The team was back on the road, and quite unhappy with the pace that had been set in order to rendezvous with the caravan they were supposed to be escorting to Tanigakure in time. Had their trip not been cut short due to the Snafu in Saida, they would have taken a far more leisurely pace in order to meet the caravan that was leaving from a trading town which was a bit to the South-East of Kusagakure and only just located inside Fire Country than the one they were currently taking in order to make sure they got there in time to help with the final checks prior to departure. The fact that Sasuke and Sakura were not yet accustomed to traveling through the treetop highway slowed them down considerably and added several days to their journey since they had to take established ground roads to get to their destination.
After the team left the caravan in Tanigakure either on the last day of November or the first of December, they would have to run back to the border between Fire and River for a week of patrol at one of the more isolated River Country border crossings before they ran across River Country and into Wind Country where they would be employed on one of the regular Winter sweeps for bandits along the Wind Country border. The mission in Wind Country had originally been arranged to give the team experience with working with foreign shinobi on a joint mission but, that was something they already had thanks to that screw up in Saida that had led to them assisting the forces of the rogue ninja Momochi Zabuza on a mission that was way above the Genin's pay grade.
As the team ran towards the small border trading town, there was a chill in the air that made it obvious that November would be coming to an end relatively soon, and that Winter was fast approaching.
Hibachi nervously tapped his pen against his desk as he tried to remember the answer to the question on the history test in front of him. He and his former classmates, as well as the three years above them had until January when school let back in for the Fall Cycle students and all of the teachers would be occupied with the current Academy students to cram in six years of study, and learn all of the things they should have learned during their first runthrough of the Academy but hadn't for some reason. If they succeeded, all of them who had previously failed would have one more chance to become ninja, which meant that this was his last chance to make his father proud of him before he got stuck back in the Civilian school that he'd been enrolled in after he'd failed his final teamwork test the last time.
Ami, who had been pulled out of some all girl's school near the Capitol for this, looked almost as nervous as he felt. He felt an upsurge of satisfaction at this. He still hadn't forgiven her for what she did to him during the teamwork test in front of the Jounin who could have been their sensei if they hadn't screwed up. Hopefully, his scores on his final test at the beginning of January would change what team he ended up on because, in his book, if he ever saw Ami again after this, it would be too soon.
The history book that he was currently being tested out of had been quite a revelation, especially when he'd tried to read between the lines the way his father had taught him. Apparently, the story about the publisher of the old textbooks having been in the pay of a foreign village was true, and the man had indeed bribed one of the Hokage's secretaries to forge the Hokage's approval for the editions he produced. That was the only explanation he could find for why the new textbooks were so wildly different from the old ones. The new textbooks that his father had told him looked very much like the textbooks that he'd learned out of when he was a kid.
The old publisher had apparently hated the Uzumaki for some strange reason. Either that, or the new publisher was an Uzumaki. In the old book, the Uzumaki name hadn't appeared once and Uzushiogakure had never been mentioned. In just about every chapter of the new history book however, either an Uzumaki or Uzushiogakure would be mentioned somewhere. The Shodai Hokage's wife? Uzumaki. Konoha's ally during the First Shinobi World War? Uzushiogakure who sent a battalion of Uzumaki to reinforce the Nidaime's forces. Konoha's ally for most of the Second War until it was overrun by Kumo, Kiri, and Iwa? You guessed it...
It made you wonder why the adults hated Naruto so much considering how important his family had been, and everything they'd done for Konoha.
The teacher's announcement that they had ten minutes violently pulled him out of his musing as he frantically turned to the test, deciding to skip that question and answer the next one. The answer to that one was of course, Uzumaki.
Suzume felt like screaming. That was the second time she'd run into that white-haired pervert while she wasn't fully dressed. A month ago, when she and Yamanaka Eri, who was currently running border patrol near Ame, had decided to stop at an onsen on their way home from an escort mission, the white-haired bastard had completely ruined her bath.
