Sakura's nose was really itchy.
She'd been sitting in the same place for over three hours, and by now she was beginning to lose feeling in much of her body. This, unfortunately, did not include her nose.
It was their fourth 'field day'—short tests meant to determine their current skills—and this one focused on tracking and not being found.
In other words, they were playing hide and seek.
Sakura had started as a hider, having been given the scenario that she had accidently sent off an alarm after taking back a scroll (which she now had tied to her back) that Konoha's enemies had stolen.
The problem was that Sakura was having a lot of trouble believing that "Konoha's enemies" could have stolen the scroll in the first place.
In her field there were three on each side. She and Yasuo were hiding, a boy named Taiko Honda had already been caught, and Morino Sachiko, Shimura's old crony Souto Ren, and her own cousin Yamanaka Inohina were trying to track them down.
It had been three hours! There were five fields, and they had been the third group to get a turn on field one. Neither of the other two games had lasted more than two hours—after all, so far most of their lessons had been more focused on tracking than hiding.
Case in point: Sakura's grand plan had been to race around in a zigzag pattern (the hardest to track, they had been told), before finding a bush that most closely matched the shade of her shirt, squashing herself almost entirely under it, and refusing to move no matter how many creepy-crawlies came to check her out.
All three searchers had passed her hiding space three times, and none had made any attempt to be quiet about it. Yasuo (a hider like her) had actually used that to his advantage, slowly following after them just out of sight rather than just staying in one place—he'd even waved at her the second time they'd gone by.
She should've done that.
Her nose really itched.
"Exam finished," The proctor said, appearing from nowhere as the trio (led by Souto, who had, for some reason, decided it was best for them to search together for the entirety of the exercise) once again passed by less than a meter away from her. "Morino, 33. Souto, 0. Yamanaka, Inohina, 0. Honda, 33. Yamanaka, Sakura, 75. Yasuo, 100. Return to the group."
"Wait, what?!" Hina and Souto shouted. Sakura scrambled out of the bush, scratching her nose wildly as she did so, and Yasuo tapped Ren's shoulder.
"R-remember, she said, th-that our scores are… are based on how, how many people we… successfully… caught or h-how m-many hours we suc-successfully hid," Morino forced out.
They began jogging to the edge of the field.
"Well, then, all three of us should have gotten 33—not just you! And why did your sister get 75, Inohina?"
"She's not my sister—she's my cousin!" Inohina griped.
"I saw her," Yasuo said. "I bet she was docked for that."
"I—I w-was the, the one to… to spot Honda," Morino said. "S-so I-I got the, um, the points."
As they arrived back at the front of the field, where the next group was impatiently waiting, Souto was still complaining.
"Yamanaka, Sakura, you've been reassigned to field four, to seek with Shimura Ryota and Suzuki Yami," the proctor said.
"Hai," she said. she turned left and began jogging to the other field as the proctor called orders to her companions behind her.
This would be more interesting than freezing in place for three hours, at least.
Shimura was one thing; he'd mostly calmed since the exam scores last year, even if he had thrown himself into training to the point that she was sure he did little else. He had, at least, stopped bullying others—in fact, while he would go out of his way to be friendly to any clan members, he outright refused to acknowledge anyone else. This test, thankfully, did not require him to, so she was sure he'd put up a good challenge to race against. As for Suzuki Yami, he was not a member of her class so all she knew about him was that he was bottom of his own, and had barely scraped a pass last year.
Which meant she really had to worry about only one tracking competitor, though she had no idea about the hiders.
She arrived at the field just as its own chuunin proctor was sending the hiders in. She recognized none of them by sight, but one was fleeing with his dog, so she'd have to think about how to catch an Inuzaka.
The proctor wasted no time upon her arrival. "As I'm sure you already know, you must find as many of the enemy—who have stolen a scroll from Konoha—as you can. Your scores will be based on the number caught, and if all are caught everyone on your team will receive a bonus. Highest score possible for this portion is 110. Highest score possible overall is 210. Begin."
"Split up for the first hour, meet up then?" Shimura asked. It was a good plan—allowing them time to boost their own scores first, then work together to find any that had escaped all three of them afterwards.
"Sounds good," she said.
"See you in an hour," Suzuki nodded.
The three of them vanished into the forested field.
