Chapter 5 - Progress:

“If I had half your brat’s energy, I really think I could take over the world.” Jiraiya told Tsunade one day. They were currently staying in a sort of ninja retirement village on the edge of Wind Country. It was her compromise with Naruto. Old people liked to bet on things because there wasn’t much else to do, and they absolutely LOVED playing cards. Tsunade called it Rule of the Universe number 27. She was pretty sure you got handed a deck and some Bingo cards along with your gold watch no matter from what job it was you were retiring.

This sort of place worked out great for all of them. Naruto got to bug ninja for training tips even if they were too old to really show him how they were done, Shizune and her could make a lot of cash because old people were always sick, and the gambling was as good as it ever got even if the stakes were a little lower than what she preferred.

The fact that there was no one here worth peeping on, so Jiraiya tended to visit not nearly as often was just cake, really. It was extremely good cake. Heh.

This was one of his rare trips, but she hadn’t seen him for a little over three months prior, so she could deal. They were currently sitting out on their porch at a small outdoor table and chair set. The breeze was pleasant and played with her long blond ponytails. “What would you do with the world that wouldn’t have the entire female populous rising up in arms and relieving you of your dick within the day?”

“Well, okay. You have a point, but it was hypothetical anyway.” He quipped, barely fazed by the threat to his manhood anymore. He’d been known as the world’s premier Super Pervert for four years now, ever since he finally put out his third little orange book. “That reminds me, have you seen my newest title? After the flop of the first one, I almost gave up on the whole author thing, but wow, the Icha Icha series has really taken off!”

Tsunade raised an eyebrow and took another drink of her sake. There was nothing like good sake on a hot day. “Jiraiya, if you still have your genitals, it’s a pretty good bet I haven’t picked up the latest piece of garbage you’re trying to pass off as literature.”

“Good point.” He crossed his legs a bit self-consciously and grabbed for the bottle to refill his own drink. “What the hell is Naruto doing anyway? I’ve never seen anything quite like that before.”

“Oh, well, I was sick of him coming to me for new chakra control exercises every three seconds, so I told him to try combining the ones he already knew.”

“So he decided to cover himself in leaves, while walking on a tree floating in a lake?”

“It’s good balance and agility training too, but well, the leaf thing is kind of accidental. He’s still got no control over his bloodline abilities, and it’s gotten worse since he started getting another mark on his shoulder to match the original one on his face. A bush reached out and grabbed him on his way through that brush there on the edge of the lake, so he must have decided he might as well use the leaves too. Shizune and I have tried everything we can think of to help him out with his botanical problems, but nothing works.”

“Well, he’s just shy of six. Maybe it’s a maturity thing? The fact that he’s getting another mark could mean that the kekkei genkai has stages like the Sharingan, and he’s just got to level it up or something.”

“Level it up? My son isn’t a video game.”

“Yeah, well, you know what I mean.” Jiraiya frowned and fiddled with the bit of metal in his hands. He’d been tinkering with this seal since Naruto’s Bee Incident, but he just couldn’t get it to do quite what he had in mind.

“If it keeps going much farther than this, I might have to scrape up enough to hire a mission out of Konoha, and ANBU are expensive, so if you’ve got any suggestions that don’t require feeding him coins, please let me know.”

“You mean hiring Tenzou to come train the brat? Sensei’s not likely to go along with that, not even for you. I know he’s the only other Mokuton user currently living after what that bastard Orochimaru did to him, but ANBU don’t grow on trees, and he’s really been moving up in rank lately. With Danzou around, they need him there.” He glanced up through his spiky bangs at his frowning teammate, “you may have to send him to the village if you aren’t willing to move back there, yourself.”

Her grimace turned feral and she slammed a fist down on the table, cracking it but not breaking it in half. Shizune only bought reinforced furniture for her mentor if she could possibly help it, and it was much cheaper and easier to find in a town like this dominated by ninja, retired or not. “I’m not sending him back there by himself! He’s still a baby and that place is cursed and a deathtrap!”

“Hey, I was just saying! Besides, you know I’m right. Tenzou could be the only one that might be able to help him.”

“Well, we’ll just have to hope it doesn’t come to that.” She growled, forcing herself to calm down and unclench her teeth before she gave herself a migraine.

“No point in worrying about it right now. If he can hold off on it for a few more years, I really think he’ll have met your requirements by the time he’s 10 or 11 – he only got hit twice in Dodge Training today, and you looked like you weren’t holding back much on speed. When he’s ready, I can have Sensei and the Mokuton kid look at him when I take him back to get his headband.”

“Che, the dodging’s impressive, but I can’t believe he’s made so much damn progress on that strength technique!” she fumed.

