Shin Ikeda

by Kassien

COMPLETE! Quasi-Self Insert into Orphaned Shin of the Leaf. Becomes Heir of Ikeda Clan through random circumstances during the Kyuubi attack, and forges his own path through the Naruto world with Fuinjutsu, hard work, and his hero the Second Hokage in mind. Until Orochimaru throws in the biggest curveball, that leaves him fighting like never before. COMPLETE!

2. Chapter 2: Genin Days

Shin Ikeda

By Kassien

Written: 10/28/22 - 7/30/23

Chapter 2: Genin Days

"Team 4," came the announcement from Sensei Sanji, "under Jounin Sensei Doto Akimichi, we have Takao Hiroto, Ito Hikari, and Shin Ikeda!"

This could definitely work. I knew both Takao and Ito to be quite serious, with Taako possessing an immense strength in taijutsu and would probably be a close range fighter or maybe even a tank, while Ito would be an ideal long range support type genjutsu or iryujutsu user. With me being a jack of all trades type at the moment, if we had a supportive Sensei who took the time to train us right, we would have a real good chance to survive and thrive out there in the big bad world of shinobi.

Doto Akimichi was every bit the perfect and supportive sensei I had wished for when worrying over the future of this world, and how I was going to be able to stand atop it. A veteran Jounin freshly back from a long assignment near the Earth & Grass Country border, practically forced to remain in Konoha for the next three years after his team was ambushed and barely returned alive. He was the only member of his team to remain uninjured, and decided to give a genin team three years to make Chunin, so he could go back to the Earth Country border and settle a few more old scores.

He, like most Akimichi, was large and ate enormous amounts of food when available, and also specialized in bojutsu and his Clan's body expansion jutsu. He wore a somewhat typical samurai outfit like many of his fellow Clansmen, and had red serpent style facial markings and a rather calm demeanor when he wasn't holding his Bo staff or hungry. He also quickly realized that I was much more developed than everyone thought, when we were first asked to fight him, and I visibly removed my weights and released and flared my full chakra before coming after him with everything I had.

Obviously, he was a Jounin with real world experience, and despite being a good kid, I was still a kid to him and not a real threat. From that moment though, Sensei was always bringing me things to read or practice and work on, as he began pushing all of us to get stronger and faster. He was doing the same with Takao and Ito, and within weeks all three of us were barely recognizable from the fresh faced genins we began as, even if our mission record didn't show anything yet.

Sensei had us training from sun up to sun down every day for over a month before he even let us take a single D rank mission, and by then we were all desperate for anything new and welcomed the break up of our day with monotonous chores. Takao and Ito were also both fellow orphans, and needed the money that our D ranks provided, even with Sensei treating us to three meals every day in between our hours of training, as they didn't even have the meager resources that I had at their disposal. I made sure they each got several of my explosive tags and a very good quality storage scroll for their important things, and we slowly over the next few months grew to really be a team that fought well together, and looked out for one another.

I was also convinced that there was something brewing between my two teammates, and that it was only a matter of time and growing hormones until the two realized it themselves and made a move to become a couple, for now we were still only 13. We were also all introduced to our Sensei's recovering teammates, a Jounin tracker named Gaku Inuzuka who lost his canine partner fighting alongside the Fourth Hokage against the A and B Kumo brothers years previously, and a Jounin and orphan named Xian who specialized in stealth and traps. The three had been teammates since their genin days, and all brought something different to the table in terms of skills that blended together seamlessly and covered one another's weak spots and backsides.

They all took turns with each of us, and all of us together, and soon it was like having three Senseis, as one of them was always around to offer a helpful hint, show a new technique, or just provide a target for sharpening our skills. And those skills were definitely being sharpened, as after six months out of the Academy, we were sent on our first C rank mission, and I was of course dreading the C rank curse I remember Naruto fans discussing in my old life. Granted, we were several years before the main characters of the series even graduated, as Naruto should be in his third or fourth year of the Academy at this point, but it was still nerve racking to be leaving the safety of the village for the first time in my new life.

+-Shin Ikeda—-+

I was right to be nervous, it seemed, as we experienced the dreaded C rank curse I was afraid of, encountering an entire team of Rock Chunin being led by their Jounin leader, who of course had history with our sensei, Doto. The fight ended up being even more brutal than I had ever imagined, and it took days afterwards until I could stop seeing the blood of two Chunin all over me when I blinked. It was an insane rush of adrenalin and chakra after watching both Takao and Ito go down to what at the time I assumed were killing blows, that at least took one of the Rock Chunin with them, leaving me the last two in an overly emotional state.

