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Chapter 13
🕑 Added 2024-02-18 15:13:10 +0000 UTCSo because Patreon gives away the content for free if I don't have a boilerplate, because intelligent design is intelligent and nothing I say will change that.
Here you go, keystrokes, keystrokes, keystrokes.
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Returning to the training ground bright and early in the morning, she’s surprised to not just find Naruto and Sasuke napping in the grass, but to also find a random Haku. The boy is rather impatiently tapping his foot against a stone while she approaches, looking like he has very little time for this and would rather be literally anywhere else.
“Are you here to take me up on that streamer idea?” Sakura asks as she approaches. “I really feel like I’d do a pretty good job as a manager.”
The boy’s expression - aided by the cute little Haku picture beside his head - tells her he’s about as impressed by her idea as Naruto would be. “No.” It’s simple, it’s direct, it’s Haku. His voice is so pretty though, it really does make her wanna record him and play him through her headphones while taking a nap. “Zabuza-sama is up and around. You’re running out of time, and testing my patience while you are at it.”
“We’re doing the best we can.” Sakura shrugs, looking at the boys to make sure they’re actually napping and not brutally murdered or something. She doubts it, but with enemy ninja it’s always worth a check. Their chests move up and down, and that makes her smile. “We’re not relaxing, we’re training our butts off in the hopes we can get strong enough fast enough. Besides, Kakashi’s almost better too, if he thinks he can take Kakashi, he’s welcome to come and waste his time.”
“Stupid girl…” Haku growls at her a little, balling his fists and holding back a rage that has so little killing intent to it that Sakura can’t help but find it adorable despite the difference in strength between them.
“You get you’re more bishonen and less yandere, right?” Sakura teases him pointedly.
“I don’t know what that means, but I really feel like you just insulted me.” Haku takes a deep breath to calm himself, before stepping forward into Sakura’s personal space unprompted. Sakura chooses not to step back, if only because that’d be admitting she’s scared, and she’s kinda not. Haku really has left the threat stage of her thinking of him, and while her ability says he’s a chunin level boss, she’s kind of used to ignoring the threat level for harmless boys by now.
“A little.” She admits, her cheeks heating up just enough to admit to the world that she did wrong and got called out on it in the same breath. “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you,” Haku’s face gets awkwardly close to hers, his expression pensive and aggressive, his eyes gazing directly into hers in a way she’d call romantic if she knew the first part of identifying romance. Statistically humans are very bad at figuring out whether someone is flirting or not, in fact, they’re below fifty percent, she’s not about to assume she’s above an average level, “to come up with a plan of action.”
“Is this when you kiss me?”
“Wha-no!” She finds two hands slam into her chest, sending her sprawling flat on her back. “I’m trying to intimidate you!”
“Oh!” She nods to herself, like this is a sudden realization. Haku clearly thinks she’s mocking him, but unfortunately she really is just now realizing this.
“You need to come up with a plan to stall my master, or I will kill you when he strikes.”
“The hell am I supposed to do to trick a jonin?” Sakura asks. “I can’t even lie to you.”
“Ehh…” The boy taps his cheek for a second, looking around. “What about your teammates?”
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They ended up settling on a rather funny plan. There’s a hundred Naruto clones Henged into Kakashi running around Wave doing odd jobs and making everyone’s life easier. The idea is to try and convince Zabuza that Kakashi isn’t just better, he actually has that much energy to spare. Zabuza should wait until he is in tip top shape before he moves out to start engaging the clones, at which point they’ll have a pretty hefty warning when the clones start dying left and right.
The point is that it buys them time, and Haku seemed happy with the plan enough to listen to her gush about idols and streaming for almost a half an hour. The boy seemed to be actually interested by the end, if only he was extremely interested, or signing a contract. Sakura’d love to see if her gaming powers influenced contracts and stuff, given it’d be a second job she has to keep up with.
