Chapter Two:

Out of the Sunrise

Barely able to contain his excitement, Naruto landed deftly onto the tiny balcony of his apartment, wrenching open the door with such force that it almost broke the glass.

"Come on, where is it, where is it, where is it!?!" he shouted to no-one, tossing around random articles of clothing that he had strewn about the floor, to lazy to find the proper place for them after they had been used. As much as he hated to admit it, the village's newest Chunin was a pretty sloppy person. Strewn about his small dwelling was a mixture of dirty clothes, empty cups of instant ramen, and various articles of paper, crumpled beyond recognition, he was sure. He had gotten in trouble for that once, he remembered with a grimace. After two days of constant harassment, Naruto's longtime crush Haruno Sakura actually agreed to come over and watch a movie with him. The problem came when the front door opened, and Sakura, seeing the mess, promptly slammed Naruto's face into it and walked right back out.

"Here!" he finally shouted, finding a large package by the front door on a small card table. "Now why would someone put it on the table?" he wondered aloud.

Drawing a kunai with a twirl around his finger, the blond-haired knucklehead sliced open the package, peering over the side to look in.

The container was filled mostly with small foam pellets, but nestled in those was a small badge-like object bearing the Konoha leaf girdled by a pair of parallel chevrons under it. It was the ID badge of a Konoha Chunin, sent to replace the one he had received when he made Genin, so long ago. Reaching in, Naruto pocketed the badge, promptly throwing the old one out a nearby window.

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Hyuuga Neji was no weakling, especially not in the area that he was about to be defeated in.

He and his teammate, Tenten Yashima, were out for a walk, having taken a break from the training they had been doing since dawn. Then, Tenten's foot caught the rim of a pothole in the sidewalk, and she pitched forward, face falling towards the concrete in front of her.

With reflexes made of equal parts inborn talent and tireless training, Neji closed his fingers around her wrist, stopping Tenten's fall. With a tug, the Hyuuga pulled his partner upright.

…And flush against him, so close their noses were touching, close enough to see every last detail of her rich brown eyes, to smell her sweet breath as it moved by his face, to feel her chest rise and fall with her short, quick, and startled breathing.

Her lips were there, looking so deliciously soft, parted slightly as if calling to Neji to take them as his.

"Neji…" she breathed, when she saw the look of intensity that his pale eyes had taken. The lasers that those eyes gave off sliced right through her, making her legs feel weak and her heartbeat flutter.

"Tenten…" he whispered back just as tenderly, unable to control how his face slowly inched closer to those waiting lips. So close, he could practically taste her.

So close…

Whap!

Something small, flat and moving at high velocity impacted with the back of Neji's head, quite effectively killing the moment. Both teens blushed, before pulling away from each other, making sure to look in opposite directions. Even so, shy smiles graced their faces. Both acknowledged, as if by an unspoken agreement, what had happened, but for now the teenagers were content to leave things as they were.

Kneeling down, Neji examined what had ruined what was on the track to being something amazing.

"Naruto, Uzumaki. Rank, Genin…" he read, before flipping the badge-like object open.

A grinning blond boy of around thirteen stared back at him.

"NARUTO!!!"

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With a rustle, Naruto freed three green vests from the Styrofoam, shaking loose any stray peanuts.

"No, no, no, no, no!!!" he growled, shaking his head in frustration. "Green? I can't go out there looking like a pile of barf!"

He attacked the mess of his apartment with gusto, searching for something amid the junk and grumbling all the while.

"Gotcha!!!" he cried after a full fifteen minuets, throwing aside a dirty t-shirt to reveal a pair of cylindrical objects.

"Blue and orange spray paint," he read. "Cloth-friendly and 100% guaranteed permanent."

Naruto grinned.

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Insert musical accompaniment:

The Running Free, Coheed and Cambria;

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Twenty minutes later, Naruto donned his Chunin flak-vest, decked out in his signature shade of orange with a blue stripe running around the collar and down the zipper. He wore it open, revealing the black t-shirt underneath and the small charm that hung from his neck.

"My dad's," he told himself. "The fourth Hokage, Namikaze Minato, my father…"

The blond haired boy gripped the necklace in his fist, placed a quick kiss against the rough stone on the chain, and then let it dangle. Taking the scroll of new techniques in his hand, he opened the door to his balcony, closed it behind him, and vaulted over the side with a whoop of delight.

Falling, he wrapped a hand around a flagpole on the side of the building, spinning neatly around it to plant his feet on the metal. Three short steps down its length, and he was in the air again, shoes giving soft clumps as he moved from rooftop to rooftop generator, and then off to the next building, leaping through the air with all the sure grace and speed of a hunting cat. He slowly worked his way higher, until he was perched atop one of Konoha's skyscrapers, clinging to the spire as the entire village panned out around him. Every shop, every house, and every park lay bare before him, bathed in the sun overhead that seemed so close he could reach out and take it in his hands.

