Alright people, due to real life, I had to hold back on the chapters, plus possible other stories my muses were insistent I write. I'm trying to save up chapters so that I always have a buffer between published chapter, and what I'm working on. Originally, I wanted to do a post once a month, but I'm reneging on that, to once every other month. All reviews are appreciated!

My remaining summer was spent in a whirlwind, telling the Nara twins and Choji my heritage, how close I'd been to being Naruto's adopted brother, and begging for forgiveness from Yoshino when I told her I knew of my family's history with her own. She'd forgiven me, tearfully telling me she could never hold the actions of my dead clan against a child. We weren't friends, not by a long shot, but, we were, at the least, friendly towards each other. It was better than I'd hoped for.

I recruited Shikako and Shikamaru in helping me teach Naruto how to actually fight, only to find that he was a master of the street fighting style I'd learned on the streets of Konoha. Naruto already had an apartment, but was given a new one, and a stipend to go with it, and I was moved into it on my eighth birthday. Without potential parents to do the paperwork, we weren't able to become official brothers, and I refused to take Naruto's clan name, not because I didn't like it, but because if I did, I would feel compelled to use my other clan name, something I wasn't comfortable with yet.

Thankfully, Naruto understood my reluctance, and didn't push me on the issue, though Shikako continuously questioned my decision. It wasn't until I exploded at her a week before the Academy restarted that she stopped. I'd had to tell her what my other clan had done to hers and her clan allies to get her off my back. She'd apologized, and I'd forgiven her. But conversation for a month afterward had been stilted and awkward. Shikamaru had accused us of having realized we had a crush on each other, until his sister had walloped him so hard he face planted on a playground bench. I felt bad for the kid, until Shikako had steered him straight, with my permission, at which point he'd stared at me. Then he'd droned about how troublesome it was to have someone as smart as him and his sister not in the clan. At which point I'd smacked him around the back of the head. Choji, in the background until now, commented that all great minds must think alike if Shikako and I had both smacked Shikamaru for his smart mouth.

I'd idly contemplated smacking him too, until I saw Shikako's hand twitch towards the rotund boy before stilling at her side once again.

This year, at the Academy, we were finally taught how to throw kunai and shuriken, and how to properly utilize chakra to pump up strength, to allow for the technique called Leaping Monkey. Ironically, it looked a lot like it sounded, at least until the chakra application portion was perfected. You crouched on one branch, arms between your legs, and you leaped for another, landing and slamming back into a crouch to reset yourself for the next leap. I was the best at the chakra part, simply because I'd been water walking longer than most of these kids had been using chakra, and I quickly evolved to the next part, where you leapt, and then landed and pushed off with the lead foot without stopping to reset. This was what all the ninja had been doing in the manga and anime, and it was something that I grasped intuitively. The teachers this year seemed to have all been replaced, with the exception of Kata-sensei, who had always treated me no differently than anyone else in the class despite my prodigious progress, or my previously unknown heritage.

These teachers though, took advantage of my progress, and had me helping them teach the slower students. This included Ronguteru Inuzuka, the girl whose arm I'd broken two years prior in a taijutsu training spar. Both she and her new nin-dog, named Shiromaru, were wary of me, until they figured out I was ignoring her wariness and simply teaching her. I still cuffed her around the head when she got uppity at her failures with chakra manipulation, and I pulled something from my last lifetime with Shiromar. My family had had a dog when I was a kid and teen, and with a veritable dog whisperer older sister, I picked up a lot of tricks for dominating dogs. The best one was flipping them over and baring your teeth against their throats and growling low in your throat. Got them to shut up every time. So whenever Shiromaru got upset when I cuffed his mistress over the head, I just did that to the pup. They figured out real quick who the boss was, and stopped fighting me so much when I was tutoring them.

There was no noticeable improvement in Ronguteru's grades, but her chakra control and manipulation did improve some. Some.

It was October, about a week and a half after Naruto and I celebrated his birthday properly, with a store bought cake and way too much miso ramen, when I got news at lunch with Gramps. Totally unexpected news.

"Though you are, in fact, in the same round of classes as Naruto," Gramps told me over lunch at Yakiniku. "Your class is on the year behind curriculum, due to the nature of educating civilian born. As such, though you are Rookie of the Year in your class, you are technically a year behind everyone else, save the four classes that consist mostly of clan children."

"The four graduation classes." I supplied, eyes narrowed as I thought about the implications. The whole round of classes was set up as a tournament that lasted seven years. There were one hundred and eight openings to make it into. Four classes of twenty seven students was a hundred eight. We started out with two hundred seventy students at the beginning of all this. That was one hundred and sixty students gone, a sixty percent loss. And between four classes, there was a sixty six percent failure rate of genin teams, meaning there were thirty six genin on the jonin track. Seventy two genin would have four options of quitting altogether, (about twenty would) going into the Genin Corps, (about another twenty would do this) returning to the Academy to attempt to make the Jonin Track the next year, (yet another twenty or so, or none, as they would take any of the other three options) and the remaining twelve would worm their way into either being a paperwork ninja or an apprenticeship in the hospital. I'd remembered reading the stats in the library years ago. In reality, only thirteen percent would get Jonin Tracked.

