A/N - it has been a long time since the last update. Quick recap. Askuna is a reincarnated Computer Scientist, who has spent the first years of his life creating mind clone jutsu in his mindscape. It has a whole bunch of protocols for how they operate on his chakra and the information he gathers, allowing him to learn, process information, and control his chakra much faster by dividing it into smaller chunks. He has spent most of its benefits on training how to be a master of the body flicker and wall sticking, as well as being able to create internal support chakra structures that can handle intense force distribution and rotations.
He is born in Minato's era, somewhere between him and Kakashi. He has entered the academy and skipped straight to the graduating class, where Minato and Kushina are. They are 9, while he is 5 and a half. In around 3 years 2nd great war breaks out and the Sannin get their title after facing Hanzo.
Recently, Askuna learned simple fire ninjutsu from the instructor, then was stalked by the chunin. He defeated the chunin, resisted the sharingan of the Police officer, and then performed a power play with the Hokage. Now, as his Academy teacher Daioku leaves, the talks with Hokage will continue.
Askuna observed how Daioku was leaving the office and giving him a stinky eye, after which he noted that one of the Anbu called out for another person. He turned to see the Police officer, who had arrested him previously, coming in and bowing.
The person who entered had his eyes consistently on Hokage, has bowed while saying "Chunin Uchiha Schorioni, reporting to Hokage."
"Ah, welcome Schorioni," Hokage greeted, before stating " I heard there was some scuffle involved with young Askuna here."
Schorioni's eyes flickered to Askuna for a second, before refocusing on Hokage. He answered "That is correct, an unauthorized shinobi duel has taken place at the roofs of Hanamawa District. The perpetrators..." he then looked coldly at Askuna "didn't resist arrest."
Hiruzen nodded, then asked, "How do you judge young Askuna's combat abilities?"
"At least Chunin," Schorioni stated simply.
"Oh?" prompted Hiruzen.
"After the smoke bomb ignited, our squad rushed to the impact zone. From the little exchange between combatants, I have observed, I would say Askuna had complete control of the battle. After kicking the chunin he was fast enough to go behind her and was about to finish the fight before we intervened." Schorioni started recounting the situation.
"From what we have gathered from the other opponent, the chunin was trying to use smoke bombs to retreat from Askuna, however, was completely outstripped in terms of speed and taijutsu."
"When we interrogated the Chunin, she also stated that Askuna was completely unaffected by the genjutsu she tried to place on him, and I would likewise confirm that Askuna fully resisted my Sharingan"
Hiruzen hummed, before saying, "Yes, the use of your clan's dojutsu was warranted in this case and it usually helps break the fights between shinobi. Curious that young Askuna could resist it."
He then hardened his voice saying " Thank you for your report Schorioni, you have handled it well. Dismissed!"
Schorioni bowed a little, before going out. Meanwhile, Hiruzen focused on Askuna and asked.
"I have heard that Schorioni is quite experienced at using his Sharingan...", he started, "but then I have also heard about you learning fire jutsu on the first try and using Academy three without hand-seals, which you claim that you have learned in an hour, you are also quite good at chakra control, aren't you?"
"I guess I am." Askuna shrugged.
Hiruzen chuckled, "I see,... just one last thing. Could you tell your part of the story about this confrontation?"
"I was pondering about how chakra works and I have noticed someone staying and observing me for five minutes. So, naturally, I shunshined to ask them what it is all about." Askuna shrugged again, before saying " But then she started running, so I went and tried again, but she started fighting me, so I went to subdue her."
Then as if in an afterthought, he added "I guess, I have caught someone's attention and they sent her to spy on me."
Hiruzen then asked. "And how did you know that she was there?"
"She was too loud." Askuna lied.
"I see. Then, as a Hokage it is my duty to say, that in the future I would advise you to not confront an enemy of unknown strength alone, or try to be more subtle about it, like asking for help... no matter how confident you feel about your abilities, young Askuna." Not waiting for his response, he took a pipe to his mouth and said "However, I will strive to make sure, that no such things occur again. Dismissed." he took a long drag of the tabaco.
