The Place Where Hell and Earth Meet Part II
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Sakura awoke over the period of several hours. Colors and sounds blended together in a synesthesia that left her dizzy and disoriented. She was vaguely aware of panting—her armpits and the crooks of her elbows lubricated by a sheen of sweat. The first thing she internalized was the thin pale sheet wrapped around her, tangled under the weight of her wayward limbs, hinting at a fitful rest.
Whatever rest she had gotten did little to appease the heavy fatigue she felt. Even freshly woken her eyelids pulled themselves closed.
She felt an odd sense of serenity in the unfamiliar room, and every breath only served to relax her further. She tried to call out to get the attention of whoever had been taking care of her, but all that came out was a jumbled mess of vowels. "Wah—wah em aye?" she managed weakly.
She tried to brush a tickling hair from her eye but found her hands too numb to lift. Instead, she sunk into the comforting mattress beneath her and returned to the world of dreams. Or she tried to, anyway. Something about the monotonous 'drip' of falling water kept her just alert enough to bar any sleep.
The room itself was fairly simple, the white hospital bed where she was lying took up most of the space, and there was no other furniture in the room save for a shabby looking white cabinet which doubled as a bedside table. The walls were white—once. Cold cement peeked through where the wallpaper was ripped, and the tile floor was chipped where the grout had expanded and contracted over the years. The grout itself was a sickly brown color, riddled with patches of mold and small holes countless insects had eaten their way through.
The dull patter of footsteps alerted Sakura that she would soon have company. She had just enough time to check herself before the person or persons would get to the room. She was clothed in a standard hospital gown, though it was a pale blue instead of the white that Konoha hospitals mandated. Beneath the hospital gown she could see a patchwork of stitches and bandages marring her pale skin. Blood had seeped through a few of the wraps, especially those around her fingers—she had doubtlessly reopened them during her fitful rest.
A boy entered the room. He was tall, and, on a second look, older than Sakura remembered. At first glance she could have mistaken him for a fellow genin of the Leaf, however now that he was standing in front of her clearly Sakura could see that her savior was at least twenty. He held himself with a confidence that Sakura had previously mistaken for a childish aloofness—she could see it in the intelligent glimmer in eyes; the calculating smirk he leveled at her.
Sakura felt naked under his gaze. She tried to shuffle herself further under the sheet.
He wiped a stray hair from his face and fixed his glasses with his index finger, then he addressed her.
"I'm glad to see that you're finally awake, Sakura-chan."
"How do you know my name?" Alarm bells were ringing in her mind. Sakura tried to sit up, but all she could manage was to wrap her limp arms around her waist.
"The walls have ears, and one of your friends is quite loud," the silver-haired man said, his eye crinkling upwards in a show of compatriatism.
Sakura allowed herself a weak smile at the thought of Naruto and his unparalleled talent for making a racket. The Academy had gone over what to do in the case of enemy interrogation, but Sakura had not paid much attention to the lecture—the teacher had informed them that none of the material would be tested and she tuned him out the moment after, choosing instead to admire the handsome Uchiha sitting in front of her. Now though, she wished more than anything that she had taken that lecture to heart.
There was something about being out in the field, Sakura realized, that made all of the lectures she had received so much more relevant. Everything she learned here mattered, everything was a matter of life-or-death, whereas in the academy it had only been about the grades. Maybe it had been about survival back then as well, and she had just been too narrow-minded to see it.
"W-what's your name?" Sakura cursed herself for sounding so weak.
"I go by many names, Sakura-chan, but here everyone just calls me 'Kabuto'," the man said with a small nod, his ponytail bouncing in tandem with the movement.
His demeanor was pleasant and disarming, but something about his eyes made Sakura's skin crawl. It was a look she had seen in her father, when he was coming down from the drink, still in a haze from its poison, but coherent enough to understand what he was. That was what disgusted Sakura the most—the self-accepting monster.
And in this man she saw the same irreproachable gleam.
Still, he had saved her life, she did owe him at least her attention. Plus, she was kind of his hostage right now.
