Chapter Two: The Forbidden Scroll

The boy lied, and won.

He noticed it then.

It was just a single line of text, scrawled in a light, messy way at the very edge of the parchment where paper met wood. But he bent down, and in the darkness, his (demon, demon) eyes picked out the words easily. "Perseverance is the key to victory," he read, "and you have persevered."

Then, beneath that line of text, where the paper all but melded into the wood of the roller, there were a few more words: "Hokage Mountain, Yondaime's right eye. Seal."

Excitement grew inside Naruto. It was like… like a secret message! It was like the book that Iruka-sensei read to them once, where the ninja went through all these obscure clues and ended up rescuing a princess! Naruto haphazardly rolled up the Scroll again and tossed it into the brush at the base of the tree. He made a clone – easy now, just a flex of that inner thing called chakra and a poof – and it approached and arranged the branches so that the bright red-and-crème of the Scroll wasn't visible.

Naruto laughed, quietly, in exultation, looked at his clone (his only companion) and said, in what he imagined was a heroic voice, "Let's go!" The clone nodded happily in confirmation.

He gathered chakra to his feet and prepared to take to the foliage for the long trip back to the Hokage Mountain. Plans were already running through his head. He'd need a diversion, and some clones, maybe some rope…

"Boss?"

"Quiet, I'm thinking," Naruto snapped, as he continued his breakneck pace, the clone following closely behind him.

"Boss," the clone persisted, "What's a seal?"

The Konoha Shinobi Library was perhaps the biggest ninja library in all of the Five Great Nations. (The Land of Trees possibly had a bigger one, but it was not one of the Great Nations and, besides, all the 'ninja' there were studious little librarians, not real ninjas.)

It contained jutsu as high as S-ranked down to the simplest of E-ranked, Academy jutsu. Due to this, it was sectioned off into 5 levels.

The first and ground level was the "E-Rank" level, open to all Genin. It contained a catalog of the things that could be found on higher levels (to encourage effort toward rank advancement), the three simplest jutsu, and the Konoha history textbooks. The second level – D-Level – was open to seasoned Genin, or rather, Genin who had been such for more than 6 months or whose Jounin-sensei accompanied them or gave them a pass. Third was reserved for chuunin, fourth for Jounin, and the final level for elite Jounin or ANBU.

Needless to say, most elite Jounin and ANBU didn't spend their free hours browsing musky old library texts, so apart from security, the top levels were mostly empty. The upper libraries themselves had very few texts, as confidential information that was ANBU classified generally wasn't given to a public place such as the library. It was mostly filled with specialized texts that, while accessible to lower-ranked specialists in minor forms (such as TenTen's sealing scrolls) were deemed dangerous enough to be limited to the general ninja. So, the library had kind of a conical shape, with cylindrical levels that got smaller and smaller as the stories progressed upward.

Information on sealing was generally considered dangerous, as sealing itself is a dangerous art, so even basic information was confined to at least B, or A Rank.

Not, of course, that something silly like security could hinder the unstoppable force known as Uzumaki Naruto.

Here's how it went.

See, Uzumaki Naruto pulled out his super-awesome ninja Hokage powers and walked through the walls and ceilings. He adopted a slow-motion, dramatic walk as something burst into explosive flames behind him before reaching impossibly well-secured levels and memorizing the information he needed before—

In all seriousness, it took one jutsu and a little bit of good-ninja cheating.

One hour before noon that day, a one-eyed Jounin with silver hair buried his face in an orange book as he walked calmly through the lower levels of the Konoha Shinobi Library. He waved absentmindedly at the door guard – "Yo" – and casually slouched in, settling himself in a sofa at the top level of the library, with a great view of the Hokage Mountain.

Nobody stopped him.

Presently he tucked the orange book away and stood up, casually. The door guard had long since settled himself against the door and was reading something. 'Kakashi' strolled over to the many shelves of scrolls that lay in the brightly lit interior of the room, past the dusty reading area.

It took him several minutes of tense examination to figure out how the scrolls were sorted. 'Kakashi' startled at the slightest noises – but that was only characteristic of a war veteran. It was only after finding an entire shelf of books on 'Seals and Sealing' that 'Kakashi' encountered his first problem. The problem was that his pouch was so small, only two of the books could fit in the pouch.

'Kakashi' glanced around. He didn't want to stay here for too long, because there was the chance that he would be found out.

Quickly, he decided to learn what he could and take two books with him. He opened the shortest, "Basic Seals", and began reading quickly.