Askuna turned around and started walking out of the office while thinking.
As he was reviewing his observations of the ninja which he has gathered so far through the village and comparing them with his experiences in battle with that chunnin stalker at the roof, he was starting to suspect that besides objective, measurable speed, there was something like conceptual speed.
'Hold on, but how do I describe it?' He scrunched his eyebrows in thought.
Going by an extreme example, feats of speed performed by ninjas like dodging lighting, or in Kakshi's example splitting it with Chidori would be impossible without moving close to the relativistic speed.
Yet, this does not seem the case.
He by himself, through his modifications to chakra sticking and the way he propels himself can move through such speeds that he can visibly see the rain falling in slow motion. In fact, he is easily one of the fastest ninja in the village by now... and probably the fastest one to completely exhaust themselves by going all out.
Yet, he isn't even traveling hundredth of the speed of lightning... or is he?
He hasn't measured the speed of lighting in this world to begin with. He has two theories of what is going on. First, is the speed of lighting and maybe the light is way slower than in his original world. Second, things slow down or speed up based on who they are attacking.
The second one is ridiculous, to be honest, but his experience in battle also was weird, so to speak. It may be just a trick of his mind, because even though he was faster than the chunin, the closer he was to her, the faster she could react, and comparatively the slower he got.
Yet, the most damning evidence was the kawarimi or in other words, substitution jujutsu. When his classmates performed it, even though they replaced themselves immediately, he would have been easily able to, let's say punch them.
It is like the conceptual weight of someone and the jutsu impacts the relative speed they can move when close to each other. Maybe, the objective speeds stay the same, but the slower person is desperate to even the gap and is becoming faster, creating an illusion of the faster person moving slower.
Let's look at an example. If the lighting is about to strike the tree and about to strike the ninja, the latter will be able to perceive it and dodge it. But by only having the virtue of conceptual weight, whether in his person, abilities to move fast, or ability to manipulate lighting, would he be able to breach the gap from mach to hundreds of mach speed?
No, that is ridicoulous. This means, that most likely lighting is slower, and in desperation, in the clutch moment of life and death, the shinobi can get faster.
In other words, even though someone can move so fast, that the other person normally shouldn't be able to block the attack, at the moment that person performs the attack, it seems like the time is slowing down for the defender and they have a higher chance of intercepting it.
But how much does the conceptual weight of something impact the speed one can interact with it?
In essence, flying thunder god and kawarimi are both instantaneous, however, one is a much better fit for teleportation than the other, through the root origin of how it works. Thunder god seems to make it way easier for chakra to achieve the intended effect, and in how efficient and masterfully crafted it is, it carries enough conceptual weight to allow Minato to blitz through the battlefield.
Askuna's way of movement tries to mimic, as closely as possible, the distribution of forces during transitioning between phases like slowing down and pivoting, making him objectively faster, but also allowing him a freeway of being conceptually faster than Chunins.
However, even if Chunins are slower, and objectively wouldn't be able to react when he got full speed to for example stab them with the kunai. They have their conceptual speed they can operate under which starts to clash with his.
Or maybe he is delusional...
"It would make the world both more difficult and less terrifying, huh", he remarked, while jumping from roof to roof.
More difficult, because even if he went full Raikage Chakra armor mode, it would mean that others could still block or evade him with Jutsu at close distances. Less terrifying because if someone suddenly developed a relativistic speed weapon like a laser, he would have a chance to dodge or block it and not just die without registering the attack itself.
But it depends on what relativistic means here. He needs to measure the speeds of light and lightning. So, he needs to learn some lightning ninjutsu.
And he also needs to see the difference between it and natural lightning. Though, with the example of Kakshi splitting an actual lighting strike it seems pretty unnecessary.
'It is also disturbing to think about feats of Kakashi, who is probably now still in his mother's womb.' he mused, then an idea struck him, ' Speaking of which, I need to make sure his mother is not an alien."