And of those thirty six Jonin Track genin? Twenty five, or nine and a quarter percent, would make it to chunin, the other eleven dying or being forced to retire due to debilitating injuries either before becoming chunin, or soon after becoming chunin. Of the twenty five successful chunin, only seven would go on to become jonin, with eight becoming special jonin, or five and a half percent when combining the two ranks. That was about three percent special jonin alone, though. The remaining ten would die or receive debilitating injuries and retire.

So, in the end, only two and a half percent of all students from one round of classes would achieve jonin. The stats were terrifying, and I understood why that information wasn't part of the curriculum. How many would drop out upon hearing those numbers?

"Yes, the four graduation classes," Gramps mused, interrupting my train of thought. "There is an opening in the lowest ranked of the four, and I'm sure you would fit in there easily."

"What are you getting at?" I asked cautiously. I knew there was going to be a deal with a catch, I could feel it in my gut.

"It took a little political strong-arming, but I have secured that spot for you over some clan children whose parents think they deserve to be in the graduating four." Gramps stated, eyeing me closely as he spoke. "However, in order to secure your spot, I had to promise something in return."

"What's the catch?" I sighed out, rolling my eyes.

"Hmph. Times like this I forget you're only nine years old, Kasai." Gramps chuckled. "The catch, as you put it, is that you must reclaim your title of class Rookie of the Year within two months to the day of your transfer. With no assistance from any teachers beyond that which you will receive in class, you will have a mere two months to overcome a year's worth of educational gap, and catch up to your peers in theory, genjutsu study, ninjutsu study and application, taijutsu, though I doubt you'll have difficulty with that last, and weapons training, which, again, I doubt you'll have difficulty with."

My eyes narrowed at the prospect of this challenge.

"Gimme the books, Gramps," I smiled. "I know you have them or else you wouldn't have brought the subject up. I've got a spot to keep."

A week later, I was laughing at the dumbfounded expressions of my friends and pseudo-brother after I explained why I alone had been moved from my class. Apparently, other than telling the clan heirs and those in the same class, the Academy instructors never told them about the entire process involved in moving people into their class after someone else dropped out. I had to tell them about how they were in the number one Graduation Class, and how, unless they outright failed the final exams, they were guaranteed to graduate the Academy. Then I explained how the last four years of the Academy were structured to have a higher workload for the non Graduation Classes for multiple purposes. The first, obviously, was so that the civilian born could be on the same level as the clan children, and have a chance at getting into the Graduation Four if and when people dropped out. This also had the probably intentional side effect of exponentially increasing dropout rates as people were shunted into spots they weren't mentally capable of handling. It was also to provide a mock-up of the stress they would handle as active duty ninja.

I found that last laughable.

The last reason, was so that they could weed out everyone who wasn't qualified to even be genin. The day I told them about my challenge was also the day I was moved into the bottom class of the Graduation Four, which provided me eight weeks to reclaim my title as Rookie of the Year in my new class. My cutoff time was Yule Tide vacation start.

Shikako insisted on helping me catch up to them, but I told her how I wasn't allowed help, and that I would be just fine.

"After all," I said to her in English. "I have had to learn far more complicated material in less time in my last life. This will be nothing."

She'd looked disbelievingly at me, before shaking her head and muttering about troublesome Uzumaki's. I let Naruto handle that one. I wasn't going near it, even with a ballistic suit and a twenty foot pole.

Damn females.

Since I knew that my taijutsu and weapons training was head and shoulders above everyone in my round of classes, I relaxed a bit there, though Hayate still dragged me out for kenjutsu practice. I was his personal exercise partner while he continued bringing himself back up to battle capability. But when he wasn't doing that, I was spending nights and weekends cooped up in the apartment, finishing whatever homework I hadn't finished in class, and then veritably inhaling the textbooks Gramps had given me the day he gave me the news. The books came with various assignments hidden at the end of every chapter, which I blasted through, easily acing everything. I was also spending an extra hour at school every day with my new class's lead teacher, Suzume-sensei, who was educating me on genjutsu theory and application, and ninjutsu theory and application. Though, she was doing this after setting the girls to the task of the day for Kunoichi Lessons.

The looks I got from the girls, I could have done without, but I didn't care enough to be embarrassed that I was in a kunoichi class, since I wasn't actually taking the class. Suzume-sensei was a slave driver, and was of the school of thought that doing was learning. Which, I had no problem with. I'd always learned that way, so her teaching style meshed well with my learning methods. Her teaching method being putting me under really obvious genjutsu, to get me used to sensing her chakra invading my system, (which I did subconsciously anyways) and slowly making the genjutsu more and more subtle. She called me a genjutsu prodigy until I told her I had chakra hypersensitivity, which meant I could easily tell her chakra apart from my own, no matter how subtle she made her illusions. Then we found out that, despite my phenomenal chakra control, I had too much chakra to viably create a genjutsu targeting a single person. I needed to put multiple people under an illusion in order for my control to equate my reserves.

It was a problem I'd never even contemplated having. And that was when Suzume-sensei's Kunoichi Class got involved in my training.

"I hear you're having trouble with the ladies, Kasai?" Gramps chuckled after we'd sat down at Ichiraku for lunch, about a week or so after Suzume-sensei thought it'd be a good idea to have me cast a genjutsu on her Kunoichi class.

"I don't want to talk about it." I grumbled.

