CHAPTER SIX – Present day, human world, Village of Konohagakure
(The page is slightly less yellow than the others, but still has a slight stain in the middle)
Anko enjoyed a lot, her sweet bean paste. It was the one food item she could put on virtually anything. Currently, she had it on several well-baked onion rolls. She'd never tried steamed onion rolls so it had been quite a treat for her. Especially since for three days she'd had to devote time to Iruka, who just didn't seem to catch details fast enough. As a result she looked forward to her lunch breaks. Still, she knew exactly how she'd handle the situation. She'd keep training Iruka, and if he showed no signs of visible improvement, she'd send a recommendation back to Yondaime to be granted authority to eject him from the program. It seemed somewhat obvious that he lacked only the open-mindedness to improve; had he accepted his problem and worked harder, he'd succeed.
Interrupting her from her meal concentration was Naruto, walking back to the training rooms after his final class session with Ebisu. She knew his secret: how he had been born into a legendary fox demon clan, but even by those standards he could be described merely as awesome. It made her shake her head in bewilderment at the thought of the youko; the oldest species of animal-type demon. The little blonde chunin would be in his prime well past the death of her great-great grandchildren, assuming she had children in her lifespan. Furthermore, strikes that would have her dead before she hit the ground would barely faze him. He could be impaled through the heart, blown up, crushed, even burned completely and still regenerate. His mother possessed such power that if she had been an enemy of the village instead of its Honorable Lady, the village probably would have been destroyed.
"Your class with me is in two hours," she informed him. "Make sure you're ready." He gave her the thumbs-up.
"Don't worry, Anko-sama, I'll be there!" He had been waiting for the meat and potatoes of his jounin training since about the middle of the first of the four units. He entered the training room that Iruka had been working out in. "Iruka-sensei," he uttered, "what's been troubling you? I don't think you've been performing up to your maximum level!"
Iruka looked away from the wooden dummy he was attacking, and saw the young student who had already surpassed him. "Naruto-san," he lamented, shaking his head. "I just don't understand what the problem is. I can't seem to improve enough. No matter what it just doesn't seem to be working."
Naruto looked around to divert his attention. He just couldn't understand it. What could be the cause of his former teacher's lack of improvement? "Aren't you working out every day?"
Iruka shot him a look. "That's the problem. I've been training with you every day since the near end of the first unit. What is causing this problem? It makes no sense."
"Let's see how far you're coming along, sensei!" Naruto took up stance.
"Gotcha."
Two lovers strolled amidst the flowers in the fields outside Konoha. Kyuubi of the legendary Zaram youko line, and Arashi of the Uzumaki, took in the sights in between glances at each other as they celebrated another day being alive and being together. Kyuubi picked from the ground a lovely pink flower. "I'm so glad to be home," she cheered. "I missed you and Naruto."
The Yondaime pushed a bit of hair back from her face. Her powerful, yet elegant beauty had always been one thing about her that he could not bear to lose. He smiled as his blue eyes met her red irises, and he stroked the back of her neck. "Kyuubi, I love you so much, I don't know what I'd do if I lost you or Naruto." He had stared down the most frighteningly potent shinobi to ever have lived, and had seen more battles than any resident of Konoha save for his lover, and yet his worst fear involved something less physically involving. The loss of either his wonderful son or his lady would easily kill him emotionally if not literally. Just the prospect of Kyuubi not being with him had plagued him so that he did not sleep the past group of days.
"Speaking of Naruto," Kyuubi brought up, "he's doing gracefully in his jounin exams, correct?"
Yondaime nodded. "I was surprised, and then, I remembered he's our son." Despite it not being worded for humor, the female fox demon found it quite funny.
"Arashi, why won't you give me a child?"
Yondaime almost leapt backwards; such a statement had come almost from nowhere. At least, in his mind it did. She had been concerned about such a topic for awhile. "K…Kyuubi, there's nothing I'd like more than to make love to you. But I am the Hokage. I have sworn to a set of rules that I must not break for any circumstances. One such is that my honor must be unflinching through times of peace or war. And as such I…"
"You can't have sexual relations with a woman that is the wife of another living man," she recited, having heard his spiel so many times. You don't know it, Arashi, but this is one defining trait of an Uzumaki, she recalled. No Uzumaki will ever do something they consider to be against their honor. While it provided for a decent set of morals it made her feel bad.