It really is surprising, simply how much the will to survive and live drives me at every turn in this world, and the two smirking Rock Chunin would never get the chance to know how easy it was to put my life ahead of theirs, and totally let loose for the first time. I had nothing to fear but another death, and I wanted no part of that. I simply willed myself to move faster, hit harder, reach for more, and before I knew it, the blood and guts of two former human beings was covering me from head to toe. When Sensei Doto found me sitting by my teammates, slowly patching up their thankfully small injuries and relieved that they were all still alive, he could tell that something profound and fundamental had changed for me, and I was now a bloodied soldier of the Leaf.

The next few months were unsurprisingly, more of the same. Sensei had us quickly picking up more C ranks after the obligatory two weeks back in Konoha after each, before we were again going near our borders, seemingly hoping to run into Rock ninja to battle, as it happened three more times before we got in over our heads. The first two were typical Chunin patrol teams that we were able to ambush both times, with Sensei taking on their leader while my team engaged theirs in brutal and insanely fast fights to the death, that always seemed to leave us with my teammates injured mostly minorly, and me covered in the blood of our enemies. I swear I wasn't psychotic, or completely unhinged, and after the first few weeks, I surprisingly grew relatively numb to the killing itself, but I still tried to respect my opponents and treated the whole thing with a machine-like efficiency that Sensei Doto was quite proud of.

I had developed into a fairly strong genin by the time I was almost 14, with well above average taijutsu skills, along with the best ninjutsu skills of my team, though I admit my current repertoire of techniques was somewhat limited as I had focused more on my speed and was still in the beginning stages of developing my water manipulation, but had successfully managed to pull off the shadow clone after asking Xian, the least likely to care about teaching something dangerous to a genin. I could only produce one at the moment, and the mental backlash was no joke when an entirely new set of memories was forcefully shoved into an overlapping pattern into your brain, but damn were they useful for scouting and distractions. They also provided the perfect material to use with the substitution technique, as there weren't always large enough things around to substitute yourself with that didn't exhaust your chakra, and shadow clones also saw and looked out for the Prime, often substituting with me due to something they saw that they were protecting me from.

It was such a substitution that just barely saved my life on our third encounter with Rock ninja, when everything went to shit quickly, and we only survived due to the timely arrival of another Konoha team. Having the memory of being killed with an impaling spike of earth wasn't pleasant even if your clone did save your life, there was simply no way to process something so visceral and profound that quickly the first time, and my hesitation after the switch cost me any advantage I gained. I was quickly blocking a veritable storm of earth bullets and spikes, instantly on the defensive as I saw two Jounin emerge from the far side of the separating landscape of rocky outcrops at the edge of the sparse tree lines, a third already engaging Sensei as Takao and Ito quickly came under similar attacks and I knew we were in serious trouble.

Almost reducing my chakra to zero, I quickly made two shadow clones simultaneously for the first time ever, but couldn't spare the excitement as one instantly leapt further away to try and get a better viewpoint of the entire battle, while the other remained trying to draw the attention as I raced to Ito's side to support her and Takao under the heavy earth bullet assault. Luckily for us at that moment, Sensei had landed a hard blow to his opponent, and one of the two Jounin attacking us, split off to go help the other fight, leaving us with better, but still shitty odds and our sensei in real trouble. The following five minutes were some of the hardest of my life until that point, as we were under a constant assault that battered any defenses or blocks we could muster, and was only still standing due to my opponent toying with us and wanting to make us suffer every step of the way.

We were definitely suffering, as both Takao and Ito fell to their many injuries four minutes in, leaving me alone and half beaten up already to try and stop a bored Jounin, who could have killed all three of us in one second if he had stopped trying to play with us. Even then, I only survived again at the last moment with the arrival of a Konoha team, and my last remaining shadow clone hiding back in the trees, substituting with me and facing his death by decapitation with dignity. The Konoha team chased the Rock team off, but didn't have anyone of their group with medical knowledge, so it was a long slow trip back to Konoha, relying on a team of veteran Chunin that weren't too happy babysitting stupid genin that got in over their heads, and an unconscious and scarily skinny Jounin Sensei, Doto Akimichi.

We all noticed that something had happened when we got close to the village, as there were several patrols that greeted us as we neared the village, stopping by to check who we were before moving on, and it left those of us that were conscious, also very nervous about what happened. The village gates were all closed, and the entire ninja population was on high alert around us, but we were directed to a small heavily guarded side entrance with a check in desk where each of us had to be identified by tired and overworked Chunin guards before we learned about what we missed. By three days, we had missed the Uchiha Massacre, and the village was still on high alert as a large portion of our forces were supposedly whipped out by a single unbalanced Itachi Uchiha, who then went Missing Nin? Or was he really a spy for Konoha?

After dropping off Sensei at the hospital, we followed the Chunin Patrol Team back to the Mission office and eventually ended up at the Hokage's office, to report about the fight we got caught in, and were given two months of forced rest. I used the additional time off to squeeze out several hundred hours of shadow clone training, focused mostly on water manipulation from the Ikeda Clan scrolls. I also celebrated actually turning 14 with a birthday dinner with my team, after Sensei recovered and was out of the hospital, and then quickly returned to studying several techniques of varying levels that I thought would work well for my style of fighting.