A small silence settled in the room as Sakura waited for the man, Kabuto, to tell her whatever it was he came to tell her. However, the boy made no move to speak, nor did he seem uncomfortable in the silence; content to just stare at Sakura with his harmless smile.
Sakura's forearms began to itch. The silence was becoming awkward and Sakura wanted to mitigate any tension she could with her savior-slash-captor. A thousand questions begged to be asked, so she chose the one that seemed the most immediate.
"Why did you sa-ve me?" Sakura's cheeks burned at her second stutter in only two sentences. 'I sound like such a wimp!' The last thing she wanted was for the boy in front of her to know how scared she was.
You sound like Hinata. Also, you are a wimp.
"Ah, that," Kabuto fixed his glasses again, and seemed to think for a moment. He tilted his head to such an angle that his lenses reflected the fluorescent ceiling lights and blocked his eyes completely from Sakura's vision. Another silence lapsed over the room and Sakura found herself tensing, waiting for a blow that wouldn't come.
"I suppose I was just being pragmatic, Sakura-chan," he began to pace, "I look at you and see a great investment."
"I don't understand." Sakura sat up just enough to rest her back against the wall and keep her eyes on her captor.
"I know you don't, Sakura-chan, but that's okay—it's not your fault," he sent her a smile that could melt any maiden's heart, but Sakura only saw a porcelain imitation, "Konoha has done you a great disservice."
"I don't follow." Her fingers twitched against her thigh.
"They failed—as they so often fail—to see your talent; your potential. Watching that fight, I saw it. In five minutes I saw the raw potential in you that Konoha couldn't see when it was right under their nose for thirteen years."
"How do you know how old I am?" Sakura struggled to keep the nervous edge out of her voice.
"What you were doing with your chakra in there, that weave—that kind of chakra control is something most jounin would be envious of. May the Mother be tested, you're chakra control might be as good as mine Sakura-chan. You're special."
"How do you know so much about me?" Sakura felt a pull at her throat. Suddenly, she was quite cold.
"What's more, you're ingenuity is truly impressive. You taught yourself, in a few minutes, how to perform the Puppet String Technique! Sakura-chan do you realize how momentous that is? That's the kind of thing they sing about in taverns.
"And then on top of that, you performed archaic medical techniques, the simplified versions of what we use today, based off of what—Academy lectures? I know you didn't take an internship at the hospital, and you were too busy for the last few years to have gained that knowledge from any tutor. No, Sakura-chan, you are special. You are the kind of prodigy that comes around once in a generation."
"You have spies, in Konoha." Sakura stated. That seemed to stop 'Kabuto' in his tracks.
He leveled her with a puzzled gaze for several seconds. Then, to Sakura's horror, he laughed.
"Oh, Sakura-chan, to be young is a good thing. But you're still far too naive and that's going to have to change."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a Konoha forehead protector.
"I am a Konoha ninja. My master is a Konoha ninja. I get my information from other Konoha ninja. This place," he gestured to the room around her, "all of it is run, funded, and operated by Konoha shinobi. Half of the patrons of this place are citizens of Konoha. You think your being here is an accident? Konoha sent you here. To die."
"No. You're lying." The words tasted of chalk. Sakura dug her fingernails into her sides, just hard enough to break the skin.
"Am I? Maybe I am, or maybe I'm telling you the truth. But it does raise some questions, doesn't it? Just know this, Konoha shinobi end up here often enough, and it is almost always with the consent of their Kage. Konoha didn't want you, they thought you'd be worth more down here as a slave than performing missions for your country.
"They sent you down here to die, Sakura-chan. But me, I know better. I see the worth in you, Sakura-chan. So I'll give you a choice. Work with me or die in the Pits. If you come with me, I will teach you more than you ever thought there was to learn. If you go back to the Pits, you will die in that arena—if you're lucky.
"So what's it going to be Sakura-chan, knowledge or death?"
Another inviting smile was plastered to his visage, though it fell short at his eyes.
"Just answer me one question, honestly." Sakura said, fighting down bile.
"Anything you desire."
"How did you find out so much about me?"
