Chapter 23: The Ultimate Test

Clone Jutsu is a staple of Ninja combat.

It comes in many varieties, and can be made out of anything you could think off. Theres Mud Clone, Bug Clone, Illusion Clone, Shadow Clone and so on so on.

So when I have enuff chakra to to teleport 4 times, I decide now would be the right time to learn how to make clones.

A quick rundown to my buddy, Naruto about the Shadow Clone Jutsu gives me the much needed explanation to execute the famed technique.

Chakra splits goes brrr.

-Uzumaki Naruto, The Symbol of Unity-

Right now, I'm looking at my carbon copy of a clone. Because of my permanent Lightning Chakra nature, the simple act of splitting my chakra produce Lightning Shadow Clone right off the bat. However, splitting a huge chunk of my chakra like this is not ideal, even if majority of the chakra would return back to me once the clone is popped out. While I would like to just sit back and let my clones do all the dangerous fighting with me sipping coconut juice at the back, I simply don't have the immense amount of chakra to pull it off.

I popped out the clones and the Lightning returns back to me. Urghh, only 70% of the spent chakra returns back to me even when I just made that clone for a few seconds. This is really wasteful.

I don't really need clones to fight. My current style is to become a One Hit KO type of fighter. I will be all cool killing off my enemies with just a slash and stuff. They would all think, wow, Hotaru is such a sugoi ninja that all he needs to win is just a slash.

No, I have such a pitiful amount of chakra reserves that the best move I can do is just defeat anyone with one finisher move. The Hisatsu Waza. Real ninja battles are not a Taijutsu match. Many of them would prefer taking me out from some distance.

Meanwhile, most of the techniques I have in my disposal are fucking chakra guzzlers. I don't have the luxury of using cost-friendly non elemental jutsu.

"Alright. Let's modify the clone jutsu."

Since the principal of Shadow Clone jutsu is to simply split chakra across your mental copies of yourself, what if I split the chakra into a smaller version of me? No, rather, a chibi version of me the size of my palm? The only thing I really need from Shadow Clone is just the espionage aspect anyway.

POOF

A chibi version of me poofed into existence on my desk.

"Banzai! Banzai!", chibi me cheered. Hmm.

I had it run around to test the physical ability of it. Its like watching a reenactment of Honey, I shrunk the Kids. The performance was okay, but I think a liliput running around doing parkour between your furniture is kinda suspicious.

Hmm, according to legend, Raiju, the Divine Beast of Raijin, was commonly depicted as either a wolf or a dog in white-blue color. It had also been depicted as a cat, a ferret, a fox, a leopard and so on. I wonder…

POOF.

A white-blue rabbit appeared on my desk. Well that works.

I tried a variation of small animals for me to conjure, but for some reason, I can't change the colorings outside the Raiju's color theme at all. All of it just appeared as some kind of white-blue animal. I scratched my head. This would look as an obvious ninja pet of some kind. Not very subtle you might say.

So the only thing I can do is just adjusting the white:blue ratio of the animal coating. In a dark environment, use a lot of dark blue. In bright environment, use a lot of white to pretend as animals that is known to have white variants, like mice, rabbits and cats. To hide the blue markings as much as possible, make it as dark as possible. From afar and not paying much attention, it would just look like some black patch of fur.

My desk now is full with conjured small animals. I snort in satisfaction.

I name this jutsu as Mini Raiju no Jutsu.

I dismiss all of it and then cast another Chibi Clone.

The Chibi Clone then immediately execute the instructions I had in mind and transform into several Mini Raiju forms. Being a chakra construct, changing its form is rather easy to do and doesn't cost much. Then, I have it replenish it's chakra by grabbing live wire. It only restore it back to the chakra portion that I had shaved off. No. Not quite. Each refill has a lower amount of full capacity of Lightning by a certain amount of percentage. It looks like the capacity deteriorated over time. But otherwise, it can operate for several days without me topping off its chakra up.

I now have a good infiltration unit.

Now, let's figure out my spare batteries idea.

)))))))))))

After several days of Jutsu Crafting in between my free time, I had settled with my newly created Battery Clones.

It is clones that I had left with just enough brain function to operate some programs. However it comes with some problems.

One, since my chakra is not neutral, the amount I recovered is deducted proportionate to distance. So I can't just store some at my home and have it constantly charged by jamming in live wire into them. Probably because of its Lightning nature, it doesn't travel well across air, which is a terrible conductor material.

Two, I can only have 10 Battery Clones at one time. That's half of me or 2 Teleport each. Basically, I have 5 Hotaru's worth of spare energy. I don't know why I am limited to just 10 at max, but eh, I guess the Writer need to put a cap on me somehow.

Welp, there goes my hope for infinite chakra. Can't have silly Makoto Hotaru going around spamming Kirin left and right now, do we?

Still, its better than nothing. Now I have at least roughly equal amount of chakra that Sasuke has now.

I store my Batteries inside my newly received Storage Watch, one of the product produced in our Fuinjutsu Engineering club. After my whole debacle with getting kidnapped by the Hyuuga, I figured, we really need gadgets.

Naruto had been studying Fuinjutsu ever since I revealed that the Uzumaki had been the ninja equivalent of Runesmith. Although that was rather contradictory to my bullshit that Naruto's mom is actually a youkai which is a big tiddy fox waifu. I hope he never noticed or just assume he just got slapped with the Uzumaki name at random lmao.