Sakura is spending her once again free time on the water, feet planted in it and focusing her hardest on not falling in. She can’t move yet, at least not while training the wind jutsu, but she has two goals and not a whole lot of time to do it so like hell she’s missing out on the chance to train them both. The issue she’s finding is that the wind jutsu seems to be even harder than the other four. It’s as if wind is the exact opposite of her natural inclination, it fights her like nothing else ever has.
Every hour of practice on the water makes her noticeably better at balancing on it. She hasn’t even fallen in the last hour, but she’s made about as much progress on the wind jutsu as she has keeping up with Naruto in physical training. That boy is a freaking monster, and this jutsu sucks. The idea is really simple, she has to create a circular wind going outward around herself. When someone in a movie has a breeze billow their cloak, or move their hair, or dramatically spin a tornado around them to flare their abilities, they’re using some form of this.
This makes it the ability she wants to master the most, because the ability to do a dramatic stage pose on command would add to her invisible coolness stat by several magnitudes over. Movie ninja pretty much all know the wind affinity training jutsu, which begs the question, how does one get a job as a movie ninja? That sounds a lot less stressful than all this Gato and Zabuza crap.
“Oh crap.” She realizes exactly how long she’s been lost in thought, as she loses her footing and splashes into the water. It only takes her a moment to climb out, but she wore herself out too much to dry herself off which sucks.
It means she’s passing out on the dock drenched.
Beats passing out in the water. Kakashi and Sasuke would scold her if they saw that little mishap she just had, so she’ll have to let it be her little secret.
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“Change of plans.” It’s Kakashi’s announcement which gets her attention mid-race with Naruto. Practicing the wind affinity jutsu while she runs doesn’t make anything any easier, and she finds she’s pretty annoyed about that.
Mostly because Naruto started to try it too after she explained how cool it is, and by the way she keeps having to use Genin dexterity to deflect twigs and stuff, he’s already got it down. It was like twenty minutes. He beat even her earth score by like a thousand percent.
Worse off, instead of a small gust of wind, when he does it he creates a miniature tornado. She’s not even completely sure it’s the same jutsu! She’s been thinking about this the entire time she’s been chasing after him and constantly getting whipped in the face by branches and run-away clones swept up in the current of ridiculous Naruto shenanigans.
She can’t help but think about what she learned yesterday as she looks at her team. They both want to restart their clan with her? She’s not dumb, she knows what that means, it’s just, not something she can imagine with them. It’s not something she can imagine with anyone.
Is she weird for not having feelings like that? Is it weird that she’s more weirded out than flattered? At least they’re not treating her differently, or expecting anything from her. She’s not sure she could handle that if they did.
Regardless of her thoughts, she does have to stop her fierce, almost concerning amount of introspection to address Kakashi. She stops the race and approaches, just as Naruto cancels his showing off and lets all the twigs and branches and an awkwardly out of place and very confused squirrel fall to the ground. It scrambles off just as Naruto spots it and rubs the back of his head sheepishly.
“Yeah, Kakashi-sensei?” Naruto asks first, skipping over to him like he didn’t just let out enough chakra for ten minutes that Kakashi’s probably jealous.
“Your plan was very creative, and I want to commend you.” Kakashi says to Naruto. Sakura chooses not to point out that it was her plan, she’d gain little and Naruto looks so proud of himself. She wouldn’t take that smile away for the world, let alone correcting her sensei. “But Zabuza won’t be fooled by it for long. We need to officially start guarding Tazuna when he leaves to work on the bridge each day.”
“That’ll cut into training.” Naruto points out.
“That’s a problem we’ll have to accept.” Kakashi says a little sternly, eying Naruto as if to try and will away any further objections, strangely enough it works perfectly. Naruto shuts up, and Sasuke doesn’t have anything to say either. The boy is eerily silent, Sakura actually has to check to make sure he’s listening and not napping in the grass again. “One of you will be coming with me each day, while the other two train. Your job will be to get Tazuna away and protect him from bandits while I deal with Zabuza.”