Those snake-like eyes traced every inch of her body, as if inspecting a meal. Then, without warning, the man pulled out a file, seemingly from thin air, and tossed it on Sakura's lap.
Trembling fingers lifted the flap. Sakura's heart clenched when she the Official Konoha Registry Stamp next to 'Classified Information: Rank C' in red block letters at the top of the page. There was the picture she had taken when she had registered to become a shinobi, as well as paragraphs detailing her grades and passing notes from her Academy Instructors.
She flipped to the next page and found more information about her, sleep schedule, diet, family notes—there was a whole passage dedicated to her father's drinking habit.
She flipped another page: favorite restaurants, how often she frequented them, a list of books she had checked out from the library over the course of the last six years. Another page, titled intrapersonal relationships, there was a picture of Ino, her mother, her father, Naruto, Sasuke, Ami, one of the waiters from her favorite Udon stand.
Another page: potential flight risks. "Abusive family, easily manipulated, seeks affirmation and confidence boosting influences, see Sasuke Uchiha, recommended course of action, raise requirements for scholarship, limit time to be influenced by potentially damaging sources. Keep on watch for ROOT influences/contact."
Sakura slapped the folder shut as if bitten. She only then realized that her breaths had become too shallow and rapid. She sounded almost like a locomotive train engine, pumping out a hundred breaths a minute, her head so light she should barely see anything.
She calmed herself by imagining a leaf on her forehead, calming her chakra into a vortex in the center of her navel. Her breathing returned to its normal pace and she looked up to find 'Kabuto' gone. When he had left, she could not say, but she knew that he would return.
And when he did, she would follow him from this hell.
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The mess hall was a cavernous room. It possessed an odd mixture of natural underground rock formations and industrial technical equipment. It was lit by a series of long cylindrical lights that gave a lifeless white luminescence to the brown and purple rock foundation and reflected harshly against the ten steel tabletops that lined the room.
Several large monitors were strewn about haphazardly, as if they had been mounted to the wall with no notion of design or continuity. These monitors possessed all of the information the slaves in the pits needed to know: upcoming bouts, bathing schedule, and the 'tickets' to each slave's name.
There were only two doors in the mess hall; one lead to the waiting room for the arena, and the other led into the long winding passage of the slave's living quarters. Above each door rested a recording device, monitoring the slaves of the pits as they went about their lives—always recorded, always accounted for.
Naruto greedily chomped at a fresh chicken thigh, his teeth and tongue sorting out the bones and depositing them from his mouth while simultaneously swallowing down the meat in massive gulps. It wasn't every day he got to eat, so when he did, he liked to do it well.
The juices from the meat ran down his chin and caked his skin with the scent of garlic and salt. The only spices they were ever privileged with here in the Pits were minced garlic and salt, and Naruto swore that if he ever escaped this place, he would never touch them again. He would never touch garlic, at least. Salt happened to be a key ingredient in ramen—which held a position of impunity in Naruto's opinion.
Next to him sat Sasuke, idly picking at her plate of white rice and what was colloquially known as 'beanslop' by the other tenants of the Pits. It didn't actually have any flavor. But old Crankeye swore that he had once seen them bring in a massive shipment of beans while he was cleaning the hallway around the kitchen in the under tunnels. Thus the legend of beanslop was born.
Tickets were the only currency slaves were allowed. Annotated by a mechanical screen, the names of the thirty-nine inmates were illuminated, and next to each name stood a number. Of course, the names on the board read 'Ba-Tri' and 'Ba-Muy' and 'Cay-Unh', and three dozen others in the style of the Land to the East. Their real names died with them on the night of their inauguration into the Pits; they went by nicknames here. Names earned, often in jest, rather than names given; their only freedom.
Tickets were awarded after every fight in the pits. The number of tickets received for a bout depended entirely on the difficulty of the fight and the mood of the proctors. That being said, there was a rather standardized algorithm to determine how many tickets you would probably receive, it went like this: the reward for killing a man was two tickets. One ticket for killing an animal or beast. Three tickets were awarded for killing a contestant (someone who would fight for a place in the Pits as a slave). Three tickets were awarded for killing a fellow slave in combat. On top of that, the victor would be awarded all of the deceased man's tickets. This made a fight between two slaves, gladiators as the Administration called them, of the utmost importance in the Pits.