It had been a disaster, to put it lightly. And I made Shikako promise to not tell anyone about what had happened, on pain of taijutsu spars. She'd glared at me while trying (and failing) to hold back her laughter. But she promised, which was good enough for me.

Thankfully, Gramps hadn't pestered me about it, and the subject had been dropped, while Suzume-sensei told me my genjutsu was good enough to pass for a genin, which was kind of the point.

She also taught me the ninjutsu side of things, teaching me exercises designed to help increase flexibility in the hands and fingers. She'd been appalled when I told her that I didn't even know the twelve hand seals necessary for ninjutsu, and so, told me to practice them during class, while she was teaching me during the hour after school, and whenever I was doing my book work. Naruto thought I knew some amazing ninjutsu if I was always doing hand seals, until I told him it was part of my catch up work. Then he'd realized what that implied, and spent an hour or two ranting in his room about the unfairness of the world. I didn't bother with talking to him about it. In the four and a half months since we'd moved in together, I'd confirmed something I'd really only just accepted Before.

Naruto was a lot smarter than he let on.

His pranks. Oh man, his pranks. They were elaborate. They were meticulously crafted. Details were polished to perfection. Joint casing was done subtly. And nobody knew when he had struck until it was too late. Hell, I'd gotten hit with the itching powder on occasion, but the subsequent sleep deprivation I put him through in retaliation ensured that that stuff stayed well away from me after that.

I could see, though, how that could transfer into Naruto being the ultimate trap maker. Add also, his spontaneity. The Konoha Street Fighter Style (as I had dubbed it in my head) had been mastered to an art form by Naruto, and the longer he fought, the more out there his punches and kicks became, until eventually, any defense crumbled under the assault. The matter was, though, letting him build up that kind of momentum in a fight. I didn't let him do that in sparring anymore, and forced him to build up that momentum quickly, before people figured out what I had, and shut him down. But, he was good at planning. He was a people person, and he knew human nature. Don't let anyone tell you they're the same thing, because they're not. But he knew both, and if got to case an area ahead of time, he could lay traps that he could draw opponents into, with lethal consequences.

When I told Shikako about this, she'd immediately taken over that part of Naruto's training, telling me that with her natural aptitude for strategy, she could teach Naruto more about that than I could. Which I easily acceded to her. No use putting up a fight over something like that. Training was training, and if someone was better than you at something, and they offer to train you, you should take them up on the offer. That was how I thought of things, at least.

But despite how smart he was, Naruto could be an absolute idiot at times. Some of his hand seals were messed up, completely, and I subtly pointed Shikako towards that problem. She ended up spending her Saturdays and Sundays at our apartment, working with us on hand seals and strategy. It helped pass the time, and she would sometimes bring lunch with her, enough to feed her, and Naruto and me, which was nice, because it meant that the food stipend Gramps was giving me for the two of us living in the apartment was able to stretch farther.

But in the end, her efforts to help me and Naruto paid off, and the last school day of the calendar year saw me securing my position as class Rookie of the Year in my new class. To celebrate, Gramps took me out to Yakiniku for dinner, and the end of my year was pretty happy.

When school restarted after the Yule season, I was given flak from my new classmates about how I'd stolen the top spot from an Aburame girl, whose name was rather simple. Aburame Modoka. There was a story behind her given name, I was sure, but it wasn't one I was interested in learning. My classmates told me to give up the top spot, and spent many lunch breaks trying to convince me to do so. It was futile, and when it got physical, I just shut them down before they hurt anyone. It took Modoka pointing out the futility of anyone challenging me to a fight, because obviously I'd earned my spot through hard work.

I was once again allowed to spar, in the new class, and I abused that privilege as best I could, putting out a challenge to anyone who thought they could beat me in a taijutsu fight. Suzume-sensei told me I was too overconfident, until I had beaten fifteen of my classmates in a single sparring session. Then she'd just limited me to five spars per session.

I was just glad these kids had no problems hitting and being hit. It made everything better.

The last month of the school year passed with a startling monotony once everyone got it through their thick skulls that I was there to stay.

We'd been out of school for a week when Shikako found me sleeping in at the apartment, barging in past Naruto to find me.

"What do you want, you insufferable girl?" I'd growled, blinking my eyes as she moved about my room, having turned on the lights.

"I managed to get the Rookie Nine together for a training session, but Naruto forgot about it, and forgot to invite you to it, so I'm here to get you both," she said in English. "Now hurry up and get changed! We're going to be late!"

"Get out of my room then." I said. "There's a reason why my door was locked."

She froze before her head cranked towards me.

"You're naked under that sheet, aren't you?" she asked, her face getting progressively more and more red.

"…"

She turned into a goddamn blur, slamming my door as she raced out of my room. I chuckled to myself before getting out of my bed. Summer started early in Land of Fire, and lasted almost until Naruto's birthday. Since we'd moved into this apartment on my birthday last year, we had discovered that during the summer months, our air conditioning wasn't the best, and until I could lift enough money to get it fixed, we left it off during the night, but kept it on during the day, so the apartment didn't get ridiculously hot. But the apartment was still warm enough for me to want to sleep in the nude. I snickered at the situation, continuously replaying Shikako's reaction in my head as she realized what I'd implied.

