Naruto was the happiest he had ever been and it was all because of three people that had recently entered his life. Despite what people thought of him, he was not oblivious to the world around him, he merely acted that way as a coping mechanism. But even before he had known the reason, he saw the way people looked at him, he knew at a single glance whether or not somebody harbored hatred towards him.
To say he was observant, was being humble. It was a necessary survival skill he had learned young to stay out of trouble. He had an almost supernatural ability to pick up on people their moods and behavioral patterns and he could smell trouble from a mile away. Every person he had met had their opinion of him reflected in their eyes, most were merely suspicious, others outright resentful and the worst were those who looked at him with clear unfiltered fear. That always managed to make his stomach turn.
So the first thing he had noticed when all of team seven had been together, is that something was missing. It had taken him until after their test to be able to pinpoint what it was. Not a single member of his team had that look in their eyes, not one. Of course, he had kind of known this already of Sasuke, too engaged in his own world to care about what people thought of Naruto. When Naruto challenged the boy, he looked at the blond with honest annoyance and nothing more. Part of why Naruto actually liked the Uchiha, despite his bad attitude.
Then there was Sakura, she was a bit of a mystery to him. Like most of their classmates, she had had a watered down version of what he saw in the adults' eyes. Disliking him by association alone. Then one morning, months ago, she had walked into class like she hadn't slept a wink and the look was gone. She had stopped liking Sasuke and she looked at him like any other person.
Secretly, he had been really relieved that those two had ended up as his teammates. Even is Sakura acted like your average, stuffy librarian and Sasuke was a bit of an ass, he felt good around them. Judged for who he was and nothing else.
However his biggest concern had to have been his jonin instructor. If he was anything like his academy teachers, Naruto would have been screwed, royally. Because some of his teachers had been downright malicious, ranging from giving him the most blunted kunai during practicals, to refusing to answer any of his questions to even giving him the wrong instructions before an exam. During one particularly eventful year, he had been giving the wrong books and despite his insistence, once he even realized what was going on, they had refused to exchange his for the right ones.
None of this had been outright dangerous, sure he had fallen behind his classmates rather spectacularly but he was used to struggling to get where he wanted to be, but out there on missions away from watchful eye of the Hokage, things could get a lot uglier.
And while Kakashi-sensei was weird, like really weird, Naruto was treated with the same aloof distance and 'the devil may care' attitude as his teammates. In fact, if he squinted, one could say Kakashi was actually just a bit fond of Naruto, maybe.
In any case he had nothing to worry about from his sensei, and as far as dangerous mission outside of the village walls went, there had been none of that either. Sadly.
"Aw man, this sucks!"
Nope, they were cleaning trash from out of one of Konoha's rivers and it was disgusting. Garbage tended to be kind of gross on it's own but make it wet on a hot summer day and you had a form of torture that should be forbidden.
Sasuke wasn't exactly careful when scooping the gunk into Naruto's basket either, so he was going to have to wash his jacket when he got home.
"Less complaining, more working." Kakashi-sensei ordered lazily from under the shade of a nearby tree. Leafing through that stupid orange book of his, inspiring Naruto to stick out his tongue in protest.
Naruto would summon his clones to speed up the work but he couldn't be sure they wouldn't attempt mutiny, right then and there. That and Kakashi had explicitly forbidden him from doing so after one his clones had pushed into another clone during a weeding job, who had knocked over a nearby citronella candle, which had then effectively set their client's prized flower garden on fire. Needless to say, that D-rank hadn't been a success.
"The pay better be worth it." He grumbled as Sasuke wordlessly scooped another load of slobbery waste in the bucket Naruto was holding out.
"Yeah, it better be." Sakura echoed his sentiment from somewhere behind them. Happy to have a more receptive audience to his complaints, Naruto turned around only to completely forget what he was about to say when he caught sight of Sakura.
"Wow, Sakura how are you doing that!" Even Sasuke turned to look at his loud proclamation.
Sakura on her part, just shrugged it off. "Water walking, I've read about it."