Yondaime consoled her, rubbing the back of her head. "It is not because you aren't sexy. I see you and your wonderful curves and I want nothing more than to make sweet love to you. But as long as my ancestor Kenzo is alive I cannot."
She smiled and kissed him. "I know, Arashi, I know." Secretly she sighed; when would she ever get the chance to feel the passion again? Around him she had never felt a need to be anything other than who she always was. Other demons that she had been with required her to fit a certain style that they liked. Kenzo required her to be completely submissive and bow to his every whim. The Yondaime simply asked that she be herself, whatever it meant.
He lifted a red flower from the ground and slid it gingerly in between two folds of her hair. "I think this one fits well with you, Kyuubi," he explained caressing the back of her hair. "I love you so much."
She leaned in closer and rested her head on his left shoulder. "You bring a sense of love to me that I haven't felt in eight thousand years." She had experienced with Yondaime a feeling that she had only experienced once before, with her previous mate who was murdered by Kenzo. For so many eons she had wanted to be loved again. Even so, she desired to experience the passion of lovemaking once more.
Naruto stood in the dojo room of the building. Anko stood across from him for what would be a one-on-one situation. Iruka already had received his training for the day and prepared to do some private training in one of the rooms. He was determined to get to the bottom of his lack of improvement. The concern on Naruto's mind was exactly how much training he could get from the female jounin.
"Alright, Honorable Son," she said, dropping into a snake-style fighting stance. "Let us get a feel for how strong you are." Leaping in the air, she landed about a meter away from him. Almost at once he swung his foot for a deadly roundhouse kick and she had just a eyeblink's time of movement enough to get out of its way. The combat now fully initiated she decided to attack with a quick yet powerful blow that had been a staple of the snake style of fighting. He dodged one of her attacks only to be put in the path of another. Hastily he recognized that the particular style his opponent used prevented simple dodging.
A downward motion of his left forearm enabled him to brush one punch out of his way and synergistic with the block he spun around and drove his left foot via a standing side kick directly into her chest. Fortunately for her she craned herself backwards a bit to lessen the impact of it, but it had hit her very powerfully. A swing kick from his right leg almost caught her off guard and she had just enough time to bend backwards significantly enough to avoid it. On the return swing of her head she craned forward and ducked a left hook. While down she stuck a mild punch to his chest which allowed for a more powerful uppercut, finally she ended the combo with spinning side kick that hit him like a joust, throwing him onto his back. She did not relent for a moment, and hastily put her foot on his throat, applying pressure to force him to submit. When he did she lifted him to a standing position.
"You are quite powerful and skilled, Naruto," she acknowledged. "You know a lot about taijutsu. But still, I can teach you quite a bit. Let us work on one major aspect of your weakness."
"What weakness is that, Anko-sama?" His question came without a shred of ego; these were students she liked.
"Well, for one, I notice you put a lot of emphasis on speed. This is usually good but against a fighter using the snake style it becomes much less an advantage." She dropped into stance once more. "Use your blocking ability more so than you do and focus a little bit more on power."
He laughed silently at the irony as he dropped into Uzumaki-ryu stance. Her advice to him had been very near to the exact opposite advice he told Sasuke. He kicked off the combat the second time around, propelling a straight punch at her chest that she had just barely enough time to dodge. It had been an intentionally weak move, however, and she learned it quickly when he nailed her directly in the face with a violent roundhouse kick that threatened to throw her off her feet. She recovered and avoided a kick to the arm, coming back up from the dodge to deliver a similar kick to his right side. It caught him off guard but the impact had very little effect on him due to his power. He kicked her in the left ankle with the force of a mild tap, but she found out the hard way that it had been intended as a distraction. Pushing hard against the ground he bounded about a foot off the ground and violently whipped around to deliver a midair spinning side kick to her chest. Her eyes flew open wide. Holy shit! she thought. He's trying to finish me off!
Summoning speed she didn't know she had, she moved just out of the way as his foot just gingerly grazed her right breast. Powerfully she delivered a roundhouse kick to his middle back while he was still in flight, which threw him face first into the wall. "That was excellent, Naruto! This is the progress I'd like to see from Iruka!"
