"Bunshin no Jutsu!"

A tsunami of orange-clad blondes swept over the edge of the Kurama compound where we'd set up for the day. My efforts at getting Naruko to the point where she could perform the basic clone technique had not gone unrewarded, even if the results were a bit irritating to deal with. It'd taken a few weeks for her to perform the technique with any level of reliability, since I'd somewhat misunderstood the problem. The jinchuriki's reserves were only part of the problem, as it turned out. The other part was her chakra control which... well, it was awful. She gave off more chakra punching a training dummy than I gave off throughout an entire day.

Of course, her awful control was also a function of the size of her chakra reserves, which made the entire issue more complicated than it had to be. Larger reserves generally made it harder to build control and one had to have a certain level of control over their reserves, which was usually innate to the given individual, to even start to build their control. It was a bit of a catch twenty-two.

Naruko with her heritage from the Uzumaki, her status as the kyuubi's jailer, and her probable status as the reincarnation of Otsutsuki Ashura... well, it was easier said than done.

I'd ended up telling the girl to ask her mother for the most chakra-intensive yet utterly useless technique the woman either knew of or could find to exhaust her. Then I had Naruko do that for most of the days she wasn't in school before walking her through training exercises when she had drained most of her chakra.

We were making progress, if slowly.

The only bright side to the whole thing was that the training plan I'd constructed for the girl mostly involved tiring her out before dedicating a small amount of time to actual instruction. I at least tried to make the various 'missions' I sent her on to burn energy interesting.

Like today.

Tenten danced with her blade through a complicated series of movements that struck down illusionary clone after clone as they all hurled themselves at the budding sword mistress.

Beside me, Satsuki watched, her hand grasping her sword right below the guard, waiting for my signal. A drained bottle of water sat by her side, silent testament to the work she'd already put in the last few hours. Much like Tenten, her clothing was nearly soaked-through with sweat and drying perspiration still gleamed on her forehead in the evening sun.

"Shuriken Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!"

I heaved another sigh as a hail of throwing stars rained down from on high, Tenten immediately switching to evasive maneuvers as her blade skillfully knocked select projectiles from her path. I couldn't fault the results of the technique Kushina had chosen, only the fact that she'd entirely underestimated the size and density of her daughter's chakra pool in determining the difference between 'useful' and 'useless.'

Shuriken Kage Bunshin was draining, yes, even to the point that Kushina had only given her daughter the technique because I'd volunteered to watch over her while she was using it. Given that normal shinobi tended to overuse the technique to the point of killing themselves, the logical assumption would be that it was sufficient to exhaust even a Uzumaki jinchuriki's enormous reserves.

Logic must hold one hell of a grudge against Naruko given the shit she's done to it.

Proving that Naruko came by a certain level of her air-headedness honestly, her mother had failed to realize the reason the technique was considered useless was because it was too expensive to use in the quantities required to be effective on a regular basis in any lengthy combat.

"Everything okay?" I asked Satsuki idly, waiting for things to calm down on the field of battle . "You've been quiet today." I paused. "More than usual."

Satsuki grimaced. "Bon-chan's been sick lately."

I grimaced, keeping any other emotion off my face. "I'm sure she'll get better soon. Are you feeling up for another round?"

"Of course." Satsuki replied sharply, obviously irritated I'd even questioned her.

"Alright then, you're up." I pointed two fingers at Satsuki and then flicked them towards Tenten as the swarm of unreal metal dispersed into a foggy haze of chakra smoke. Satsuki nodded, then leapt off the tree branch we'd been sharing, snapping a basic illusion in place to mix in with the latest wave of clones Naruko was sending in. My lip twitched as Tenten spun based on what seemed like pure reflex to parry the incoming strike Satsuki launched with the draw of her sword. In reality, I'd given both of them just a bit of the Bene Gesserit training to enhance their senses at will, so Tenten had likely heard the scrape of steel even in the awful din of the mock battle going on around her.

Satisfied at the turn of events, I jumped backwards and hit against a series of tree trunks to slow my momentum before coming to a crouched stop near Yakumo.

"Is Tenten still managing?" The illusionist asked, a canvas set up before her with a pallet of paints resting in notches I'd beaten into a metal bracer. In her free hand, she held a metal tool which she used to spread the paint quickly and roughly, but with all the exacting control I'd carefully ingrained in her.