Alright… three enemies, all of whom have to remain unseen for three hours. Some would likely hide using the natural vegetation like she did, some might go with Yasuo's plan (a harder option, actually, given that they'd split up), some may even use what skills they already had to camouflage themselves in less obvious places.
But where to begin?
The one enemy she knew anything about was an Inuzaka, which meant he had to plan not only for himself but also for his recently obtained puppy, who Sakura knew from her own Inuzaka classmates would still be unable to do just about anything, and was not potty trained.
So it was unlikely he was hiding in the trees, where he'd have to worry about the visibility of wetness running down the trunk, or using his own clothing to keep that from happening.
Inuzaka also tended to be hyperactive. She was fairly sure she'd never seen any of them sit still for longer than about five minutes, which meant this one had to do something that allowed him to move.
He would also have incredibly good smell, allowing him to tell where his seekers had already been.
Which meant… she needed to douse as much of the forest as possible in her smell. That, at least, she was already doing. Since they'd been sent in, she'd been systematically going over the entire field's area, starting with the left border and making her way right. As she went she glanced around at every tree, bush, and rock she came across, but she hadn't yet noticed anything out of the usual.
What else could she do?
She skidded to a stop.
Traps.
Most traps, of course, would take too long to set up, but she knew a quick wire one that could work. She pulled some out of her pocket and began.
About fifteen minutes later, still making her way through the field and setting up traps as she went, she heard a cry. Wasting no time, and knowing that Shimura would be hot on her heels, she whipped towards the noise and took off.
Sure enough, there was the Inuzaka, carrying his tiny pup in his arms and trying desperately to untangle his feet from their wire trappings.
The second she laid eyes on him the proctor appeared.
"Inuzaka out. Yamanaka leading."
She untangled the boy and vanished, taking him with her. Sakura wasted no time turning back around—she'd only managed to trap about a ninth of the entire field, and wanted to get at least a third done before they had to team up. As she did, though, she nearly ran into Shimura.
"Nice," he said, glancing at the remains of the trap. "Don't expect to get so lucky again," he disappeared, much faster than she could. This could not become a battle of speed, or really a battle of any physical attribute, and she wasn't exactly that far ahead of him in any mental ones either. No, she had to get really lucky, or she had to try—no. Not worth it. This was just a test, so she would just have to get lucky.
The next half hour passed uneventfully. Sakura soon had the preparation of her simple trap down to a science, and was constantly on alert for any movement in her field of vision. She'd been sidetracked by squirrels twice, and a deer once, but so far there was no sign of the other two enemies, and she knew she would have been alerted if they were captured.
So, as she neared the meet-up time, she knew she'd have to change her strategy. She was currently ahead, yes, but Shimura would almost definitely grab the victory unless she thought of a better plan.
The problem, of course, was that she had nothing. She'd arrived at the field too late to glean any information, information that both Shimura and Suzuki had, about the other two hiders, and she'd already caught the only one she had an idea how to. So far she was simply hoping that one of them was emulating him, and that really wasn't working out.
Then Sakura noticed something odd, a mound of dirt about three meters away from her.
It was kind of lumpy, for one, and not the kind of lumpy that was generally found in nature, and for another she happened to know that the Senju who had just been integrated into her class happened to already be training in earth techniques. She poked it with a stick. The proctor appeared.
"Senju out. Yamanaka leading."
Ha! She didn't need another technique after all!
…admittedly, her original plan had not been what had allowed her to see him, but results, she figured, were what mattered. Thankfully, this meant she now had the lead—combined, her score would be about 142, which would likely put her in the upper quarter of the class: very few, after all, seemed to be able to evade being noticed by someone for any more than two hours, and she was fairly sure that on average each of her classmates had only managed to catch sight of about one 'enemy' each, placing them at a wonderful score of 100. Still, getting a score of 185 would be nice, and almost certainly put her at or near the top of the class.
Unfortunately, it was not to be. The hour passed, and the trio met up and began to systematically search each part of the arena. The girl that Sakura had not recognized turned out to be a shinobi daughter who was barely doing better than Suzuki, which made her ability to evade them stunning. It was Shimura, in the end, who found her dangling desperately to the top of a tree at the very right edge of the field, right wear Suzuki had started.