When I came out of my room, Shikako was sitting at our kitchen table, her head bowed and hands clasped together, and I did my level best to keep my laughter down to a snicker, which didn't work as well as I'd hoped, because she lifted her face to meet my eyes and glare at me. It wasn't very effective, due to the bright red hue she was sporting, but I kept snickering as I moved through the kitchen, looking for something to eat. Naruto stumbled out a minute later in his orange cargo pants and a black shirt with an orange Uzumaki swirl on the back, and I easily handed the cup ramen to him. He never seemed to eat anything else for breakfast, unless it was hand made by yours truly. He stared morosely at the kettle I'd set on the stove, and I was tempted to tell him that a watched kettle never boiled. Then I remembered that he'd probably take it literally for the next few years and squashed that urge.

Once we'd finished our respective breakfasts of ramen and leftovers from dinner, Shikako lead us over rooftop towards her clan compound, something that took me longer than it should have to figure out. I was going to have to relearn the village from this new vantage point, which I mentally allotted a week to sometime this summer in my head. And that was on top of all of the stuff I already wanted to do this summer. Which was no small list.

When we got there, I was surprised to see all members of the future Rookie Nine sitting around, just talking. I assumed they were waiting on me and Naruto, in addition to the hostess of course, but just seeing them all in one place kind of jarred me. Sasuke, the lone survivor of his brother's massacre. Shikamaru, the smartest person his age, no matter what room he walked into. Choji, the faithful and friendly human tank. Ino, the seemingly ditzy blonde that actually was vivacious, and had a wit as sharp as any kunai. Kiba, the loyal friend that protected his own to the death. Shino, the forgotten one, without whom common sense and logic may have been lost on this bunch. Hinata, the shy girl whose beauty was only matched by her compassion. Sakura, the second coming of Tsunade, 'nuff said. Naruto, the dead last who would one day achieve his dream of becoming the best there is.

And then there was us. The two reincarnates. Nara Shikako, and Kaze-Uzumaki Kasai. In a way, we were alone, having only each other to rely on. We knew things that they didn't.

And that wasn't necessarily a good thing.

But, for today, I put that out of my head, and focused on what was in front of me. A good day of training.

Kiba challenged me to a taijutsu spar, and Yoshino volunteered to be the proctor for it, which I was grateful for, because Kiba had a hard time stopping unless someone not in the fight stopped him. The fight was spirited and fast paced, but I was hardly winded at the end of it, so Naruto challenged me. I carefully kept this one going, preventing him from gathering too much momentum, but not shutting him down either. But, eventually, I ended that fight too.

I was introduced to everyone I hadn't been introduced to yet, Shino being quiet and not quite shy, Hinata blushing cutely, and Kiba brashly calling me his rival. I had to stifle a groan at that last one. That was the last thing I needed. But, I dealt with it for now.

The rest of March passed peacefully, the high point being when I got a book on medicine for Sakura's birthday. But starting the second day of April, I disappeared into the underbelly of Konoha. I returned just in time for Choji's birthday, giving him a recipe book from Kumo that I had acquired. I had let my hair grow out, and it was now in a high tail, just beginning to droop under the effects of gravity. I'd had a growth spurt, and now stood at around a hundred forty-two centimeters, making me temporarily taller than everyone else. Naruto had been worried about me, and Shikako had confessed that she thought that Danzo had gotten to me, due to the fact that I was an orphan protégé. I assured her I hadn't had any contact with the old war hawk, sticking out my tongue to prove it to her. But there were things I'd been forced to deal with, my rising fame in the Konoha Underground forcing me to become involved. I'd taken on an alias, moving through circles like a wraith, until I had come to own it.

As it was, I had been forced to "convince" a man to be my puppet head, letting him have an amount of money to ensure his loyalty. My time was becoming more and more pressed, and I was forced to reevaluate a lot of things.

I was proficient enough in kenjutsu that Hayate felt comfortable letting me practice on my own, which I did every day, for at least two hours before breakfast every morning, followed by an hour of taijutsu practice with Naruto after breakfast. Then, a week after I returned from my sabbatical, Shikako got me interested in learning seals. I was reluctant at first, not wanting to spend so much time on something that would take years to see a viable return on, but finally, she convinced me that the end results would be worth all the frustration.

And so, following my taijutsu practice with my pseudo-brother, I began studying sealing with Shikako until noon, where we would pause for lunch, usually paid for by someone's lifted wallet. Not that Shikako knew, she seemed oblivious to the idea that Konoha was anything less than perfect, her eyes sliding right past the urchins that had taught me how to survive on the streets of this village. I could tell it wasn't conscious, because her eyes wouldn't slide back to them as she passed them, she just didn't seem to comprehend the idea that there were homeless in her home village. Surely, Konoha didn't have poor people living in the elements? It was nothing against her, it was just that she was sheltered. Even Naruto had learned things from the people on the streets before we moved in together. That boy could pick a lock faster than you could tell him it was locked.

I didn't tell her, not to spite her, but so that she could enjoy her second childhood. I just wished I could have had one in my first lifetime. Being the child of a soldier was hard, what with my Dad always going off overseas, and telling me I was the man of the house while he was gone, and that it was my responsibility to watch out for my mom and two sisters. I didn't hold it against anybody, but sometimes I wondered what it was like, to have a family that was close. To not have to worry about things that I had come to consider normal in this new life, like getting food on the table, stretching funds to cover bills, learning how to protect myself from grown men. None of this was unusual for me now, but once upon a time, I would have looked at what I've become and condemned me.