She had been thinking it through for the past hour, trying to keep her advanced knowledge to herself, until finally giving in after stepping in some unknown, slimy substances at the bottom of the river, twice. Effective getting the goop between her toes. Now she was shoveling the dirt from on top of the river, a clean and dry place.
Old Sakura had learned the technique after finding out Ino could do it, wrangling an explanation from the other girl and then got it right after her first try anyway. It wasn't beyond the scope of possibility that she could have figured it out on her own, after reading about it. Kakashi hadn't so much as bat an eye at her when she stepped onto the water's surface.
"How does it work." Sasuke demanded, rather than asked. As was usual, the Uchiha would only give her, and everybody else, they time of the day if there was something to gain from it. However, Naruto was also standing at attention and since Kakashi wasn't fond of actually teaching his students, Sakura figured it couldn't hurt to have him a bit more skilled, a bit earlier on.
"Well, usually people learn tree walking as a first step, since water is the more advanced technique. But basically, you channel your chakra to the soles of your feet to keep yourself on top of the water. The difficulty is in using the right amount. Too little chakra and you'll fall right in, too much and you'll be repelled."
This spurred both boys to give it a try. It was a good thing they had the sense to put the basket and shovel away because Naruto took a plunge in the water after failing to summon any chakra to his feet at all and Sasuke used way too much, resulting in the water exploding beneath him as he was catapulted back into the riverbank. It was, thankfully, a hot day, so she didn't mind being sprayed with the nearby water, as long as it was just water.
"Naruto, you didn't use any chakra at all." She commented as he resurfaced.
"I didn't?" He asked earnestly, blinking the water out of his eyes.
Kakashi was chuckling and she couldn't tell whether it was at some passage in his porn book or at her poor attempt at teachinghisstudents but it infuriated her all the same.
"No." She said, sending a stink eye to their sensei. "Can't you... feel that?"
"Uhm... feel what?" He sounded genuinely confused.
"Get out of the water first." She suggested as Sasuke had picked himself up and was getting ready for a second attempt, a determined look on his face. Her blond teammate wadded over to the side and got out while Sakura followed him on foot.
"Your chakra," she continued on land, "I'm not a great sensor but I could tell nothing happened while you stepped on the water."
"Are you supposed to feel chakra?" Naruto said, then. "And what's a sensor?"
"Somebody who is good at sensing chakra, other than their own." She explained impatiently before moving on to the more pressing matters. "Yes, of course you're supposed to feel chakra! How else do you perform jutsu?!"
When Naruto flinched, she regretted her tone of voice and forced herself to adopt a more mellow approach. "Why don't you try the hand sign for your Kage-Bunshin, pretend you're going to do the jutsu but don't release it."
It was entirely possible, if nobody ever properly taught the boy, that he was performing jutsu on pure instinct and wasn't in touch with his chakra network. That would explain why he struggled so much with basic ninjutsu, if the boy didn't even know how to measure his chakra it was almost impossible to do. However, it was a foreign concept for Sakura who was acutely aware of her own chakra ever since she could remember.
"Okay." Naruto mumbled, uncharacteristically unsure.
Then he made the cross sign and with Sakura actively attempting to feel what was going on, she nearly yelped in surprise when a wave of powerful dense chakra crashed into her senses. "Can you feel that Naruto, the energy?" She grit through her teeth. Boy, he sure did have monstrous chakra levels.
He closed his eyes and scrunched his brow. "Uh, I guess so." Then he brightened when he actually caught on to the sensation. "Yeah, I can feel it!"
In the background, Sasuke, once was once again send flying backwards.
"Now hold on to that sensation, walk back to the waters edge and try direct some of that to your feet." It wasn't likely going to work, seeing as water walking required control, but he would get his first taste of what control, or lack thereof, felt like and that was a first step.
"Alright!" Naruto shouted enthusiastically.
He let one foot hover over the water, performed the Kage-Bunshin sign and directed the chakra to the sole of his feet.
"Now hold on a second-" Kakashi-sensei suddenly got up from his position at the same time Sakura realized what was happening.
