The morning after the bell test, Naruto arrived at Training Ground Seven at 7:58 AM — two minutes early, which was a personal record that he felt deserved recognition but would receive none.
Sakura was already there. Of course Sakura was already there. She was sitting on a blanket she'd brought from home — a pink blanket, because Sakura's commitment to her color scheme was absolute — with a large bento box on her lap and a thermos of tea beside her. Her massive thighs were folded beneath her, the pink blanket barely visible under the sheer acreage of flesh and fabric that constituted her lower body. Her enormous breasts rested on the bento box, which creaked under their weight. She'd done her hair nicely. She was wearing lip gloss.
It was 7:58 in the morning.
"Naruto!" She lit up like a sunrise, patting the blanket beside her. "I made breakfast! There's tamagoyaki, grilled salmon, rice, pickled vegetables, and—" she paused for emphasis, "—twelve pieces of naruto fishcake."
"Twelve?!" Naruto's eyes went wide. He dropped onto the blanket and accepted the bento with the reverence of a man receiving a holy artifact. "Sakura-chan, you're the best!"
Sakura's entire face turned the same shade as her hair. She pressed her thighs together — a motion that produced a soft, audible sound given the volume involved — and clasped her hands beneath her chin.
"I also brought you tea," she managed, her voice approximately two octaves higher than normal.
"You're the BEST!" Naruto repeated, already shoveling tamagoyaki into his mouth.
From the opposite side of the clearing, a figure emerged from the tree line.
Sasuke walked toward them carrying a bento box wrapped in dark blue cloth. Her expression was neutral — the studied, careful neutrality of someone who had spent forty-five minutes that morning deciding between a navy blue wrapping cloth and a midnight blue wrapping cloth before selecting the navy because it complemented Naruto's eyes.
She was not going to say that. Ever. To anyone.
She sat down on Naruto's other side — the side not occupied by Sakura — and placed the bento box in front of him without a word.
Naruto looked at it. Looked at Sasuke. Looked at the bento he was already eating. Looked at Sasuke again.
"You made me breakfast too?"
"I had extra," Sasuke said, which was a lie so transparent it was practically invisible. She had woken up at 3:30 AM to prepare this bento. She had hand-rolled twenty pieces of onigiri. She had shaped three of them into tiny fox faces using nori and sesame seeds. She had practiced the fox faces six times before achieving acceptable quality. She had extra nothing.
Naruto opened the bento.
The fox-face onigiri stared up at him with tiny nori eyes.
"THESE LOOK LIKE LITTLE FOXES!" Naruto shouted, delighted. "SASUKE, DID YOU MAKE LITTLE FOX RICE BALLS?"
"They're just onigiri," Sasuke said, her voice perfectly flat, her ears perfectly red.
"They have FACES!"
"Eat your breakfast, Naruto."
Naruto ate both breakfasts. Simultaneously. One chopstick in Sakura's bento, one chopstick in Sasuke's bento, alternating bites with the efficiency of someone who had been training for this moment his entire life. He made enthusiastic sounds of appreciation for each dish, completely oblivious to the fact that the two girls on either side of him were engaged in a silent, invisible war of escalation — each one watching which bites he enjoyed most, mentally cataloguing his reactions, planning tomorrow's bento with the strategic intensity of a military campaign.
Sakura noticed that he seemed to especially enjoy the grilled salmon. She made a mental note: more salmon. Different preparations. Teriyaki. Miso-glazed. Salt-grilled with lemon.
Sasuke noticed that he ate all three fox onigiri first, before anything else. She made a mental note: more character onigiri. Maybe a toad. Maybe a spiral. Maybe a tiny Naruto-face, although that might be too on-the-nose. Maybe a tiny Naruto-face anyway.
By 8:30, Naruto had consumed approximately four thousand calories and was lying on his back on Sakura's blanket, his hands on his stomach, his expression one of pure, bovine contentment.
"I could die happy right now," he announced.
"Please don't," Sakura and Sasuke said simultaneously, with an urgency that seemed disproportionate to the casual statement.
They waited.
8:45. 9:00. 9:30. 10:00.
At 10:17 AM — two hours and seventeen minutes late — Hatake Kakashi appeared.
She didn't walk into the clearing. She didn't flicker. She materialized — one moment the space beside the training posts was empty, the next it contained approximately two hundred pounds of jōnin and the scent of something floral mixed with weapon oil.
"Yo," she said, raising one hand in greeting.
"YOU'RE—" Naruto began.