But I didn't have that luxury anymore.

So, I kept quiet, putting on a cheerful façade for Shikako and all of the other Rookies, and I buried myself in work.

Sealing was interesting. I think it might have been heritage, but the art of turning words into power just kind of… clicked for me, like I was hardwired to understand all the swirls and twists, how things connected. I was no genius at it, but I just worked progressively through it, like a worm tunneling across a garden.

Shikako though, she was, in fact a genius, plowing through books, compiling notes, comparing and contrasting, writing her own Sealing for Dummies basically, since there were no texts in the civilian section of the Konoha Public Library. She was like a rabbit, making leaps of logic and connecting ideas that I was only distantly aware of being connected. She surpassed me several times, but my steady advancement managed to put me ahead of her just as many times. It turned into a contest that honestly terrified our friends. The idea that two near ten year olds were making explosives out of paper and a little bit of ink terrified them, and Shikako's father, Shikaku, ended up sitting us down and making us promise we wouldn't start blowing things up without him or Yoshino around. I just stared at him until he figured out that I wasn't going to give my word on that since he wasn't my parent, nor an authority figure I considered deserved obedience.

Shikako was resourceful though, delving into her clan archives on the subject of sealing, and that school year, not two weeks after I turned ten, Shikako and I started giving our teachers grey hairs as we totally ignored our classes, focusing only on sealing, and still acing everything thrown our way. Gramps commented on how focused we were on our study of fuuinjutsu when I next had lunch with him, to which I confessed our little competition of who could become an accomplished fuuinjutsu user first, without cutting corners. He was a little wary at first, until I explained in detail what all was happening between us.

The next time I had lunch with him, I brought Shikako's Sealing for Dummies notebooks, the majority of them encrypted using my third tier codes, which was as far as Shikako had been able to get in breaking and using the codes I'd begun presenting her with after we discovered just how much I sucked at Shogi. She wasn't good at code breaking, it had taken her a month and a half to break my simple, first tier codes that I had used to encrypt the stories and such I'd copied from Before, and six months to break my second tier code. It had taken her until just before we started learning fuuinjutsu to break the third tier, almost eight months total for that alone.

I had broken all of her codes in a matter of a month, once she felt comfortable showing me her encryption techniques, which infuriated her to no end. Though, since she was my superior in Shogi, she was fine with me being her superior in encryption.

But, when I showed the encrypted work to Gramps, he was mind-boggled that I'd come up with such complex codes that didn't have anything to do with Konoha conventional codes. He tried to have me let him use the codes that Shikako and I were using, to which I adamantly refused, though I told him I would consider making specific codes for the village, provided I received a profit from the village using it. He promised to think about it, and in the meantime, I created several codes that the village could use, without exposing any of the ones Shikako and I used, since they were written in English, and we didn't want anyone learning how to read that. We'd both written down such damning evidence that the risk of someone even having a chance to break my codes wasn't worth it.

In the end, one month later, at the lunch with Gramps, he proposed something to me. Something that I thought was a godsend. I was going to be paid if I let Konoha use my codes! I would be paid half a ryo per message Konoha sent and received, and with almost four hundred messages a day, I was set to make almost seventy thousand ryo a year for the rest of my life! And that's after taxes! I could use that money for so much! Gramps even had a contract for me with him, and since I had about three different codes, each one more difficult than the last, with the third one being chosen to be used for ANBU! That was another hundred messages a day! The first would be used for genin and chunin, the second for jonin and special jonin, and the third would be for ANBU!

Gramps took me back to his office, sending an ANBU to the Academy to tell Suzume-sensei that I would be indisposed for the rest of the day, and that I would be making up my work the next monday.

That night was spent in negotiations with Gramps and the village treasurer, the contract that Gramps had initially shown me having been burnt up by a seemingly errant ember from his pipe. It wasn't until sometime around five the next morning that the new contract was written up, the treasurer actually seeming pleased with the idea that he would be spending money on someone that wasn't even a ninja yet. In the end, I was getting paid three different wages, one for each code. The first, for genin and chunin, would net me half a ryo per message, with approximately one hundred and twenty-five messages a day, would net me just under twenty three thousand ryo before taxes. The code for special jonin and jonin would net me point seven five ryo per message, averaging seventy-five messages a day would net me about twenty thousand five hundred ryo before taxes.

The best part was the ANBU one, where I would earn one point two five ryo per message! At an average of one hundred messages a day, I would get forty five thousand six hundred and twenty five ryo a year! Adding all that together and putting in for the five percent income tax Konoha had, I was bringing home eighty four thousand five hundred and twenty ryo a year! There was even a little part of the contract stating that I was able to submit new codes every six months to keep things fresh, with a twenty thousand ryo tax free bonus for each new code I gave to the village of Konohagakure! So long as my codes continued to prove superior to every other code used previously, my income was set for life!

Of course, I was sworn to secrecy, as seemed to be the norm in this village, but I didn't mind. I'd hit the jackpot for money! And since I submitted three codes at the same time, I received a sixty thousand ryo cheque on the spot, which I used to open a bank account under an alias at a bank that I knew to be doing well, and being good at being discrete with their customers. As a bank run by retired shinobi, I knew my money was in safe hands.

