I do not own Naruto.
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Quick recap:
Naruto survives an attempted murder and learns to use his chakra. He ends up creating two techniques, both lacking names. One shoots a bullet or blade of sharpened chakra, while the other creates a tightly compressed orb of wickedly spinning chakra. He gets the Hokage to enroll him in the Academy and starts learning the three techniques he'll need to graduate - the Transformation, Body Replacement, and the Clone Techniques. Dissatisfied with the need for hand-signs and vocalization, he sets out to understand how these three techniques work and how to do them by molding the chakra without the use of hand-signs or his voice. He succeeds, prepared to enter the Academy with quite the repertoire of skills.
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Uzumaki Naruto walked calmly and deliberately to the Ninja Academy of Konohagakure. As he walked, his thoughts touched on many topics, but the most significant of them was how to act during his days at the Academy.
He knew a few things. First, most people older than ten years old hated him with a wicked passion that he didn't understand. However, that was not important to him as he knew that they couldn't do anything to him; he would investigate the subject later. Second, with a little bit of Taijutsu training and physical conditioning, he'd be fully capable of graduating. He was planning on studying Genjutsu on his own. Third, the best in the class was put with the dead center and dead last ranking members; he definitely didn't want to show his talent and be stuck with the world's dumbest teammate. The fourth thing he knew wasn't so much something he knew as something he didn't know. He didn't know how the adult ninjas would treat him. This would be crucial. If the instructor was nice to him, it would be a real problem to act as though he were the worst in class and get placed with a good and an excellent teammate with whom he would certainly be able to excel. Furthermore, this team was traditionally given the most skilled jounin sensei of all of them, due to the fact that the dead last would need the most improvement.
So, with these thoughts and more running through his head, Uzumaki Naruto stepped into the Academy, walked through the halls, and entered room 101, the room where all first years had most of their classes. He took a seat in the back, and waited for the others to file in.
He observed them quietly as they walked in, while ignoring the teacher sitting in the front glaring at him. Nobody in particular caught his eye, and nobody seemed to be from any prestigious clans, so he didn't think that there would be any spectacular talent in this group. He sighed and sat down, ready for one hell of a year.
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The year passed quickly. Nothing of any particular use was learned, so Naruto was forced to continue his studies outside of school. Since the teacher, Masanori-sensei, always seemed to "lose" his work and insist that it wasn't done, frame him for things he didn't do, and give him zeroes on his tests, Naruto saw no particular reason to even bother going, and regularly spent days at a time in the forest, training his body and his abilities. He could now do all sorts of techniques silently and without hand-signs; he had even come up with a simple term for it: if he could do a skill with no hand-signs and no sound, he had mastered it.
Mastery of even the simplest of techniques could take weeks, considering that he needed to truly understand it to bend the chakra to his will. He had taken about four weeks to master the Wind Release: Great Breakthrough technique. After all, he needed to spend a lot of that time in the library, reading up on the topics relevant to the attack. It was actually rather elegant, how it worked. The user would create a microscopic shell of super-dense chakra, impenetrable by the gasses that made up the atmosphere. The ball would expand, creating an ever-growing vacuum. Then, the user loosened the walls of the shell enough for air to rush in. The user then re-thickens the walls, so that the air is trapped within. Immediately afterwards, he splits this wall into two and shrinks the one in the middle so that the air is super-compressed. The outside shell loosens and lets air in, then hardens and splits again, compressing the air again, around the already-compressed air on the inside. The already-compressed air is released into the compressed-air shell, making it even more compressed. This process is repeated until the user has compressed the air to a level that he or she is pleased with. They then collapse one side of it, allowing the air to rush out at incredibly high speeds.
At first, this process had taken Naruto a long time. But, with a week of practice, it was second-nature to him. It was almost like doing kata for Taijutsu. The more you did it, the faster and easier it got. Now he was capable of releasing massive gusts of wind capable of leveling trees in only one second of preparation. After another week, he had perfected a variant in which the walls of the final shell degraded over time, so they could be thrown into a group of people and they would detonate after a set amount of time.
The end of the year came, and, just as he had expected, the teacher failed him and made him repeat the year. It wasn't much of a loss, though. There was nobody particularly spectacular in that class, certainly nobody he cared to spend a year or two with as a genin.