"Well enough." I nodded. "I'll be joining Satsuki in a moment, which will be Naruko's signal to come down and try her hand in melee with us."

"I've almost got the genjutsu set up here." Yakumo stated.

"Excellent." My praise made her blush and preen, even if my next words brought her back down to reality. "I'll want one more out of you today; so once you finish, move to the final target and put us all in a desert."

The Kurama heiress took a careful breath as she put the finishing touches on a cave wall. "Yes, sensei."

I snorted and shook my head, then darted off to join in the fight.

…

"...hate... you..." Tenten gasped as a widely-grinning and sweating Naruko carefully poured tiny sips of water into her mouth.

"I'll make a note of that." I smirked at the barely-moving girl, hefting her bag as I looked through it to confirm what I already knew. "You found eight of the ten blue targets, destroyed seven of the ten red ones, and managed to get the five yellow ones to the dummies we marked as couriers without being seriously injured. All of this while being stalked by a larger force with at least comparable skills, then cleared the safe zone after a fighting retreat that earned you what would have been an interesting scar if Satsuki was using a real blade... but nothing debilitating."

For emphasis, I tapped the tip of my boot against the contact-paint in a line on Tenten's shoulder, the same shade as what I'd had the Uchiha girl smear on the reverse-blade sword I'd given her for this exercise.

Live steel was one thing for controlled spars, but a full-contact brawl like this? Only if I'd gotten Obito, Itachi, or Guy to oversee it.

"...pass?" Tenten asked weakly, hopefully.

I grinned and nodded, tension flowing out of her body as I spoke. "Pass."

The bun-haired girl flopped even more lifelessly against the ground, an ecstatic smile on her face as Yakumo and Naruko congratulated her eagerly. Even Satsuki was wearing a tiny grin, a muttered piece of praise lost in the racket the other two girls kicked up.

"That! Was! Awesome!" Naruko enthused happily, doing a little eager dance. "I wanna' go next!"

I rolled my eyes as Tenten groaned and tried to move.

"This was for Tenten's graduation test next week, frog-for-brains." Satsuki rolled her eyes tiredly as Yakumo giggled. "Kota had to do a lot of work setting this up anyway. You shouldn't make him do more than he already does."

I raised an eyebrow at the girl, who blushed and looked away, virtually confirming that she was quoting her mother instead of voicing an honest opinion.

"Well, I'm a man of my word." I stated with a clap and a look at Tenten. "You lasted all eight hours, accomplished more than three quarters of the objectives, and didn't suffer a major injury. So we'll hit the baths and then you get to pick where we have dinner, my treat."

Tenten blinked, finally finding the strength to take the bottle of water from Naruko and taking a deep swig before dropping back to the grass. "I... thought I only found half of the yellow courier targets?"

I snorted, shaking my head. "There were only ever five. I just skipped the numbers two and four and marked them with seven and ten." Her mouth dropped in outrage and disbelief and I reached down to flick her forehead. "Bad intel is a thing. I wanted to see what kind of judgment you made under the kind of stress near-failure would bring."

"...hate youso much," Tenten whispered, closing her eyes and shaking her head as she chuckled to herself in disbelief.

"You prioritized the objectives you could complete instead, for the most part." I continued, approval in my tone. "I'll have a full evaluation for you, and everyone else," I swept my gaze over the other girls, "don't think you're getting off easy, but that'll be another now."

"Another now?" Naruko cocked her head.

I carefully controlled my face and took a deep breath. "Not this now, another one. Later" Affecting a fake grin, I reached down and grabbed Tenten's arms before hoisting her into a fireman's carry. All the while I pushed the words my father had been so fond of back where they came from and tried to forget again. "C'mon, we're all covered in dirt and sweat. Let's head to the baths."

…

We'd had to wake Tenten up when we finally got to the bathhouse, as she'd fallen asleep while I carried her on my back. Remarkably, Satsuki seemed to understand that this was simply Tenten's day for special treatment and didn't devolve into a pouting and irritable cat at the sight of one of the other girls getting to spend so much time in close proximity to me.

...eventually, I'd have to do something about that, I knew.

