Disclaimer: First Chapter
Story Start!
They failed their mission.
That was all there was to it.
"We couldn't convince him... we really couldn't convince him." Sakura whispered, heart broken over the failed mission and the loss of another one of her teammates. Naruto didn't hate them, and he wasn't doing what Sasuke was doing, but he was still leaving the village without the intent of ever coming back. She had thought that just them showing up would be enough for them to get Naruto to see reason, as his friends.
She hadn't expected this.
Now that she thought about it, until the Chunin exams, none of them had ever really treated Naruto like a friend before. She had treated Naruto like an annoyance, and leaned on him for support more than she allowed him to lean against her. He had suffered all alone, and she had never really been there for him when he needed her. It made sense that he didn't consider her a good enough friend to abandon his happiness for.
"What's wrong with him, Konoha is his home... the jerk." Kiba muttered in just as much annoyance as anyone who had been on the Sasuke mission should have. Kiba looked over at Shikamaru and Choji, all of them had almost died to retrieve Sasuke and failed. They had bonded over their shared near-death during that mission, and even though they failed, none of them would have ever expected one of their squad members to be the next one to abandon the village.
Shikamaru was gripping his hands together.
He was angry.
With himself.
'... No, this mission was doomed from the start. When we were in school, I mocked Naruto as a dunce, and during the Chunin exams, I targetted him because I thought he was weak... it wasn't until he fought Kiba that I started to respect him. Even then, we never really hung out, and I never treated him like a friend. Of course he isn't going to pick us over his new friends.' Shikamaru had taken a moment to cool his head. They only had mere hours before they were pulled back to the village, and considering they had failed to convince Naruto, the fact was that the mission was doomed to be a failure, and had always been doomed.
He looked at Choji.
His friend seemed to be of the same mindset, in that both of them had come to terms with the fact neither of them had ever really treated Naruto the same way one would expect out of a friend. Naruto was a good guy, and always friendly with them, but they had always been pretty dismissive of him in most situations. Now they were seeing the error of their ways, and it was too late for them to make ammends.
Anger at Naruto quickly transformed into anger at themselves.
Ayame and Guy had already returned, since there was no need to watch over them anymore now that they were about to be summoned back. Iruka was gone as well, though he had left minutes ago after saying goodbye to Naruto.
"Neji, if you seal Naruto's chakra points, maybe the toads can force summon him-"
"I have no interest in forcing Naruto to return. If he wants to stay, I will respect his choice. Naruto has taken his destiny into his own hands, and found the happiness he deserves." Neji rejected Shikamaru's idea outright. He glanced over at Hinata, and he watched as she looked, staring blankly at the ground with an expression of profound sadness. It was a horrible expression for her, one that he didn't like seeing on his cousin at all.
Still, hearing his words caused her to smile ever-so-slightly.
"Yeah... this is for the best... he's happier here." Hinata whispered too low for anyone but Kiba and Akamaru to hear, but Neji could read her lips. He smiled at her words, before he frowned when he realized just how deeply her love for Naruto ran.
She truly wanted what was best for him, even if what was best, didn't include her being in his life, and that hurt him to understand. She was willing to let go of the person who meant the most to her in her life, who had been the only positive influence that kept her going. It was a genuinely selfless act of love, and it would never be rewarded.
"I hate this..." Sakura crouched down and curled up on herself.
Neji also felt sorry for Sakura, because he could understand where she was coming from too. She wanted to be selfless, but she was flawed. She wanted Naruto to come back for selfish reasons, and she hated herself because of it. As much as she could understand that she was being selfish, and as much as she hated herself for it, it was the strongest part of her. She didn't want to lose her teammate, who she had grown to see as a friend. She felt ashamed that she could never treat him with the friendship she was seeing he lacked at the time.
"We still have some time, lets try again, I'll bet he's really close to breaking." Kiba suggested.
-With Naruto-
"Not going to say goodbye to your friends?" Mizore asked Naruto as she studied on his bed, while he sat leaned up against the bed with her legs over his shoulders. The cold parts of her body pressing up against his neck and face.
"Nope."
"Why not?"
"Because, I don't want to give them hope that I'll go with them by showing up, just to rip it away from them. It would be cruel of me to do that to them." Naruto didn't want to see his friends again. It would be better for them if he just didn't say goodbye, and allowed them to leave angry at him. He didn't want a tear stained goodbye, and he didn't want to have the final moments he spent with his friends to be an argument as he watched them poof away.
"You want to say goodbye." Mizore pointed out.
"Yeah, of course I do." Naruto didn't lie, he agreed with her, and was honest.
"Then go say goodbye."
"No, because I don't want to hurt them anymore than I already have." Naruto could tell that if he saw them again, it would turn into some kind of argument. That wasn't how he wanted to spend the last moments with his friends. It wasn't how he wanted them to leave. "I don't want the-" Naruto's door opened.
Yukari came in.
She had DARK circles under her eyes.
