The fourth year of the Academy started with a new Sensei. Sensei Masaru, they were told, would go back to working with younger students, and Sensei Utatane (an implacable, austere woman who had to be at least forty) would take over for their class.
There were now 120 students in Sakura's grade split over three classes. There had been about ninety at the end of year class, but another thirty had decided to take the Hokage up on his late Academy offer. The classes, therefore, were completely rearranged: The top forty students were divided into two groups and placed in two classrooms, with the next forty students taking up the remaining twenty spots in each class. The bottom ten students of year three, as well as all incoming students, were placed in the last classroom.
Sakura didn't expect many of them to last.
More important than any administrative changes, however, were the material additions: chakra manipulation was officially a part of class.
It was only a few weeks after class had started, August 15th, but they'd already finished the basic theory and Sensei Utatane had them working with leaves. She hadn't batted an eye at how over a quarter of the class (including all of the seven except Utatane Aiko, who had been placed in the other class) already knew the basics of the exercise, or that many of them were capable of maintaining the connection for about five minutes. Instead, she simply put more leaves on them, or instructed them to move the leaves along their bodies and spin them.
The best part outside of chakra use, at least to Sakura, was the sparring lessons which happened every other day. Last year they had been required to use the standard Academy stances to prove that they could both learn and use them effectively, but this year the emphasis was more on making sure they had at least some talent before graduation. Now they were allowed to use whatever skill, whatever styles they liked—once a week they were even allowed to use weaponry in addition to their bodies.
Sakura, now six, relished using Yamanaka style eleven. The Yamanaka had, in total, well over twenty styles, each meant to work best with whatever individual jutsu each clan member could perform best. While Sakura had not yet been taught any of the clan's jutsu (that was reserved for genin), Yamanaka style eleven was chosen due to her body type as well as her father's own talents (which relied heavily on only entering someone else's mind for a split second, just enough to trip them up), her mother's apparently being irrelevant in battle.
Her style, as well as her constant practice, meant she finally began climbing in class rankings, but she was still in the second quarter of the class and it did not look like that would change until she stopped lagging behind them so much physically (when you were anywhere between one and three years behind your classmates, making up the ground was not exactly easy, and she was a bit too pain averse to excel in taijutsu anyway.)
The worst part of the new Academy focus, however, would come in one week.
In one week, she would be expected to start practicing chakra sensing.
She'd told her group—Shin and Juro, Aiko and Bokuso, Yasuo and Sachiko—about her time spent in the white, white room the day the chakra sensing lessons were first brought up. She'd told them about the ocean, the flood of information, and she told them about how she hadn't tried to open the door that led to her chakra sensing since.
They'd supported her, and her parents had too, assuring her that if she didn't want tom she could just not attend the classes.
She knew better.
War was coming, though she didn't know when, and it would be best to have, and have practiced, every advantage possible.
But the first class was still a week away, and the thought of opening that door, allowing those sensations to overflow… she was still cautious of subsuming the other life's memories, and that had been so much less than the pain that the sheer amount of chakra caused by itself.
"You okay?" Bokuso muttered from behind her. Sakura straightened, refocusing on Sensei Utatane, who was describing military strategies used in the Great War.
"Fine," she mumbled back.
That afternoon, after class had ended, the usual group met up at the usual training ground. Aiko showed up last, having been held back in her class, and even before she'd opened the gates, she'd begun to rant.
"I. Hate. Girls!"
"…You are a girl," Shin said.
"Other girls!" She snapped. "Girls who—who don't care about anything but catching husbands!"
Sakura frowned. She'd noticed, of course, that many of her classmates (mostly female) had stopped paying as much attention to the Sensei and started paying more attention to whichever male had done the best in sparring, but she hadn't paid much attention to them—they'd behaved normally when talking to her, Shin, and Juro, so she hadn't seen a reason to care.
"Are they that bad?" She asked.
"You're six," Aiko sighed. "They don't see you as competition. I'm eight. I'm competition."
Sakura was still confused.
"Look, these girls, especially the civilians, have gotten it into their minds that they need to get a boy interested in them. I'm top of my class, so most boys willingly talk to me when they won't talk to any other girl. That makes me a target, so I have to deal with wads of spit in my hair and people trying to trip me in the hallway and all the girls trying to ostracize me and things like that."
Sachiko nodded. "I've started to be targeted too, especially by your cousin Inohina," she told Sakura. "She's really interested in Juro's older brother—"
"What?" Juro shouted.