"Inuzaka combined, 77. Senju combined, 33. Okada combined, 33. Yamanaka combined, 152. Shimura combined, 143. Suzuki combined, 10. Dismissed."
.
Sakura waited outside the Academy with Juro for Shin to finish. He'd scored 33, because he'd caught one enemy, but only managed to hide for twelve minutes before being found. Shin, Juro told her, had been a seeker first, and caught two of the hiders—the third, from the Mitokado clan, having successfully stayed out of sight for the full three hours.
Games like this took place once a week every week. The last one had been a classroom wide race to decode as many messages as possible— Sarutobi Kenshin came in first there, with the Zatsuon team member Nara Taro second and Sakura herself third (Shin had been fourth.) The week before that had been obstacle courses (the less said about Sakura's performance the better), and the week before that it had been a sort of scavenger hunt, with nearly every sort of question, trick, and double meaning necessary to get the answer.
Sakura had actually won that one.
They weren't told what the tests were until the day of, and the day the test started varied as often as the length of the test did.
The worst part, at least to Sakura, was that not one bit of it included chakra.
It was explained, at the beginning of the semester, that due to the new rule that children only had to take the final three years of Academy no chakra would be taught until then. Instead year three would become entirely about tests and refining skills.
Shin appeared from around the corner (with a high final score of 166), and the three left the Academy.
It was late November now, and the chill in the air was unavoidable even with the throng of people crowding the street. As they were third year students, the chinmoku team had been given more freedom, and they now had two hours after class to get home. Sometimes they used the choice time to go to the library, and other times they spent the hour hanging about in a restaurant or wandering around Konoha. Mostly, though, they went to training ground forty.
Training ground forty was one of the smallest in Konoha. It was about half the size of the playground it neighbored, and was walled in on two sides and fenced in on both others. The ground was covered in stone tiles, and the walls had some rudimentary wooden targets stuck on, but it was otherwise empty.
Almost every day, immediately after Academy ended, it would promptly fill with seven children.
There were the chinmoku, of course. They'd been the ones to find the training ground in the first place and realize it was never reserved due to its relative uselessness. Bokuso was the next to be invited—while his general demeanor still creeped Shin out, most of the rest of the group had gotten used to it and Sakura still thought it was the coolest thing ever. Juro had chosen the next person to include: Aiko Utatane, who he'd met in the medical texts area of the library. She was six, like Shin, and was well known in her own class for being able to work with anyone. Her general demeanor, actually, was quite pleasant, and Sakura had no problems imagining her as a medic-nin later in her career (she had a sharp wit, too, when she was in a mood, which Sakura preferred to Aiko's uncanny charm offense.)
After Aiko the last two members of Training Ground 40 came very quickly. Shin invited Yasuo, Sakura invited Morino Sachiko, and their group was complete.
And so, every day, for about an hour a day, the training ground was filled with seven children doing something that they were absolutely not supposed to.
"You got it to stick!" Sakura said as she opened the training ground's gate.
"Yes. New record: fourteen seconds," Bokuso replied. As he did so, a single leaf dropped off his forehead.
Practicing in chakra wasn't necessarily illegal, per se. Technically, anyone in the nation could do as much as they liked with chakra. Realistically, actually, many major clans—the Hyuga and Uchiha most noticeably—taught their children how to use chakra from a very young age, often well before they entered the Academy. That said, the Yamanaka, Akimichi, and Nara clans were all of the firm belief that they should do as the Hokage suggested, and following his announcement about late entry to the Academy he… encouraged… clans not to teach their children chakra until the Academy did, to allow each child to start on even footing.
Sakura disagreed.
The fact was, she was already insanely further ahead than any civilian. There was a reason that civilian children and even non-clan shinobi children rarely showed up as top scorers in the Academy. Sakura had, after all, been taught the basics since well before she started the Academy, and she continued to be intermittently trained by her clansmen after entry. And this wasn't an advantage that was liable to go away—even when she and her peers became genin and got more private tutoring, the clans would simultaneously begin instructions on clan techniques, something non-clan members certainly wouldn't have access to.
So, given that, she'd never quite understood the argument that she should be held back to give others time to catch up. She had no problem with Sensei spending more time with non-clan children, of course, and she fully agreed that every child should get the chance to flourish, but intentionally making other children weaker? That didn't make sense, especially because non-clan children were (at least in this case) just as capable of starting to use chakra at Academy year three as she was.