He made a mental note.
For now, he retreated towards home to train the fire jutsu, and possibly extrapolate it to all other elements. Other mental clones proposed the project of writing kanji with fire in the air before him, as well as with other elements.
Suffice it to say, writing single Kanji could be divided into modules done by particular clones spawned during the execution of the program, and then turned off to not waste resources right after.
Doing such a thing would also allow him to train fire and other clones' manipulation, raising his elemental chakra manipulation, and look outstanding.
There is no reason why Askuna couldn't remake this fire-spewing technique for water spitting or earth spitting, maybe the inherent difficulties of modeling it are different, and he would fry himself when doing lightning spitting.
Then, he remembered a little booklet about fire chakra, which he had received from his sensei Daioku.
He leafed through the pages in seconds and relaxed on the couch in the living room to make time for his clones to process the info in parallel.
He loved his jutsu.
After processing the info, it was mostly basics about different people who grew their elemental proficiency with fire chakra. It boiled down to 80% philosophical debates and flourishing descriptions of how to think about fire, 8% how to mold fire chakra, 5% about leaf burning and making fire hotter exercises, and the rest were two D-rank jutsu to train with, one which spewed fireballs and second about small whip of fire.
"So pretty disappointing, as expected." he sighed, getting up.
He tested both of the jutsu once, and performed them seal-lessly, before continuing his project by practicing writing fire kanji in the air.
Sadly, he has almost no control over fire, he can't shape it.
Yet.
So he is going to cheat. For each kanji, he is going to develop separate hand seals which will emulate how the kanji should appear. He will also create a framework for whole sentences.
Luckily he has experience with jutsu which takes up more than a hundred handseals. His mothership jutsu, so creating a new one shouldn't be too hard.
He ran out of chakra after an hour. Which made him continue only with four mental clones to regenerate more chakra.
"Curse, my small reserves." he sighed, as it was going to be a long weekend.
...
Daioku and his girlfriend Mayuri eat dango in his house.
Mayuri covered her red face and shook her head in embarrassment.
"The kid is a monster," she whined.
"yeah, yeah." he patted her back, but then he stupidly added "But it was your fault for checking him out."
She glared at him and then huffed, "You told me you teach once a generation genius, who defeated Chunin at the entrance exam, of course, I wanted to see what all this fuss is about."
As he caressed her he asked, "And how was he?"
She splayed in his embrace and pathetically said, "He beat my ass."
He hummed, "Don't worry I'll give him some special once-in-generation workout routine on Monday and then afterward give him personal pointers."
She whined, "Daioku he is just a kid..." but she bit her lip and hugged him tighter, clearly not objecting.
He kissed her head and played with her hair strands. God, he loved her auburn hair. He gotta give it to the kiddo, for how his girlfriend is clingy tonight, he almost doesn't want to make his life hell on Monday. Almost.
...
On Monday, Askuna should have been tired, as he spent all night working on finishing touches, but in fact, he was speaking while his mental clones were grinding, so he felt okay.
So as per usual, he burst into the class through the open window and landed sitting on the seat next to Kushina, startling her.
But he was more interested in the reaction of his teacher, who seemed to have turned around and had a hand on kunai in a holster. His eyes were narrowed on him.
"Askuna, you are eight minutes late," he noted.
"I apologize," he answered. He truly did not care.
"Your punishment will be delivered on the obstacle course." he delivered, before continuing the lesson.
The murmurs in the class started and Askuna's eyebrow rose.
'Well, that is something new.' he mused. Kushina was glaring at him strangely and tightening her fist, so he took a finger and showed her a floating fire kanji above it.
'Sup?'
She reeled back, but then anger turned into curiosity and she leaned in. We were in the back, so no one aside from sensei had seen us, as he partially concealed it by lying on the desk.
She went to touch it, but quickly got her hand back, due to it being hot.
'Hot, isn't it?' the kanji changed.
She huffed. He smiled, dismissed the kanji, and went to sleep. His clones were creating other miniature fire kanji under the desk in the meanwhile.