"Late, yes, I know." Kakashi's visible eye curved. "I got lost on—"
"THE ROAD OF LIFE ISN'T REAL!"
"It's very real and it has terrible signage." Kakashi ambled toward them, her massive body moving with that deceptive casualness that hid absolute lethality. Her flak jacket was unzipped to its usual halfway point, her breasts straining against her dark blue undershirt, each step producing a gentle bounce that cascaded through her entire body. Her hips swayed, her thighs pressed together and apart and together again with each stride, and her monumental ass carved slow arcs through the morning air behind her.
She was carrying a scroll.
A big scroll.
She tossed it onto the ground in front of Team Seven, and it unrolled with a dramatic flourish that was clearly rehearsed. The scroll was covered in dense, precise handwriting — diagrams, charts, technique descriptions, training schedules, and what appeared to be a color-coded progression system.
"What's this?" Naruto asked, sitting up.
"This," Kakashi said, settling onto the grass with them — her massive ass hitting the ground with a soft thud, her thighs spreading wide to accommodate her seated position, her breasts settling onto her lap like two loyal pets — "is a training plan."
She said it like other people might say "this is a revolutionary concept" or "this is something that should have existed already but didn't because the system failed you."
"A real training plan," she continued, her single visible eye moving across the three of them. "Not 'do some laps and figure it out.' Not 'here's one technique, good luck.' A real, structured, comprehensive training plan that will take you from where you are now—" she gestured vaguely at them, "—to where you need to be."
Sakura was already reading the scroll, her green eyes scanning the dense text with the speed of someone who devoured textbooks recreationally. Her eyes widened. Then widened further. Then went so wide that her eyebrows threatened to leave her face entirely.
"Kakashi-sensei," she said slowly. "This curriculum includes ANBU tactical doctrine."
"Yes."
"And jōnin-level elemental manipulation."
"Yes."
"And... is this a sealing module?"
"Basic fūinjutsu, yes. Naruto will need it more than you two, given his heritage, but you should all have the fundamentals."
"This is a FIVE-YEAR program," Sakura breathed, flipping through sections. "Taijutsu restructuring, weapons specialization, elemental affinity development, advanced chakra control, tactical theory, field medicine basics, infiltration and counter-infiltration, and—" She stopped. Read something twice. Looked up at Kakashi. "Sensei, this section is titled 'Killing Intent Resistance Training.' That's a jōnin specialization course. They don't even teach that to most chūnin."
"You're not most chūnin," Kakashi said simply.
There was a pause.
"We're not chūnin at all," Sasuke observed.
"Not yet." Kakashi's eye crinkled. "Give it time."
Naruto, who had been trying to read the scroll upside down for the past thirty seconds, finally crawled around to the right side and stared at it.
He understood approximately fifteen percent of the words.
He understood one hundred percent of the intent.
"You're going to actually train us," he said, and his voice was quiet in a way that Naruto's voice almost never was. "Like, for real."
Kakashi looked at him. Really looked at him. Her single visible eye held his gaze, and for a moment — just a moment — the lazy, amused, too-cool-for-everything mask she wore slipped, and what was underneath was something fierce and tender and almost angry.
Not angry at him. Angry at the world that had failed him. Angry at an Academy that had let him slip through the cracks. Angry at a system that had looked at Uzumaki Naruto — chakra reserves that dwarfed most jōnin, an Uzumaki bloodline, the son of a Hokage, a jinchūriki, a boy with more potential than anyone she'd ever seen — and written him off as a lost cause.
Angry at herself, a little. For almost doing the same thing. For almost being just another person who looked at him and saw only what was on the surface.
"For real," she confirmed. "Starting today. Starting right now."
She stood — a process that involved her thighs flexing, her ass lifting, her breasts bouncing, and the general displacement of a significant amount of air — and faced her three genin.
"Everyone up. Jackets off. Weights on."
"Weights?" Naruto asked.
Kakashi reached into her flak jacket — an action that required navigating the considerable landscape of her chest — and produced three sets of training weights. Wrist and ankle weights, each one sealed with gravity enhancement fūinjutsu.
"These start at five pounds each and increase by two pounds every week," she explained, distributing them. "You will wear them at all times except when sleeping and bathing. You will eat in them, train in them, walk to the grocery store in them. In three months, you won't even notice them. In six months, you'll feel naked without them."
Naruto strapped the weights on. They were heavier than he expected.
"They're heavy," he said.
"That's the point."
"I love them."
"That's concerning but appreciated." Kakashi clapped her hands together, her breasts bouncing with the motion. "All right. First lesson."
