"Took you longer than I thought," said Mitarashi Anko through mouthful of dango. The woman was propped up in the doorway to the room which she had locked Sakura in only an hour and half prior, and if Sakura had the strength to do it, the pinkette would've planted her fist in the older kunoichi's face.

As such, having been dosed with chakra poison by the other woman and only recently having been cured of said affliction, Sakura was in no position to display that kind of behavior. "And what exactly, Mitarashi-san, led you to believe that I would have been equipped to handle that any more efficiently than I did."

Anko shrugged, nonchalant and evidently oblivious to Sakura's annoyance. "You've been a genin longer than my team was."

Sakura quirked an eyebrow in annoyance. "And how, exactly, did your team handle that situation?"

"Mm? Naoki opened up his tenketsu and dispelled it. Though, Ryou convulsed and passed out the first time."

"And you, Mitarashi-san?"

"Me? I just blasted chakra through my system until it broke up."

Sakura glared, pinching the bridge of her nose. 'Because of course she did.'

"And what exactly was the purpose of that?"

Anko declined to answer right away, instead shoving off of the doorway and walking into an adjacent room, where there was a table and chairs set up in the very middle. She took a seat, gesturing to Sakura to do the same, where there was a canteen and ration bar waiting for her, as well as what appeared to be a chakra soldier pill.

Doing as instructed, Sakura took a seat, washing the chakra pill down with the water from the canteen. She tore into the ration bar and listened as the other kunoichi started to explain.

"ANBU says that you've been doing analysis for them. Apparently, they want you to have a some more practical knowledge of your subject matter."

"And what exactly is that?"

"Otogakure. ANBU seems to think that I have some expertise in their 'kage's methods,'" drawled the other kunoichi, pulling up a satchel onto the table from under her chair.

Sakura gave a questioning look as Anko up-ended the satchel, scrolls tumbling out in front of her. "Why is that, Mitarashi-san?"

"I've already told you – cut that 'Mitarashi-san' shit out. And because the Snake Bastard was my jōnin sensei on my genin team," she said absently, opening and reading over one of the scrolls.

Sakura froze, stuttering out, "O-Orochimaruo was your jōnin sensei? One of the sannin?"

Anko gave a look. "The traitorous one. Yeah."

Sakura was about to inquire further when a scroll smacked her in the face.

"Read that," commanded the kunoichi, chair scraping against the floor as she rose from her place at the table. "It starts with the basics. You should be able to get through the rest well enough if you start with that one. Keep it to yourself, of course. Once you leave here, those go no where but your room at the ANBU compound until you return them to me."

Sakura looked out at the scrolls on the table. There were exactly eleven. Hopefully they weren't too extensive. "When do I need to have them read by?"

Anko had already turned heel to leave the room at that point. She didn't look back as she replied. "By tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?" she cried. "Mi—Anko, hey, wait!"

The other kunoichi failed to turn around and give her a more reasonable deadline, so Sakura despaired for five minutes, head on the table, staring forlornly at the half-eaten ration bar on the table. 'All this in one night. Doesn't this crazy woman know I have shit to do? Wasn't drugging me and locking me in a room enough for one day? And then I have to go deal with Ocelot, who doesn't even want to be training me.'

After sufficient wallowing, she snapped up, ready to deal with the task in front her.

'Okay. First is first. I can't do this here. I need a controlled study space. Bright lighting, quiet room, even temperature, a clean desk, a chair that's neither comfortable nor uncomfortable,' she thought, eyes shifting to the ration bar, 'and not terrible food.'

It didn't take long for Sakura to get back to her room in the compound, though she did take the time to pick up a plethora of snacks to munch on while she studied. It was a shame that she wouldn't be able to keep any notes she took on the subject, but she had decided to take down notes while studying to be burned later. Reorganizing information into her own thoughts and words had always helped her as an Academy student. And if she were to have all this read and processed by tomorrow then hopefully it would help her again.

When the pinkette opened the first scroll, she was surprised by what she found – it was all writing almost exclusively concerning chakra. It was fairly comprehensive in terms of breadth, though its depth was fairly extensive too, a number of the writings on theory being accompanied by experiments with hard data. It actually occurred to her that this was a personal scroll of Orochimaru himself. It would been something to marvel at had it not read like the personal writings of a genius of his level – that is, to say, vastly complex, if very well articulated.

She was in the middle of an explanation about how tenketsu reacted to chakra when geared to the different elements and how they reacted to normal chakra when she realized that she only had five minutes to get to her meeting with Ocelot.