The only fights the slaves would watch were those between two fellow inmates, or the occasional fight between slave and contestant. Naruto could remember on his third night in the Pits, there had been a fight between Nipple Dick and Froggyboy (most of the nicknames were unflattering). The mess hall was filled. Every single inmate had watched that battle on the shaky display, the air so thick Naruto thought it might crawl down his throat and choke him then and there.
There was an odd sense of camaraderie within the Pits. Although belonging to different A-ranks, and sworn enemies at that, the two men shared an undeniable bond. They ate their meals together occasionally, passed easy comments with each other, on some nights they were known to share a bed. Rashbeard had told Naruto and Sasuke with a hushed voice that he had heard rumors of them being cousins from the capital of Fire Country. Then Froggyboy had used a Water Manipulation Technique and once again there was utter silence in the mess hall.
Despite the sense of camaraderie, it was not with empathy that the slaves watched.
Every breath, every strike, every movement was recorded. The slaves were there for information. For if they should ever find themselves in the same position as Nipple Dick, the knowledge of Froggyboy's water jutsu could make the difference between life and death. Twenty-three tickets or a funeral pyre.
There were no tears shed for Nipple Dick, though Froggyboy didn't talk to anyone for a few days afterwards.
Twenty-three tickets had been worth more than his friend's life. That was the modality of the gladiators in the Pits.
Naruto himself had inherited 8 tickets from the Demon Brothers, or whatever they had been called, and had earned another five tickets in matches since.
One ticket would buy you a potato from the kitchens or a quarter packet of tobacco. Two tickets would buy you half an hour of free-time in the arena or a hit of the poppy. Three tickets would buy you a chore, usually cleaning, or so Naruto had been told. Five tickets would buy you the same dinner the guards got to eat (Naruto had only ever seen the A-ranks opt for this though, anyone else would just have their meal stolen by someone of a higher rank, or one of the A-rank's gangs). Ten tickets would buy you a one-hour training session with one of the guards. Twenty five tickets would buy you clothes. Fifty tickets sandals. Two hundred tickets would buy you a bamboo sleeping mat. Two thousand tickets would buy you freedom.
"What is it Dobe? Stop staring at me." Sasuke shot at the boy, breaking him from his daze.
"Heh sorry," Naruto flashed his favorite smile and scratched the back of his head.
"Hey, Teme, you're not going to eat your chicken?"
Sasuke leveled Naruto with a look of utter disbelief.
"Chicken?"
Naruto pointed to the lob of meat sitting on Sasuke's plate. "Mhm."
"No," Sasuke said, then paused to think for a second before reiterating. "Fuck no."
"Eh?" Naruto grabbed the mound of meat of off Sasuke's plate and shoveled it unceremoniously onto his own, "Why not?"
Sasuke twitched.
"Not all of us can just close our eyes and pretend it's chicken, dobe."
"Of course it's chicken, what else would it be?"
"That's a good question."
Naruto snorted and returned to his meal. It wasn't exactly flavorful, hell most people wouldn't even call it edible, but Naruto had found that his hunger trumped his taste buds every time and after two weeks the foodstuff had become bearable.
He crushed several small bones with his teeth, swallowing them along with another mouthful of garlic-drenched meat as he returned to his meal. It was odd to hear the mess hall this quiet, Naruto noticed, as he turned his attention to the rest of the room. If there was one thing Naruto had picked up quickly in the Pits (or rather, one thing Naruto had remembered after being in the Pits), it was the importance of paying very close attention to what was going on around you—a lesson he had first learned in his sixth year when he had fled the Konoha Foster Program to live on the streets. Sometimes the only tell that something was going to go down was a look, a flag one day where yesterday there had been none, a marking on a wall, an unnatural silence.
Now, when he heard the quiet that had accumulated around them in the usually boisterous mess hall, Naruto was concerned. He took a quick glance around to observe the room.