He made them quite chakra-efficient and got quite good at more common ones. Yet he would still run out of chakra after some time of practice, so he wanted to squeeze in some training now, and then just wait for it to regenerate.
While it was halfway through the theoretical lesson his clones started to contemplate how to create shadow clones, so he could just be somewhere else.
A mind clone notified him about a finger that was just about to nudge his arm. He lifted his head and looked at the offender. She looked startled and retracted her finger in embarrassment, but she still gave him a note.
'How are you doing it?'
He mused what to do. On one hand, he could give her twelve hand seals he has used on one of the kanji. However, if someone had seen it, they could ask questions about how he created those hand seals, and then ask more questions about whether he created hand seals for each kanji, and then they could have some ideas of being creative.
He couldn't have that, because the creativity of others was his worst nightmare. He was living in a world where some people created jutsu for teleportation, shadow clones, reviving dead, and body modifications...
Okay, they pretty much know they can create reality-altering jutsu through hand seals. So that point is moot.
Then, it is about knout knowing his methodology, it would be way harder to reproduce his steps if he just said that he created those Kanji with pure fire chakra manipulation. It would also give an impression to others that he could create with it whatever shape he desired.
Instead of being retarded and creating a thousand useless jutsu and writing a Kanji framework.
He shrugged, and wrote in the air: 'Make notes.'
He then explained it can be done through pure fire chakra manipulation or a specific combination of hand seals.
In creating the jutsu it also helped that certain strokes of Kanji were similar to each other so he could reuse them. Still, just for writing several kanji, he had to initialize tens of clones in a cold start to write those letters, before dismissing them, as holding the structure was far less expensive.
Still, it was far more chakra efficient than constantly burning through resources to maintain those clones.
He also asked her at the end to keep it a secret.
He wondered if she would keep it. Nevertheless, she thanked him and he had his peace.
After the lesson, there was a break, through which Askuna's body flickered on the roof to not deal with kids. After those, there would be several hours of training and then they could go home.
So as the break ended, he came to the obstacle course. He was quite surprised that he was given a blindfold and other children received three paint pellets to throw at him.
"I know you can do this." Smiled Daioku while giving him a strong hearty three pats on the back which Askuna naturally neutralized, rooting himself to the floor.
Daioku also held pellets of his own.
As he went to the starting line, there was an interruption.
"Can I also join Askuna in this training?" asked sheepishly Minato, while raising his hand.
Daioku sensei's eyebrow rose, but then he acknowledged the request.
However, another person volunteered, "Hold on! I'm also doing it!" and came in stomping Kushina. " As a future Hokage, I can't back down from the challenge!."
"Suit yourself, "shrugged Daioku, then prompted, "Does anyone else want to be covered with paint?"
There were no other volunteers. So both of them went to join him on the starting line.
Minato, in the middle, gave us a smile saying, "Let's do our best."
Kushina spluttered, "Thank you, same."
"Sure," Askuna nodded, but then asked, "have any idea how to do this?"
"Um, we ran this course since year one in Academy, I think I may be able to do it blindfold, by now." He sounded uncertain and Daioku put him in the blindfold.
Well, Askuna was a little uncertain. His chakra sensing worked on people. He had mind clones filtering his normal senses but they were not boosted by chakra yet, so kind of useless.
He had however trained his bodyflicker with closed eyes, where he extended chakra roots centimeters from his body to feel the first surface of contact to slow down. So he could body flicker on his head and be fine. He practiced it with his mind clones, each looking at a different section of threads.
Well, as they were about to start, he said, "First one will become Hokage."
Which earned him sounds of feet digging in the ground from his mates.
"Start!" shouted Daioku.
Askuna's body flickered to the first climbing wall and stopped two centimeters before his eye embedded itself on a rock, he then jumped upwards trying to jump over the wall, but he didn't catch anything.
He must have overshot. He started falling only, to feel a pellet stopping near his face, blocked by his chakra sticking.