'Damn, damn, double damn,' she cussed to herself. Throwing her casual clothes off, she put on the sleeveless black ANBU shirt and gloves and slipped on her sandals. Grabbing her weapons and securing them, she then donned her blank recruit mask and rushed out of her room.

It wasn't until she had already been jogging for three minutes that she realized that she'd forgotten to locate Training Room Twelve. Sighing a big sigh, she snagged a random person and after apologizing profusely, asked for directions.

All-in-all, she wound up being five minutes late. Her new sensei was severely unimpressed, but after a scolding and another bout of apologizing, they began the lesson.

"Draw your blade," said Ocelot. "I need to see to see you fight firsthand if I'm expected to break you out of mediocrity."

Sakura grit her teeth behind her mask. She was beginning to expect that she'd prefer Anko to Ocelot. Regardless though, this was to be her new teacher, so she did as instructed, drawing her katana and taking her stance. Ocelot did the same, mirroring her stance and instructing her to begin. Taking a few steps, she angled her blade downward, keeping her eye on her opponent's katana. Thrusting her blade out as a feint, she aimed toward Ocelot's right thigh only to run straight into the tip of her opponent's blade.

"Disappointing," came Ocelot's condescending voice. "Return to the starting point and try again."

The second attempt went much the same. On the third, she managed to sidestep and avoid impaling herself on the blunted tip, bringing down an overhanded slash that was handily parried by Ocelot. Her blade was knocked aside as it were a mere twig and Sakura took a slash to the face.

Her fourth and fifth attempts were better, if not lasting more than three to six exchanges. The difference between an actual, experienced ANBU operative and the recruits was stark – Sakura had gone from simply outclassed to laughably out of her league. 'And this is supposed to help me improve?'

The sixth time around, she charged in, only to come crashing to the ground, dragged by an invisible force. She sat up, looking behind her mask at her instructor. "What was that?"

"That," said Ocelot, "was not a mindless, straightforward, painfully obvious attack."

Sakura rose from her position on the floor, staring dumbly at the other woman, waiting for her to continue.

"You're supposedly training to be initiated into the ANBU, and yet you always attack head-on," drawled the ANBU operative. "This isn't a shinobi assault team you're training for. ANBU don't fight fair, especially when our opponent has the advantage."

"But this is a kata—"

"First – this isn't your little training group. Second – I just told you ANBU didn't fight fair or on someone else's terms. What's hard to understand about that?"

Sakura frowned. She knew that ANBU operated outside of the lines, but was she supposed to break the rules ANBU set for her as well? "You still didn't answer my question, you know."

"What dragged you to the ground?" inquired. She palmed a kunai and tossed it up. To Sakura's surprise, it floated right above Ocelot's hand.

After a few seconds floating in the air, Sakura realized what the woman was showing her. "Chakra threads."

As she vocalized her realization, glowing strands of chakra lit up underneath the kunai, holding it in place inches above Ocelot's gloved hand. "I didn't get assigned to be your instructor so I could browbeat kenjutsu into your head. Though, by the end my instruction, you will be able to embarrass those fools in the training ring."

"So you're teaching me advanced techniques instead?" ventured the pinkette.

Ocelot scoffed. "I'm not some private tutor hired to teach you a laundry list of jutsus. What I'm doing is teaching you how to fight, how to think about fighting like an ANBU operative. Command seems to think our strengths lie in similar areas, so that's why you're here instead of stuck in the ring."

The younger woman nodded slowly. "Okay. So where do we start?"

"First, you're going to let that lesson we just went over soak into your head. Second, you will be learning form chakra threads and manipulate objects with them. The lesson, you can soak in on your own time. During our allotted time, we'll work on the second agenda."

As it turned out, Ocelot was a much more attentive instructor than instructor than Anko had been. Whereas Anko apparently seemed to be of the 'throw the child in the water to teach it to teach to swim' variety of teacher, Ocelot would be the kind to have you read literature on the subject before you dipped your toe in it and then once you had accomplished that grand step, yank you back out to lecture you for another hour before having you wade in waist deep.

Luckily for Sakura, the hardest thing about forming and using chakra threads aspect of chakra control, which Sakura was not only stellar at but also recently had a large amount of practice in.