“You should know how determined he can be when he really wants something.” Jiraiya pointed out.

“Yeah, well how could I have known that it was possible to achieve perfect control of just one technique when your natural level is almost completely average?” She growled, “It shouldn’t be possible to learn something like that through nothing but repetition and sheer force of will!”

“Well, you didn’t tell him it wasn’t possible, so of course he could do it.” Jiraiya grinned, “He’s going to break all sorts of rules of possibility, if for no other reason than he’s too stupid to think it through and realize it’s impossible before he starts, and he won’t give up once he begins trying something until he can do it flawlessly!”

He should have expected her fist to the top of his head, but somehow, he never saw it coming.

“BAKA! My son is NOT stupid! He’s just got too much damn energy to sit still and learn things! It’s the damn Kyuubi’s fault for jacking his chakra levels so fucking high! I’ve assigned him two hours at the Shogi parlor every day as part of his training, so hopefully that’ll teach him patience and a little strategy. If he pisses the old guys there off too much by running around, they won’t give him pointers or show him jutsu anymore.”

“It’s got nothing to do with the fact that people bet on Shogi, and he absolutely can’t lose games of chance, is it?” Jiraiya grinned, as he picked himself up off the ground and regained his now kind of wobbly seat. “You know that kid will never be good at planning and conventional tactics. He’s too much of a natural genius at improvisation and unpredictable creative strategy in the middle of battle to ever slow himself down and apply People-that-aren’t-Naruto logic to a situation.”

Tsunade sighed, “I know. He’s absolutely hopeless at long-term analysis. He can’t think, ‘what would I do in this situation’ to predict other people’s actions because no one else would ever think of half the shit he does, and more than half the time his answer to the question would be, ‘I’d just wing it’ anyway.”

“I’d say he’d have to grow out of that if he wants to be Hokage someday, but it always seems to work out for him so it’s hard to criticize.”

Tsunade groaned and buried her head in her arms, “I know! The kid can’t lose if probability is involved. It’s not fair!” Impulsively she stood up, knocking her chair over in the process and pointed accusingly at Naruto, “Hey Brat! Stop stealing all of my luck, you little bastard!”

The yell broke Naruto’s concentration and all his leaves went fluttering into the lake while he wobbled frantically on the now unstable log before catching his balance, “Hey, you old hag! You almost made me fall in!” he screamed back.

Jiraiya chuckled and went back to fiddling with his new seal, ignoring Tsunade’s grumblings about ungrateful little brats with no respect for their mother’s suffering. “I wouldn’t complain too much, if I were you.” He said, turning serious. “I’m pretty sure he’d be dead by now if he had your luck instead of Minato’s with some of the trouble he gets himself into and the way he pushes himself training with new jutsu and chakra techniques without anyone watching him.”

Tsunade sighed, but had to agree. When it came to getting stronger, the kid just loved it and refused to fail at anything he set his mind to. She’d done everything she could think of to curtail his chakra use without supervision, but he was the most headstrong and independent little bastard ever. He had to get it from his father. That jerk had a lot to answer for when she met up with him again in the Afterlife. No way did he get his stubbornness and willingness to take chances from her side of the family.

“So, want to play another hand of cards? Double or nothing?”

“Hell yeah! Now you’re talking!” She eagerly agreed.

†

Naruto glared down at the floating leaves that he’d been dutifully holding with his chakra while balancing on the log which he was keeping stable in the lake with a great deal of concentration. He was getting kind of frustrated. He seemed to have reached a plateau in his training and it was really pissing him off. He was pretty sure if he could just etch out another little bit of control, he’d be able to perform a Bunshin, and from there, it was just another small step to his kaa-san’s freakish strength. Technically, for him, the strength and Bunshin should be about the same difficulty because Freakish Strength required a lot more chakra.

Every night he stayed out late hitting boulders, blocks, and logs until they shattered, but it was still taking two or three hits instead of just one, and he frequently had to heal his arm afterwards. He’d gotten to the point where he didn’t have to think about how to mold and release the chakra anymore when it used to take him ages to prepare himself for a single attempt. He was even pretty sure he could use this much of it in battle since it was coming so naturally to him, but it wasn’t nearly as good as Kaa-san’s and when he messed up and hurt himself – well, that wouldn’t be good in a fight.

He’d narrowed down the possible problems to one or two things. He was pretty sure he was building up enough chakra in preparation, or at least as much as he was capable of at his size and age. He could feel the pressure on his chakra coils whenever he did it, and he knew if anything, he’d been able to gather more of it than he used to do, so the solution wasn’t to use more chakra. (He was really glad to have ticked that one off the list because his aunt was always on his case that ‘all problems can’t be solved by applying more chakra to them!’ - she’d had a field day with that rant when he’d originally begun having so much trouble with bunshin.)