He and Sasuke sat in the back of the room, nearest the door to the living quarters. In front of them the room was clearly divided into the two major gangs of the Pits. There were three A-ranks in the pits, and each of them held a contingency of followers who, in exchange for protection, would devote themselves to the A-rank.
The first A-rank was Fuki, or Rok-Tic, as his gladiator's name. He was a wiry man of thirty with a comically large mustache and an aura of mental unhingement. He was prone to fits of puerile rage, in which he would scream and kick whatever was closest to him, often his own men. He was originally from the Land of Rain, according to rumor, and had been a malefactor of the highest order there, a civilian mercenary who would do anything for a price. His gang called themselves 'Fuki's Boys', and marked themselves with two 'X's above their left eyebrows. Naruto thought they looked like idiots.
They sat today with an air of malaise, as if they had collectively swallowed a scorpion. There were a dozen or so of them in total, with Fuki at the head of the table glaring venomously at one of the projector screens.
On the other side of the room Buma and his gang were having a huddled conversation. The whispers were too hushed for Naruto to make out any words, but he could read their body language perfectly from across the room. There was trouble.
Between the two distressed groups sat Paradise talking easily with his (objectively) much smaller gang of followers. Paradise wasn't tall and lanky like Fuki, nor was he a muscled giant as Buma was, in fact, compared to the other A-ranks he looked rather normal. He was in his late twenties, clean shaven and shirtless. His torso was covered in the blueish and blotchy ink of slave tattoos, patterns of fish, dragons, skulls, demons, birds, and weapons painted his skin everywhere it was visible. His hair ran down his back, unkempt and pitch black. He sat in his signature slouch, and Naruto couldn't help but find the man's general nonchalance unnerving.
"What do you think is going on?" Naruto asked, turning once again to face his teammate.
"We should find out." Sasuke was fixed on the same monitor that Fuki had been glaring at earlier. "Soon."
"Well now, it seems our two newest friends are a little out of the loop," a singsong voice called from behind the two genin. The timing was perfect. Too perfect. So perfect that it went straight past suspicion and into downright distrust.
A man Naruto had never seen before was standing where a second ago there had been noone. His small, beady eyes did not match his carpish smile. They were trained on Naruto and Sasuke and shone with a hungry sheen, gluttonously eating the industrial light of the mess hall.
"Who are you?" Naruto demanded.
"Oh me? I'm just a man," the mysterious man giggled into his hands, "I'm just a man named Yusei. People around these parts call me an information broker." He laughed again to himself, as if there was some joke in his words only he was privy to.
"Convenient." Sasuke said, mistrust plain in his posture—arms crossed over his stomach, eyes never leaving Yusei.
"Oh yes! Convenient, that's me!" The man chirped, then leaned forwards to whisper conspiratorially to the boys. "And cheap too; the first time." He winked at Naruto.
"We'll make a little trade, us three. I'll tell you what has got this bunch all wound up, and in exchange," he paused for a moment to examine Naruto and Sasuke, "You will both tell me your names and the day you were born. Easy, right?"
The strange man giggled again to himself.
"Deal!" Naruto said, louder than he would have liked. It wasn't that he thought that Yusei didn't have some ulterior motive—he definitely did—but Naruto understood the importance of building a rapport with new clients as a broker of, well, anything, and they needed the information. Yusei had information that could very well save their lives, and he wasn't asking for much. Yet.
"The name's Uzumaki Naruto," Naruto grinned and pointed at himself, "and you better remember it! Oh, and uhh, I was born on October 10th," he added as an afterthought.
"Ichida Sasuke, January 3rd."
"Excellent, excellent, oh yes!" The man, a little too large for his clothes burst into yet another fit of giggles. "And now it's my turn! Now then... Oh yes! Well it goes back to the very night of your little inauguration," he leaned in to whisper conspiratorially to the two genin, "some very important people had a lot of money running on that fight; between your girlie friend and Mizuki-san. They were not very happy when Kabuto-san interrupted, no, no, not very happy at all."
