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A Few hours later, Naruto strolled into Training Ground 7.
"You're late!" Sakura yelled, pointing at him.
"Kakashi was gonna be later anyway. So, I did some light training."
The sweat soaking through his shirt delivered the stench of evidence of how "light" that training had actually been. Sasuke noted the lack of fresh scrapes on the boy's hands, but plenty of cuts torn through various parts of his clothes. Like he'd healed the body underneath while leaving the fabric to fend for itself.
"What kind of training did you do?"
"Naruto Uzumaki's Patented Shadow Clone Squadron Training."
Sakura and Sasuke gave him identical blank stares, nowhere near matching the pride radiating off him for the name.
"And what did that involve?" Sasuke asked, genuinely curious what the class's dead last had been doing to get this strong this fast.
"Oh, I assign roles to a group of clones," Naruto said, shuddering slightly at the memory. "Like, one clone comes out swinging a sword, another one stays back and throws kunai or fires arrows."
Arrows. Sasuke's attention snagged on the word. He wondered, whether the idiot actually knew how to use a bow or not. The young uchiha had learned archery when he hunted boars with itachi. He'd sworn off the weapon entirely because of exactly what it reminded him of every time he picked one up. But watching Naruto use armours, sword and more, Sasuke found himself wondering if maybe it was time to reconsider that.
"Yo, teme," Naruto called. "Wanna spar?"
"Hn."
Sakura watched as Sasuke stood.
"I've been training a lot. Your tricks won't work on me this time."
Naruto's grin widened as Sasuke's Sharingan flared to life.
"Guys, come on, you two fought yesterday!" Sakura didn't want to get caught in the middle of whatever this was again. "We're a team. We're not supposed to fight each other."
Both boys ignored her completely.
"Oh my. What a lively team I've been handed."
"Kakashi-sensei, do something!" Sakura shouted.
"You two, there will be no sparring until I say so," Kakashi said, eye curving into an upside down smile.
Sasuke clicked his tongue in annoyance. Naruto just shrugged.
"I already beat the emo once. Guess I'll back down. Bullying someone weaker than you isn't very knightly of me anyway."
Sasuke's glare could have melted stone.
"Alright, everyone, sit down. I've got today's plans to go over."
The three of them settled onto the training stumps.
"A shinobi team is an investment from the village," Kakashi threw that out. "Do any of you know what that actually means?"
Sasuke couldn't be bothered to care. Naruto was clearly trying to think it through.
"It's because of the jonin," Sakura offered.
Both boys turned to her, equally confused.
"A formal jonin-led genin team isn't the standard outcome for everyone," Kakashi explained. "Most of your graduating class won't pass a bell test at all. Depending on how the jonin rates them, they'll either get sent back to the academy or filtered into the genin corps."
The three of them went quiet at that.
"The ones who do make a genin team get treated differently after that point," Kakashi continued. "Jonin are elite ninja to the village. Just having them teach a bunch of snot-nosed brats means the village is actively losing money. That's why it is an investment. The expectation is that you'll grow into the next generation carrying this place forward." He made sure his eye lingered on Naruto just slightly longer than the others while he said it. After everything, the kid needed to hear that he was worth investing in.
Naruto and Sakura both perked up visibly. Sasuke allowed himself the smallest smirk.
"Which is why I've put together individual training schedules for each of you covering the next three months," Kakashi said, handing them out. Each schedule was broken into training days, off days, and mission days. It was more than any of them had expected from a man who always looked like he'd rather be reading porn.
Naruto hummed, already trying to figure out how he was going to squeeze Lordran into whatever this looked like. Sakura swallowed hard, wondering if she'd even be able to keep pace. Sasuke frowned down at his own sheet, which read, in its entirety, for the first full month:
Rest days.
"What the hell is this?"
"Lucky," Naruto said, leaning over to peek at it. "Kakashi-sensei, can I swap schedules with Sasuke's?"
