Disclaimer: I do not own Danny Phantom or Naruto!
Danny took aim, lined his kunai up, and threw it. It landed just outside the bull's-eye. Four kunai were wedged into the target in various places, and three were stuck inside the trunk of the tree. One was on the ground in front of the tree. Only the kunai that Sakura threw rested in the bull's-eye.
"Almost," Sakura said.
"Okay, so I can't hit the bull's-eye, but I can do this!" Danny exclaimed as he spun the kunai around his finger by the circular handle. Sakura chuckled dryly.
"Great, Danny. C'mon, we'll never be able to move on to shuriken unless you can perfect aiming with the kunai."
"All right, all right…" Danny threw another kunai without really thinking about it. It landed half an inch above Sakura's; right on the bull's-eye. Danny and Sakura stared at it. And stared at it. And stared at it some more.
"Do it again," Sakura demanded. Danny did so.
"I think you've mastered it," Sakura noted.
"Me too. Do you think we should move on to shuriken today?" Sakura looked up towards the sky; the sun was just starting to set.
"I can show you the technique, and you can throw one or two. But it's getting dark; we won't have time to master it. She held up a shuriken for him to see, then taught him how to throw it sidearm so that it spun correctly. He threw one, that curved straight up and got lost in the tangled branches of the tree, and they decided to call it a day. Sakura had him focus his chakra one more time, so that they could get back to Naruto's house. He did so, and they half-leapt, half-sprinted back to Naruto's place.
"So the same thing tomorrow, then? Meet me at the academy so that I can teach you a different justu, then we'll go to the athletic fields so we can practice with more kunai and then some shuriken?"
"Sounds good to me," Danny replied. He headed inside and Sakura made her way back to her own house. Naruto was waiting for him when he entered.
"So, how was training?" he asked.
"Great! I learned how to throw kunai, how to focus my chakra, and how to do a transformation jutsu."
"You know, I invented my own jutsu that was based off of the transformation jutsu," Naruto stated.
"Really? Awesome! What's it like?" Naruto smirked.
"I call it the sexy jutsu," he said as he was engulfed in gray smoke. The smoke cleared and Danny's jaw dropped.
In front of him was standing a drop-dead gorgeous girl with blonde hair tied in two pigtails that went down to her waist. Her voluptuous body was completely nude, and her..uh…private parts were covered by two ultra-thin clouds of mist.
"Hey, Danneh," she said in a voice that sounded to Danny like that of a kinky schoolgirl from a cheesy anime show. She blew him a kiss, and Danny felt his insides turn to jelly. There was a puff of gray smoke and Naruto reappeared in the girl's place.
"So, what did you think?" Danny's jaw was hanging somewhere around his belly button.
"I'll take that to mean you liked it?" Danny nodded weakly.
"Dude…" he began. "That's genius! I'm kind of glad you didn't do it in front of Tucker, though. He can be a bit of a skirt-chaser, if you know what I mean." Naruto nodded sagely.
"Yeah, it took me months of stealing adult magazines and sneaking into girls' locker rooms before I mastered that jutsu," he said. "You remember from when you did your own transformation justu, you need to have an exact picture of the thing you're going to transform into in your mind."
"Yeah, I'd imagine the jutsu would turn out funky if you didn't have a clear mental picture."
"So did you work on throwing kunai and shuriken with Sakura, or did you just do different kinds of jutsu?"
"After the transformation jutsu she taught me how to move and jump really fast by spreading my chakra throughout my body. We went over to the training fields and practiced with kunai there."
"How'd you do?"
"I got the hang of the kunai, but I still want to practice it some more tomorrow. I need a lot of work on the shuriken, though."
"Oh, okay. So, ready to train some more?" Danny gulped.
Before he knew it, the two of them were standing in a circular courtyard of the ninja academy. The courtyard was devoid of any grass or plants, so the ground was made of firm, hard-packed earth.
"So…what are we supposed to do here?"
"Run."
"Run? That's it?"
"Yep. That's it."
"How far?" Naruto smirked.
"Trust me; just start running for now. You'd rather not want to know the answer to that just yet." Danny shrugged, knowing that if Naruto wasn't about to tell him, he probably had a good reason for it. He started running.
Danny, panting heavily, jogged up to where Naruto was standing and came to a stop.
"How…much farther?" He gasped.
"Oh, I don't know…What'd you do, twenty laps?"
"Something…like that…"
"Okay, so that means you have…" he paused to count on his fingers for a second. "Nine hundred and eighty left." Danny immediately stood upright.
"You want me to run a thousand laps?"
"Well, no, not since you've already done twenty. You've only got nine hundred and eighty left. Trust me, you can do this."
"How do you know?"
"Because when we were going through the academy, they made us do at least two thousand laps when we were only seven or eight years old. Obviously you can't run that much, since you weigh so much more than we did, so you only have to do a thousand. Make sense?" He stood there rubbing the back of his head, with a goofy grin on his face that made it look to the observer as though he'd just stated the most obvious thing in the world.
Danny stood with his eyes shut tight, and his lips were slightly moving. It looked to Naruto as though he was having an argument with himself. Finally, he stopped, opened his eyes, and looked directly at Naruto.
"Fine." He started running, and had passed Naruto by a couple hundred feet before he called him back.
"Danny, hold up for a second." Danny stopped in his tracks and turned around.
"What's up?"
"Even though you were being asked to do something you really don't want to do, you put aside your personal discomfort to accomplish the mission. That's something a true ninja would do. You're getting stronger." Danny grinned.
"Cool! Does this mean I don't have to run anymore?" Naruto snorted.
"Nice try. Keep running." Danny groaned and resumed his nine hundred and eighty laps.