"So what, that's it? Some old dudes are cranky, why is everyone so upset then?!" Naruto was losing his patience and he didn't want to sit there and put together pieces (he didn't have) to a puzzle (he wasn't sure existed).
Yusei pulled his head back and gave an exaggerated look about the room, his neck craning like a barn owl and stretching the fat skin on his neck. "Well you see," he leaned towards the genin once again, "now Uk-tuk-sama, he's the warden of the Pits, he has to make those very angry men happy again. He has to make them very sure that no more fights are 'rigged', and the best way to do that is to kill off some of the crowd favorites. Not actually, make sure they die, but make the challenges so hard that even the experienced slaves will die. They want spectacles of blood, and they have the money to make it happen."
"So what you're saying, is that the people were mad that this Kabuto guy saved Sakura-chan, and now they want to make the fights even harder going forward, in the hopes that some of us die?"
"You're sharper than you look, young Naruto."
"What the hell is that supposed to mean!? I'm going to become Hokage one day don't you dare look down on me!" Naruto was standing now, finger pointed daringly at Yusei who was quite obviously not used to being the center of attention he now was, as the entire mess hall had turned to watch the spectacle.
"Of course, of course, apologies Naruto-san."
And with that, he stood up from the table and sunk into the rock wall, disappearing from the room just as quickly as he had appeared.
"What was his problem?" Naruto huffed, not really expecting an answer.
Sasuke gave him none, the Uchiha's eyes once again trained on the monitor titled 'UPCOMING BOUTS'.
Naruto read it for himself, then he read it again, and then once more just to be sure.
BA-TRI : TOMORROW 22:15 DIFFICULTY: 8
Naruto gulped. Ba-Tri was his name, or well, slave name rather.
A few lines further down he saw Sasuke's moniker as well: JU-HA: 3 DAYS 18:00 DIFFICULTY: 9
Difficulty was determined on a scale from one to—you guessed it—ten. Ten being the hardest, and usually reserved for the A-ranks who could handle chūnin level challenges. Naruto gulped and felt the chicken (please be chicken) in his stomach tighten and squirm and threaten to come up, and let his eyes roam the rest of the screen.
It was not just him, every upcoming bout on the board was unusually high in difficulty, ranging from 6-10 where in the last two weeks the highest difficulty Naruto had seen was a seven.
"What do you suppose a 'difficulty 8' even looks like?" Naruto asked, careful to keep the hiccup of fear from his voice.
"Multiple opponents, probably." Sasuke's eyes never left the board.
Then, without warning, the Uchiha stood up and walked towards the prep-room door. "Come on dead-last, we don't have time to sit around."
"Eh?!" Naruto called. He ran to catch up, making it halfway across the room before remembering the unfinished food still sitting at the table. He ran back and, with a graceful flick of his wrist, shoveled the remaining beanslop down throat before running after Sasuke once more.
"Wheh ahe we goimnh?" he asked, still chewing on the foodstuff as the door to the prep-room opened with a mechanical hiss.
"We're cashing in our tickets."
Naruto thought there would be some process, maybe a waiting period for the cogs bureaucracy to turn in their favor and eventually they would be rewarded with a training session. Instead, he and Sasuke were ushered into the arena as soon as the brooding boy announced their intention to spend their tickets.
Naruto found himself standing face to face with the scarred guard from his inauguration, and greeted the man with an enthusiastic hello. The guard nodded once at Naruto, then glanced over to watch his fellow guard put Sasuke in a blindfold and begin walking him through some exercises.
"Ne, Guard-san, what the hell are they doing?" Naruto asked, biting down a smirk as Sasuke tripped over a jutting rock.
"Work'n genjutsu by the looks o' it." The scarred guard watched Naruto for another moment, his eyes like grated steel. Naruto felt his stomach drop a little, he didn't hate genjutsu per se, he just never really found it all the useful. It wasn't really his style, after all, no one ever wrote stories about a really well crafted genjutsu. Moreso than that, crafting genjutsu never really felt right with his chakra, as if he were pitting it against its very nature by trying to fold it into tendrils and probe its way into his target's nervous system. It felt wrong, dishonest.