A few weeks later, Gramps admitted to me over lunch that the number of people capable of learning and memorizing the full code had almost doubled, while security had simultaneously increased exponentially. I told him stories about how I'd heard Graduate Year students complaining about suddenly having the cryptography class redone around the new code, and having to learn the new one. We both had a good laugh about that.

I hadn't told Shikako or Naruto about the new income I had, as I continued picking pockets to pay for the nicer stuff that Naruto and I needed around the apartment, and repairs to the air conditioner before summer hit again.

It was early February when Shikako made a rather unexpected discovery. In order to be able to make seals, a fuuinjutsu user needed to have perfect handwriting. Not good, not okay, perfect.

That was when I looked at our handwriting, and realized that we fell into that typical, "super smart people have messy handwriting because they have so much going on in their head" archetype of handwriting, and that we still had a long time to go to be able to start even inking our own seals. Gramps laughed at the next lunch when I told him about our little hang up on sealing, and he told me that he had been waiting on when we discovered that little detail. Then he began recounting tales of how he'd been forced to teach Jiraiya how to ink kanji in the necessary perfection for him to begin his journey to seal mastery. He was sure to be detailed in how often the old toad got himself blown up or heavily burnt. And how often he ended up missing his eyebrows. I just glared at him, and told him that that wasn't going to stop us.

When the Academy year ended in the beginning of March, Shikako and I took to the library, her from morning to night, myself from noon to night. I, unfortunately, had more things to do than her, so she began pulling ahead of me in our race to seal mastery, but I kept up by dint of late night practice, and sheer tenacity. She would take a ten minute break every hour, while I continued practicing my kanji for hours on end without stopping. Though, she stopped taking as many breaks when she saw that I was beginning to catch up to her again.

One thing you need to understand about sealing, is that, ironically enough, the simplest seal to make and use, is the explosive seal. The next, is storage seals. After that, there are enough variations on seals and their uses that trying to put them in a strength to complication ratio and hierarchy was enough to give me a headache.

Shikako and I dedicated a whole note book to comparing the twelve most used branches of sealing arts. Method, theory, range of uses, results, points of conflicts… It was exhausting. We copied images of famous seal master's signature seals, wrote down the owners, like my relative Uzumaki Mito and her infamous chakra sealing seals that cut a ninja off from their own chakra networks without killing them, Jiraiya's well known human summoning seal which allowed him to summon someone who had the marker seal on them… But there was nothing on how to create our own seals, or how to apply them with a touch for use in combat. There was not a thing on any of that, and this was when I cursed ninja for their obsessive compulsive nature to hide information.

But, we made discoveries that we hadn't expected. Though, Shikako admitted to knowing most of this beforehand. The hospital pretty much ran on seals. There were seals to keep the heart beating, to perform blood dialysis, to keep a person breathing, to put them in a medical coma, to put them to sleep for surgery, anything that had required some form of technology Before, a seal was used for it here. Which meant that Tsunade had done a fair bit of learning about seals, after all, the blood dialysis seal was her invention! But again, nothing on how to create our own seals!

Oh sure, we came up for workable ideas of variations on explosive seals, but we couldn't try them out until our kanji was up to par. Our summer passed in a bit of a blur, time seeming to accelerate the closer to graduation we got. Three new codes were made in the span of a week, and turned in the following Monday, and all three implemented on the first of July, and sixty thousand more ryo tossed in my bank account. I had given a routing number to the Konoha treasurer, so my monthly pay from all messages sent using my codes was automatically put into the same account.

Three days later was my birthday, which was when I received a purple delphinium plant from Naruto. He was an avid gardener, and when Shikako saw the thing on my windowsill, she laughed until I got her to tell me what she was laughing about. Apparently Naruto had gotten me the flower of my birth month. But then it got kind of odd, because there were three different colors for the plant, with pink being a sign of fickleness, white being the color of joyfulness, or being happy go lucky. Naruto had gotten me a purple one, which mean "you have such a sweet disposition." I knew it was sarcastic, because I knew Naruto had grumbled about how I should smile more.

By the time Shikako left after giving me an ink and brush set, I had already hatched a plan to get my revenge on Naruto. Not that I was going to get rid of the plant, because I liked it, and it was a gift from my pseudo-brother.

The next morning, said pseudo-brother started howling at the crack of dawn. On the other side of the village. On my birthday, I'd lifted enough wallets to buy the necessary ingredients to create a sleeping gas, which I had used on Naruto once he fell asleep the previous night. It was strong enough to keep him unconscious while I had used three rolls of shrink wrap I'd 'acquired' to secure him to his mattress. Then I'd gotten Hayate and Yugao to help me take bed and boy to the Hokage Tower, where we'd used another three rolls of shrink wrap to secure the mattress to the top of the flag pole that typically flew the village symbol. Then I'd left him there all night.

He didn't return until noon, carrying his mattress on his back, grumbling, and in nothing but his boxers. Pink, frog covered boxers.

I was sitting at the kitchen table when he came back, working on my kanji, and it took every ounce of self-control to not bust out laughing right away.

"What the hell happened to you, Naruto?" I asked, wide-eyed and perfectly innocent. "When I woke up and didn't hear you, I assumed you'd gone training like you do every once in a while."

"You did this to me!" Naruto yelled, dropping his mattress just inside the door to point accusingly at me.

"Um, bro, I was at Hayate and Yugao's last night, and came back around midnight. I went to sleep like, five minutes later after I got undressed, like usual."