"No. I built these around how each of you is actually going to improve," Kakashi said. "Now then. Let's get started on individual training."
A small cloud of white smoke popped around the jonin a moment later.
"Oh, you're gonna use shadow clones to teach us."
One of the clones motioned for him to follow.
"You know how to use Body Flicker?"
"Yeah?"
"Then keep up."
In a single flicker of movement, the two of them were gone, deeper into the trees.
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"So, what awesome jutsu are you gonna teach me, Icha Icha fanboy instructor?"
Kakashi's clone sweatdropped at the nickname. "Do you know how important a solid foundation actually is for a shinobi?"
Naruto nodded. If Oscar had beaten one thing into him over and over, it was exactly how much the basics mattered.
"Think of it like this," the clone said, tone as unbothered as ever. "I've seen genin who could pull off a beautiful B-rank fire jutsu and still get taken out by a chunin with nothing but decent footwork and a kunai. Flashy techniques are the roof. Fundamentals are the foundation holding the roof up. You can have the nicest roof in the Elemental Nations. Doesn't matter if the floor gives out the second real pressure gets put on it."
The man handed him a folder instead of waiting for a response.
"What is this?"
"Just read."
An uneasy feeling settled into the blonde's stomach as he scanned the page.
Taijutsu skills: B
Genjutsu skills: F
Ninjutsu skills: A
He skimmed past the rest, not particularly eager to read every single detail laid out about himself.
"These aren't the same scores I got at the academy."
"Of course not," Kakashi said. "This is my evaluation."
Oh. A small, involuntary smile crept back onto his face. Kakashi's read on him was worth a hell of a lot more than any academy report card ever had been.
"Guess I'm awesome."
Before his ego could fully inflate, Kakashi popped it without hesitation.
"Alright then, Mr. Awesome. How do you break out of a genjutsu?"
"I don't need to. It doesn't work on me."
His Knighy crest made sure of that, though he wasn't about to explain the full mechanics of it right now.
"What's the importance of hand signs in ninjutsu?"
"You can't perform a jutsu without the right hand signs."
"Name five other villages. What are the chakra natures? Why does chakra control matter as much as it does? What's the best way to improve hand sign speed? At what angle do you need to throw a kunai to get a clean forty-five degree deflection?"
"..."
The boy looked thoroughly overwhelmed.
"The basics might not look impressive," Kakashi said, "but the further you push into advanced techniques, the more your fundamentals end up carrying you. Skip them, and eventually something blows up in your face."
Naruto's mind flashed to being set on fire by the Body Flicker.
"I trust you, sensei. So teach me."
"So, are you planning to use shadow clones to speed through the basics?"
"...Yeah. How'd you know?"
"Iruka mentioned you'd used them to learn Body Flicker."
Naruto rubbed the back of his head, blushing slightly. "I'm just using what I've got."
"That's fine, and honestly smart," Kakashi said. "But you need to actually understand the dangers and limits of what you're using, not just the upside."
"What dangers?" Naruto hadn't run into a single problem yet.
"When a shadow clone dispels, all the chakra split between the clones returns to whoever's left, keeping the total evenly distributed. Along with that chakra comes every memory the clone experienced while it existed, which is what lets the original remember everything as if he'd lived through it himself."
"I already know that. Dattebayo."
"What you might not know," Kakashi continued, "is that stacking multiple clones' worth of memory onto one mind puts real strain on it. Extra hours, sometimes extra days of lived experience arriving can push someone into unconsciousness. Which means the actual safe window for this kind of training is a lot narrower than it looks, and a lot more exhausting than people realize."
Naruto wasn't fully convinced this applied to him. He already had workarounds. Estus could handle the mental fatigue the same way it handled everything else. Or worst case, he could just sit at a bonfire and let it burn off. But Kakashi's next words stopped that train of thought cold.
"There's also the kyuubi's seal to consider."
"What about it?"
"That same mental stress puts pressure on the Kyuubi's seal. The more you push shadow clone training past safe limits, the more that stress accumulates, and the more opportunity it gives the Kyuubi's chakra to bleed through."