"Oh…" he deflated.
"Don't worry, boy. We're going to be doing something dat be far more," he struggled to think of a proper word, "entertaining."
"Awesome!" Naruto flashed the guard a megawatt smile and hoped it covered his unease.
"I'll be teaching you how to use chakra to enhance your body." he said as if departing some great wisdom.
"But I already know how to do that!" And he did. He had been doing it all his life, Sage be sworn, he had done it his first night in the Pits as well-tearing a man's skull clean in half.
"Aye, boy. I've seen what you do. It ain't the right way though." He stopped talking to pick up a rock about the size of his hand and clenched it. "Watch."
Naruto squinted his eyes as the guard poured his chakra into the stone, oversaturating it, drowning it in an almost transparent blue of concentrated energy. Naruto knew what would happen, and just as he was going to warn the guard that he was using too much chakra—he stopped. That was the point. He was oversaturating his own muscles when he enhanced them, and it always resulted in strains or tears, sometimes even broken bones. It was only thanks to his ridiculously fast healing that he was able to get away with it in the academy.
Sure enough, the rock cracked. Big streaks arching through it at first, then a thousand smaller cracks filling in the space until the entire thing dissolved into dust.
"That be the way you've been doing it. Now watch again."
He picked up another stone. This time his chakra coated it, sharp and precise. Naruto could barely make out the sheen of pale blue light, flickering dangerously over the surface of the rock and watched with awe as the scarred guard threw it into the steel wall of the arena and the wall cracked. The stone was perfectly undamaged, but the steel wall was left with a fist-sized dent in its otherwise immaculate body.
Excitement rushed through him like a drug. Adrenaline was a drug, kind of, if he remembered his basic shinobi medical training course. Or maybe it was a hormone, whatever, it didn't really matter. Naruto felt his whole modality shift as he once again faced the scarred guard, bright with determined spirit.
"Teach me."
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Naruto mustered up every ounce of hatred he had in his body and glared at the pebble in his hand. This wasn't fair, he could do it, he knew he could. And yet, every time he channeled his chakra into the pebble, it would never sharpen, only crack or occasionally explode.
He calmed himself and began again. He could feel his chakra, it was everywhere, some of it floating in his hands, some in his chest, stomach, feet, knees, some of it was floating outside of his body, attached by some invisible magnetism. He pulled at some of the chakra in his hands and pushed it into the stone. Immediately he was rewarded with that sixth sense ninja got with objects infused with their chakra—he could feel it as if it were his own hand, sort of. It was hard to describe the feeling beyond having some sort of knowledge as to the state of the material. He could feel its weight, its density, the coolness of its center, and he could feel his chakra breaking it. He pulled back, trying to slowly syphon his chakra back out of the stone until only the right amount remained; but his chakra leaving only destabilized the material faster and almost immediately it cracked and fell in a hundred pieces to the arena floor.
"Ugh!" Naruto punched the ground, his knuckles whining with the pressure. "Hey Guard-san, isn't there some sort of trick to this? Why is it so hard? Hey, what's your name anyway? I'm Uzumaki Naruto, remember it!"
The scarred guard blinked at him, looked down at his watch, and sighed. "There be a trick, but that's f'r you to figure out. Time be up now, on your way."
And just like that Naruto was whisked from the arena and back into the prep-room, where Sasuke was waiting for him.
"I can't believe that asshole," Naruto said in a way that indicated that he was, in fact, not at all in a state of disbelief. "I spent two whole hours crushing rocks and he didn't help me once!"
"At least you could see, my eyes still haven't readjusted to the light in here."
"Ne, Sasuke, what were you doing in there anyways? I never would have guessed you'd be into blindfold play."
Sasuke's lips quirked and almost formed a smile, before his face reset itself in its signature pompous scowl.
"He wanted to me to practice empathy. You would hate it dead-last, you actually have to use your brain."
"Bastard."
As they walked back into the slave quarters Naruto pocketed a dozen or so small stones for later practice, he wanted to have mastered this technique by his match tomorrow—he wasn't quite sure what a 'difficulty 8' match would entail, but he doubted it would be pleasant, and at this point, Naruto needed to make use of every tool in his arsenal if he wanted to avoid another kage bunshin disaster.