Naruto wilted like a flower in the desert.

"Wha-? Bu-? Huh?"

"But, the door was unlocked when I got home, so maybe someone you pranked one too many times got in here and did that to you. What did they do to you, anyways?"

"Never you mind!" Naruto growled, towing his mattress back towards his room.

"I was waiting for you to get back since I saw your keys still here!" I called out. "I'm heading over to Shikako's for seal practice!"

I waited until I was two full streets away before I broke down laughing. Shikako didn't understand why I showed up to her house with tears in my eyes until I explained what I'd done to Naruto, choking my way through my laughter. Nara Yoshino had overheard it, and soon joined us with her peals of laughter. It was a good day.

Soon, though, the Academy started back up, and we began the basics of learning "advanced" chakra control. In other words, tree leaf sticking. I shocked Suzume-sensei by telling her that I was capable of water walking, and Shikako told me that she herself had freaked out her parents and brother by telling Iruka-sensei that she could tree walk. She'd been afraid to start water walking yet, citing the fear of falling into a river she couldn't get herself out of, and I idly wondered if she'd been in a landlocked place Before, where she'd not been able to go swimming much. I couldn't think of many places like that though, and I wondered if she'd just not learned to swim that well as a child Before, and not felt like becoming proficient in her adulthood. People who didn't learn how to swim as children typically tended to not learn as adults, which made them wary of water.

On the other hand, I wrote a note for myself that I posted in my yearly calendar telling me to 'train' Shikako in how to swim. Oh, that was going to be fun.

Since I was so proficient at chakra control exercises, the teachers decided to give me a little extra credit assignment by having me teach the chakra control exercises throughout the year. It was annoying, to put it lightly, but I was still able to maintain my position at the head of the class, in addition to continuing to work on my kanji and sealing to keep up with Shikako. Naruto complained that I knew too much, of course, until I sat down and explained to him in detail just how complex sealing was, and how hard it was for me to do all the things I was doing. He didn't believe me, until I got him to try sealing. He didn't understand any of it. Which made me wonder how in the hell he was actually an Uzumaki, much less related to the most famous fuuinjutsu user since our ancestor Uzumaki Mito.

Other than that, the school year passed without much to it. We began doing survival training towards the end of August, which lasted us all the way to the end of October. Every Thursday and Friday, we would pack up Academy issue packs, and tramp out to a random training ground, set aside specially for us to learn how to survive in the wilderness.

This was another area that I surprised my peers and teachers in. Before, I'd lived with grandparents who lived out in the middle of nowhere. People would actually pay my grandfather in order to come hunt on his property, because there were always deer, fox squirrels, rabbits, and he even had a pond stocked with fish, and an unfortunate case of snapping turtle. I had actually spent an entire summer there, post deployment, living in the woods surrounding his house, living off the land, hunting deer, squirrel, and rabbit, taking fully matured corn off the corn stalks, as Grandpa had told me I could, and occasionally breaking up the monotony by having some fish and snapping turtle. I knew how to stalk game. I knew how to skin it, cook it, and make it taste delicious.

I knew how to do all this stuff, I'd lived under the stars without a tent as a Marine, and I'd lived in the woods with and without a tent in my grandparent's forest. On the one hand, I knew what I was doing, on the other, I was required to help everyone around me.

Thankfully, the teachers recognized that in showing everyone how to do things, I was doing a majority of the work, so they finally let me off the teaching hook.

That extra credit better be damn good in the end.

I ended up being the one person to not have a partner when it was time to go hunting, which I was just fine with, because I disappeared to start the hunt before the teachers had officially released everyone. My dinner of rabbit and squirrel was already half cooked by the time everyone else got back, marinating in a lovely stew that I'd spiced and seasoned with various herbs I'd found in the forest undergrowth.

Habit from Before dictated that I eat lightly, for quick movement, and maintain a high state of alert for unknown threats. I stayed up late, and got up early, staying in a light sleep I'd begun perfecting once again in this lifetime, after waking up one too many times with itching powder in my pajamas after coming to live with Naruto. I'd had it Before, but I needed it again as a ninja, and it saved me from being doused with water by Suzume-sensei, who congratulated me the next day, and told the class I'd been the only one to successfully evade being doused. All of my classmates were shivering in the chill morning air, their clothes damp as they glared at me. I just hummed to myself as I packed my stuff up quickly and efficiently, disappearing as soon as Suzume-sensei told the class to head home and change and shower before bringing our issued gear back to the Academy.

Every Thursday and Friday following that one in late August, we spent out in the field, slowly progressing from basic camping, to laying traps, creating perimeters, digging pits, tracking in unfamiliar territory, everything we would need to know for when on missions out in the rough. I aced it all, all of this very familiar territory that I'd had to internalize Before. Whenever we met up, Shikako told horror stories of how she'd vaguely managed to avoid being soaked thanks to her chakra sensitivity, to which I told her she needed to get a seventh sense, since we both already had a sixth, to tell her when she's in danger that didn't depend on her sensitivity at all. She seemed horrified when I told her this, as if the idea of not using her sensitivity had been her plan for her whole life. I changed the subject then, figuring she still hadn't thought that far ahead.