"Naruto, not all of it!"
But it was too late, the noise was deafening as the river exploded under the force of Naruto's chakra. She was sent flying backwards from the shock wave, along with, she assumed, Sasuke and Naruto.
"W-what the hell?" Sasuke coughed somewhere nearby while Sakura struggled upright.
Once the debris cleared, Sakura spluttered in disbelief while Sasuke repeated his previous statement. The land was split up by a huge crater, already slowly filling with water, creating a small lake in the middle of the river.
"Well, that should have been expected." Kakashi said, outwardly looking entirely unbothered by what happened but Sakura could swear she noticed a hardness in the set of his shoulders that wasn't there before.
"How was that expected?" Sasuke snapped.
"The boy does have sizeable chakra levels."
"No," Sasuke grit out between his teeth, "I have sizeable chakra levels, this is freakish."
Sakura bit her lip, not liking the direction of the Uchiha's thoughts but unable to disagree. The difference was that she knew why, while Sasuke was still in the dark.
"That must he his legendary Uzumaki clan heritage. They were rumored to have immense chakra reserves, after all." She blurted out to break the tension.
"Uzumaki clan?" Sasuke asked.
"Yeah, I've read about them in 'the history of Konoha'. They've been wiped out ages ago but I figured Naruto must be a descendant. The wife of the first Hokage was one herself."
Narrowing his eyes, he turned to Kakashi. "Is that true?"
Kakashi-sensei shrugged, still carefully neutral. "About the Uzumaki clan? Supposedly, it's true. But even I'm too young to remember a time where they were still existed. Like Sakura said, they have been massacred a long time ago."
"Massacred." Sasuke mumbled.
Sakura doubted that their sensei's choice of words was coincidental.
"Should we, uh, look for him?" Seeing as Naruto was no where in sight, she thought to ask.
"Hm? He's in that tree over there." Kakashi replied, pointing at a huge, and rather distant tree. Sure enough, something orange was hanging from one of the top branches. Sakura was gaping but she couldn't help herself.
"You two are dismissed for today." Their sensei said, sounding resigned.
"But-"
"Dismissed, Sakura." His tone was firmer now.
Needless to say, this D-rank wasn't a success either.
Instead of going home, or to the library as she was prone to do with her spare time, she found herself wandering to an empty training ground nearby. Kakashi had uniformly decided that physical training was the way to go with team seven. That meant that so far they had been doing nothing but routine strength and endurance training, also the occasional spar, something that Sakura found herself excluded from more often than not.
All of this, was completely pointless for a med-nin. Sure, Sakura didn't have the confidence to practice on people other than herself, nor the stomach to cut open small animals so she could stitch them back together. So perhaps calling herself a med-nin wasn't entirely accurate but healing her own bruises had come easily, as did a bunch of other things.
That included stimulating muscle growth with minimal effort, maximizing her muscle density and pumping athlete levels of oxygen through her bloodstream. Sakura had, while respecting the limits of her twelve year old body and refusing to look like a bodybuilder, reached her peak performance physically. She literally had to wait for her body to grow older, to grow any stronger.
That meant that while the boys were at least benefiting from their daily training sessions, though she was of the opinion that control was a much more pressing issue to address, they were a complete waste of time for Sakura.
That brought her to her current mystery. You see, Sakura was confident that she would find no other girl around her age stronger than her, nor any adult civilian man, but for a shinobi she was still well within the scope of 'normal' and old Sakura's strength had been downright inhuman.
She stared at a training post, focusing intently. Her feet shifted to a more grounded stance, her chakra rose with her breath, surging into her left hand. She struck, and the post rattled with the force of her punch but remained unmarked. Her hand sustained no damage, at least that was an improvement from the first few tries when she had left a bloody smear on the wood. Or later when she had actually utilized enough chakra and ended up shattering all the bones in her hand.
It had been a painful but productive lesson to piece it all back together.
She called on her chakra again, raised her fist, then dropped it again. Her chakra was carefully redistributed in her system, she was never wasteful with it, couldn't afford to be.