"—so she's upset that he won't be friends with her, because she thinks that'll catch Shichiro's attention, and besides you and Aiko—who's not in our class—I'm the only girl he regularly hangs out with."
"No, let's go back to Inohina having a crush on Shichiro. Since when?"
"Who cares about that?" Yasuo whined. "No one's tried to come after me! Am I undesirable?"
"Yes," everyone else said reflexively. He groaned.
"I'll have you know I'm a catch! And, anyway, I'm in the top half of the taijutsu rankings! If they're trying to target the best fighters, they should go after me."
"Leaving aside that you think you're one of the best fighters," Shin said, "you are an orphan. While some clan girls, particularly those who are particularly gossipy like Inohina, are doing this, most of the worst offenders are children of civilians. They're trying to catch someone who's high in social status, too."
"As proof, while Ryota is the most frequently targeted, Hiashi and Hizashi are nearly as much."
Yasuo frowned.
"She is explaining their stupidity: Main house Hyuuga never marry outside the family," Bokuso explained.
"So—what? Am I just unwanted?"
"Oh, shut up," Juro groaned. "It's not like anyone else in this group are one of their targets. I'm the closest, and that's because Inohina wants to date my brother."
"Well, it's not like you want to date her anyway," Aiko said, but Juro flushed. "No! You like her!"
"I don't know," he said. "She's pretty."
"She's a gossip," Sakura said bluntly. "And a whiner."
Shin snickered.
"Can we talk about something else?" Juro muttered.
"Seconded!" Yasuo said.
They abandoned the conversation and turned to training instead—Sakura was having some trouble with one of the new pen techniques they were learning in her calligraphy course, and Sachiko was the only other one in her group who was taking it.
That evening, at dinner, the topic popped back into Sakura's head.
"Some girls in my class are trying to flirt with some of the boys," she said when it came to her time to speak. "I don't understand why."
"Yes," Kaa-san started, "You're probably still a bit too young for that. You just have to remember that it's not their fault—a lot of them are pushed to act that way by their parents."
"Why?"
"Oh—I know!" Ayame said. "It's because a lot of their parents only had them enroll in the ninja Academy to get husbands. Auntie was ranting about that just last week."
"That's right in many cases. While clan girls are generally aware they are capable of doing just as well as boys in shinobi careers, many civilians and pairings where only the father is a ninja think finding a partner at as young an age as possible is the way to go. Anyway, as I said before, you're much too young—I wouldn't expect you to actually want to date anyone for a good five or six more years."
"Who would you date, if you had to date someone in your class?" Ayame asked.
"Bokuso," Sakura stated firmly. Ayame scrunched up her nose.
"Isn't he the one who lets bugs crawl all over his face, even when he's talking to someone?" Kohana asked. Sakura nodded.
"He doesn't care what anyone thinks."
"I saw a big worm thing crawl into his ear once," Fujio interrupted, "and not come back out. He's gross. Pick someone else."
"I can pick whoever I want to!" Sakura snapped.
"I pick Tsubasa," Himari decided. Kaa-san sighed.
"You can't pick your cousin, Himari."
"Why not?"
"You have to pick someone you're not related to," Fujio said.
"Ren married Ikue, and she was a Yamanaka," Sakura pointed out. "I change my mind. I'm dating Kohana."
"Ikue wasn't a close relation—she and your brother only shared a great great grandmother," Kaa-san said.
"I chose you too," Kohana said.
"You can't choose family members, and you can't choose girls!" Fujio snapped.
"Why not?" Sakura asked. "Ren did it."
"Which boy are you going to date, Fujio?" Himari asked.
"I'm not—you can't—" Fujio started, but he didn't seem to know how to finish.
"Dating is different than friendships, and pointless to explain until you're at the right age," Kaa-san said. "You can, if you like, date girls, but you can never date someone who's close in relation to you and I assure you that you won't want to. Now, let's set the topic aside."
"I'm still going to marry Tsubasa," Himari mumbled rebelliously. Sakura thought that was funny—Himari might think of Tsubasa as a friend, but Tsubasa just saw his small cousin as an annoying brat, and generally ran in the other direction when she came near.
"I think I've convinced my sensei to let me be frontline," Ayame offered up, and the conversation moved on.
.
A few days later, Kaa-san asked Sakura to pick up a package of spices from her old Akimichi teammate, and so that day she left the training grounds early to get the package in time for dinner.