I wasn't as interested in the Hiding in the Mist technique, though I did make sure I knew the basics, as I was a more straightforward fighter at this point, and went with the water bullets and water whip first, before getting to water clones and adding another wonderful training partner by the end of the first month. It was after our break, that Sensei told us he was going to slow down on the C rank missions, and really train and prepare us for the next available Chunin Exams, though we would have to wait at least another year as Waterfall just had theirs. Since Kumo was hosting the next exam in six months, we would have to wait until the following one as no Konoha teams would be safe going to a Cloud Chunin Exam.

I wasn't too worried about being stuck in the village training, as we had built up a nice little bit of mission money, and I was eager to actually learn more and get stronger, knowing that to be the best, I couldn't get complacent and kept at it. I could also tell that Takao and Ito were both slowly starting to plateau and stick to similar style moves and skills they knew and were comfortable with, not wanting to push themselves the same way I did and wondered what they really wanted out of life. In the first month alone, I had grown significantly while they were both still complying with our forced rest, and I was quickly realizing that I had long left the two behind in terms of skill, and would need to talk about it with Sensei and his teammates to see what could be done.

Well, Sensei agreed with Daku and Xian, that I needed to be pushed harder and I was eager to learn more, while my teammates were happy to steadily get slowly better, until they would be able to become Chunin, and then probably stay there and start a family. I didn't begrudge them or resent them, I understood this life wasn't for everybody, and even then, most burned out, got seriously injured, or died long before their time, and few truly pushed themselves to keep getting better. My Sensei taught me the shunshin technique to help me travel faster, and tons about tracking and traps, doubled my weights, and started really attacking me and forcing me to get faster and learn by staying alive, and it worked.

It worked a little too well, as I was quickly growing to really enjoy the adrenaline and rush of fighting, the grind of working yourself to the bone physically every day, exhausting my chakra still every night, and dealing with the constant headaches from shadow clones continuously popping whenever they successfully completed copying a scroll from the Konoha Genin Library into my own. The time sort of blurred together after the first few months, and while we were still completing a few D rank missions every week, our focus had turned entirely to training, and when my team was given time off, I found something to study or train.

By the time for my 15th birthday, I had exhausted the Fuinjutsu I had available from the Ikeda Clan Library, and wasn't too eager to experiment too much with higher level Fuinjutsu at my current stage without a teacher, but at least with water or shadow clones, I had plenty of "willing" volunteers to test my small experiments. I still needed some multiplier or special technique if I was really going to compete with the real power houses of this world. I was growing quickly no doubt, and my Senseis all thought I was passed Chunin level in pretty much everything, but I wasn't looking to be a run of the mill Chunin, or even Jounin, I needed to be able to hold my own against the Kage level opponents, and nothing in my current repertoire was going to put me at that level.

Yes, I had well above average chakra for both my age and rank, and my control was constantly improving along with my water manipulation. My speed and strength and taijutsu were slowly approaching upper Chunin level according to Xian, and they were eager to test me against Konoha's current taijutsu specialist, and had even talked of getting me a weapon at some point. And, to their eyes, I was already a prodigy, but all I could see was Orochimaru's Chunin Exam Invasion of Konoha in about one and a half years, and the S-rank Akatsuki members I would inevitably have to go up against afterwards and still found myself lacking significantly.

I thought about some of the other superpowers that I remembered from the Naruto Manga, and contemplated somehow trying to open the Eight Gates, or becoming a Jashinist, or an Orochimura experiment, or a tailed beast, or get the Jiongo, or a cool rare dojutsu, or an amazing bloodline limit Kekkei Genkai, but all of those seemed so far out of reach or too debilitating to be truly effective long term (ie: Eight Gates) that I discarded them. My other thought was the Rasengan, as I at least knew the steps to learn it, but I didn't know how I would EVER explain how I learned it, and it didn't feel right unless I could turn it into my own technique. Fuinjutsu was probably my best bet, but I simply didn't have any more material to learn, and not enough direction to just go blindly into the unknown on a discipline as advanced and dangerous. Maybe if I asked my Sensei, the Hokage, the Librarian, and the Weapon's Seller I sell my own seals to, I might get a lead on more avenues of Fuinjutsu study.

Surprisingly they almost all had some lead for me to follow, as Sensei got permission to allow me to copy two Fuinjutsu Scrolls of the Akimichi Clan, the Hokage gave permission for the Library to release the Introductory Konoha Fuinjutsu Scrolls to me to study from (and copy), but not remove the originals from the Library. And the weapon merchant pointed me to a traveling merchant from the Land of Tea, who supplied him with the small selection of seals he sold before me. That man, Salaq Dendei, had a contact back home that supplied the seals and offered to introduce me if I accompanied him on his next journey home, as added protection.