He trained with her in the dojo for about five days of the two weeks of part two of the program, then out of acknowledgement of his skills and improvement she passed him onto part three. Iruka, however, would still have trouble.
Wham. The sound of flesh meeting the concrete floor face first reverberated. Umino Iruka picked himself up after having been rather humorously handed his defeat. The first time he avoided one attack only to be put directly in the path of another. The second time he made a complete reading error and failed to predict the next move of hers. "Iruka!" Anko yelled. "You need to focus!"
"Easy for you to say," he told her. "You're the one who keeps on winning!"
"Cut the shit, Iruka," she flat out ordered him. "I know you're better than this. I mean, you're a chunin, for chrissakes. Act like it and put up a better fight!" He wiped blood off his mouth and took up stance.
Naruto had just finished weapons training for the day with Hayate. He couldn't help but be amazed at the complexity of the weapons he took for granted, and all the different ways that they could be utilized. Not only did the jounin training help him hone his skills, it also broadened his mind. He had some free time so he decided to do his training with Iruka for the day.
"Iruka-sensei?" the blonde chunin asked, entering the training room. "You wanna do some training with me?"
Iruka waved him in. "Yeah, sure."
The combat began, the teacher and former student sparring against one another. A kick from one was dodged or blocked by another, a punch from one was avoided by the other, the trade of blows went both ways until both fighters stood apart from each other, having learned a little bit about the other's fighting style. Naruto, in particular, had learned something very important about his opponent and friend.
"Iruka-sensei," he told him, "I think I've got down the cause of your lack of improvement."
The academy instructor looked at him quite skeptically. "You do?"
The blonde chunin nodded. "Yeah. You seem to be fighting with too much in mind. You don't focus enough. You seem to be thinking about every possible outcome to the combat, or at least you're thinking too much about what could happen. Quit thinking about your opponent's moves and stop thinking so much of the future and concentrate on what's at hand first."
"That's…thank you. I appreciate it." Iruka's lack of words came from his inability to mask his sense of ironic stupidity. Such was basic advice and he couldn't see it, and here stood a student that he had taught the ways of being a ninja to, and he already picked it up. Naruto's sharing of wisdom struck him as amazing.
"Furthermore," the blonde said, "I notice that when you attack, you don't seem to properly be reading your opponent's moves. You need to read more quickly and less calculatingly. Calculating your enemy's position will take too long and might get you killed. Think in terms of human psyche and less in terms of method."
It came at precisely the same class time the next day that Iruka decided to implement his student's advice on combat. He found out quickly that, when thinking less about the proper technique of fighting when calculating his enemy's position, it became much easier to predict accurately where Anko would be at any given moment. The first combat against her he lost, although less quickly than the previous day. The second one, he fought her to a draw. She complimented him; his progress did not come as quickly as Naruto's did, but still, improvement was improvement.
Weapons training seemed bizarrely more difficult than either of the first two units of the jounin training for Naruto. He excelled at strategizing, and ruled at fighting, but when it came to weapons, he found it incredible that there was so much to learn about the weapons themselves in addition to how many different uses they had in the moment of combat. It took most of his cognitive ability just to memorize each of the different fact sets about weapons. He eagerly awaited the class that Hayate would give him instruction on proper use of ninja-to.
Walking into the classroom the fifteenth day of the second month of the training, he saw a series of weapons laid on the table in front of Hayate. "Naruto," the sickly jounin ordered, "write down on the sheets of paper beneath each weapon what it is, what the primary function is, and what the secondary function is. This'll be the last of the classroom sessions before you learn the proper way of using a ninja-to katana." Naruto did as instructed. It took him quite a bit of time to remember all the information that he memorized, but in the end he had each of the names and functions where they needed to be. Hayate read each sheet and gave a nod of approval. "Come with me."
Naruto followed the jounin out into the field, where two swords sat leaned against a tree. "So, are we going to practice with swords now?"
Hayate nodded. "Yes, Naruto, we shall begin the ninja-to unit. I know you've been dying to get here." They each picked a weapon and drew it.
"This is my favorite part!" Naruto cheerfully drew his blade.
(A/N: So the sixth chapter ends! I hope to have the jounin training arc of the story done within two chapters from here)