“No, I’m not,” I told him seriously. “Until four days ago I was a silly little fan-girl with a crush who thought playing ninja would get her attention. When those Sound ninja tried to murder us all, and I wasn’t strong enough to stop them, it opened my eyes.”
I turned to Ebisu. “Sensei, I’ve never trained seriously before, but I know now how stupid I was. I’m ready to become a real kunoichi. I need to become strong enough to stand by my comrades. Strong enough to protect the people I love, and to defend the village from those who would destroy us. I have a long way to go, but I’m willing to do whatever it takes to get there. Will you help me?”
Yeah, it was corny, but Konoha is like that. Ebisu eyed my feet, still perfectly dry despite the fact that I was standing on water, and frowned. “You do have potential, Sakura. But your jounin sensei was quite specific about what techniques you should be shown.”
“I’m not asking for more techniques, sensei. I’m asking you to push me as hard as possible, and help me turn myself into a worthwhile ninja.”
A jounin who specializes in teaching wasn’t going to turn that one down.
The funny thing was the training actually helped. My taijutsu reflexes were as scrambled as the rest of my brain, with the skills my demon self had stolen with her Sharingan randomly intermixed with the styles I’d learned under Gai and the moves I’d developed myself. Fortunately it wasn’t too hard to push all my old memories away and play clueless novice the first time Ebisu showed me any particular move, and then pull them back out and reassemble the pieces when he wasn’t watching. Within a week he’d decided I was some kind of natural taijutsu genius, and of course Naruto was keeping up with massive shadow clone training and sheer stubbornness.
Mind you, I was still an emotional wreck. I managed to stay professional with Ebisu most of the time, but to anyone I’d ever had a personal connection to I was unbearable. Even Naruto started giving me a wide berth, which said something considering what a raging bitch I was to him before the loops. Of course, it might have just been that he didn’t know what to do when I’d suddenly burst into tears, or kiss him out of the blue, or drag Hinata out of her hiding spot and insist that she join us for lunch. It was bad enough that Ebisu pulled me aside at one point to ask if I had any mental conditions that weren’t in my file, and it took all my decades of practice at lying on the fly to convince him to put off sending me to a shrink until after the exam.
During the whole month of training the only technique Ebisu showed me was Body Flicker, but I made sure he noticed that by the end I had that and the basic three academy techniques fully mastered — which to me means being able to do them without seals or concentration, in the middle of a taijutsu move, without smoke or flickering or any other obvious sign to give me away. I also made it obvious I’d figured out I was earth-natured, and asked a lot of ‘purely theoretical’ questions about the mechanics of inventing low-level techniques.
Oh, yes, I was building a nice back story. Most days I even remembered why.
“Sir! I’ve got an emergency situation!”
I dropped off the roof and staggered to my feet in front of the pair of shogi players, panting slightly after my long run. Asuma looked up slowly, taking in my bloodstained clothes and the depleted state of my shuriken pouch, and his ever-present cigarette drooped. “Sakura? What happened to you?”
“I picked the wrong spot for some last-minute training,” I replied. “There’s a party of over four hundred Sand nin approaching the city from the south, maybe four or five hours behind me. I don’t know what’s going on, but a couple of their scouts tried to kill me when I ran.”
Shikamaru sighed, and began picking up the shogi set. Asuma stood, and gave me a concerned look. “You’re right, this is serious. But why did you come to me instead of telling the gate guards?”
“There’s no way a force that size could get so close to the city without inside help,” I pointed out. “You were the first jounin I could find who I’m sure wouldn’t be in on a plot against the Hokage.”
He nodded. “Well done. Come with me, we’re going to see my father.”
So much for the invasion. Now I just had to get promoted.
Sasuke was seriously pissed that he wasn’t going to be able to fight Gaara after all, which I found pretty amusing considering how many times I’d seen the Sand jinchuuriki crush him like a bug. When they reshuffled the ‘random’ matches I found myself up against Shikamaru, which seemed imminently doable.
He looked up at the stands with a sigh, and started to say something.
“If you give up without a fight I’m going to follow you around for the next month causing you as much aggravation as humanly possible,” I growled. “Take a dive if you don’t want to get promoted, but I need to put on a good show first.”
“You aren’t the same girl I knew at the academy,” the lazy genin drawled. “Alright, then. It’s a pain, but better an hour of bother than a month.”
Shikamaru is a surprisingly tough opponent, with an incredible tactical sense and a preternatural ability to read his opponent’s moves. But he still needed a hand seal to activate his shadow bind, and his shadows moved slowly enough to give me plenty of options for evading them. I opened by body flickering into melee range, and immediately verified that he was no match for me at taijutsu. But I needed to show off a little for the judges, so I let him fend me off with his shadow after a quick exchange of blows. Each time he reached for me with a shadow bind I evaded with a different method — body flicker, replacement, distracting clones, pretty much everything that can be done with the basics. I henged into a rock and let my clones wear him out for a few minutes, until he realized none of them were real and worked out my actual position. I even let him catch me once, just so I could demonstrate teleporting myself out of the bind with a perfectly controlled replacement technique. That was a jounin-level application of the technique, and one of the fanciest tricks I planned to show off.
His eyes went wide. “Are you sure I can’t forfeit now?” He whined.
“No worries, Shiki, I think we’ve put on enough of a show. After all, a good kunoichi doesn’t reveal all her tricks! I think it’s time for the one-hit knockout now.”
“Oh, great,” he groaned, and settled into a defensive stance.
I cloaked myself in a jumble of overlapping illusion clones to cover palming a knockout grenade, and replaced it with one of the rocks at his feet. I’d put a sound-suppression seal on it to keep it from hissing, so his first hint of what I’d done was the smell of the gas. Of course, at that point it was too late.
The crowd cheered. I bowed to the Kage’s box with a grin. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why every ninja is taught the basic three. Maybe next round we’ll see what other techniques I have.”
Naruto beat Neji, and Sasuke beat Shino, so the final rounds were all team seven. Then I got to watch Sasuke and Naruto fight, which was fun right up until the brooding asshole picked out the real Naruto and put a chidori through his belly. A hush fell over the crowd until the medics announced that he was still alive, and carried him off the field.
“That was uncalled for, Sasuke,” I growled as I stepped back into the arena. “I was going to make this a friendly fight, but now I’m going to put you in the hospital right next to our teammate. When he’s fine in a couple of days and you’re still in traction you can use the time to think about how you treat your comrades.”
“You?” He scoffed. “You may not be as useless as you used to be, but you still can’t touch me. I’ll knock you out with one hit.”
He activated his Sharingan and charged me, not even bothering with a probing attack. I suppose he was expecting me to dance around like I had with Shikamaru, but against his eyes that would have been a fatal mistake. Instead I stepped into his attack, letting it hit me so I could land a punch of my own at the same time. His blow put a bruise on my cheek that would look terrible in the morning. Mine broke two ribs.