She sighed to herself. A quote her father occasionally tossed around when he was feeling particularly smart, entered her mind.The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.
Yet, there she was. She needed a different approach but her motivation was fleeting when something did not come naturally to her. A part of her was hoping that one day, preferably soon, she would find the missing bit of information that kept her from superhuman strength in her overcrowded memories. To find the part where Tsunade-shishou explains what she's doing wrong.
Until then, perhaps she was better of focusing on other things. Such as genjutsu, now that was something that did, in fact, come easily to her. Both 'a journey through the world of genjutsu' and 'an illusionists guide' had been completely read through in days and were now replaced by ten other books of their kind.
The first had been a collection of note-worthy genjutsu throughout documented shinobi history, included the hell viewing technique, Kakashi had tried to use on her. By each technique there was a detailed explanation of how they worked, which hand signs could be used and how these techniques came to be. Naturally there were no truly groundbreaking genjutsu documented in a book available for all of Konoha's ninja population but it was a start and Sakura had practiced a few on herself, with success.
The second, 'an illusionist guide', focused more on a deeper understanding of how genjutsu worked, how it affected the senses and several ways to get your chakra into your opponent's cranial nerves. While ninjutsu required a combination of yin and yang release, genjutsu was mostly pure yin release. Generally speaking, this chakra was always inserted through one of the five senses. With sound and touch being the most popular methods of inducing genjutsu, sight being mostly, though not exclusively, dojutsu related and taste and smell considered rarely utilized and also almost completely undocumented.
The fun part was that the book did theorize over how to work with smell and taste. Or well, fun for Sakura.
The third book she had gotten that day, she hadn't returned to the library, in fact she was fairly certain it didn't come from there at all. Some of the things mentioned in there were far too advanced for most genin, or even chunin. Her other books were also advanced, but this one required her to keep a pen and notebook at hand to fully dissect the chakra diagrams displaying the proper movement of chakra trough the pathways, write down the words she didn't get, and sometimes ever decipher parts written in code. Those were usually the handwritten parts. However they were a well of information if she could translate them.
The first part she had decipher had taught her how to turn genjutsu on herself, to manipulate the chakra in her cranial nerves, already naturally present, into making the world her playground. Anything she could imagine, she could conjure before her eyes looking as real as the sky above her. Or well, it was supposed to.
When she turned Naruto's eyes brown for her amusement, it had come out wrong, brown in the most clinical sense of the of the word. The simplistic shade of dirt brown was not how eyes looked. Then she turned to observe the people around her, perhaps staring a bit too intently in random people's eyes. It had earned her a couple of affronted stares but it also yielded results. Brown eyes, had flecks of yellow, green and sometimes even red hues, making the entirety come to life and the next time she tried it, Naruto had looked much more natural with hazel eyes.
Observing and then, realistically recreating those observations, that's what she had been doing in her spare time. That's what she needed if she didn't want to stick to the same rehashed genjutsu that every person that briefly dabbled in the subject could do.
However as good as things looked before her eyes, she had no way of knowing how her work would hold up against people. She had no sparring partner, no one she could ask, and practicing on unsuspecting civilians was illegal.
There was only herself to count on, it had only ever been her.
Her mind wandered to earlier events of today, how Naruto had blown up that river with pure chakra release because of her prompting. With a twist of her chakra she recreated the scene and marveled at the destruction before her. Naruto would become a force to be recognized with once he actually wrangled control over his ocean deep reserves.
However, she did feel kind of bad about the whole thing and hoped Kakashi wasn't being too hard on him.
Mind made up, she brushed herself off, released her technique and walked towards the store for a cup of ramen she still owned her teammate.
The fancy kind.
I always wondered why Naruto used too little chakra when tree climbing instead of too much like Sasuke did. It seems like a given considering he can only use shadow clones instead of regular ones because of how much chakra they require. With his power he would have blown those trees to bits. My best guess is that he knew about his insane chakra levels, had trouble controlling it and was actually afraid/reluctant to use it. My second guess is that it was too difficult for him to channel chakra through his feet at all.