He fell, and his body flicker training allowed him to cushion himself in an awkward position.
'Hmm, where am I' he wondered. After the wall, there was the short obstacle of going on the tree branches. But according to his fall, he must have fallen to the ground, so he needs to backtrack to the wall and climb it on the other side.
His chakra-sensing clones registered that Minato started blitzing above him on the trees, then Kushina not far behind.
Therefore not to backtrack to the wall, he jumped to Minato's last general position. He jumped and collided with his head to the branch, stopping with chakra sleeping, soon after Kushina ran above him with an unsteady yelp as the pellet splash resounded.
To not be in an impact zone his body flickered on the tree the branch was coming from, and he stood upright on the side of the tree.
He traced the branch they were on and looked for his clone's information where Kushina and Minato were.
Minato was far ahead, and there were multiple trees between them, so he started running on the branch and tried to follow the past movement of Kushina.
Suddenly pellet struck him in the side of the head, tilting his body sideways so instead of sticking himself in place he jumped off to the side to analyze the situation.
'How?' He questioned, 'Chakra was in the pellet clone supplied."
That explains it, chakra sticking worked best when there was no foreign Chakra, normally in a fight he would have expected the Chakra of others and put it into consideration to only stick to the surface area. His normal tree-walking roots were normally digging into an object to stop it, which in this instance failed.
This means Daioku-sensei probably realized that normal throws wouldn't do anything against him so he put in the chakra to pellet.
Clever, but he will be ready next time. Well, sufficiently ready, as if someone used much more Chakra, it would cost much more to put on a passive defense.
His somersaulting ended with him repositioning himself to hit the ground, but he touched a tree with his side first, making him land there first.
His ear and face were sticky with the pellet making him grimace. He made new mind clones to quickly figure out a water element to wash himself, but in the meanwhile, he tried to jump to his last position.
Third of his clones argued he jumps too high, and third that he jumps too low. In the end, he must have done either of those as he overshoots.
'Okay, kiddie gloves off.' He started burning of chakra by creating tens of chakra strings coming into each direction and creating tens of chakra clones to rely on and gather information for him.
Doing so, he quickly identified the tree that he should jump on, and he started to fling himself to the correct path using strings and body flicker.
He started blazing through the obstacle course to find that Kushina was also struggling, climbing the wooden pole on the jumping place. He jumped through them all in one jump. Minato was way ahead of him.
His improved defense blocked another pellet filled with chakra and he continued running through the obstacle course. Usually wasting only several strings on the things ahead of him.
Every time he tried to go farther with body flicker, he ended up somewhere where he didn't know, so he had to replace it with boosted running.
This in turn given his pathetic stamina made him quite exhausted, and in the end, he arrived just seconds behind Minato.
The jackass was even free of paint and was congratulated by everyone. Minato came to Askuna and said" Good job Askuna!" smiling.
"Yeah, nice win," he commented, before hearing from Daioku.
"Greatest genius is still wet behind the ears, it seems." he mocked him, which earned him a few snickers. And it worked as his eyebrow twitched.
It was the time that Kushina arrived, and she was full of dirt and pellets.
Daioku turned to the class, "So, what Askuna did do wrong?"
The girl who has taught Askuna Academy three raised her hand.
"Yokawa." Sensei gave her permission to speak.
"Askuna jumped over the climbing wall, which is supposed to be climbed." she started, weakly, but then added with conviction, "which made him fall off the course and land beyond safety nets. So he could have injured himself unnecessarily when falling."
'Ah, right, there were safety nets under the obstacles.'
"Yes, thank you Yokawa. Now, his second mistake was when receiving the pellet to the face he jumped off the branch he was on and again fell beyond the obstacle course. Everyone, remember, that when you try the course yourself, so no serious injuries happen."
It took them a second to register that they would be going blindfolded too. Daioku then added, "Also, Askuna, falling off the course is equivalent to failing it, so you need to go again." he grinned at him.
Sadly, he only created a jutsu to wash his face when the paint dried off.