The next year came, and he had begun to take up doing pranks as practice for infiltration and stealth over the short break.
Entering the classroom the day that class was set to begin, he was ecstatic to see a boy with pale white eyes and a beige jacket. A Hyuuga, for sure. This was definitely a class that he wanted to graduate with. And, after seeing the determination of a boy with almost no chakra in his body, he decided that he would attempt to land himself in the middle of the rankings, so that he could team up with Hyuuga Neji and Rock Lee. In fact, he became fast friends with both of them, sharing Lee's determination in bettering himself and being the only person willing to put up with Neji's glumness. Unfortunately, the teacher, Takao-sensei, was just like the last one. He was completely incapable of getting good grades with a teacher like that, and ended up failing, though through his training that year he had developed rather strong Taijutsu skills, just like Rock Lee.
But that year was not a waste. He had begun mastering more and more techniques, though most were of the non-elemental variety. Water Release techniques he had found easy, though. All he had to do was one of three things. Pull water from the air, pull it from the water, or create it in its most pure form using chakra. From there, he could simply control it as he wanted to, using his chakra to make it take shape and form.
Fire Release was also simple. Through his reading on the sciences he had discovered the chemistry of fire, as well as something called the "Fire Tetrahedron". It really made things rather easy for him. All he needed to do was condense his chakra into strings of matter called hydrocarbons. There was one particularly useful one called propane that was easily controlled by chakra and incredibly combustive. A little chakra-induced heat and voila, a fireball. With the oxygen in the atmosphere and his chakra constantly forming more tetrahedrons, the fireball could last for a long time, and if he needed too he could always make his own oxygen.
After discovering how to easily create and control Water and Fire Release techniques he realized something. He was creating matter, water and propane, from what he was pretty sure was an energy, chakra. He spent the entire year experimenting with this, reading up on the civilian science of Physics, and yet he still couldn't quite figure it out. Clearly more research needed to be done, because if he had learned anything it was that everything had a reason behind it.
He didn't have enough time to learn Earth and Lightning Release techniques, and Wind Release techniques were so ridiculously varied from one to another that it was pretty much unbelievable; mastering one rarely helped you master another.
But when his next year at the Academy rolled around, he had a new resolution: Learn Genjutsu.
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He walked into classroom 101... again. He was getting rather tired of teachers that wouldn't let him graduate, and if it happened again he would tell the Hokage for sure. But he would still hope that it wouldn't come to that.
He took his usual seat in the back of the room, and smiled broadly at the blue-haired, pale-eyed girl that sat next to him. Another Hyuuga, excellent.
He continued to be surprised as more people walked in. A boy with fang tattoos on his cheeks. An Inuzuka. A boy in a trench-coat with a popped collar and sunglasses. An Aburame. A boy with his hair in a telltale pine-apple shaped hair-do. A Nara. A really, really fat boy. An Akimichi. And last, but certainly not least, something that made his heart stop for a second. A boy with black hair and eyes, wearing a blue jacked with a stylized fan on the back. An Uchiha. The last one was both good and bad. Uchihas were notoriously dark, brooding, arrogant and ill-mannered, but they were also notoriously powerful. He could be a blessing for a team.
Naruto's heart stopped for the second time that day when the teacher walked in and smiled at him. Not the class, him. He could already tell that it would be an excellent year.
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As the final bell rang, the students got up and began to file out. As Naruto walked down to the floor-level of the room, he was stopped from leaving by Iruka-sensei. Naruto was simply flabbergasted. No one had ever taken this kind of initiative with him before.
"Naruto-kun, I understand that you've been having trouble in school. I just want you to know that I'll be here if you ever have questions or need help."
Naruto frowned. "Thank you sensei. I think I'll do alright this year though. And I promise to stop pranking."
Iruka was suddenly very happy. "Really?"
"Well, I promise to stop getting caught." Both parties smiled.
"I'll see you tomorrow, Naruto."
"See ya, Iruka-sensei!"
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Naruto sat quietly in the shinobi portion of the library, turning the pages of a small book at a rapid pace. The book was entitled Genjutsu: The Intricate Art of Illusions and it was one hell of a read.
It detailed the entire theoretical practice of Genjutsu, from the application of the illusion, to the sustaining of said illusion, and how illusions affected the enemy mind.