Case in point: out of all of them, while Aiko and Sakura were generally the best at the leaf-sticking exercise, Sachiko was directly behind them and rapidly improving. Yasuo, while not as quick to identify or successfully use his chakra, had taken to taijutsu like a duck to water and was now exercising for up to two hours every day after the Academy. Meanwhile, Akimichi Arata didn't look like he'd stay to the end of the year, Nara Taro was so sure in his own superiority he outright refused to study, Inohina Yamanaka was more focused on who's dating who than anything Sensei said, and Inuzuka Teru had some of the worst written scores in the class.
There was no reason that they should not start chakra now; give the late coming students extra lessons if necessary, but Sakura had no plans to slow down.
So.
The leaf sticking exercise.
Sakura was up to nearly two minutes now. It wasn't ideal, of course, and both her control and her capacity could use some work, but it wasn't half bad.
Juro, at least, had no problems with the latter, and Shin was miles ahead in the former—he just couldn't maintain chakra output to save his life. Really, they did balance each other quite well. Still, practice made perfect and training ground forty had everything they could ever want—space, leaves, and, of course, occasional distractions.
"It is I, the Mighty Duy!" Ah… and there was today's entertainment.
One of the walls of the training ground was a building that held a long-term daycare, a popular childcare option for non-clan ninja. Every day a genin team would be brought in for eight hours each to help care for the children. While most went unnoticed, too quiet to be heard through the thick walls and otherwise, Sakura was sure, doing their jobs more than adequately, there was one key exception:
"Hey Mighty Duy!" The seven on training ground forty screamed.
"Hello voices in the wall! It is truly wonderful to hear you again!"
Might Duy was, as far as the seven could tell, a relatively recent genin whose team tended to have the afternoon daycare mission about three times a week every other week. He was, they quickly learned, an incredibly hard-working ninja, and he seemed to be surprisingly good at keeping the children in the building happy—at least, when he was there training ground forty heard a lot more audible laughter.
He was also loud.
Very loud.
Out of all of the ninja, and daycare workers, and young children that came in and out of the daycare, Duy was the only one whose presence (or lack thereof) they could be absolutely sure of.
"It is a lovely day, is it not?" Duy shouted.
"Absolutely wonderful!" Sakura shouted back.
There was the typical muffled speaking, then "but I don't understand, Sensei, why I should not talk to them?" More typical muffled words. "But this is my normal volume, Sensei!"
Ah. Might Duy. What a great guy.
After finishing their chakra training for the day (and getting to listen to Might Duy convince at least twelve children to convert to vegetable lovers), Sakura went home.
By November, Ren, Sayuri, Aoi, Kamui, Akina, and Arato had completely moved out, and Tou-san hadn't been back in months, which meant that it was only Kaa-san and the five youngest children.
The good news about that, at least, was that Sakura only had to share with Kohana, and everyone else got their own rooms. Ayame's was the largest, as at nine she was the oldest, and Fujio's was the furthest away from the rest of theirs. Kohana and Sakura had never moved out of their first bedroom, and Himari got the remaining one.
Lucky little four-year-old.
That was not to say that the house was ever really empty. Ren, his wife Ikue, and their young son would stop by frequently, especially now that Ikue was pregnant again. Sayuri was also in and out quite often, especially as she'd just broken up with her boyfriend and hadn't found a new one yet. Aoi had disappeared, and Sakura was willing to bet anything that he as well as the twins were involved in long term infiltration like their dad, but perhaps at an even higher level. Kamui, despite being a fulltime resident of the Akimichi clan, was also constantly dropping off his cooking experiments, and while some needed to be disposed of in a hole at least ten feet deep, the majority was edible and some of it was even tasty.
Kaa-san's sister and her children would also frequently visit the family's personal training ground (which was larger than their own), and Kohana would invite over some of her civilian friends at least once a week.
All of this meant that as she entered the house she was not surprised to be nearly barreled over by a terrified Fujio fleeing from a screaming Kaa-san as Himari screamed for help from her position stuck inside a kitchen cabinet and Kamui tried to help her out while juggling at least ten bentos, ignoring one of Fujio's partners as the Academy student tried to wrap up the other's bleeding hand.