Essentially, the usage of chakra threads was like directing of the flow of chakra through one's body but then forcing it out of the tenketsu in one's fingertips. It was harder than it sounded though because once out of the body, there were no fixed points to direct the chakra to. Then there was the fact that it mattered whether or not you used chakra from your hand or from your entire bod. If you used chakra from your whole body, the threads would be more stable and stronger due to a larger influx of chakra – though, Ocelot had been sure to note that the truly adept didn't need to use chakra from the whole body to have good threads and that much chakra flow tended to make the threads harder to control.

Regardless of the nuance, though, Sakura rapidly progressed. She didn't quite have dexterous control of using the threads to actually control what they were attached to, but the threads themselves and their movements were solid. Ocelot appeared to be surprised by Sakura's rapid growth and extent of control, but that appeared to only make her push Sakura even harder.

By the time their session ended, Ocelot had set the a goal for Sakura to have mastered plain manipulation of simple objects and create a steady stream of invisible threads, the hallmark of true chakra thread usage.

That brought Sakura to her current situation, twirling a kunai with her chakra threads while pouring over Orochimaru's writings. She had found, to her relief, that the subsequent scrolls had been much more focused on a singular subject, which consequently left her with less to read. The content within all of them was fascinating, if a little grotesque when referencing certain experiments, and she found herself going back to scrolls she had already read to compare them with new information she had learned from others.

Three or four scrolls in, she had managed to run out of paper for notes. She briefly entertained going to obtain some more but found herself too enthralled by the material to put it down. As much as she hated the man for taking Sasuke-kun away, she had to admit that Ororchimaru truly had prodigious talent and a mind for research and experimentation. True, her stomach turned several times when he detailed his methods of experimentation – she could see why the village had never disclosed what the Snake Sannin had been doing in his free time and why the Third had finally declared him an enemy of Konoha.

"So if the poison you used on me yesterday attacked tenketsu from Zone I, that means that there's a fundamental difference in tenketsu? Well, of course, otherwise he wouldn't have broken down the zones like he did, right? Unless, chakra travels differently in the zones, meaning that it wasn't necessarily the—"

"Sakura!" yelled Anko, pinching the bridge of her nose. She halted her advancement, stopping fast on a tree limb. More quietly she added, "Please, shut up."

The pinkette scowled, as they resumed travel. She knew she had been peppering the older kunoichi with questions, but what did Anko expect after giving her so much information to read in one night? Besides, wasn't she supposed to be teaching Sakura, not just dumping scrolls on her and drugging her? "Can I at least know where we're going?"

Anko didn't give any signs of hearing her, though she knew the woman had.

'I guess that's a 'no.'' They had been travelling for a few hours, and Anko hadn't deemed it necessary to fill Sakura in on their destination. She'd asked if she should put in for leave at the compound, but the jōnin had waved off her concerns. She was beginning to expect that she shouldn't have listened to her, but Sakura knew better than to complain. Something about all the questions seemed to irritate Anko – she guessed the woman didn't have overly fond memories of her former sensei.

Thankfully, the pair made their stop shortly after Sakura had voiced her unanswered question. There were in the middle of a large clearing, very unlike the densely wooded area where the bunker had been on yesterday's trip.

"Geeze, I can't believe you're really interested in all that garbage," bemoaned Anko, fiddling with her fishnet where some leaves had gotten stuck in the mesh. "And as for your question – yes, the tenketsu are different but not in the way that your think. And yeah, the chakra flows differently because of that, but the poison blocked the output nodes, not the receptors, so—"

"Wait, wait, then that means—"

"Shut it kid, I'll dig around for some scrolls that explain it. I'm not about to waste my day gabbing about chakra theory."

"So this isn't common knowledge for most jōonin?" asked Sakura curiously. A shake of Anko's head, said that, 'no, it wasn't.' "But you seem to know so much about it, and you don't really – I mean, er, never mind."

"And what's that supposed to mean, brat?" barked the jonin, shooting a glare at Sakura. "What? Just because that shit's boring doesn't mean I can't grasp what's going on. I'm not an idiot."

Sakura kept quiet on that front, doubting that the jōnin would care for her thoughts on the matter. Still, Anko was a former student of the snake sannin's; perhaps there was more to her than there seemed to be. She supposed she was in a good position to find out personally. Anko finished taking a swig out of her canteen, capped it, and put it in her pack.

"Alright, kid, I brought you out here to meet someone," said the woman, wiping her mouth on her sleeve. "Stand back a little."

'Meet someone?' she thought to herself. Her question was answered as Anko bit down on her thumb.

'Ah. A summon.'