Apparently there were two types of illusions: environmental and personal. An environmental illusion was what the Transformation and Clone Techniques were. They used chakra to create a construct that could mimic sound and touch. These affected anyone around, but they were severely limited in their scope. The most useful form of this was an invisibility technique that bent light around your body, the kind that was used to Transform into something smaller than you on a larger scale. It could even be applied to an entire structure and its contents, though that required a great deal of focus and chakra.
Personal illusions only affected one person, but they were much, much more powerful than their counterparts, albeit many times more difficult to use and maintain. Personal illusions used chakra to affect the way the brain received signals from its various systems. They were normally used by placing a technique over the enemy that allowed one to control exactly what they were seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling. Because these required the user to control so many variables, it was a very difficult thing to do, but they were terrifyingly effective at breaking minds and exhausting bodies.
This was, however, an endeavor that would take Naruto years to truly master. While most illusionary techniques simply required a user to focus on what was to be seen, to have a mastery over them, as Naruto called it, required one to know what the chakra needed to do to the brain in order to bring about certain reactions. For example, a complex genjutsu is made up of thousands of steps, each of the variety of apply x amount of chakra to y.
Since this was an incredibly complex process, Naruto decided to first master the art using hand-signs and already-defined techniques. He still wouldn't vocalize the name of his technique, because that would just be stupid. It was really only there to add focus to the technique, focus that most ninja seemed completely incapable of giving.
So Naruto left the library with a book in hand, headed straight towards his favorite training ground. He let out a long sigh; it was going to be a long night.
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Naruto showed up at the Academy the next day dragging his feet, his arms hanging at his sides like they were dead. As he walked by Iruka's desk, he grabbed the coffee that was sitting there and drank it all in one gulp. Clearly not satisfied, he smiled wanly as Iruka just pointed towards a pitcher that was sitting in the corner of the room. Naruto trudged over and drank all of that, too.
Seemingly revitalized, he practically skipped to his usual seat in the back of the room. Coffee really did do wonders for him.
Iruka just sighed and shook his head as the bell rang and class began.
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Finals for the Academy had finally rolled around, and Naruto was feeling very pleased.
It was difficult, but he had managed to pull off even the trickiest of illusions. What made it particularly vexing was the fact that he had no one to practice on, and had to do it to himself. It had been a rather horrifying experience, but there were some advantages. Especially the incredible pain tolerance that he had built up as a result. However, he had been careful to very slowly build up this tolerance. Now, though, he was positive that pain would not affect him in combat, and it would take more that getting sliced up with a katana or burned with a fire technique to break his mind.
It had also made him a harder and more dangerous person. Since he was now accustomed to levels of pain that most jounin haven't even been subjected to, he thought less about hurting someone. And, since the entire thing was triggered through the brain, there were no wounds to heal, bones to set, or muscles to repair. Not that that would have been a problem; he had always healed very fast, and while he didn't understand it, he didn't really need to.
His body was now lean and tightly muscled, just like a ninja's body should be. He could move at spectacular speeds, and run for hours before tiring out. If he needed to, he could reinforce his muscles with chakra and move almost faster than the human eye could see, certainly faster than most ninjas could react.
His repertoire of mastered Ninjutsu had expanded greatly, thanks to his policy of never learning another technique until he had mastered the one he was working on.
The Body Flicker was one of his most powerful techniques; while most ninja needed hand-seals and a second to gather chakra for it, he had it down to something that he could do in a fraction of a second. The Body Flicker operated by first enhancing the muscles that needed to be used, and then adding a buffer of chakra around the user, so that there was little to no wind resistance—the buffer forced air to flow around it by using microscopic little balls that spun in the direction the air needed to go in. Finally, the technique released directed bursts of chakra behind what muscles needed to be used, in a matter very similar to how Naruto propelled his chakra "bullets" and his chakra "blades".
The result was movement at an incredible speed that seemed to be teleportation. And while it was anything but, it was still incredibly powerful, and Naruto had begun building his own Taijutsu style built solely around mastery of the technique.
Still his most powerful techniques, though, were his chakra "blades", "bullets", and his incredibly powerful "spiraling sphere".
