength to take them down. What really threw Naruto however was X had forbidden Naruto from using any of his acquired powers in the last mission in this one, except for the speed upgrade on his boots.

He didn't ask why but it was still odd for that to suddenly be pushed onto him. Naruto was going to wait until he had acquired a large amount of weapons so he could use most of them on these three targets and maybe he had the weakness of one of them. X then informed Naruto that if he completed the stage while that one maverick was there and Naruto did not defeat him, then that maverick would wander off and the part would be irretrievable. Naruto allowed the maverick of that stage to completely destroy him to avoid this fate.

Naruto did note however, that the capsule pieces were harder to find. He had found a few suspicious areas but there was either nothing inside or a strange material blocking the way that he couldn't get through.

So he wandered around some more trying to find anything to help him when he finally found a drop in one of the stages that went through a long hallway full of turrets and at the end of it, was a capsule.

Excited, Naruto quickly acquired it and learned that the helmet upgrade he just received would search out nearby areas for anything hidden and reveal the location to him. With this new upgrade, Naruto was on the hunt. Areas he had found before were revealed for the most part, but other things he never found before or even attempted to search were revealed to him.

Thanks to this upgrade Naruto had quickly found a few heart pieces and sub tanks that he never would have thought to check for. Some areas still confused him by having nothing inside them, but he figured there must be a reason. Even though he knew there were a few obvious items around like heart capsules in open areas, he didn't know how to get to them. In the tank for example, there was a wall of spikes in the way, and he couldn't just jump or climb over them. He would have to come back later once he found a way to climb up there.

Then there was the factory with all the security lasers set up. He could see the area where one of the secrets was at, but he couldn't reach it. He did however make it to the other one in the stage as it was easier to reach, but he still felt as though he went about it wrong.

It was then that Naruto decided to complete a stage the other mavericks weren't in and see about finding their weaknesses, and that's why he was back in the tank stage. Currently he was standing waist deep in red water trying to fight Wheel Gator, who kept diving under and jumping up to bite at Naruto or the occasion where he would stay above water, he would shoot some saw blades at the boy and while Naruto ignored them because they flew right over his head, he didn't notice them crawl up the wall behind him and then drop down from behind.

While those didn't do too much damage, Naruto still wanted to avoid those attacks and cursed as he backpedaled to avoid them. Once the final one fell however, the gator immediately jumped into the air, straightened out and began to spin like a drill before he flew straight towards the wall.

Naruto blinked before he climbed the wall, barely avoiding the attack and taking note that there were now spikes in the wall from the damage done to it.

He quickly swapped to his first maverick power, Strike Chain, and launched it. The results surprised Naruto as Wheel Gator immediately recoiled from the attack before diving underwater. The blonde smirked, he had found his weakness. Gator tried to do the leaping bite but Naruto avoided it and hit Gator with the chain again and the pattern continued of him diving into the water after the attack. Naruto quickly finished him off after that and got a new power.

With that taken care of, he had a sneaking suspicion and went back to the desert stage he was at before and found the wall made of strange material. Changing to his newly acquired power, he shot out a saw blade and watched as it quickly tore apart the wall and cleared the way. Grinning widely, he walked inside and was rewarded with finding a new capsule.

Wasting no time, he immediately climbed inside and was rewarded with a new dash upgrade, allowing him to use his dash function in midair. The boys grin couldn't get any wider and he made his way back through Wheel Gators stage and thanks to his new dash, acquired a buster gun upgrade that allowed him to fire two charged shots at once, and the previously unobtainable heart piece.

He then paid a visit to the factory guarded by a maverick named Magna Centipede and found the sub tank. Seeing no third party maverick guarding this location, he continued on confidently to the boss and prepared to fight. However, he was immediately in for a rude awakening when he was sucked in by the maverick and said maverick stung him with his tail and his armor turned completely black.

He then tried to charge up an attack only for nothing to happen. Blinking in shock, he tried again but he couldn't charge any of his attacks. Then he tried changing weapons and he couldn't fire them at all. They refused to work whatsoever and then fear settled into the boys stomach when he realized that his dash wasn't working and his entire body felt heavy as lead when he couldn't jump as high as before.