One of the more obscure shinobi arts is the practice of Sealing. Although most shinobi do not study this branch of jutsu extensively, even in an amateur's hands, sealing can become something extraordinarily powerful. For example, rudimentary knowledge of how to create a seal can allow a shinobi to create an explosion tag that can level a house. A containment seal can be altered to store a lake full of water.

"That's really cool," Naruto decided.

However, perhaps the first paragraph is a bit misleading. One can change these seals to level countries, and hold oceans (with liberal application of chakra), but there is no such thing as an 'explosion' seal or a 'containment' seal. Seals are like power lines, through which a wave of chakra can flow and be amplified or altered. The Sealing amateur needs only know special arrangements of these lines, known as 'Furu'. Putting several Furu together create a seal. For example, an 'explosion' seal is made up of three Furu – [Amplify], [Fire], and [Eject].

This was going way over the blonde's head (or rather, the semblance of Kakashi's head). However, he drove on through the text.

A Sealing Master, on the other hand, is not limited to the 100s of Furu when creating seals. A Sealing Master understands how chakra flows through the lines and how different formations of lines can change the chakra. Thus, a Master can create any sort of seal, including ones to teleport (Hiraishin), grow trees (Yakima Method), and even create new Furu such as the Life, created by Takimoto Fujiro of the Sand.

Naruto swallowed. Sealing sounded incredibly complex. He turned the page, expecting another block of text, but instead came face-to-face with a really strange scribble. It was circular and round, with no angles. It seemed to be divided into four uneven sections.

This is the Containment Seal. It is comprised of four Furu. You, as a novice, should first practice copying this seal. Start from the upper left corner and begin. Be sure to use stiff paper, a nice brush, and Sealing ink – rather, ink that is three parts ink and one part blood. The blood is needed to channel chakra.

Clockwise from the upper left, the Containment Seal is comprised of the [Space], [Activate], [Time-Stop], and [Shield] Furu. You can see that the arrangements seem to be blocks of text, connected by lines that form a circle; this is because the circle is the most stable shape for chakra to circulate in.

This Seal can contain objects. If an object, such as a shuriken, is placed on top of this, the Sealer can place a hand on any line in the [Activate] Furu of the seal and apply a small burst of chakra to the seal. Then the object will disappear. When the object is needed again, the Sealer should repeat the process of applying chakra to the Seal through his hand. (Be warned that this should take quite a bit of chakra.) The object will then reappear.

Naruto read the page twice to make sure he understood it. He then placed a hand on the seal and summoned up chakra. A blue haze appeared around him for a second, and part of it – so little he could barely see it – was drawn into the seal. He felt the loss of chakra as a scribe who copies two books every day might feel the writing of a character. "Was that all the chakra it takes?" He wondered out loud. "That's about a tenth of what I use for Henge…"

There was a poof of smoke. "That took a while," the boy observed. When the white smoke cleared up, he was somewhat surprised to see that it had worked. There were two strange kunai sitting on top of the book. For some reason, they looked flimsier and had three prongs. Naruto shrugged and tucked them into his kunai pouch.

It was then that it hit him. "If this works, then I can just seal all the books away and take them out!"

Now just to find a sheet of paper… and a brush… and ink… with blood in it.

This was going to take a while.

He was back again after a day, under the guise of a brown-haired smoker wearing the green Konoha vest. Aware that he had to pick a Jounin to get into the upper level, he at last found a man leading a genin team he recognized – Shikamaru, Choji, and Ino.

He had watched the team for a while under the guise of a female civilian. They were eating at a popular barbeque place that he had never gone to because of expense. The man seemed friendly, laughing easily and smiling a lot. He most likely talked more than the would-be-sensei. He was also rather sharp, being, of course, a Jounin. He had glanced up after about the tenth minute and Naruto blushed and walked away, trying to imitate a woman with a crush.

The blonde was now rather glad that he had spent so much time getting the 'girl act' down perfect.

He swaggered into the library again. "Hey," he greeted the same chuunin guard.

The guard looked bemused. "There have been a lot of visitors recently," he remarked.

The brunette Jounin looked up curiously. "Who else came here?" He questioned.

"…Kakashi-san," the chuunin confided after a pause. "But he might have only come to get the Icha Icha collection. There's a section for those on this level." His eyes stared at the hidden Naruto intently. Icha Icha? He vaguely remembered seeing that on a poster ad close to the red light district of Konoha, where his home was. It was a small, orange book – it was the book that Kakashi had read on the fateful day of his Genin test.

For a man to carry a book like that around in his weapons pouch…

"Nah, he's got all of them," Naruto guessed. The guard was obviously suspicious. As far as the boy could tell, however, it was the right answer, because the man relaxed and waved him through the door. He walked through immediately but only relaxed when he heard the telltale thud of the guard sitting down again.