Anyway, rather than just do boring seals in scrolls, we decide it will just be a better use of our talents, aka, Naruto's talent coz I sure as hell has no braincells for this engineering crap to use Fuinjutsu to create gadgets instead. The Storage Watch is one of those gadget.

The idea was that since I can't use actual seals for the life of me without it going kaboom, Naruto would just seal his own chakra within seals products I would use as the powersource instead. My Lightning would serve as relay activator signal and depending on which Seal Relay I activate it would seal or release any item stored within. Basically, what I have in hand is a really basic Fuinjutsu-based computer made in the shape of a smartwatch.

All three of us has one of these watches, though two in my case for reasons to be revealed later, and within it are interesting items of engineering, all powered with Naruto stupid amount of chakra.

Man, Team 7 is going to be OP as fuk.

Oh yea that reminds me, I guess the team goes just like in canon afterall, but Team 8 was obviously cancelled since I pretty much ruined Kiba for life and Hinata is now a Clan Chief so it would be stupid for her to go around doing missions outside.

(((Yesterday)))

"Heee… so Sakura is your third member, huh. My condolences."

"You make it sound like we got saddled with a deadweight ", Sasuke chimed in.

"She is." I confirmed.

"Oh, You don't know about it since you've pretty much delete Sakura from existence in your brain, but actually Sakura had really grown after you punched her in the face!", Naruto defends her. "She had trained hard and become a really good kunoichi you know!"

Apparently, after I pretty much almost killed Sakura by caving her face in with a punch, Sakura finally get a wake up call and perform a character development arc offscreen.

Naruto and Sasuke sells me a thorough 20 minutes presentation as we ate at Ichiraku about how Sakura has really become a great character and is totally awesome and strong now. Behind the scene, she has arrested a group of human traffickers, solved a murder case, and helped Konohamaru to achieve his potential. Sakura has evolved past her Useless Sakura form, and become Awesome Sakura, the greatest kunoichi of our generation.

Little did I know that this is the start of the chronicles of Sakura's Offscreen Adventures

.

((( Present time)))

"So you want me to make the test instead of you?"

Kakashi, the deadbeat that he is, decides he want to shove off the Genin Tutorial Test to me. "Yes, I figure you can make an interesting test that can be meaningful to learn from. So, what do you say?"

"I don't wanna.", I politely decline.

"I knew you would say that.", Kakashi shove his hand into the pocket of his flak jacket and draw out two paper strips. "Here, two movie tickets for the up and coming Princess Gale movie. You can go to a date with Lady Hanabi!", Kakashi presented me the two movie tickets with the Kakashi Giving Ticket pose.

"Why would I go to a date with Hanabi?

We're not dating.", I replied, deadpan.

"ehem ehem. Sure. Totally.", Kakashi fake coughing and winked at me.

I yawned, too lazy to deal with Kakashi's bullshit right now. "Fine.", I took the tickets.

"Just tell them to come here in an hour."

((((Naruto and Sasuke))))

When Team 7 arrived into the cabin, they found a note on the door. They read the note, which contain instructions for their Tutorial Test.

-Sakura will be the leader of this team. Naruto and Sasuke must follow her order absolutely.

-Find me. I am hiding somewhere. You have until 5pm to do so because I don't work outside office hours without OT pay.

-You can ask these individuals for hints on where I am hiding.

-One who wields the sword of wind

-One who wield the fist of youth

-One who wields mirages

-Now get off my lawn.

"I told Sakura that Hotaru would have just sleep his bed and doesn't even bother to actually hide, but nooooo! There's no way a ninja would do something as stupid as hiding in plain sight, Sakura said. Now its 4.59pm and we still can't find him!", Naruto complained.

"That's because he's obviously just chilling in his cabin.", Sasuke correctly assumed. "There's no way he would actually think a smart test. He just made up that note and make Sakura captain so that we have to go away and waste our time and energy."

That and the Jounin Senseis were obviously don't even know who the hell is Makoto Hotaru nor do they even know they're part of a test.

"And after all that, Sakura still doesn't believe us and think this is just Hotaru's genius test where there is code within code within code within code times 25! There is no code! He's just wasting our time!"

"And the test is over!", Kakashi suddenly appears.

"GAAHHH!!!", Naruto and Sasuke screamed in shock.

"Domo! Wow, you've all completely failed your test! I knew it was a great idea to make a betting pool against you cute Genins!", Kakashi laughed over the money he will received back in the office later.

"Where's Sakura, Kakashi?", Sasuke asked.

"Oh, apparently she had stopped an armed robbery at Konoha Bank.", Kakashi explained.

"Wow, Sakura really has the best adventures offscreen huh?", Naruto admires.

"That she is.", Sasuke added.

"Anyway, Sakura had already headed to Ichiraku for team dinner. She said that Hotaru is indeed a genius ninja that even she can't outsmart and is definitely a role model of the new generation!", Kakashi informs.

Sasuke scoffed. "What she really got was getting outstupided. Tell us Kakashi, Hotaru was just sleeping in his cabin this whole time right?"

Kakashi just laughed. "Who knows? You had never opened the cabin to confirm. Makoto was both in and not in the cabin. He had existed as both probability at once. And now?"

Kakashi looked to the sky with admiration.

"You kids will never figure out which."

Truly, this is The Ultimate Test.

(((Author's Note)))

somehow when I transfer copy past it becomes mostly italics. i try to fix i, and hen I got lazy .