Naruto considered what his arsenal was exactly. He could perform the replacement technique, a standard henge, the kage bunshin, and a very shitty bunshin.
A basic bunshin, or clone technique, would produce a flat and unlifelike imitation of the user. These could be perfectly accurate in terms of desribing the body, however would feel flat and unlifelike, even to the untrained eye-much the same a cardboard cutout of a person might fool your eye for a split second, a bunshin will often give only a millisecond of advantage in most cases, or only fool an opponent from a distance. This is partly due to weaknesses in the technique, and partly due to the way light reflects off of clones. Animating clones is very difficult and moving clones are almost immediately spotted out as fake, unless performed by someone who has mastered the jutsu (usually special jounin).
Naruto's bunshin was so bad that even from 100 meters a civilian could tell them apart from the original.
And beyond those jutsu, Naruto really only had his admittedly 'rough around the edges' taijutsu and his trapmaking skills to rely on, although it would be almost impossible to actually set up a viable trap inside of the arena before a match—and that's assuming he could somehow find materials for said trap. He was still wearing a loincloth for the Sage's sake.
His greatest strength, Naruto knew, was his toughness. His stamina and his will to never give up, no matter how great a challenge he was facing were what made Naruto a worthwhile shinobi. But he feared, for the first time in his life, that just being tough wouldn't be enough. He needed a new trick, something to give him an advantage over whatever challenges were coming his way.
He thought he had found it in the kage bunshin, but…
A flash of steel. Flesh whimpering under the pull of cold metal. Moonlight pooled in a lake of blood. The tang of sweat, fear. A face melting and another taking its place, skin warping, swirling into guts and bone.
A thousand clones. Naruto had killed Mizuki with a thousand clones, and each one remembered it with the distinctive pang of first blood.
Naruto and Sasuke walked in silence down the narrow passageway, darkness taking more and more possession of their world as they descended further into the earth. They crawled through the narrow hole in the wall that lead to their cell, wet stone scraping Naruto's joints as he squeezed past.
It was late, he knew, but Naruto found no rest that night. Instead he practiced channeling his chakra into stone after stone, his brow furrowing deeper and deeper with every failed attempt. If he put too much chakra in initially, the process of taking it out would destabilize the rock and it would crumhle—he extrapolated this to mean that his muscles would become even weaker than they were initially if he tried to pull out his chakra while enhancing himself. So instead he pumped as little chakra as he could into the stones at a time, and found for the first time in his life that his chakra felt sluggish. It was like trying to run full speed with a bucket of water and then stop on a dime. Water spilled. He could push his chakra into the stone but more chakra than he wanted would come with it, and when he tried to stop his chakra was slow to respond, more pushing even more into the stone than he intended.
And even then, when he had managed to use only the tiniest bit of chakra and not break the stone, nothing happened. It didn't solidify, if wasn't reinforced as the scarred guard's had been. It was just, soggy with his chakra.
He didn't sleep at all that night, not that he slept much anyways, pulverizing pebbles until the morning wake up alarm rang through the corridor and the industrial lights overhead flickered on with their inexorable buzzing—like a dull imitation of the fervorous crowd.
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(A/N): This chapter was getting way too long so I broke it up into two parts. Really interesting what some of you have pointed out, the thing about a divide forming Kakashi and the rest of Team Seven is definitely something I'm going to play around with later. Also Sasuke's gender stuff will start to get explored in the next chapter.
One thing I'm kind of struggling with is the OC's. I somewhat introduced four new characters in this chapter (seven, technically), and in addition to having separate 'slave titles' for Naruto and Sasuke, I worry that it might be too much to remember. Anyway, they're important and you'll start to see them at play very soon so try to bear with it, Yusei will come up throughout the entire fic. Let me know what you thought about this chapter, if there's anything you liked or didn't like and what you think I can improve on for future chapters, I love hearing from you guys (and you keep me honest).
Thanks for reading.