"I figured it out! I figured out a way to transfer those extra energies inside that seal of yours into puppets, so we can talk to them and get them to explain how the seal key works!" Yukari shouted out to Naruto, she noticed that Mizore was in the room too. Naruto stared at her, not really interested in what she had to say.
"Eh?"
"I wanted to study your seal, but the huge problem is that without the key, the seal isn't complete... but you have the energy of the people who made the seal in you. If we can take that energy, and put it into puppet bodies, we can just ASK them to put down the schematics for the key and I can study the complete seal!" Yukari had skipped class and club activities so that she could magically study every part of the seal that she had been able to copy down.
It was absolutely amazing.
It was a thing of pure-perfection in how it was crafted, something so intricate and amazing that if she didn't have the key, there was a 100% chance that she could study the seal for the rest of her life and not had a perfect grasp of how it worked. Her knowledge of the seal and how it worked was stuck at close to 65%, and that was barely more than half. She had hit such a roadblock in her studying that she had lost a bunch of sleep over it.
Then it hit her.
Ask the people who made the seal by taking their energy, putting it into magical puppet bodies, and asking them to explain the seal key to her.
"How?" Naruto asked her.
"Your seal has a TINY opening in it, super tiny, that allows energy to escape from the seal and mix with your energy. Well, using that tiny opening, I can extract those energies since they aren't being protected by an extra sealing layer involving a key... and then I just magically insert them into a puppet body as you would a summoned spirit. It's so simple but so genius." Yukari explained.
"What?" Mizore was lost.
"Stuff." Naruto explained simply, and though she was lost still she just accepted his answer and was willing to move on. "So... how does this benefit you and me?" Naruto asked Yukari.
"Well... I can study the seal more, and since your magic power is fueling the seal that is keeping these two energies from leaking out, you'll become a tiny bit stronger." Yukari could extract the energies, and his seal wouldn't need to suck as much of his energy out to keep those two powers sealed away as well. It would be less strain on Naruto's body, and would allow him to exert more of his own power.
"How much is a tiny bit?" Naruto questioned.
She paused.
"... maybe 4.4% stronger." Yukari did the math, and she wondered if that much would be worth it to Naruto. She saw him thinking about it, and he was giving it some serious thought if such a small percentage of growth was worth the effort.
4.4% was tiny.
Still, it might not be as small as one would think.
'Considering how much chakra I have right now, 4.4% would actually be a shit ton of extra chakra to work with, since it is a percentage of MY chakra.' Naruto thought as he tried to math it out in his head. He tried to use simple terms in his mind. Considering the rate of growth his chakra was experiencing, that might be enough to push him to be able to train way harder. "What will happen to them when you're done with them?" Naruto asked Yukari.
She tilted her head.
"I mean, nothing bad will happen. When I extract the magic power, I plan to transform it into puppet cores. It will just transfer the memories and personalities of the magic power into the puppet body. When I'm done, I can try and put them back where I got them when I'm done with them." Yukari mentioned to him, since the entire process wasn't something that would destroy the energies inside of him.
"... Copy the memories and personalities..." Naruto muttered.
"I mean, the magic seems to have those already there. It wouldn't be hard to copy and paste it into puppet bodies. Puppet bodies aren't super expensive, and are typically only about as strong as a C-class yokai... so they aren't useful for training." Yukari really didn't have much she could offer.
Naruto leaned forward and had to think about it.
"How do puppet bodies work?" Naruto asked her.
"Oh, you just take a core, put it in, and the puppet body mimics the appearance, memories, and personality of the core you put in it. They aren't super useful other than doing cleaning and housework, so nobody really uses them for anything. You can have them when I'm done with them if you want."
Naruto had to think about it.
There was a lot about this situation that Yukari was ignorance about.
"Sounds cool, I'm game, when do we start?" Naruto asked.
"When the puppet bodies I ordered get here... so in a weeks, maybe a month or two." Yukari watched as Naruto leaned his head back in mild annoyance at having to wait.
-With the Genin-
"I'm going back now..." Neji looked at his fellow shinobi, unfolded the scroll, and he bit his thumb as he searched for his name on the scroll. He paused when he saw everyone else had signed underneath where their name was to go back early.
"Giving up?" Kiba asked.
"More like, accepting that sometimes things are better left as they are." Neji started to write down. "... and sometimes things are better changed." Neji glanced towards Hinata as he spoke that. She tilted her head in confusion and watched him, unsure of what he meant by that. There was a moment where Neji paused, and then he unfolded the scroll some more.
He didn't vanish at first.
He started to write down something else on a different part of the scroll, before he rolled it up and tossed it to Shikamaru. He vanished in a puff of smoke as the summoning contract ended shortly after he signed his name.
"He isn't even going to come and say goodbye." Sakura didn't know if she wanted to laugh or cry.
They didn't have long left, and he hadn't shown up to wish them well.
Maybe this was how Naruto felt all of his life when others ignored him.
It felt horrible.
Chapter End!
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