She walked to the nearest tree — a large oak at the edge of the clearing — and placed one foot on the trunk. Then the other foot. Then she walked up the tree as casually as walking down a sidewalk, her massive body perpendicular to the ground, her silver hair hanging sideways, her enormous ass jutting outward from the trunk like a shelf defying gravity in two different directions simultaneously.
She stopped about thirty feet up and looked down at them, one hand in her pocket.
"Chakra control," she said. "The foundation of everything. You're going to learn to walk up trees."
"WHAT?!" Naruto's eyes went the size of dinner plates. "YOU CAN WALK UP TREES?! THAT'S SO COOL!"
"Focus chakra to the soles of your feet," Kakashi continued, ignoring his outburst with practiced ease. "Too much and the bark will crack and repel you. Too little and you'll slip off. Find the balance. Mark your highest point with a kunai."
She walked back down the tree — each step causing her thighs to press together and her breasts to bounce gently, which was a deeply surreal image when the person doing it was perpendicular to the ground — and landed lightly on the grass.
"Go."
They went.
Sakura got it first.
This surprised no one. Sakura's chakra control had always been her strongest asset — her reserves were small, but her precision was extraordinary. She walked up her tree on the first try, smooth and steady, her feet adhering to the bark with textbook perfection. She reached the first branch, sat down, and swung her legs — her massive, thick, creamy-skinned legs that were each wider than the branch itself — and smiled down at her teammates.
"It's not that hard," she called down, which was technically true but tactically unwise.
"Very good, Sakura," Kakashi said, genuine approval in her voice. "Now do it twenty more times. Then I want you to try walking on the underside of that branch."
Sakura's smile faltered. "The underside?"
"Upside down. Hanging by your feet. You have the control for it."
Sakura looked at the underside of the branch. She looked at her chest — at the two enormous, gravity-obeying masses that were currently resting comfortably on her lap and would, if she were upside down, be resting on her face.
"...Right," she said, and began practicing.
Sasuke got it on the third try. Her first attempt cracked the bark — too much chakra, too much force, too much Uchiha intensity applied to a task that required subtlety. Her second attempt, she overcompensated and slid off at the six-foot mark. Her third attempt, she found the balance, her dark eyes narrowing in concentration as she felt the chakra in her feet calibrate, adjust, and hold.
She ran up the tree — not walked, ran, because Sasuke only had one speed and it was "prove something" — and reached the top in seconds, standing on the highest branch, her dark hair whipping in the wind, her enormous body silhouetted against the sky.
She looked down at Naruto.
Naruto was on his fourth attempt and had just been launched off the tree by an excess of chakra, landing flat on his back with a thud that shook the clearing.
"OW!" He sat up, rubbing his head. "Stupid tree! Stupid chakra! STUPID—"
"Too much," Kakashi said, crouching beside him. Her massive thighs were folded beneath her, her ass resting on her heels, her breasts hanging forward as she leaned toward him. "You're flooding your feet with chakra. Your reserves are enormous, Naruto — much larger than average. That's an advantage in combat, but for control exercises, you need to learn to regulate."
"How?" he asked, frustrated.
"Imagine a faucet," Kakashi said. "Right now, you're turning it all the way on. I need you to find the drip. Just a trickle. Just enough to stick."
Naruto closed his eyes. Concentrated. He could feel his chakra — a vast, roaring ocean inside him, blue and bright and barely contained. It wanted to surge. It wanted to explode outward. Controlling it was like trying to drink from a fire hose.
But Kakashi said trickle.
So he tried to trickle.
He opened his eyes, stood, placed his foot on the tree.
It held.
He placed his second foot.
It held.
He took a step. Another step. Another.
He was walking up a tree.
He was WALKING UP A TREE.
"I'M DOING IT!" he screamed, which disrupted his concentration, which destabilized his chakra, which launched him off the tree again. He hit the ground, rolled, and came up grinning. "DID YOU SEE THAT?! I DID IT! I WALKED ON A TREE!"
"You walked four steps," Sasuke called down from her branch, but her voice was warm.
"FOUR STEPS ON A TREE, SASUKE! A TREE!"
He threw himself at the exercise with the manic enthusiasm that was his defining characteristic. Attempt after attempt, each one a little higher, a little steadier, his chakra control improving in real-time through the combination of sheer repetition and Kakashi's patient, precise instruction.