While our sensitivity was awesome, it wasn't the end all of sensory abilities. It was like new infantryman Before thinking that night vision goggles let them see everything in the dark. While, yes, technically, they do, you have to have days on days' worth of experience to be able to recognize objects at night through NVG's, because you weren't used to seeing the world in neon green.

When I next had a meal with Gramps in October, it was at dinner, since he'd been extra busy with paperwork that day, and we had been reviewing our performances out in the field. He commented on how well I was doing, wondering where I'd learned all of the skills I'd been using out in the field, which I simply ignored, and changed the subject. There was one more field training for the month of October, and then after that, we only did field ops once a month for the rest of the school year.

Nothing unusual happened, though Shikako and I finally got our kanji inking within the necessary parameters necessary for us to begin making exploding notes, though we agreed to wait until summer time to begin experimenting with that, not wanting to chance someone bumping us in class and setting of a dynamite stick's worth of explosive power in our faces. We continued working on our kanji though, determined to add speed to perfection, which was far more difficult than one would expect.

For Yule season, Naruto managed to arrange a little gift exchange between us Uzumaki, and the Nara Head family, with Naruto gifting everyone with flowers of some kind, though this time he was smart enough to not turn it into a joke. I got a variety of things for the Nara family, a recipe book of exotic dishes from Kirigakure for Yoshino, a personally made chess board with pieces with written instructions for Shikaku, several spools of ninja wire for Shikamaru with a note saying "If ever there is both a light, and an object, there must be a shadow, no matter how small."

Shikako and I almost got laughed out of the room, the both of us having gotten the exact same, extremely high end calligraphy ink and brush set. I'd ended up dipping into my secret account to pay for it, the price somewhere around three months' worth of rent for me and Naruto, which made me wonder if Shikako had paid for it herself, or if she'd convinced daddy dearest to pay for it.

That man could say what he wanted, but he was putty around his daughter's fingers.

She could use "Doe Eyes" like a master, though I think she was taking advantage of the fact that she'd had who knew how many fawns and does to learn from.

Right after the celebration though, I spent a week making codes for Konoha, which were once again implemented on January first, and I once again put sixty thousand away in my secret bank account.

When school resumed, we began learning the basic mechanics for chakra manipulation to pull off ninjutsu. We knew the theory from the year before, but now we were learning the actual twist and pull and push behind the hand seals. I already knew all of this from when I'd spent weeks and months in the Konoha Public Library, but now that I had someone showing as well as telling, it was so much easier. My hand seals were flawless, according to Suzume-sensei, so while everyone was trying to twist their hands into the right forms, she moved me on to learning the hand seal sequences for the Academy basic three. They were easy, with the Kawarimi being the most complicated because of how many things you were doing, in addition to it having the most hand seals at five total.

It wasn't until late February that something unusual happened.

"Kasai, I'd like you to meet one of my students." Gramps told me when we had lunch. "He's back at my office right now, and he would like to meet you."

I squinted sharply at him, and spoke my thoughts aloud.

"The only students you ever had were the Sannin, consisting of Senju Tsunade, Jiraiya, and Orochimaru, the latter of which defected from the village as an S rank nuke-nin." I stated, which got a nod from Gramps, in addition to a frown. "Tsunade, though not a nuke-nin, is classified as 'on vacation' and has been for over twenty years, with legend stating her parting words were something along the lines of 'I'm never coming back to this hellhole.'"

Gramps frowned even more. I ignored it.

"That leaves Jiraiya, the only one of your students to remain openly loyal to Konoha, a reputed pervert, and also the spymaster of Konoha in one hell of an open secret. Am I missing anything?" I asked.

"No, I think you got everything." Gramps drawled dryly. "Now, since you're done with your ramen, why don't we go meet him in my office?"

"Sounds good, Gramps." I smiled cheekily, and with that, he put a hand on my shoulder and we disappeared in a Shunshin.

And reappeared in his office, where I stumbled slightly, but quickly shook off the disorientation inherent with the high speed movement technique. Almost immediately, my chakra sense was assaulted by a high power signature I'd never felt before, and I whirled towards it, falling into the defensive opening of my taijutsu style, and holding there. That was when I saw him.

It had to be Jiraiya, nobody else had hair quite like that, or dressed like that, or had a giant-ass scroll hooked onto them. But I didn't drop my guard.

"Who are you?" I asked.

He looked at me, then ignored me as he spoke to Gramps.

"Oi, sensei," he grumbled. "I thought you said you were getting me Konoha's new code master?"

He said this as he stepped around me, and I easily shuffled on the balls of my feet to continue facing him, angling my body to provide a smaller target, while simultaneously allowing myself a greater avenue of attack.

"Kasai, stand down," Gramps stated, moving to sit behind his desk, a pipe appearing in his mouth. "Jiraiya, I'd like you to meet Konoha's newest code master, Kasai."

I slowly moved out of my taijutsu stance, and went to stand slightly behind and to the left of Jiraiya, keeping him constantly just forward of my peripherals, in that perfect spot between obviously staring at him, and side-eying him.

"What, the brat?" Jiraiya asked, turning his head to stare at me.

"I wonder how much you really know if you're actually a spy-master like everyone says you are." I drawled in English, earning a look from both people visible, as well as that all too familiar twist of chakra from everyone else that I was so used to feeling from ANBU level signatures.

This would prove to be interesting.

So, yeah. This is a thing. Leave a review please!