Konohagakure seemed to have grown since the last time she spent simply wandering around. Mostly she just went from home to school to the training ground and back again, but every once in a while she had to go somewhere else, like the Akimichi compound or the library, and she was always amazed at seeing a new building having appeared from seeming thin air, or a new stall producing tantalizing aromas at the corner of two roads, or a new bridge crossing one of the smaller streets that branched off the main roads to allow for easier travel.
Today, she noticed that a couple buildings seemed to have new floors added on top of the existing infrastructure, each balanced precariously on top of what had once been a roof. She'd heard some adults talking about the dangers of the new additions that people kept making—how they caught on fire more easily, and sometimes collapsed for seemingly no reason—but they had also said that as long as the walls of Konoha limited expansion outward, and the land within the city was restricted by training grounds, the city would continue to expand up. Sakura supposed that was true; even in her own compound there were fewer and fewer two-story homes like her own being built and more eight or nine story ones, each meant to hold multiple families instead of just one. The Akimichi were the same, and just last month her mother's old teammate had moved into one of the additions, so now Sakura had to climb up four flights of stairs just to get to him.
After retrieving the package, and politely having a 'small snack' that was larger than the dinner she usually had, Sakura made her way out of the Akimichi compound and back into the main streets.
She moved towards the adjoining street, but before she could start heading home, a shout caught her attention and her head turned almost without her meaning it to.
The shout had come from a man holding a small child to his chest as two Uchiha police officers went through a bag in front of him. He'd shouted because they were now trying to grab the child from him, and he didn't want to let go. Sakura crept closer.
"I haven't done anything wrong!" The man said, but the Uchiha barely looked like they were listening.
"As we said before, a man matching your description was just reported fleeing a corner store robbery not two blocks from here. This is just standard procedure," the first Uchiha rattled off, looking bored.
"And did that man have a child with him?" The man snapped.
"You could have stashed the kid somewhere, then picked him up after you were done," the second Uchiha said. As he did so he turned the man's bag inside out, dumping its contents onto the ground, and began examining its seams.
"I wouldn't do that! I swear!" The man said.
The second Uchiha seemed to have finally decided the man wasn't hiding anything in his backpack, and handed the empty sack back to the man. The first Uchiha gave him back his (now wailing) child too.
"You're clear. You're free to go," the first said. The two turned and walked towards Sakura, down the street. They nodded to her as they passed.
Sakura felt funny. She rushed forward, helping the man pick up the baby supplies and jug that he'd been carrying.
"Thank you, dear, but you don't have to. I'll have this all put away in just a moment," he said.
"It's okay, I have the time," she said. She'd have to rush home, but she would make it. "Why… why did they treat you like that?"
The man snorted a laugh. "That's how they treat poor folk, and country folk, and immigrant folk… any folk that aren't ninja or merchant, really."
He crammed the last dumped items into the backpack, and calmed his son down enough to stand up and sling the pack over his shoulder. "Don't you worry about it anyway. There's no need for you to be concerned," he turned, and made his way down the street, away from the Akimichi compound.
Sakura thought of bringing up what she had seen at dinner that night, but Tou-san had unexpectedly come home, so the evening was spent catching him up on everything that had happened and laughing at the funny stories the others told. So the experience—and the funny feeling it had given her—were laid aside for the time being, and then the next day it was the first day she was going to be sensing, so there was no time to contemplate it then either.
"You'll be fine," Juro said. Shin nodded. They'd come to pick her up that day, instead of just letting her walk to the Academy alone. "You can always change your mind, too—don't forget that."
"I'm not going to change my mind," Sakura said. A short phrase Arden knew, '—third shinobi war—,' kept playing in her head, and she wanted to be prepared for its full consequences. "Do you know if Sensei Utatane will be the one teaching it? She's not a sensor, after all."
"No, I asked my Dad and they bring an expert in if the teacher can't do it. I wonder who it'll be," Shin said.
The man who appeared shortly after lunch was around twenty, by Sakura's estimation. He had gray hair, but his skin was clear of wrinkles, and his green eyes seemed too kind to have gone through too much of life.
"Hello, my name is Kato Dan and I will be your chakra sense instructor."
He started them out by sorting them into groups that were already actively using their sense, those who were passively using it, and those who had been tested as positive for the skill but hadn't put it to use yet. Before he even started, however, he took Sakura aside, having her stand apart from the group.
Then he doubled.
Sakura blinked.