At noon — after forty-seven attempts, twelve falls, three bark explosions, and one incident where he accidentally ran sideways along the trunk and crashed into Sasuke's tree (she caught him, pulling him against her chest with one arm while maintaining her own tree-walking with her feet, an act of multi-tasking that spoke to both her physical capability and her absolute refusal to let him fall) — Naruto reached the top of his tree.
He stood on the highest branch, his arms raised in triumph, his orange jumpsuit bright against the blue sky.
"I DID IT!"
The sound carried across the training ground. Birds scattered. A squirrel reconsidered its life choices.
Below him, Kakashi looked up at him, and behind her mask, she smiled. A real smile. The kind that made her eye crinkle and her chest feel warm and her fingers itch with the desire to touch his hair.
"Come down," she called up to him. "Carefully."
Naruto walked down the tree — slowly, wobbling slightly, but maintaining his chakra the entire way. His feet touched the grass and he stumbled slightly, breathing hard, sweating, grinning so wide his face might split.
"Good," Kakashi said, and she reached out and cupped his face with both hands.
And kissed him.
On the mouth.
It was not a peck. It was not a brief, accidental brush of masked lips. Kakashi pulled her mask down — just her mask, revealing lips that were full and pink and curved in a smile that was equal parts proud and possessive — and pressed them against Naruto's mouth with a firm, deliberate, unmistakable pressure that lasted approximately four seconds.
Four seconds.
Four seconds during which Naruto's brain, already running hot from training, executed a complete shutdown-and-restart sequence. His eyes went wide. His arms went rigid at his sides. His chakra fluctuated so wildly that every sensor-type within three miles felt a brief spike of confusion.
Kakashi pulled back. Her mask was still down. Her lips were curved in a soft, satisfied smile. Her single visible eye was crinkled with warmth.
"Good job," she murmured, and pulled her mask back up.
Naruto stood frozen.
His mouth opened. Closed. Opened. His brain, having successfully rebooted, attempted to process what had just happened and ran into an immediate stack overflow error.
"Wha—" he managed. "You— that was— on my—"
Behind them, at the base of two separate trees, Haruno Sakura and Uchiha Sasuke were vibrating.
Not shaking. Not trembling. Vibrating. At a frequency that was visible to the naked eye. Their bodies — those absurdly thick, impossibly voluptuous bodies — were producing a low-frequency oscillation powered entirely by rage so pure, so intense, so perfectly distilled that it had transcended emotion and become a physical force.
Sakura's hands were clenched at her sides. Her fingers had punched through her own palms. She didn't notice. Blood dripped onto the grass. She didn't notice that either. Her green eyes were locked on Kakashi with an expression that was three philosophical concepts beyond murder.
Her inner voice — that loud, uninhibited second personality that lived in the back of her mind — was screaming at a volume that would have shattered windows:
"SHE KISSED HIM. SHE KISSED HIM ON THE MOUTH. ON THE MOUTH. OUR NARUTO. OUR MOUTH. OUR— THAT'S OUR— I'LL KILL HER. I'LL KILL HER AND BURY HER AND THEN DIG HER UP AND KILL HER AGAIN AND—"
Outwardly, Sakura said nothing. A blood vessel in her left eye had burst. She still didn't notice.
Sasuke was worse.
Sasuke was standing perfectly still — the kind of perfectly still that prey animals recognize instinctively as "the predator has locked on." Her dark eyes had changed. The black of her irises had shifted, deepened, and in the center of each eye, a single tomoe of the Sharingan spun lazily into existence.
She had just awakened her Sharingan.
Not from trauma. Not from grief. Not from the desperate, violent emotion of seeing someone she loved in danger.
From jealousy.
Pure, undiluted, weapons-grade jealousy.
The first Sharingan in history awakened because someone kissed the wrong boy.
The single tomoe in each eye spun slowly, recording every detail of the scene before her with perfect, indelible clarity: Kakashi's hand on Naruto's face. Kakashi's lips on Naruto's lips. The angle. The duration. The expression on Kakashi's face afterward — satisfied, warm, claiming.
Sasuke's Sharingan recorded all of it. And Sasuke's Sharingan would never, ever forget it.
"Kakashi-sensei," Sasuke said, and her voice was calm. Perfectly calm. The kind of calm that preceded extinction-level events.
Kakashi turned to look at her and noticed two things simultaneously:
Sasuke had awakened her SharinganKakashi was going to die
"Oh," Kakashi said, her visible eye widening slightly. "Sasuke, your eyes—"
"We should continue training," Sasuke said, still in that terrifyingly calm voice. "I would like to learn tree-walking. I would like to master it. I would like to master it right now. So that I can receive the same... reward."
