Lessons of Experience
Chapter 2: A Deft Touch
By: BukkakeNoJutsu
Disclaimer: Naruto is not mine. San is mine however, and he is an evil old man. What a bastard.
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It soon became routine for Naruto to start training at first light every weekday with San.
Naruto had even taken to crashing at the mysterious old man's sparse apartment to wake up on time. The blonde orphan had grown used to sleeping on San's ratty old couch.
The old man would train him and then regularly buy him a hearty breakfast. Naruto, unused to such treatment, made sure to thank him each and every time.
San requested that Naruto keep the details of his training a secret for now. Naruto silently swore to never betray the old man who had acknowledged him.
Naruto's training now mostly consisted of an exercise that he mentally referred to as "tag." It was the very same practice that the white-haired man had inflicted on him during the first meeting. It was a game of attack and defense where the old man was always the assailant, and Naruto, a hunk of meat to be carved up.
The old man always had his knives during the exercise, but the games would always be different time after time and day after day. The terrain would always be different, sometimes leaving him very little room to dodge. He had to make due with his body positioning.
Sometimes, the retired ninja would wield a single knife in either hand, and use the empty hand and the rest of his body to counter Naruto's feeble defenses or to pull him in fatally close. Naruto grew used to being stomped upon, elbowed, head butted, and swept off his feet, while still having to deal with a knife or two threatening, and often succeeding, to gut him.
Through all this, the old man never drew Naruto's blood without iterating a lesson.
"Flank me, goddamit! Don't back up in a straight line. You'll run out of space as I rush you down. Move so that I've got to readjust to your position strike after strike," the old man swore, knives slicing the air, trying to drill the subtleties of evasion into the boy.
"If caught in a place where you can't evade, parry just enough to remain behind the force of my attack. Any lack of subtlety on your part will get you cut and killed. Be invisible," San hissed, drawing a line of red at Naruto's brow, sending trickles of blood into the boy's eyes.
The boy was learning to be quick and sneaky.
"Relax, boy. You can't expect to survive my attacks panic-striken. Calm yourself and breathe deeply."
Thus, the boy learned to be calm facing danger whether he was bleeding, gutted, crippled, or blinded.
It was not to say that old man San had no sense of humor while training. It was usually that if the old man was having a good time training Naruto, the odds were against Naruto having a fun time as well.
Sometimes to reiterate a lesson, the old man would specifically target a single point on Naruto's body, like his right eye socket. During one particular training session to remind the boy to keep his temper, San took a single knife in his right hand and spun it in his palm into an icepick grip. He then pummeled the boy's right eye with the pommel for any hint of a tantrum.
It was the crudest kind of aversion therapy.
When his student's face ended up bruised and swollen, San revealed that he was in range every time, if he chose to switch his knife to a forward grip, to shove his knife blade past the blonde's eye socket and into his brain.
"Anger will only get you and your loved ones killed," San spoke, weighed down by memories.
For Naruto, it was another important lesson of the many he would learn.
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The effects of Naruto's training did not go unnoticed by some of his classmates.
Hyuuga Hinata noticed the object of her crush showing up exhausted to class. It wasn't an uncommon sight for her to see him sleep through entire lessons uninterrupted, for no instructor other than Iruka-sensei bothered to wake him up.
The blonde's pranks that she had secretly found amusing were now few and far between, as if something else had captured his interest. Uzumaki Naruto was still confident and enthusiastic about his dream of being Hokage in the face of widespread disbelief and disapproval. That was what mattered most to her.
Inuzuka Kiba had noticed something off about Naruto, besides his new drab clothes with only the barest traces of orange. Both he and Akamaru detected the faint scent of blood, much of the time around Naruto. It was always his own. Normally, Kiba did not care much about the dead last student in his class, but the repeated instances disturbed him enough to once inquire about the situation. Naruto simply answered, "Training." It was enough to satisfy Kiba's curiosity for the time being.
Iruka noticed subtle changes in his most troublesome, and if pressed to admit it, his favorite student. The blonde boy had calmed down just a little along with his troublemaking. Oddly enough, Naruto usual boasts were intangibly less like posturing, and now held a certain genuine degree of pride.
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Outside of practices, Naruto found San to be a patient, and even kindly, old man. He encouraged questions from Naruto, but not whining. During their meals together, Naruto took the opportunity to learn more about his teacher and the art he was being taught.
During one of their first meals together, the whiskered boy asked, "Why do we train the way we do?"
The aged shinobi pondered for a second before answering.
"I am putting you through hell now, because it is best that you get put through the paces during practice, rather than against someone who won't hesitate to kill you for real. Also, before you learn how to kill, it is helpful to experience the kinds of pain you will soon learn to inflict, so that you won't end up using your skills thoughtlessly."
Naruto nodded thoughtfully. It made sense. The blonde knew exactly what how it felt to have his entrails spilled or his eye gouged out, and he would not do those things carelessly to another human being. It was like the how the Old Man Hokage, exasperated over a massive prank, had wanted him to be more "responsible."
San continued, "What you are learning now in your flesh, blood, and bones is a "deft touch." The Hyuuga clan in Konoha has a style of taijutsu known as the Jyuuken or Gentle Fist. Are you familiar with them?"
The young boy shook his head and the old man sighed at his ignorance.
"Their goddamn style isn't gentle at all. They have a bloodline advantage that allows them to strike at their opponents' vital points directly with chakra. Compared to what I'm trying to drill into you, they are clumsy oafs that allow much more room for error."
"Huh, what are you saying?" questioned confused Uzumaki Naruto.
"Boy, what happens when you fuck up when I attack you?"
The blonde brought his right index finger to his lip in a thinking posture.
"Umm…I end up cut or stabbed, blinded, missing fingers, coughing up pieces of my lungs..."
Naruto started to recall all the grievous injuries he received under San's tutelage, using his fingers to list them all.
The old man interrupted, "Don't you get it? The stakes are so much higher for you than a Hyuuga. In training, the worst injuries a Hyuuga gets is closed tenketsu, or chakra points. It feels like pins and needles compared to the shit I put you through."
Naruto sighed, "I wish I were a Hyuuga…"
"Enough of that bullshit, boy. The defenses I'm teaching you will far outshine any cheap bloodline tricks. If you get this right, you'll learn how not to be touched by damn near any attack. Not a kick, punch, weapon or even chakra strike will injure you. You'll be a goddamn ghost. All you need is a deft touch."
The blonde's eyes grew wide, becoming comically large.
"Gramps, will this involve some crazy awesome teleportation jutsus?"
San snorted in derision.
"Nope. Just good old-fashioned complete tactile mastery of timing, space, and distance. Also an inhuman sense of self-preservation, bordering on precognition. It's how I survived at my age being a frontline fighter against the ninetailed fox demon."
San regarded the slightly dampened enthusiasm of his student and remarked, "Cheer up, brat! We haven't even started to learn about offense."
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Naruto threw himself wholly into his training and, after a period of weeks, the results spoke for themselves.
What would normally inflict deep injuries on the boy left shallower cuts, any attack that would have cut him shallowly merely grazed him, and what would have grazed him before he dodged completely.
San nodded to himself noting the boy's progress.
Soon, Uzumaki Naruto would be ready to dish out the kind of damage he had been soaking up.
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Sarutobi kept an eye out on San's pet project, finding that he winced less and less as the Yondaime's legacy became more and more proficient. Still, it took a special kind of nin who could maim a child on a regular basis and call it training.
The Sandaime's stray thought caused special jounin Mitarashi Anko to sneeze violently, flinging snot over an order of dango.
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End Chapter 2
C&C welcome