Between the three of us, we'd even managed to get Tenten and her hair washed, soaked, and dried over the course of an hour. The fact that I'd borrowed a bit of Naruko's chakra to perform some basic healing on the bun-haired girl's overstressed muscles probably played a big part in her actually being both conscious and sensate enough to choose one of the middle-upper-end Akimichi grills for our night out.

Which was where I handed over a storage scroll I'd been carrying around all day.

Tenten blinked, looked up at me, and cocked her head as she wiped away sauce from the corner of her mouth. "A scroll?"

I nodded. "You know Kushina let Naruko give us the Uzumaki's basic primers on them. Your graduation present is in there. The scroll is general-use, too, so you can consider it a bonus."

Tenten frowned. "Shouldn't I wait until next week when I find out if I've passed?"

I snorted and shook my head. "If you really think I've taught you enough to earn you calling me 'sensei,' then you should know exactly what I think of one ofmy studentsactually failing some test the academy will give you."

Satsuki snorted and crossed her arms.

Tenten blushed slightly, but nodded with a small smile and unrolled the scroll before running her finger over the center seal with a bright charge of chakra. In a burst of smoke a large blade snapped into existence in her lap, along with another, much more slim scroll.

"The scroll is just a bunch of recipes and stuff you might find useful out in the wilderness." I waved that off. "The blade, though-"

Tenten pulled it free from the scabbard by a single inch, her eyes widened as the blade hummed with energy even under casual handling. Immediately, she snapped it shut, her wide eyes staring at me in shock and surprise. "This is-!" She stopped and lowered her voice even as she looked to her left and right. "I can't accept this!" She whispered, taking the contradictory action of holding the blade tightly to herself while she did so.

"What is it?" Yakumo asked, leaning over as she daintily picked at her beef spears.

"It's just a really good sword." I stated firmly, drawing attention back to me as Tenten opened her mouth to explain what I'd given her. "It was something of a cooperative effort, actually. I needed Naruko to keep helping me recharge my chakra while I was working on it. Wolfram is a hungry beast to forge with, as it turns out."

With a better forge I'd finally, finally been able to hit the temperatures I'd needed to start messing around with the metal I knew as tungsten. It wasn't that the metal had any magical property, it was just obscenely durable to the kind of energy transfer you had to put chakra blades through. This meant that while you could make a blade from liquid metal you treated with chakra, the best chakra blades required an alloy of tungsten to take the heaviest kind of abuse ninja would put them through.

"I helped too." Satsuki pointed out, and I nodded in deference, even if Satsuki's clan affairs had kept her busier than Naruko.

"Satsuki did." I affirmed, moving a few of the muscles in my body to massage the ethereal soreness in my coils. I'd pumped quite a lot more energy through them than usual, even to the point of asking Naruko for periodic recharges today to keep myself at peak performance to test Tenten. I was still bloated with her ultra-dense energy to the point where my metaphysical existence seemed simultaneously sluggish and energetic to the point of a sugar-high.

If that girl dealt with this all the time...

It honestly answered a lot of questions.

"I-if it's from everyone..." Tenten waffled, biting her lip as she considered the sword that she obviously didn't want to part with.

I nodded. "Yakumo's father is the reason I could afford the special metals I needed in the first place, so she contributed too, even if not physically."

The Kurama heiress perked up at that, smiling instead of frowning over her lack of involvement. While I could have easily dragged her into the project, I was still worried over her strange chakra mixture and what it would do to a sword like this. I fully intended to test that later, but not on a blade that someone I knew was going to depend on for their life.

"Then... thank you all!" Tenten grinned widely, blushing happily.

From there, things wound down until we all managed to stumble to our respective homes with full stomachs and tired muscles. The moon hanging high in the sky told me that the especially productive week I'd had wasn't quite through yet, the gibbous lunar body quietly declaring its intent to hand down greater wisdom to me tonight. Thankfully, it wasn't too late, so I managed to get home and greet Sagara before doing a few chores and finally heading up to bed. Even with my impressive ability to repair my own body and minimize damage on the fly, the day had still been wearing on me. As soon as my time of the month triggered, I would-

My eyes shot wide as I felt my mind pulse-

-then pulse a second time!