Everyone, in the end, knew of the shadow clone technique. It wasn't so much that it was commonly seen—after all, it took quite a bit of chakra to do, so generally only jounin could use it, and even they did so sparingly. It was more that when the Senju had first come up with the technique it had ended up being the lynchpin that allowed them to win the Great War, so even in the first semester of history the might of the technique was stressed.
Still.
It was the first time she had seen it in action. It was… disturbing, to see two of the same person and know that neither was an illusion or a twin.
The first—original—one spoke. "Those who haven't used chakra sense, with me. Yamanaka, you too," the second spoke. "The rest of you with me."
Dan focused on the ones who hadn't used it first, spending the time to get them set up and meditating. It was only once most of them were in a trance, or at least faking it, that he turned to Sakura.
"Can you try to open your senses willingly?" He asked.
Sakura grimaced, but nodded. Never mind that chakra sensing was, well, potent, or that it didn't seem to have any sort of middle ground, only on or off, the fact was that because she'd managed to start (slowly) integrating Arden's memories there was no reason, except fear, that she wouldn't be able to do the same with sensing now.
"Alright, then that's exactly what I want you to do," he said, but nearly the second he finished there was a scream behind him as a boy—as Yasuo—leapt up suddenly, batting his eyes wildly and looking around. As Dan moved to calm Sakura's friend down she frowned. She knew Yasuo was going to be part of the class, of course—he'd mentioned being tested positive for it at the beginning of the Academy. But she'd barely registered his presence upon entering, and every time their friend group had talked about chakra sensing recently the topic had focused solely on her, not him.
Another girl screamed—the only one who hadn't been knocked out of her trance when Yasuo had—and thrashed about in a similar manner, before coming about equally quickly.
Dan shot a look at Sakura as he moved to the other student.
Right.
Here's the thing.
Sakura wasn't… she wasn't very good at forcing herself to do anything. If she liked it, like weapons training, or if she was naturally good at it, like basically anything based solely on memorizing information and how to use it, then she could do it no problem. But anything else, particularly anything ninja based, she found nearly impossible to do without external motivation.
She suspected this was Arden's fault.
Just as she was only allowing in Arden's memories and information into her consciousness piecemeal, those same memories were also placing blinders on her—forcing her to ignore or refuse to do things that would have made their progenitor uncomfortable.
What's more, she was (according to everyone she knew) no longer at the age where her lack of motivation was acceptable, which meant she had to find a way to remove the blinders which simply didn't work in her life (for all that Arden's own seemed fine with someone refusing to kill.)
So, she had to get over her and Arden's distaste for feeling overwhelmed or in pain. If she couldn't force herself to do this now, when the stakes were comparatively low, then what use would she be in the field?
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.
And then opened them.
And then closed them.
And then opened them.
And then closed them again. She was going to do this.
The 'gate' that held her chakra sense back was less of a gate and more of a…block, a mental refusal to do anything that may lead to… well, to actually using it.
But, well, the third time's the charm, right?
She tried, and tried, and tried to force the block back. She would not give up.
"Alright," A voice interrupted her. "That's enough for today. Back to class."
She forced her eyes open—after closing them for so long they were almost glued shut—and looked around to notice that, based on the slant of the sun's rays, over an hour had passed without her accomplishing a single thing.
That day after class, the usual group met up at training ground forty. She immediately (both to give him the praise he deserved and, admittedly, to deflect attention from her own failures) told everyone else that Yasuo had been the first to open his chakra sense in the class.
"Nice!" Aiko said, grinning. "Manage to make it useful too?"
"Um, no," Yasuo said. "Sakura's right—it's very overwhelming. Still, I managed to figure out that my current, um, 'field' is only about 90 meters, and I can generally tell the amount of chakra, but not the kind."
"That's still good," Shin said, yawning. His older sister had just had her first child earlier that week, and against his own wishes he'd been promptly offered up by his parents as free childcare. "Considering, you know, most people can't sense anything."
Yasuo was still frowning. "I guess, but I can't sense the type or shape of the chakra, or if it's active or passive, or—"
"Forgive me if I'm mistaken," Sachiko said, "but can't your abilities grow with practice?"
"Yes," Yasuo admitted. "But I'm starting worse than most sensors."
"We're already starting worse," Sachiko snapped, "considering we're orphans. But we've managed to do well so far, and there's no reason that you won't be able to manage it for sensing too."
