Hey folks, as you might have noticed, the updates are going to be slower now that I've worked past my built up supply of chapters. I'll try to keep production roughly weekly on Orbs and Jokes, but Mage Knight is likely to fall back to a bi-weekly/monthly update.
Thankfully for the pre-gennin squad, the week passed by without any further problems. Aside from Naruto being chased by Anko, while she hunts him down to stab him. All in all, a rather lazy week of classes, scrubbing the floors of the Hokage tower, training, life and death games of hide and seek, and lots of take out.
If one didn't know better, they'd have sworn the kids were college students.
But one of their instructors had not been having an easy week of things. First she went over to Naruto's apartment, and used her snakes to try and find the box with those wonderful, beautiful, magical, ultra-special, shiny killy-kill-kill orbs inside. Okay, so saying that Anko is a few grains short of a rice ball, would be like saying that Orochimaru has a slight preference to young, underage boys, an understatement by orders of magnitude.
But the snakes reported that other than a slight trace of them under the bed, and against the wall where it hit, there was no trace of them. And thus the next day Anko tore apart his apartment with abandon, replacing everything after she was done. Her investigation was cut short when she heard a key in the lock of the door. Panicking she did one of the easiest things for a ninja to do, she hid.
Even though she was absolutely certain she'd gotten everything back exactly as she had found them, Naruto noticed that things were amiss. Anko watched him from the ceiling as he began with an almost compulsive nature putting everything back in what he saw as order.
As he was walking out, he looked up at her and shook his finger teasingly. "Now, now Anko-sensei, I'm not hiding them here anymore, so no need to worry."
Anko's jaw went slack as the brat simply walked off laughing. But he had given her a big clue, they weren't here, so she'd just have to check through the other student's housing. This she could manage easily enough with her shadow clones. Another clue he'd given was he was just as adept at finding people as hiding. Good thing to know for his training.
The next day it was Tenten's place, and while she was far neater than Naruto could even hope to be, there was still a small surprise waiting for Anko when she got there. Tenten had a cat.
Thinking back to the day she had flirted with the bun-haired brunette she remembered this cat. It was black with white markings on its paws. If she didn't know better, she would have sworn that damn cat was watching her with a twinkle of mirth in its eyes. It even seemed to be laughing at her for the entire time she went over Tenten's place with a fine toothed comb. Finding nothing, she let out a grunt of frustration. Her escape from the apartment was cut short however, when Tenten returned home. And thus she hid in the only place she could think of. Unfortunately for her, the only place she could think of was the cat's bed, and the cat seemed to like digging its claws into her poor scalp as it settled into place.
As visions of cat-swallowing snakes danced in her head, Anko made her escape when Tenten and that damn cat went out to eat for the night. Her next stop was the hospital to get patched up from the feline claw marks now decorating her face. No one asked any questions, but for some reason the Tora mission got bumped up a position in D-ranked missions, currently it was just shy of being a C-ranked mission.
Getting back to her lonely, empty, cold apartment, she wondered when Kurenai would be letting her sleep over again. It's not like it was her fault that girls are cute, and she liked planning for the future. Was it?
Throwing a kunai into the Orochimaru shaped voo-doo dart board of ultra shiny, super sparkly doom, she smirked as it embedded itself in his groin. Alone time would be meaningless now. Slumping down on her couch, she idly played with the chained-shackles hanging down out of her wall. Not only had Kurenai yelled at her for hours, but now she was grounded from having snu-snu fun times with her girlfriend for a whole week. And to make it worse, NO DANGO! Kurenai had used a favor from the Hokage to get her banned from all the dango stands in Konoha for the entire week.
And her search for the orbs was going nowhere fast. Her clones that had gone to Shikamaru's and Lee's places had found nothing. While the one that she had sent to Kurenai's where Hinata was stay had found something... a boot to the head was not what she had been hoping for.
It just wasn't FAIR! She was the super awesome kick-ass kunoichi with the ultra-special snake summoning jutsus. Why was a pre-gennin beating her every attempt at getting her own squishy, cuddly, slimy, oozy tentacle raping monster to coat her entire body?
And yes, in her own mind, that made perfect sense.
Since it wasn't in any of the locations that she could get to easily enough, she supposed that the next step would be to covertly observe the blonde, to see if he would lead her to the orbs. He would have to check on them occasionally, to ensure that none of them had gone missing after all, right?
Getting up at midnight, to watch the boy's apartment seemed to pay off right away, as she found out that he got up at four in the morning to go on a jog around Konoha, then he did sit-ups, push-ups, and other exercises for nearly two hours. He was barely breathing hard when he was finished, making her wonder just how much stamina the boy had, for she knew it was a workout that would have left many a gennin out of breath, whining and complaining in the dirt. After that came breakfast at Ichiraku's, where he proceeded to eat his weight in ramen.
If it wasn't for the chef adding extra vegetables and meat to Naruto's bowls, she would have sworn that he couldn't possibly have enough vitamins and other healthy thingies, whatever they were called, in his system to last as long as he had. After that came the academy, which was always wonderfully fun and entertaining to watch.
After two classes, she was not enjoying herself. Her cute, precious, little blonde ball of sunshine was being targeted by the teachers. In the first one, the teacher yelled at him every time he raised his hand to ask a question, and even kicked him out, right before teaching something critical for his development. And then the second one had a test, but gave Naruto a test that was at least two grade levels over his classmates. What surprised her was that he got more than two-thirds of them right.