The word "reward" came out like a kunai being drawn from a sheath.
Kakashi, to her credit, recognized the danger. Recognized it, assessed it, and made a tactical decision that would have impressed Sun Tzu: she pretended nothing had happened.
"Right!" she said brightly, clapping her hands. "Tree-walking practice continues! Sasuke, excellent job with the Sharingan, by the way — we'll work on that later. Everyone, back on the trees! Twenty more repetitions each!"
Naruto, who had finally recovered from his brain's reboot sequence, shook his head vigorously, slapped his cheeks with both hands, and declared:
"I don't know what just happened but I'M GONNA DO THIRTY REPETITIONS! BELIEVE IT!"
He charged back to his tree and began running up it with renewed energy, apparently having processed the kiss as "some kind of jōnin reward system that's probably normal" and filed it away in the same mental category as "Anko living in his apartment" and "Sasuke making him fox-shaped rice balls": things that happened around him that didn't require analysis.
Sakura and Sasuke exchanged a look.
It was a complicated look. A look that contained multitudes. A look that said "I hate you but also I hate her more" and "we have a common enemy now" and "if she kisses him again I will set this training ground on fire" and "agreed."
They returned to their trees.
They practiced with an intensity that bordered on psychotic.
By 2:00 PM, all three genin could walk up and down trees with reliable consistency. Sakura could do it upside down, hanging from branches by her feet, her enormous breasts hanging downward (or upward, from her perspective) in a way that was genuinely impressive from a chakra-control standpoint. Sasuke could run up trees at full speed, transition to branches, and move through the canopy with a fluidity that made the trees themselves seem cooperative. Naruto could walk up, down, and sideways, and had discovered — through an accident that involved sneezing at the forty-foot mark — that he could stick to the tree with enough force to resist a fall, which wasn't technically part of the exercise but which Kakashi noted with interest.
"Good," Kakashi said, checking a box on her scroll with a pen. "Tree-walking, complete. Ahead of schedule by approximately three weeks."
"Already?!" Naruto was drenched in sweat, breathing hard, and radiating the feverish satisfaction of someone who had just conquered a fundamental skill through sheer, stubborn determination. "What's next?"
Kakashi looked at him. Then looked at the scroll. Then looked at the small pond at the far end of Training Ground Seven.
"Water-walking," she said.
"TODAY?!" Sakura's eyes went wide. "Kakashi-sensei, most genin teams don't learn water-walking for months after tree-walking! The chakra modulation is completely different — the surface tension requires constant adjustment because water is a dynamic surface unlike—"
"Are you telling me you can't do it?" Kakashi asked mildly.
Sakura's mouth snapped shut. Her green eyes narrowed. Her enormous breasts rose with a deep, determined breath.
"I didn't say that."
"Then let's go."
They went to the pond.
Water-walking was harder. Significantly harder. Tree bark was solid, stable, unchanging — once you found the right amount of chakra, it stayed right. Water was alive. It moved, rippled, shifted. The amount of chakra needed changed from millisecond to millisecond, requiring constant, real-time adjustment.
Sakura, predictably, adapted first. Her exceptional control translated into a ability to feel the water's movement and adjust accordingly. Within thirty minutes, she was standing on the surface of the pond, her enormous body somehow remaining upright on a liquid surface through chakra alone. The water rippled gently around her feet, but held.
"The trick is to feel the water breathing," she called to the others from the center of the pond. "It expands and contracts in micro-waves. You have to match the frequency."
Sasuke adapted second. Her Sharingan — the single tomoe still spinning slowly in each eye — allowed her to literally see the chakra patterns in Sakura's feet and copy the modulation technique. Within forty-five minutes, she was standing on the water beside Sakura, her dark hair whipping in the breeze, her massive thighs reflected in the pond's surface.
Naruto fell in.
He fell in a lot.
He fell in seventeen times in the first thirty minutes. Each time, he surfaced sputtering, cursing, and immediately trying again. His problem was the same as with tree-walking — too much chakra, too little control — but worse, because the consequences of over-applying were more dramatic. Too much chakra on a tree cracked bark. Too much chakra on water created a localized geyser that launched him into the air like a blonde, orange missile.
On his eighteenth attempt, he modified his approach. Instead of trying to match Sakura's precise, delicate control, he did something different. Something that was, in retrospect, so perfectly Naruto that it should have been obvious from the start.
He created a shadow clone.