No, he had to be either not narrowing and condensing the point down tiny enough, or not releasing it at the right moment. He knew he wasn’t releasing it way too soon because his arm never exploded off of his body, but he thought there might be an interval between ‘way too soon’ and right on time. It was also possible he was letting it go too late. He had tried all sorts of combinations, but the answer still eluded him. Either way, it was a chakra control problem because he just couldn’t make it do exactly what he wanted it to, but he was a lot closer with that one, than the chakra scalpel jutsu. That one required a small, precise, and sustained amount of chakra, and he kind of thought it might always be beyond him.

He figured that since he’d never have the natural control his mom and aunt had, he’d just have to treat each jutsu like another chakra exercise as well as a technique. He may not be able to intuitively know just exactly the right amount to use, but if he tried it often enough, he was sure to stumble on it eventually. He did have excellent senses, and he knew when he did it correctly because it just felt like it was right. It was an uphill struggle because while most people just had a decent sized puddle to feed through their chakra coils, he had a damn lake. When the valves were open, the pressure was higher. It made it much harder to regulate. It was like trying to get exactly a liter of water from the floodgates on a dam verses the taps on a faucet. To further complicate things, his proverbial faucet was always leaking power to his seal to keep Kyuubi back, and therefore, throwing off the flow.

He plopped himself down on the log, and being sure to keep his chakra flowing around it and down to the bottom of the lake so it stayed stable, he carefully took off his sandals and threw them on the shore so he could dangle his feet in the water without soaking his footwear.

Idly he swished his legs back and forth, tracking the underwater movements he was causing by the way the submerged leaves moved. He tried to get them moving farther away or to go in specific directions by hitting the water harder, and using more forceful movements, but that just made them swirl around a lot. They hardly ever even hit the log he was sitting on as the currents pushed ahead of them and bounced off of the wood before they got there, repelling them back. He found that if he got closer to them before plunging his foot in, it was a little easier to get them to do what he wanted because there was less room for the water to spread out and make the leaf do other weird things. Also, they obeyed a bit better if he approached them slowly and sped up gradually to disturb the water as little as possible outside of the main movement.

…wait a minute.

Eagerly he jumped off of the log and sprang the distance between it and the shore, sprinting for the old wall behind their house that was his favorite target for super-punching practice. Instead of focusing the chakra just generally ‘in his hand’, he’d try to put it on the very edge, right on the knuckles. If he was lucky, maybe that would even protect him a bit from the force of the hit! ‘That must be how Kaa-san does it, she puts the chakra point at exactly the right distance from her knuckles so that there’s enough room for a slight buffer around her hand, but releases it as close as possible so all of the force is directed into the target except for that tiny protective bit! She builds it up slowly and then BAM at the right moment, SMASH!’

†

Jiraiya watched him run past as he raked in his winnings while Tsunade dealt the next hand of cards. “I think you’re in trouble. He’s got that ‘sudden epiphany’ look on his face his father used to get when he finally figured out the trick to something like the Rasengan.”

Tsunade growled, “Well…he might figure out the punching part, but the kicks are much harder because chakra is so much more difficult to mold in the feet.”

“Bet you 100 ryo he’ll have the whole thing mastered AND combat ready within two years.”

“Ha! Deal! There’s no way even MY kid is that brilliant! Maybe if he only had that to focus on, but I bet you didn’t know how hard Shizune’s working him on senbon accuracy! He bet me 50 ryo last week that he’d be so good at it in a year that he’ll be able to safely throw them during dodging practice and hit any target with at least 90% accuracy! AND he’s got to learn a basic medical jutsu and memorize the biology behind it every other month until he’s seven as punishment for purposefully giving me the wrong numbers on last week’s lottery ticket and selling the right ones to everyone else in town.”

“What’s with the sudden interest in weapons? He can hardly throw a kunai or shuriken to save his life, and while he’s never really complained about senbon practice, it’s never been his favorite.”

“Heh, well, he saw Shizune temporarily disable a pervert’s *ahem* ‘equipment’ the other day when they caught him trying to peep in the changing rooms at the department store where she had to take him to replace his jacket after the Cake Incident.”

Jiraiya swallowed nervously, crossed his legs again, and made a mental note not to mess with Tsunade’s apprentice, “Cake Incident?”

“You don’t want to know. Think of the Beach Ball Debacle only about three times worse and involving more old men in golf shirts.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. We’re not allowed back at the dog park anymore. Poor TonTon, she really liked the dog park here.”

†