This time, she had been changing, and had seen a glint in the distance. Figuring that it might be a poacher, she'd hopped into a nearby tree and pulled out her field glasses in order to investigate. What she saw when she looked through the binoculars was a certain white-haired pervert who was putting a telescope away and pulling out a notebook. If that white-haired pervert was who she thought he was rather than an impostor, there was a good chance that she would be appearing in the next book in the Icha Icha series since she couldn't go over there and shove that damn notebook up the Sannin's ass because he was just outside the borders of the nature preserve she was supposed to be patrolling.
As soon as she wasn't stuck playing park ranger, she would be tracking that pervert down and giving him a piece of her mind with her fists, Legendary Sannin or no.
Konohamaru sighed as he made his way up to the small rooftop greenhouse where the boss kept most of his plants. The boss's former teammate Satoshi had to go on a mission so, he'd handed him the boss' keys and asked him to water his plants until either he or Naruto got back. He'd agreed to do so because, he knew that Naruto would be sad if he found his plants dead when he returned sometime in late December.
When Naruto had gotten back before he turned around and left again, he may as well as been gone, since he hadn't really had any time to spend with him when he'd returned for about thirty hours or so after being gone for three weeks. First, he'd had to spend a bunch of time being debriefed about a mission that had gone wrong, then he'd had to unpack his apartment. The next day, he'd had to meet with the Council, re-pack his apartment, and leave again.
It sucked while Naruto was away. Things had gotten boring rather quickly after he'd left since he didn't really have anyone to play with, and nobody to teach him aside from boring old Ebisu. Even having Naruto around when he was going through one of his bad days was better than not having him around. Without Naruto around, he hadn't really had any adventures.
When Naruto was there, there was almost always something interesting going on, like back when they'd played veterinarian and snuck onto the Nara property to watch how baby deer were born, or the time they'd played ninja on the Library roof and got chased off by an angry librarian. Naruto had taught him how to climb trees, set traps, and set bones. Not every lesson Naruto had taught him had been fun or even nice but, there was one thing the lessons never were, and that was boring.
Sanbashi Mizuko sat in his favorite watering hole in Kiri eagerly listening to the account that a merchant from Hot Water Country was relating to the entire bar. Apparently, Momochi Zabuza and a group of ten ninja had gone into that country, raided the base of a criminal organization that had hired more than a hundred missing-nin, and slaughtered every last one of them. The most amazing thing about the story was the fact that four of the ten ninja who had accompanied the rogue swordsman had been children who were no older than thirteen.
He had been inclined to disbelieve the story right up until the merchant had mentioned a description of one of the children who had participated that was based on the eye-witness account of one of the survivors of the massacre, one of the children who had been spared that night as all the adults had been slaughtered. According to the child, one of the ninja that had taken part in the killing had been a blond boy who had lines on his cheeks.
It would seem that Uzumaki Naruto had been getting around.
Apparently, Konoha hadn't wanted any rogue wanna-be ninja villages anywhere near their borders. Hiring Zabuza, whose reputation preceded him, in order to draw attention away from their involvement in the incident had been a stroke of pure genius. Since nobody even seemed to realize that Konoha had been involved because Zabuza's name had gotten itself attached to the operation, Konoha would be able to keep their goody two-shoes reputation for a while longer.
Naruto sneezed as he helped set up camp. He'd been doing that alot lately, and if he had ever been sick a day of his life, he might've thought that he was coming down with a cold. Since he hadn't, he just figured that it was just one more of those weird and inexplicable things that tended to happen to him. Shrugging it off, he went back to gathering kindling for the fire. As he reached for a stick that he'd noticed lying near a log, he felt a sharp pain in his wrist. Looking down, he found that the reason his wrist was hurting was because a snake had buried its fangs in it.
"Aw crap, not again!" he yelled as the snake disengaged and rather swiftly started slithering away.
The two puncture marks were completely healed by the time he started to feel nauseous. Fortunately, he managed to make it back to camp before he started puking his guts up. The cramps had already started setting in by the time anyone realized that something was wrong.
Considering what had happened the last time he'd gotten bitten by one of those things, tonight was going to be hell.