The clone stood on the shore and watched him try to water-walk. When Naruto fell in, the clone dispersed, and the memory of watching himself fail — seeing his own chakra patterns from an external perspective — fed back into the original.
"That's..." Kakashi murmured, watching this happen. Her visible eye widened. "That's actually brilliant."
It was an unorthodox use of shadow clones — using the memory transfer not for parallel training but for self-observation. Naruto was essentially creating his own instant replay system, watching himself fail from the outside so he could identify what he was doing wrong from a perspective he couldn't access alone.
On his twenty-third attempt, he stood on the water.
Wobbly. Unsteady. His chakra was fluctuating visibly, creating tiny ripples around his feet like a stone dropped in a still pond. But he was standing.
"I'M DOING IT! I'M STANDING ON WATER! LOOK AT ME! I'M BASICALLY JESUS!"
"Who?" Sasuke asked.
"I DON'T KNOW BUT I'M HIM!"
He stood on the water for approximately twelve seconds before a slight breeze created a wave that disrupted his balance and he fell in again. But twelve seconds was enough. Twelve seconds was a foundation. Twelve seconds would become twenty seconds, then a minute, then five minutes, then permanent.
He surfaced, gasped, and looked at Kakashi with an expression of pure, dripping, waterlogged triumph.
Kakashi was standing at the edge of the pond. Her single visible eye was soft. Her hand reached up to her mask.
Naruto's triumph shifted to alarm. "Wait—"
She pulled the mask down.
She stepped onto the water.
She walked across the water toward him.
She reached him, bent down — her massive breasts hanging forward, water droplets from his splashing glistening on her dark blue undershirt like tiny jewels — and cupped his wet face in her dry, gloved hands.
And kissed him.
On the mouth.
Again.
This time it lasted five seconds. Five full seconds of Kakashi's soft, warm lips pressed against Naruto's wet, stunned, completely unresponsive mouth. Five seconds during which the afternoon sun glinted off the pond's surface and a bird sang somewhere in the trees and the world was, for those five seconds, a beautiful and insane place.
She pulled back. Smiled. Pulled her mask up.
"Good job," she murmured. "You used the shadow clones brilliantly. I'm very proud of you."
From the shore of the pond, two distinct sounds competed for dominance:
First: the sound of Sakura's fist hitting the ground hard enough to crack the earth in a radius of six feet. The crack radiated outward from her impact point like a spiderweb, and a nearby tree — one of the ones they'd been practicing on — tilted fifteen degrees to the left and stayed there.
Second: the sound of Sasuke's Sharingan evolving. The single tomoe in each eye spun faster, faster, and then — like a cell dividing — split into two. Two tomoe. In each eye. Awakened through the sheer, evolutionary pressure of watching someone else kiss Naruto Uzumaki.
"That's our SENSEI," Sakura hissed through teeth so clenched her jaw muscles were visible. "That's our SENSEI doing that. That's a JŌNIN. That's an AUTHORITY FIGURE. That's—"
"Unacceptable," Sasuke finished, her two-tomoe Sharingan burning.
"COMPLETELY unacceptable."
"Agreed."
"We need to do something."
"Agreed."
"But what?"
Sasuke was silent for a moment. Then: "We master every exercise first. Before him. So that we receive the reward before he does."
Sakura's rage-fractured mind processed this tactical suggestion and found it sound. "And if she tries to kiss us?"
"She won't. She only wants to kiss Naruto."
"Then WHAT'S THE POINT—"
"The point is that we will be standing NEXT to him when he completes each exercise. Physically between him and her. She'll have to go through us."
Sakura considered this. Her eye was still twitching. The blood vessel was still burst. She was still bleeding from her self-inflicted palm wounds. But the plan was solid.
"Deal," she said.
They shook on it.
Their handshake cratered the ground beneath them by an additional two inches.
The afternoon continued.
Naruto, having been kissed twice by his sensei and having processed this information with roughly the same depth as a goldfish processing quantum mechanics (which is to say: not at all), threw himself into training with redoubled energy. He didn't understand why Kakashi kept kissing him. He didn't understand why Sakura and Sasuke seemed angry about it. He didn't understand most interpersonal dynamics, if he was being honest with himself, which he rarely was, because honest self-reflection was for people who weren't busy becoming Hokage.
What he understood was training. And for the first time in his life, someone was actually training him.
"All right," Kakashi said, gathering them in the center of the training ground after water-walking practice had concluded. All three genin could now walk on water with varying degrees of stability — Sakura smoothly, Sasuke efficiently, and Naruto through a combination of determination and creative clone usage that was technically wrong but functionally correct. "Basics are covered. Now we move to something more interesting."