"She's right, you know," Juro said. "You two are already outpacing some of the weaker or more lazy clan students, and while that is in part because you've got help from us, you and Sakura could always work together—" He winced. "I mean, when she opens her sense."
"I've spent my entire childhood keeping that sense closed," Sakura sighed. "It's going to take a while to open it back up again."
"…Let's talk about something else," Yasuo said. The group shifted, waiting for a new topic to be introduced.
"Have—have any of you seen the Uchiha police?" Sakura asked.
"Of course," Aiko said. "They're all over the place."
"I believe," Bokuso said, "she was talking about their actions."
Aiko, as well as Shin and Juro, looked confused, but the orphans shifted uneasily.
"I—when I went to pick something up from my mother's old Akimichi teammate I saw them roughing up a man with a young child because he vaguely fit the description of a thief."
"There aren't really… many rules," Sachiko started, "about how the Uchiha police have to behave. I mean, I've not really heard of them putting innocent people in prison, but then I don't know how we'd know if they were."
"They're allowed to act like that?" Sakura said.
"Yes," Yasuo said firmly. "They are. Look, there's a lot of people in a very small area—Konoha is one of the most populous places in the world, and that's not even considering the merchants that come and go every day. The Uchiha's job is to make sure everything is as orderly as possible to make sure that the entire nation doesn't burn down in a fiery ball of shit. I mean, can you imagine what would happen if a riot broke out? The security risk that would pose?"
Juro frowned. "So the police have similar free reign in other ninja and civilian cities?"
"Some are better, some are worse," Yasuo said. "Though Konohagakure is known for being particularly civilian friendly: most other ninja cities just have their policing done by the military sector of ninja, which doesn't tend to work well. And Capitals generally have a samurai contingent dedicated to policing. I actually don't know what the countryside does."
The group sat in silence for a while. It wasn't… the best, really, to know that so long as the Uchiha kept order, they were allowed to do as they wished, but no one else seemed to have a better system. Still, it was uncomfortable to know that people got mishandled on a daily basis.
"Proposal One:" Bokosu suddenly said. "Each of us notes experiences we are not comfortable with over the course of the week, and every Friday accumulates those problems into one record. Proposal Two: we use said record to theorize possible solutions, continuing to revise said solutions as we age until such a time that we can enact desired changes."
"Seconded," Sakura said.
"A proposal has been made," Shin smirked. It wasn't as if they'd done this before, but each felt a rush of adrenaline at the mere idea of changing their world for the better—while the propaganda they were subjected to at the Academy was intended to make them good shinobi it also made them desire to act, to do good. This was the first chance they'd gotten to act on that particular desire. "Any counters?"
Silence.
"Then I'll call for a vote. Ayes or nays. Ayes?"
"Aye."
"Aye."
"Aye."
"Aye."
"Aye."
"Aye."
Shin laughed, then finished unnecessarily. "Any nays?... Then it's unanimous."
A cheer erupted.
Life went on. It took nearly three weeks of daily effort for Sakura to open her sense, and another week to do so quickly and well. Her chakra sense turned out to be one of the most detailed in the class, explaining in part her particular difficulty; she could sense location, size, type, and whether or not it was being actively used. While she couldn't quite get shape, the only people who ever did so with any usefulness were the Hyuuga, and she wasn't about to get one of their eyes to act on that knowledge with.
As an apparent counterbalance to this her range was comparatively small—about 75 meters, compared to a class average of 100.
In terms of their "Reform List," as they'd termed their record of things they weren't happy with, it now listed dozens of items, ranging from the problematic police behavior to the tense relations between the Daimyo and Hokage to the generally poor quality of orphanages to… well, it was an increasingly long list. It would be a while, she knew, before they had any idea how to tackle the list, but it did help her with one issue directly: since she'd started to focus on all the problems she wished didn't exist it had become easier for her to force down Arden's residual refusal to pay attention to the bad.
Well, that wasn't fair. It was less refusal to pay attention, and more refusal to believe; the complete inability of Arden's memories and information to understand the new world Sakura was trying to apply them to.
But now that she was focusing on those issues, it gave her more and more practice ignoring those twinges of discomfort, and her mental determination to fix whatever was on the "Reform List" solved the rest of the issue, at least for now.
(In other news, Might Duy was still very much alive and well—while he no longer visited the daycare as often he'd taken to constantly running around town, going through his exercises and "seeing the world!" as he did. Some people really didn't like the sheer volume of his antics, but Sakura and the rest of the seven just found him funny.)