He fired a basic shot at Centipede, who simply made a familiar hand sign and vanished as if he were never there. Naruto blinked in shock and began to look around frantically before he was suddenly hit in the back by something.

Turning around, he saw that he had fired a piece of his tail that now resembled a shuriken before he leapt down from the ceiling and threw more at Naruto, who sadly was unable to dodge the attack. Not because of his lack of skill, but rather his lack of ability to do so.

Needless to say this wasn't a fight, it was a god damn ass whooping.

Despite X's claims that they were holograms of the originals and didn't have any feelings or personality, Naruto swears that centipede had a smirk on his face the entire fight. With a sigh, he told Naruto that perhaps it was time he took a break, but Naruto refused, saying that his teammates were currently training just as hard as he was and he needed to continue. While this had surprised X, he didn't show it and allowed the boy to continue as he went to a different stage.

-Meanwhile with Team 7-

Sakura and Sasuke were indeed training just like Naruto had said. Kakashi had increased their weights and their workloads by having them do an increased amount of their normal exercises and even added a few more to the list.

After they did their normal routines they were split up. Kakashi had taken Sasuke to meet a fellow jounin named Might Gai, a taijutsu enthusiast who had agreed to help the boy find a style perfect for him and to help further along the one he was currently learning.

When inquired as to why, Kakashi stated that while he was decent with taijutsu, he felt that Sasuke would be better off learning from an actual master than him who only had a basic idea of the style he was teaching.

The same was told to Sakura when he had asked Kurenai to help her out with her genjutsu training. Kakashi had told her that while he had much more to teach her, Kurenai was the best choice for learning genjutsu since he specialized in ninjutsu while she specialized in genjutsu.

Under these new tutors, things had changed drastically. Gai gave off the impression of being a masochist but the man knew his stuff. The training he had put Sasuke under, the Uchiha would swear could be classified under physical torture. Although he could definitely feel the difference in his strength as he was training.

Sakura meanwhile was learning much under Kurenai, who was expanding the girls mind to new heights every day and helping her learn more and more about genjutsu. At first she simply learned how to tell when she was in one, which later turned into a serious lesson about dispelling them.

The girl only knew theories much to Kurenai's horror when she was deposited into her lap and she had went out of her way to make sure Sakura was adept at illusions on at least a chuunin level. After learning detection and dispelling came the fun part of learning to use genjutsu and creating your own effects from genjutsu.

Sakura was basically a sponge for information much like Sasuke was a sponge for taijutsu training and she was excelling at a rate that shocked Kurenai. Her own students didn't show much interest in genjutsu and she was a bit disappointed by this, but having Sakura train under her had given the jounin a great boost to the ego and a she was swelling with a bit of pride that she finally had a student, if only for a little while, that wanted to learn her profession.

Then Kakashi decided to get weird and change some things up. After Sasuke had taken to Gai's lessons, Kakashi pulled him and said he wanted to drill Sasuke on some more chakra control and ninjutsu lessons while Gai took over with Sakura.

The girl thought she was going to die. If the training she did before with Kakashi was just a nightmare, then this was hell. Gai was making her go all out in her endurance training and had almost doubled her weights and nearly doubled her routine.

By the time she had finished training, her limbs felt like they were made out of rubber and it was taking all of her willpower to keep her knees from buckling under her. She wanted to faint and when she went home that night, she was asleep before her head had touched the pillows.

Sasuke wasn't doing much better. Kakashi had made the boy train dangerously close to chakra exhaustion. He made the boy work on the tree climbing exercise and then started him up on learning water walking. Once he had shown to have that down to a certain level, he began to drill finer control of his jutsu before he had shown the boy a more creative way to use his fireball jutsu.

While Sasuke was not physically tired like Sakura, he still felt absolutely ragged after he was done training and had passed out that night when he returned home, for once he was too distracted to reflect on his revenge.

-Back with Naruto-

The boy was gasping for breath, his energy was low, but so was the maverick. He began to charge his weapon as Violen sent out his tail to crush Naruto, who had quickly jumped up between the wall and the platform that had appeared and it completely blocked the tail from hitting him before he dropped back down and fired one shot.