She held up two fingers.
"Jutsu."
Naruto's entire body went rigid with excitement. His eyes went so wide they were practically circular. His hands clenched at his sides. A sound came out of his mouth that was less a word and more a vibration of pure, concentrated anticipation.
"You each have different elemental affinities," Kakashi continued, reaching into her flak jacket — again navigating the considerable terrain of her chest — and producing three small squares of paper. "These are chakra papers. Channel your chakra into them, and they'll tell us what nature transformation you're suited for."
She distributed the papers.
Sakura went first. She held the paper between two fingers, channeled her chakra, and watched it crumble into dirt.
"Earth," Kakashi confirmed. "Good foundation. Defensive capabilities, terrain manipulation, strong synergy with your chakra control."
Sasuke went second. The paper crinkled, then ignited.
"Fire and Lightning," Kakashi said, nodding. "Expected for an Uchiha. Fire's your primary, Lightning is secondary. We'll develop both."
Naruto went third.
He held the paper. Channeled his chakra. And the paper—
Split in half. Clean, sharp, decisive. The two halves fluttered to the ground like tiny, murdered butterflies.
"Wind," Kakashi said, and her voice had changed. There was something in it — surprise, maybe. Or recognition. "Interesting. Wind is the rarest affinity in Fire Country. It's offensive by nature — cutting, piercing, penetrating. It enhances weapon techniques, and it's the natural counter to Lightning."
She looked at Sasuke. Sasuke looked at Naruto. Something unspoken passed between the three of them — a triangular dynamic of power and potential and the suggestion that these three affinities, together, could be something extraordinary.
"I'm also going to teach you techniques outside your primary affinity," Kakashi added casually, and all three genin went still. "A shinobi who can only use one element is predictable. I want you versatile."
"You can DO that?" Naruto asked, leaning forward. "You can learn jutsu that aren't your element?"
"It's harder," Kakashi confirmed. "Takes more chakra, more practice, more control. But yes. I've copied over a thousand jutsu with my Sharingan, and most of them aren't my natural Lightning affinity. With enough training, you can learn to perform techniques from any element."
She paused. Her eye swept across them. Then she smiled behind her mask — they could tell by the crinkle — and said:
"Let's start with something dramatic."
Day One — Afternoon: Water Style
"Water Style: Water Dragon Jutsu."
Kakashi stood at the edge of the pond, her hands moving through a sequence of forty-four hand seals with a speed and precision that made the individual signs blur together. The water behind her erupted — no, that wasn't the right word. The water became something. It rose, twisted, compressed, and shaped itself into a dragon thirty feet long, its body made of churning, pressurized water, its eyes somehow conveying malevolent intelligence despite being made of liquid.
The dragon roared — a sound like a waterfall compressed into a single note — and lunged across the clearing, hitting a training post with enough force to shatter it into splinters.
The spray from the impact rained down on Team Seven like a localized thunderstorm.
"That," Kakashi said calmly, brushing water from her shoulder, "is what you're going to learn."
Naruto was vibrating so hard he was slightly blurry. "THAT WAS THE COOLEST THING I'VE EVER SEEN IN MY ENTIRE LIFE AND I'M GOING TO LEARN IT RIGHT NOW."
"It's a B-rank technique with forty-four hand seals," Kakashi said. "It's going to take time."
"I DON'T CARE! TEACH ME!"
Kakashi did.
She broke it down — the hand seals, the chakra conversion, the visualization required to shape the water, the sustained output needed to maintain the dragon's form. She demonstrated each seal individually, then in pairs, then in sequences of four. She made Naruto practice each sequence until his hands moved through them from muscle memory before adding the next.
It was tedious. It was repetitive. It was the kind of painstaking, methodical training that Naruto normally had zero patience for.
But Kakashi was patient. And precise. And every time his attention wavered, she said something that snapped it back:
"Naruto, focus. The second Hokage created this technique. You want to be Hokage? Learn his jutsu."
That worked. That worked every single time.
By the end of the first day, Naruto could perform the forty-four hand seals in sequence from memory. He couldn't produce a water dragon — not yet, not without water affinity and significantly more practice — but he could form the seals, and he could feel the chakra pathway they created.
"Good," Kakashi said, marking her scroll. "Tomorrow, we add elemental conversion. Sakura, you'll start on Earth Style. Sasuke, Fire Style fundamentals — I know you already have the Great Fireball, but your form is sloppy and you waste chakra. We're fixing that."