“That sucks.” Naruto echoes her thoughts perfectly, she chooses not to tell him that.
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The next week passes by very quickly, training water walking and the wind affinity jutsu whenever she gets the chance. She gets down Water Walking pretty quickly, evolving Tree Walking and celebrating her victory with a box of pocky from her bag. Luckily a lot of her snacks weren’t destroyed, she doesn’t know what she’d do without a sugar boost every now and again throughout all this ceaseless training. Shove raw ground up sugar into her mouth, maybe?
It really does drag on in a way she finds makes her quite weary, especially now that she knows she can’t just do it constantly and spend most of the day passed out. It was like living in a haze, she barely had to actually experience the actions. It was nice, but also terrifying. It’s probably the difference between her photographic memory and actual photographic memory, the ability to fade out. She knows she can’t have actual photographic memory, it’s not in her traits list.
It reminded her of countless nights of grinding to fight super bosses, or learning cool tricks in a shooter and getting it down pat. The hunter training from L4D2 is a pretty good example, there was a modded map one could use to learn hunter tricks and perform an obstacle course to get better at lining up movement for the Vs mode. She spent a lot of time on that once, and it felt pretty much exactly the same as her few days of track training and lightning grinding. Though, the track grinding was probably worse, as she’d do the hunter training again but fuck that.
Unfortunately, her physical training has to be cut loose pretty hard. Naruto’s either with Kakashi, or Sasuke is, and they have to make occasional rounds to ensure no one attacks Inari and Tsunami in their home. She’s not sure what the likelihood is that they'd actually catch an attack, but Kakashi said the idea was to show the enemies that the home isn’t unguarded, and less trying to get lucky enough to intercept a mid-day slice and dice.
That and leaving a Naruto clone back at the home makes her feel a lot better. She’s grown rather attached to the little brat, and Tsunami’s done a whole lot of warming up to her too, even if she barely sees either of them enough for it to matter. She won’t see them at all soon, that’s a sad thought. She likes it here, even if she misses her mother and father a whole lot more.
Homesick doesn’t begin to cover the feelings she’s had the last few days now that she’s slowed down enough to think.
It’s harrowing, she’s never been far away from her parents. Even when they were active ninja they took jobs just outside the village so they could always get back to her in a heartbeat. They also took jobs in such a way that one of them was always home should she need them. One would do in village D ranks, the other would do something like gate guarding or border patrol or bandit hunting.
She’s never gone more than a day without seeing at least one of her parents, even in her deepest gaming binges they’d slip into her room and give her a hug before they went to bed.
It’s been a couple of weeks now, she’s pretty sure. It’s hard to tell, what with several days in there being a blur of motion sickness and ugly stat grinding, and another being a moody panic after getting stabbed to a tree by her own sword.
Her days actually at the bridge are wasted. Inari lets her borrow her own gameboy back for the bridge since she can’t train, so she spends most of her day scanning everyone in sight in the hopes it levels up.
It does not. At least she can check Inari’s progress on stuff every few days.
Which is what brings her to this moment, walking in circles on the water while accepting that wind is beyond her for now. Even Kakashi can only use four elements, so she’s read, maybe she has to accept she’s not some super ninjutsu master in training?
Well, she is, but it’s going to take a lot more work than she wants and that’s saying something because all she has to do is move some wind around in a circle!
At least she can mold wind chakra, that’s a step forward.
“Hey.” It’s that sweet, sweet, cute bishonen voice that catches her off guard and makes her look up. Luckily her control is great enough with water walking that she doesn’t even dip a little bit into the water. She’s got it down. She already knew that since the notification to tell her she’d evolved Tree Walking into Water Walking came a day ago, but it’s very satisfying to have a real life example of something instead of words on a floating invisible page only she can read. “You’re out of time.”