"...How do you even know that?"
"I looked into the Fourth Hokage's sealing work, and Jiraiya-sama's notes on it," Kakashi said. "The seal's stable right now, which is the only reason none of this has caused a problem yet. But nobody actually knows exactly how much additional mental strain it would take before that stability starts to slip. Better to stay well clear of that line than find it the hard way."
"...I understand," Naruto said quietly, nodding. "So how many clones can I actually use?"
"Two for studying, since we don't want to flood your brain with more information than it can hold at once. Twelve for physical training."
Naruto still looked a little skeptical, but he nodded anyway. "Okay. So what're we actually doing first?"
"We're fixing your taijutsu."
"But I use a sword in a fight."
"And a sword doesn't do you any good if your footwork falls apart the second someone closes the distance and takes the blade out of the equation," Kakashi said. "Taijutsu isn't just punches and kicks. It's balance, distance control, reading an opponent's weight before they commit to a move. Every single one of those skills carries straight over into how you handle a sword. A swordsman with bad taijutsu just means a swordsman who gets thrown off balance the first time somebody actually closes distance on him properly."
He paused, considering something.
"That said, I'm not the right person to teach you sword work specifically. I'll find someone who actually knows kenjutsu to handle that part."
"Eh, but you had good sword skill when we fought in the bell test?"
"Too much effort."
The boy sweatdropped.
"Leaf Style Close Quarters Combat," kakashi continued. "Leaf Style CQC was formalized under the Second Hokage. Tobirama Senju didn't care about elegance. He cared about efficiency, speed and reliability. What works when things go wrong."
"And things always go wrong in the field." Naruto said touching his eye while Kakashi narrowed his eye.
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Author's Note: And with that, the chapter comes to an end.
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Q: Why is Kakashi a better teacher than in canon?
Before I answer, I want to go on a quick tangent about one of my biggest pet peeves in fanfic. When a canon character starts behaving in ways that don't track with who they actually are. Like the Naruto fics where Kakashi is comically evil and hunting Naruto down because he secretly blames him for Minato's death or whatever. I hate that trope. You can call it fanfic or AU all you want, but I've never understood the appeal of flattening an interesting character into a caricature.
So, to avoid sounding like a hypocrite here: why is Kakashi an actually competent teacher in this story?
Simple. Hiruzen.
I think I've made it fairly clear over the last few chapters that, because of everything going on with Naruto, Hiruzen is actively supervising Kakashi and making sure he steps up as Naruto's anchor to Konoha.
Unlike canon, where Kakashi coasted through his teaching until Shippuden, here he's got the Hokage directly pushing him to actually be better.
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Q: Does Sasuke know how to use a bow and arrow?
Yes. In chapter 580, there's a flashback of Sasuke and Itachi hunting a boar together, and Sasuke uses a bow and arrow in it. Plus his susanoo uses a bow and arrows.
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Q: Why did you nerf shadow clone training?
I didn't.
Every limitation shown is straight from canon.
When a clone's memories return, the mental exhaustion and stress that clone accumulated comes back with them.
In chapter 318, Naruto passes out multiple times while learning to cut a leaf with wind chakra. He passes out again in chapter 320 during the waterfall training.
In chapter 322, during shadow clone training, Naruto unintentionally released three tails' worth of Kurama's chakra before it got suppressed. In chapter 329, one of his clones is shown with the Kurama chakra cloak active during that same training arc.
So nothing here is nerfed. I just laid out the actual canon dangers of shadow clone training instead of glossing over them.
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That's It… For Now.
I want to thank you all for taking the time to read, comment, and follow along with this story. Your feedback means more than you know, and it helps push me to make each chapter bigger, sharper, and more true to the worlds of Naruto and Dark Souls. And if you can't wait for the next update, you can read ahead to Chapter 100 on Patreon.
Until next time,
Praise the Sun.
\-Adam-/