"Hi," Sakura said.
Himari cried. Kaa-san screamed about murder. Kamui grunted. Fujio's partners didn't even notice.
"What happened?"
"Fujio and his friends decided to try throwing kunai blindfolded without supervision, with expected results, and when Kaa-san went to kill Fujio and patch up Ryoken Himari decided to try to touch the ceiling again and accidently got herself caught in a cabinet. I was here to drop off some bentos, but the fridge seems to be broken so I'm going to leave them at Aunt Hina's house," Kamui said.
"Is Yamanaka Inohina from my class related to Aunt Hina?" Sakura asked. She really hoped not. She moved to the injury cabinet as she did, pulling out some gauze and a bit of chakra-infused paste.
"Not directly, I don't think. You had the ancestry lessons more recently, anyway," Kamui successfully extracted the still crying Himari from the cabinets without dropping a bento and unceremoniously plopped the still crying girl onto the floor. She didn't look to be too injured—just upset and achy—so Sakura didn't bother to get anything else out of the injury cabinet and just tossed the already grabbed objects at Fujio's partners' heads. They caught them and began working to take care of the injury.
"Alright, I'm going to go to Aunt Hina's. See you later. Himari, Kansai, Ryoken, stop being stupid. Bye!" Kamui disappeared. Kansai and Ryoken did too, apparently more concerned with getting away from Kaa-san than helping the now-caught Fujio from getting free. Himari glared at Sakura.
Himari, unlike all of the rest of the children, would not be admitted into the Academy at all. Her birth had been a hard one, far harder than Sakura's, and it quickly became clear that there was no way she would be able to be a ninja. Her development was somewhat delayed, too, at least in terms of what was normal in this world. From what Sakura could tell, Arden would have thought Himari's behavior was normal for her age (except, perhaps, for her ability and desire to climb on everything and anything.)
"Do you want me to read you a story?" Sakura asked. She'd gotten a copy of a recently written epic on Konoha's creation from the library the day before, and hadn't yet started it.
"Yes please."
.
That night, well after dark, Sakura suddenly awoke. She'd been fast asleep, having only bothered to review a story Arden had remembered involving elemental 'bending' and giant flying bison before bed, and hadn't expected to get back up until the morning.
Nevertheless, she was awake now, so she may as well try to understand why.
Kohana was still asleep in the bed beside Sakura's own. She'd arrived home late—that day was the first she was allowed to start learning how to arrange flowers, and she hadn't come home until only a minute or two before dinner.
Himari, Sakura thought, probably wasn't awake either—she tended to be a deep sleeper, but when she did wake up everyone knew.
As for Fujio, Sakura didn't know, but—
There was a thump on the staircase.
Sakura slipped out of bed.
"Kaa-san?" She asked, squinting into the darkness.
"Hush, sweetheart," Kaa-san said. "Go back to bed," She sounded tired.
"Are you okay?"
"Go to bed," Kaa-san said again. She slipped into her own bedroom.
Sakura blinked at the door. Her mother, she knew, worked at T&I, and while she went out of her way to hide it from her children, sometimes her exhaustion and bad days slipped out. The bad days, however, seemed to be coming more frequently.
Arden's memories of Sakura's own world weren't ones she looked at that frequently. They had clearly been watched as a story, and one with a kind of annoying main character, and unlike most of Arden's other memories they weren't in anything resembling order.
One thing she did know, however, was that there wasn't just one World War.
She didn't know when the next would come, when the world would be decimated once more, but ever since—
Ever since Kaede's death, it had been harder to not be aware of the impending danger. Kaa-san's increasing workload and difficulties also didn't help, and Sakura was becoming increasingly aware that when it did arrive, she would either be too young and helpless to do anything or old enough to be forced to fight, to kill.
She didn't know which would be worse.
She went back to bed.
The next morning, Kaa-san seemed fine, and nothing was mentioned at breakfast, but as she walked to school she heard whispers, murmurs just too loud to be ignored. Uzushiogakure had caught some Iwa spies, they said, and managed to get out the names of the Iwa spies in Konoha. There were several, they said, dozens, hundreds! Konoha must retaliate, they said. Konoha must do something.
Sakura slipped through the Academy doors and wished desperately that Sensei Masaru would work them too hard for any more gossip to be heard that day.