"That's just what I'll do," Naruto decided, his face the look of righteous determination. "I'll take the sun. I'll take my dream, and nothing's gonna stop me!"

He looked over his shoulder, towards the Hokage Monument in the corner of the village. Even set in stone, it always seemed that his father's eyes were watching him.

"I'll make you proud, dad… I'll make you proud…"

With a whole scroll full of new jutsu for him to master, techniques on a level above almost anything else in the blond boy's arsenal, his dreams didn't seem so far off.

Nobody could have told him that, quite the contrary to the high he was feeling now, to get his dreams Naruto would fight through the lowest of lows.

Blue eyes bracketing a training field, one of the many spread throughout the village, Naruto leapt from his perch, bouncing across the skyline, still surging with delight from his newfound freedom.

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"Are you ready, Hinata?" asked her partner.

"Well, Kurenai-sensei…" the Hyuuga said nervously. "I'm not exactly sure…"

A woman with long black hair and blood-red eyes stepped forward, resting a reassuring hand on Hinata's shoulder. She was a tall woman, and five foot three Hinata had to look up to look her sensei in the eye. "Relax, Hinata," the illusion specialist said. "The doctor cleared you to continue training, so why are you worried?"

Hinata looked down with a forlorn expression.

"Last time…" the princess started, before biting it off, something she knew she would regret before she did it, but was powerless to stop.

Kurenai gently tilted Hinata's face, forcing the girl to look at her.

"Last time…" Hinata said again. "Last time, I wasn't strong enough… I'm just afraid that…"

The older woman gripped her student in a quick hug, before giving a small kiss on the forehead.

"You don't have anything to be afraid of," Kurenai told the lavender-eyed girl. "If not being able to protect Naruto upsets you…" she let Hinata go, stepping back and settling into her preferred school of taijutsu, the swallow style. Her legs were spread a medium distance, weight on her back foot with her rear knee bent and her front knee straight. Her left hand was bent at a right angle, forearm held before her face, and her right was in the same position, except lower, parallel with her ribcage.

"Then the only way to fix it is to train harder," she finished.

Hinata remained slightly skeptical, but went along with it, moving into the oh-so-familiar stance of Jyuuken, the chakra-based fighting style of her family.

Neither moved, but then, sudden as a snake and twice as fast, Kurenai charged forward, kicking up a cloud of dust in her wake. She lashed out with her left foot, the crook of her ankle set to strike the left side of her student's ribcage.

As fearsome as the teacher's charge was, it was not enough to avoid the student's counter. Hinata stopped the kick with her left forearm, before thrusting forward an open palm, releasing a violent burst of blue chakra at the apex of her attack.

Yet when the strike seemed to impact solidly against Kurenai's exposed stomach, it instead slipped past her completely as the Genjutsu expert became two.

Hinata only had a split second to uncover the illusion before she was struck, but thankfully it was not an overly complex trap. Seeing that one of the Kurenais had no shadow as they moved to flank the Byakugan user, Hinata leapt into the air, spiraling away as she released the illusion. With the deception gone, Hinata took the offensive, rushing forward with a flying front-kick that, though blocked, sent her opponent skidding backward a good ten feet, following up with a series of standard strikes chained into a spinning back-kick that sent Kurenai tumbling away.

Yet as her sensei's back hit the ground, the red-eyed woman vanished! Gone without a trace, and without the normal pulse of chakra that gave away most teleportation techniques.

"That's what I like about sparring with Kurenai," Hinata thought as she set about avoiding her teachers attacks while trying to find some hint towards the way out of the new illusion. "She always has some new trick up her sleeve."

Little did Hinata know that Kurenai would not be her only sparring partner that day.

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Eager to begin, Naruto almost tore the scroll out of its case to get at the information held within. What he didn't expect was a small letter to come out along with the first page.

Dear Naruto,

Thanks to your increased chakra levels, Lady Tsunade has permitted me to add a couple extra, more chakra-intensive jutsu that I though you might enjoy. And even if you don't have fun learning and using them, if it saves your life, it'll be worth it anyways.

Your Friend,

Kakashi

"Thanks, Kakashi-sensei!" Naruto called to nobody, chuckling to himself. As much as he laughed at his former sensei for being such a lazy pervert, he couldn't help but feel as though he had found a surrogate father when he first started with Team 7, three years ago. It seemed so long ago.

Looking at the first jutsu, he knew that Kakashi had given him a gift.

"Force Cannon Jutsu…" he read. "Conjures a highly agitated blast of raw chakra energy, very powerful, but chakra drain is immense. Advantages include variable power based on the amount of chakra channeled into the technique."

After that was a list of hand-seals, and Naruto needed no more.