He waited until the tail started to go back up before he fired again and suddenly, the tail detached and flew off as Violen began to spark before exploding in a flash of light. Naruto quickly warped back to the main menu and let out a sigh. During the past few days he had worked hard and got through the remainder of the mavericks and even rescued Zero. But these new areas were giving him hell.

Not only did he have to fight the three mavericks again, but their tactics were supposedly changing. Violen still used his tail as his primary attack, but he was making platforms randomly appear and he was moving around more often and firing more projectiles. While the change was enough to catch Naruto off guard, he had still managed to defeat him on the first try.

It was a work in progress but he was making leaps. After defeating the three new mavericks the first time and rescuing Zero, Naruto had quickly gone through and defeated the rest of the mavericks and found the other capsules and items. It was rough to find a few of them but he managed and now was trying to get through this fortress.

He had some trouble with Serges the second time, but he quickly found out that by charging up his sonic slicer and standing underneath the man as he operated the tank, he was able to safely fire at the guy with the charged version. The man was thankfully weak to the weapon and died quickly.

Then he got to Agile and the fight was just plain weird. Agile had changed from trying to cause damage to trying to drop things on top of him with a spiked floor underneath. All the boy could do was shake his head. He thought it was pretty pitiful that they were using spikes and instant deaths to try and defeat him at this point.

Then he had to refight all eight mavericks in one go. While that sounded daunting at first, Naruto quickly realized that he had all of their weaknesses, he knew their weaknesses and there were energy orbs on the platforms in the center column.

So he sped through that with a small hiccup now and then as a maverick did more damage than the orbs recovered but he got through just fine and when the base was beginning to explode, Sigma made himself known and said he would be waiting for him.

So Naruto charged into battle, and was surprised when he entered the last area only for it to look like Magna Centipedes stage. However, once he had made it to the halfway point, Sigma appeared and suddenly Zero appeared with him, although this Zero had black armor.

Taken back by this, Naruto listened to Sigma drone on about how Zero wanted revenge against him for letting him die when suddenly some charged shots flew past Naruto and destroyed the black Zero, the real Zero in his red armor dashed into the room and Sigma quickly fled.

Zero then blasted a hole into the floor and went off to handle the bases main computer while Naruto dealt with Sigma. Feeling motivated, he jumped through the hole and fell for quite some time until he finally felt himself land on something and then the room became illuminated as Sigma appeared, popped some claws out of his fists and charged.

Naruto barely had time to dodge before he fired, but Sigma blocked the blast with his claws before he did a slashing motion by slicing his claws together and sent out a wave of electricity that Naruto avoided by climbing the wall.

To his surprise, Sigma quickly leapt up after him but was amused when he dropped directly down. He still had a similar pattern, but then he was shocked when the man bounced off the wall and completely vanished, before he reappeared directly overhead and tried to drop down on him.

The fight went on like this, Naruto quickly dodging all of Sigma's attacks and launching attacks when he could. Finally he took him down after a couple close calls and Sigma exploded before a giant wireframe of Sigma's face appeared.

It opened its mouth and would spit out random enemies, more for distraction than anything Naruto noted as they would sometimes drop energy and were too weak to be much of a threat. What really caught Naruto off guard however was when Sigma's face suddenly turned black and he had huge red lips and big white eyes before shouting something about a laser and firing a blue blast across the room.

And then the simulation suddenly came to a halt. Outside, X and Zero were glaring at Axl who was laughing while sitting at the control panel. He glanced their way before sighing and putting Sigma back to the way he was. "Oh come on, that was funny and you know it." He said but the only response he got was Zero smacking him upside the head and X shaking his head.

Naruto blinked as the fight resumed. He had no idea what the hell just happened and he would honestly prefer it to stay that way as he continued his fight. Confused and a bit wary now, he finally finished off Sigma and the entire place began to explode. Naruto warped out and watched Sigma's flying fortress, (seriously, where did he get these things?) crash into the ocean and explode.

Then the room went back to normal and Naruto looked up at the control room. He gave them a nod and X gave a nod back before glancing at Axl who began to type at the console before Naruto was taken in to another training simulation.