Immediately he burst into action. As one hand fished the paper, brush, and ink jar from his pouch, his feet led him to the aisle where the books were. After his last visit, he had decided it was too risky and had left all of the books there. He smoothed out the paper and took out the book, flipping quickly to the page where the seal was.

His hands easily traced the shape of the seal onto the rice paper.

It was a skill from a lifetime of negligence. In class, when they had gone over forgery, everybody had been astonished at how good he was.

"I told ya I was good at this kind of stuff!" Naruto exclaimed in victory. Iruka peered from one sheet to the other. There was really no difference, other than the inkblot on the original copy – but Naruto had even made a (good) attempt at reproducing that.

"It's really very good," Iruka reluctantly agreed. Suspicion immediately formed in his mind. "Did you really do this, Naruto?" The loud, brash prankster couldn't possibly have done so well on something even Iruka found challenging, could he?

"Of course!" The boy explained, with his cheeks puffed out and eyes unabashed. Nobody thought that he was lying. Well, nobody but her. Haruno Sakura slipped through the crowd and quickly examined the papers. "Isn't it great, Sakura-chan?" Naruto prompted. Haruno Sakura was a leader of Sasuke's fan girls. Surely, if she complimented him, then somebody would agree!

She smiled, but it looked victorious rather than congratulatory. It came to Naruto then that Sakura had always had a viciously quick mind. "There's no way you could have done this," she declared. He vaguely heard somebody agree loudly, but all his attention was focused on keeping the angry heat in him down. "I bet you failed so badly that you decided to take Sasuke-kun's work for yourself!" Horrified at this turn of events, Naruto couldn't even protest. "Isn't that right, Sasuke-kun?"

He turned to the boy – surely Sasuke's pride would keep him from accepting this, right? There was a moment of tense silence. Naruto stared at his dark-haired classmate. Finally, the Uchiha nodded once, slowly. Sakura turned to him. There was a triumphant glint in her eyes.

In that moment, she looked beautiful, in the way that a soldier kills beautifully. She had gone in to win, and with the support of everybody else's unconditional beliefs, she did.

So his paper was switched with the Uchiha's. Everybody naturally lauded the 'genius', even though the boy himself wore a grimace. And Naruto stared down at his paper, filled with the cramped, stiff writing of Uchiha Sasuke, and smiled as he heard the praises. Because no matter what anybody said, they belonged to him.

The next test day, he stole two sheets of paper. With his usual abysmal, half-of-it-blank performance, he finished one. On another, he made an 'effort' but made it fail miserably. This he did in Sasuke's handwriting, which he had studied over the weekend. Of course, as he turned it in, he palmed the bottom sheet, which the Uchiha had turned in first, and slid his fake there instead. He almost froze when he heard the loud crinkling of paper as he folded Sasuke's test to fit up his sleeves. After class, the Uchiha was dragged apart for a 'talk'.

Revenge was a dish best served with a mask of innocence and harmlessness.

He heaved all dozen-some books on the sheet. Placing a hand on top of it, he murmured, "Seal." There was a slight delay of about two seconds before a puff of white smoke (the byproduct of used chakra, as he recalled from a remedial class) enveloped the books. They disappeared.

"Is everything okay in there?" The guard peered into the room, having felt the short burst of chakra. He saw 'Asuma' reaching up to the top shelf (which was ridiculously high) and laughed before turning back around.

Fifteen minutes later, the chuunin peered in and called out, "There's a message for ya. Says you need to go to a Jounin meeting in forty-five." Naruto nodded affirmation and went on thumbing through a text labeled 'Genin Lessons'. It was quite interesting – tree walking and water walking, along with some team strategies that he could probably combine with Kage Bunshin.

Half an hour later, Naruto walked out of the library with the face of an old smoker and at least a dozen smuggled books. He waved goodbye to the chuunin guard and lazily sauntered through the front doors, making it to an alleyway before taking off his guise and speeding away.

On another note, Asuma was late for a Jounin meeting. That is to say, Kakashi arrived before him. Usually, the meeting went on regardless, but with two Jounin missing out of the relatively small force, nothing started. Annoyed, Sarutobi sent Kurenai to find him. Kurenai, being annoyed at having been made to wait for two hours, left quickly and with much rage.

While an ever-alert Kakashi was at an entirely different level, the sleepy, unsuspecting Asuma, who had just napped with his genin team, was no match for the enraged femme fatale.

Author's Notes: 10.31.2012: Minor edits & additions

Thanks again to all my reviewers; you guys just keep making my days brighter.

Liffae ^-~