He also had his own share of accomplishments inside of the Academy as well. He had become good friends with Kiba, Choji, and Shikamaru, and he had also realized how terrible a person Sasuke really was. It actually bothered him that so many girls would be so stupid as to chase him even when he clearly reciprocated none of their feelings. Of course Naruto had heard of the Uchiha Clan Massacre, but the idiot should have been at least smart enough to realize that he'd probably never catch up to his brother. He had stopped those thoughts when he caught word of the powerful Genjutsu that Itachi had used on his brother, knowing full well how powerful they could be.
So with a smile and a spring in his step, Naruto walked into room 101 to purposefully get a barely passing grade on his exam, and maintain his position as worst in the class. He didn't really want to be stuck with the Uchiha, but otherwise he could be put on a team of nobodies that wouldn't pass. He knew that the Uchiha would be passed because the Council of Fire seemed to love the creepy little boy. He didn't really understand it—it was obvious that all he wanted was power and that he'd do anything to get it, and somebody would eventually offer him such power to get him away from Konoha.
But it was all alright, because Uzumaki Naruto would be there; he'd be there to pick up the pieces and put to rest a problem that would otherwise come to bite the village in the ass. Though he still wasn't quite sure if that was a bad thing.
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Ah, thought Naruto, how excellent. Break's definitely the best time of year. Not enough time to train with Academy in the way.
He began punching a tree, chakra keeping his hands from breaking or otherwise taking damage.
His thoughts began to drift, especially towards improving his original technique, the chakra "bullets" that he loved so much.
At long distance, things like gravity and air that don't affect it at shorter distances begin to take their toll, making it difficult to hit a target, and impossible to ensure a lethal hit.
But then he began thinking about how he could use chakra to contain fire and control water. It occurred to him that maybe he could use similar techniques to control the path of his "bullets". Yes, he thought, that's it! Wonderful! All I need to do is attach a chakra string to my target, then use that as a guide for my bullet. Maybe I can shoot the bullet through the chakra string! That's it! A hollow chakra string to shoot my bullets through!
Ecstatic in his discovery, he started punching faster and faster so as to quickly reach the one thousand he had set himself.
As soon as that was done, he began running his usual fifteen laps around Konoha, at a rather heavy pace, the kind he might use in a light Taijutsu fight.
In a short thirty minutes he was done, his breathing slightly labored. He then began to do another fifteen laps at a dead sprint, forcing his legs to go as fast as they could. In fifteen minutes, he was done with that, and headed towards his training ground so that he could begin his usual Ninjutsu and Genjutsu practice.
It was over in an hour, him having gone through every Ninjutsu and Genjutsu he knew; his lack of screaming while practicing Genjutsu on himself was a testament to his ridiculous resilience and pain tolerance.
Then came the part that he spent the most time on; "Creation and Mastery" time, as he liked to call it. He spent roughly twelve hours a day creating, tweaking, mastering, or otherwise learning new techniques. Of course, today's was a "tracking" form of the chakra bullet that could be used from any distance and never miss.
It took him all twelve hours, but he was done, and he went home to collapse onto his bed and fall asleep.
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Over the next two months, he managed to perfect his "tracking bullets". The trick was just what he though it was, create a hollow "string" of chakra that latched on to the target, and then use the walls of it to guide the bullet. This was all well and good in theory, but in practice it was incredibly difficult. As the bullet traveled, it was necessary to provide small, concentrated bursts of chakra along the walls to redirect the bullet, or else it would just punch through the wall.
But after two months of working on it, twelve hours each day, it was complete, taking almost no more concentration than a normal bullet and only three times as much chakra, though beyond twenty feet that three times became greater and greater. For ten times as much chakra, he could hit a pin-sized target from a mile away. It was incredible. He'd be the perfect assassin.
It dawned on him, finally, that he was already one hell of a ninja, and that by the time the Academy was over he could prove an invaluable asset to Konoha.
And then, it also occurred to him, he might not have to be. For once in his life, he had a choice. With all the power he was going to end up having, should he stay in Konoha, or should he leave and pursue his own future?
Finally, Naruto's life was looking up.
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Alright, please, please review and let me know what you think.
Thank you very much to Goategg, with whom I came up with many of the ideas I/we have for the theory of chakra and jutsu in general, though I didn't use much of it this chapter. If you review and ask a question, I'll try to answer it.