But after he was done, the majority of the ones he'd gotten right had been marked as wrong, and NONE of the wrong ones were corrected. He was being purposefully mis-instructed, and mis-graded. Oh yeah, the idiots were treating him like they would have if she was their student. But the third teacher was a vast improvement, he was fair, honest, and beyond that cute. Now she'd known Iruka for a few years now, but seeing him with his students was something new and precious.
He was so sweet, tender, and feminine when one of them stole his hair tie and his hair fell loose down over his face. She might just have to get him a dress and heels, and put him in the path of one porn-loving jounin, named Kakashi Hatake. They'd be cute together.
Then came lunch, which Naruto used as a chance to skip classes, after he left, Shikamaru and Hinata looked at each other and nodded, before joining him. The trio went out to a long abandoned training ground in the part of town that was still rebuilding from the Kyuubi invasion. No one lived here, so it would make an excellent location to be alone.
It was at that moment that Naruto did something she hadn't expected, he let out a scream of rage and shot a huge fireball at a boulder melting it. It seemed that he was sick of holding it in. His two friends she could see hiding at the edges of the clearing while he vented on every boulder in the area. Watching him, she reflected on the dark days following Orochimaru's betrayal of the village. She had been targeted like he was, but she at least had the benefit of not being an academy student.
She was going to have to watch over him a little more closely, and those other two brats as well, probably the older pair as well. And learn to dodge Nai-chan's shoes, she had a lot of lethal and highly painful shoes and sandals that she was brutally accurate with.
Oh, he was on the move again. Tracking him while not as a part of the game was actually far easier than she had thought. He was going back to school... why would he...
Oh, it was Iruka's class time, and he was covering traps. For some reason she just couldn't muster up any amount of surprise at his interest in that. For the second time that day, he wasn't the target for the teachers, but rather a classmate, one with a font of practical knowledge in traps. Some of what she was reading off his lips, she hadn't even thought of, a few of which she'd have to try on Nai-chan sometime.
And she'd have to check into what the boy was reading, because she was fairly certain that Kinbaku was a subject matter he shouldn't have learned yet. And from the ever increasing blush on Iruka, the teacher agreed with the sentiment.
OH, see, there's what she was expecting from most of the class, almost all of them had a rather substantial nosebleed going, save for the Uchiha, who was writing down notes. He was also substituting male pronouns and words for the female ones Naruto used occasionally, but she wouldn't break the news about his orientation just yet. She felt there was some cosmic force out to show the entire Elemental Nations, and beyond just who Sasuke was meant to be with.
For some odd reason Naruto and Sasuke both shivered and looked around, swearing that someone had just started plotting yaoi stories, and art about them.
After school, Naruto and his two classmates walked to the Hokage tower with Tenten and Lee, talking about random topics. Academy students were boring, all they talked about were tests, training, ramen, curry, and weapons. Okay, so the fact that Tenten seemed more than a little turned on about the topic of weapons caught her attention, but it was too cute to interrupt them about that.
Her musings were cut off when she noticed suddenly that she wasn't exactly alone. Turning her head slightly she found red eyes bearing down on her with an expression she couldn't quite read. "Now... Nai-chan... this isn't what it looks like..."
"Oh? It looks like you're watching over our little students..." Kurenai answered while pointing to the group of pre-gennin separating at the entrance to the Hokage tower. After Tenten and Lee had gained a little distance from the tower, the genjutsu expert continued. "Why don't you stick around here and watch over the younger ones? I'm going to talk with the older two..."
"Sounds good..." Anko answered before leaping away towards the tower, if it kept her off Kurenai's bad side, she'd have volunteered to leap into Orochimaru's lap dressed up as a little boy... again.
Finding the group of students scrubbing the fifth floor, she smiled as she noticed that the two were careful to keep Naruto flanked at all times, and prevented more than a few people from messing up the work the blonde was doing. They also kept up a lively and cheerful conversation throughout the entire time. It was a very pleasant and heartwarming scene if she'd admit it to herself, until she overheard Shikamaru speaking up. "So where did you hide those troublesome orbs Naruto? Anko-sensei has been very troublesome in searching for the box of them..."
The orange clad academy student snickered as he continued scrubbing the floor. "It's somewhere she'll never be able to get to... The Hokage himself gave me the storage scroll, and it's linked to my chakra."
Anko cursed under her breath at that. If the brat was linked to it, only he could open the damn scroll and pull out the orbs. Which in a way made sense, after all he was the leader of the knights, she was just the teacher. But she wanted an orb, and she'd rape him if she had to get it...
For some reason, two girls felt an unyielding desire to strangle their more exotic sensei, but had no idea why.
Hinata looked over at the smiling blond with a nervous frown. For some reason Enganxa was screaming her head off for the elimination of Anko-sensei, and the only word she could understand otherwise was Naruto. He was still up ahead of her, scrubbing the floor. She had to admit one thing, despite the raging voice in her crying out for blood, death, and ruin. Naruto had a nice ass.
Shikamaru looked up and found that Hinata had stopped working, one look at the drool had him wondering what was going on, following her eyes gave him the answer. She was staring at Naruto's backside again. While he had to admit that even before the bonding, Hinata hadn't exactly kept her feelings for the blonde a secret, now... he was fairly certain that she was getting so blatant that it was almost a miracle that Naruto hadn't noticed yet.
A miracle in the sense that the two females on the team had a troublesome crush on their leader. And judging from Anko-sensei's recent activities, she wasn't to be counted out yet either. And if Anko-sensei were to hop that particular fence, could Kurenai-sensei be far behind? At least Naruto was taking all the troublesome attention from the girls, meant that he and Lee wouldn't have problems with them, unless they wronged the blonde somehow.
Naruto for his part, was thinking about ramen. But what could you expect? He was hungry.