Sensei Doto, thought it a great idea, and took a delivery mission to the Land of Tea's Degarashi Port, an old favorite destination of his, to allow us the time necessary to travel with a civilian back to his home village, while I was now loaded down with new things to read and study along the way. At least 80% of the Fuinjutsu stuff I got to copy from the Akimichi and Konoha Scrolls was basic stuff I already knew, so it didn't take nearly as long as I thought to get through all the new information, though there was a whole section on bodily enhancements of the senses through seals, which could be activated at will, and that would be a huge help in increasing my awareness and detection capabilities.

I didn't get too far into it by the time we reached Degarashi Port, to turn over the documents and get our official mission signed off on, before continuing south to Salaq's small coastal village where we arrived without any problems. It was here that I met the elderly lady simply named Old Jin in their village, and even with her hair now white, I was convinced she was an Uzumaki descendent as we launched into a very detailed discussion on seals after Salaq's introduction that had Sensei give my teammates three days off in the village while I settled in to learn. I spent every waking moment over the next three days picking Old Jin's brain for every scrap of Fuinjutsu she could remember, and it was a freaking lot.

She was definitely an Uzumaki, and much more skilled in certain aspects of sealing, primarily barrier seals were her specialty, and even knew about her Clan's famous Adamantine Sealing Chains, though she herself was never able to manifest them, she had a sister who had. She was a true delight, who was grateful to have someone to share in her passion and love for sealing, and was quick and happy to show me everything she knew, even allowing me to copy her own sealing formulas, scrolls, and notes she had gathered throughout her long life. She had so much, that I begged Sensei for three more days, and he took Takao and Ito back to Degarashi Port for those extra three days as they were bored in the small village, so I could continue to learn from such a great resource while my clones frantically copied her entire library.

I was really sad when it came time to leave, having learned so much in such a short time, that I knew these lessons were the ones to help me most going forward, having finally understood and fallen in love with barrier seals myself. With Old Jin's help, I had quickly reached a level of proficiency that would serve me well, and I thanked my temporary teacher and shared with her all of my own limited sealing knowledge from the Konoha and Ikeda Scrolls in a fair and equivalent exchange. When it came time to leave, she even kissed me and thanked me for giving her someone to pass her teachings on to, and I promised to look out for any worthy students and would pass the knowledge along, before waving goodbye and meeting back up with Sensei Doto and my bored teammates.

By the time we returned back to Konoha, Sensei revealed that we were now six months out from the Kusa (Grass Country) Chunin Exams, and I was loaded down with ten times more Fuinjutsu information than I left with, and hundreds of ideas running through my head. First was the series of sense enhancement seals, to increase my ability to see, smell, hear, feel, and taste more of my environment, to give me time to get acclimated to their new capabilities. The other thing I had worked out with Old Jin, was a better, more comprehensive version of the gravity seals that affected different parts of the body differently, to help maximize my growth in speed without sacrificing my strength or agility, and quickly got to work implementing them.

From that point however, Fuinjustu just became the thing I (or my clones) were always studying, researching, or experimenting with during any of my free time, though it didn't prevent me from stepping up my physical training even more in preparation for the upcoming Chunin Exams. Takao and Ito were both progressing nice (and slow) to my standards, but I felt that they were both easily Chunin material by this point and hoped to use the ramp up to the exams to work on our teamwork some more, and keep pushing my personal training. With two month's until we had to leave for the exams, I finally reached the second stage of water manipulation, by fully becoming one with water, and it simply opened up the power and higher level attacks with my now rather large chakra reserves more finely tuned to the constant flow of water.

The final step, and one that I was already starting on as it was simply too valuable, was what made the Nidaime Hokage so feared, and that was such total control of water that he could create it from nothing. In the middle of the dry desert he could flood a village without a single water source within miles, simply through his water natured chakra, and it was a step I hoped to one day reach as well in my quest to be the best. For now, I simply used my advancing Fuinjutsu skills to fill specialized storage scrolls with thousands of tons of every element I could get my hands on, never knowing when having it on hand would be helpful, and not above getting an added edge to control any battlefield I was on.

Those last two months were spent working with Takao and Ito on our teamwork, and also in making sure we all knew everyones' skills and capabilities, and ensuring any deficiencies were covered. I was able to physically dominate the pair of them, but Ito's growing genjutsu did cause me a few problems until I realized what was happening, and was able to struggle through countering the difficult illusions that affected my now superior senses. It made for a frantic last few weeks as I worked on genjutsu myself, making sure I knew enough to counter and negate anything that somebody might try against me, knowing I couldn't have such a glaring weakness if I wanted to make it to the end of the exams on the top.