“What?” Sakura can’t help but blink at the boy, looking as pretty as ever on the dock just a few short feet away. He’s in a dress today, she chooses not to question him. If he wants to embrace the femboy, he can embrace the femboy. “Kakashi’s actually at full strength now, is he crazy? He hasn’t even started killing clones.”
“I think he saw through the gambit.” Haku admits, chewing his lip a little. Her?
Should Sakura say her when Haku’s in a dress? She’s really not sure if cross dressing is indicative of a momentary gender switch or just a cute thing to do, and she’s not about to add that complicated bag of questions to her already broken social skills. She’s not gonna ask. Haku’s a guy until further info is given, simple. The point is Haku looks really pretty in red, that’s all there is to it. “Kakashi is not known for creating so many clones, perhaps you went too far?”
“Maybe I did.” Sakura grumbles, conceding defeat there. “So you’re here to kill me? Like you said?”
“No. I think I can delay him one more day, but you have to do whatever you are going to do now. Come tomorrow, if Gato still lives, I will kill you.” Sakura can tell two major things.
One, that Haku still lacks killing intent. There’s no desire to harm her, no inner rage, no bottled up seething hatred trained into him from the academy, ready to explode out in an instant like she did to the demon twins. She tries not to think about them, they're a touchy subject in her mind right now. She hates that, she’d do anything to avoid it.
Her first kills were real, and her boys judged her for it.
Two, Haku is totally serious.
They will kill her. She will die. Naruto will die. Sasuke will die.
Kakashi will probably be fine.
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While Sakura would have loved for Kakashi to tag along for the dungeon, the reality is that someone needs to guard the damn bridged builder just in case Haku’s lying and wants to use this for a planned attack. So it’s the team of Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura standing in front of the dungeon that Sakura checks back in for. She’s been a bit dissociative lately.
She’ll need to fix that once they get home, and she can hug her mom and tell her all about this craziness. Maybe she’ll leave out the part about dungeons and numbers and blacking out only to train again the moment she wakes up. Maybe she won’t.
Her mother yelling at Kakashi about this sounds really soothing to her nerves.
[Gato Tower Dungeon, Level Recommendation: 20
Level of current party: 20
Please ensure you are on level and have equivalent quality gear that is in top condition. There will be no leaving to rest once you have entered.]
“Wow, we really got eleven percent stronger.” Sakura says.
“You, got eleven percent stronger,” Sasuke grunts, “I’m stronger, but I don’t think anyone can train as hard as you besides Naruto, and he’s already too strong to advance like that so fast.”
“Wouldn’t that mean she’s stronger than eleven whatevers?” Naruto asks, “since it’s probably averaged between all three of us?”
“Sakura, how much do you remember from the last time we looked at this cave to now?” Sasuke asks.
“Uh… we started training, and then I met Haku, and then I stood on a bridge a little, and then I met Haku again.” Sakura recites. “There was some training in between, I think.”
“You don’t remember the training.” Sasuke quirks his brow. “At all?”
“No, I remember some.” Sakura’s hand rubs her arm awkwardly. “I think.”
“Don’t you have a photographic memory?” Sasuke asks.
“I ran out of camera film.” Sakura jokes, watching as neither seem to get it.
Or maybe she didn’t tell it right. “It’s fine, I never have to do that ever again. What are the odds we get another A rank mission the next time we step out of Konoha?”
Naruto starts to open his mouth-
“Exactly, zero!” Sakura doesn’t let him talk. “We can train at a normal person pace back at home, and I can do that thing where I repress most of this mission directly after I give the Hokage my report, you know, like you do with a test or horror games you played as a child.”
“That explains so much.” Sasuke says, twitching quite visibly. She tilts her head to try and proc the facial chart, but it seems to think she should just get this one since it’s not helping.
It’s not important, what is important is they have a dungeon to clear. “You boys ready? I’m ready.”
“What are the odds this place is empty?” Naruto asks.
“None.”