Sasuke's eye twitched at the word "sloppy" — no one had ever critiqued her signature technique — but she said nothing. She recognized competent instruction when she received it. She also recognized that improving her skills would make Naruto notice her more, which was a motivation so powerful it could have moved mountains.
Day Four — Fire Style
"Fire Style: Great Fireball Technique."
Sasuke demonstrated. Her fireball was large, hot, and impressive by genin standards. It was also, as Kakashi had noted, sloppy — the edges were diffuse, the burn duration was short, and she was using approximately thirty percent more chakra than necessary.
Kakashi corrected her form. Adjusted her hand seal timing. Showed her how to compress the chakra before release, creating a tighter, more efficient ball that burned hotter with less fuel.
Sasuke practiced.
Then Kakashi turned to Naruto.
"Your turn."
"But I'm Wind affinity—"
"And I said I want you versatile. Fire and Wind are complementary — wind feeds fire. A shinobi who can use both can create devastating combination techniques. Now watch."
She demonstrated the hand seals. Naruto watched. She demonstrated the chakra conversion — the feeling of heat, of combustion, of turning chakra from a neutral energy into something that wanted to burn. Naruto felt.
His first attempt produced a puff of smoke and a sound like a small, disappointed cough.
"More heat," Kakashi instructed. "Feel the burn. Not in your throat — in your chakra. Your chakra needs to be angry."
"My chakra's ALWAYS angry!" Naruto protested.
"Then use that."
His second attempt produced a fireball the size of a basketball. Small by Uchiha standards, but respectable for a Wind-affinity genin attempting a Fire technique for the first time.
His third attempt was bigger.
His fourth was bigger still.
By his tenth attempt, he was producing a fireball that was roughly seventy percent the size of Sasuke's — and it was his first day with the technique.
"That's impossible," Sasuke breathed, watching from the sideline, her two-tomoe Sharingan recording every detail. "His affinity is Wind. He shouldn't be able to—"
"His chakra reserves are enormous," Kakashi explained quietly, standing beside Sasuke while they both watched Naruto practice. "What he lacks in elemental compatibility, he compensates for with sheer volume. It's inefficient — he's using five times the chakra you would for the same result — but with his reserves, that's sustainable."
Sasuke was quiet for a moment. Then: "He's going to surpass me."
It wasn't a question. It wasn't tinged with jealousy or resentment or the dark, bitter envy that had driven canon Sasuke toward destruction. It was a statement of observation, delivered with a quiet, wondering pride that sounded almost... reverent.
"He's going to surpass everyone," Kakashi murmured, and her single visible eye was warm.
Naruto completed his eleventh fireball — his best one yet, roaring and bright and hot enough to scorch the training post he'd aimed at.
He turned back to them, grinning, soot on his face.
Kakashi walked toward him.
Naruto's grin flickered. "Wait— Kakashi-sensei— you don't have to—"
Mask down. Hands on his face. Lips on his mouth.
Six seconds this time.
"THAT'S IT!" Sakura roared from across the clearing, where she had been practicing Earth Style: Earth Wall with commendable focus that had just been completely annihilated. The ground beneath her cracked. Not from a jutsu — from her foot stomping. "THAT IS ABSOLUTELY IT! I AM GOING TO—"
Sasuke's hand landed on her shoulder.
Sakura looked at Sasuke.
Sasuke's two-tomoe Sharingan was spinning. Her expression was calm. Terrifyingly calm.
"Not yet," Sasuke said quietly. "We wait. We train. We surpass. And then..."
She didn't finish the sentence.
She didn't need to.
Day Seven — More Fire Style, Plus Lightning
"Fire Style: Fire Dragon Flame Bomb."
Kakashi demonstrated the technique on the far side of the training ground — a wide, open area with nothing flammable for a hundred meters in any direction. The jutsu was exactly what its name suggested: a dragon made of fire that detonated on impact. The explosion carved a crater in the earth eight feet across and set the surrounding grass ablaze.
"A-rank technique," Kakashi said, extinguishing the fires with a casual water jutsu. "Higher chakra cost than the Great Fireball, more complex shape manipulation, and the detonation component adds a secondary chakra pulse at the point of impact. Sasuke, you'll learn this first — your Fire affinity gives you the natural advantage. Naruto, watch and learn. You'll attempt it once Sasuke has the basics."
Sasuke learned the Fire Dragon Flame Bomb in three days. Her Sharingan — now a reliable, always-active tool — allowed her to watch Kakashi's demonstration once and capture the chakra flow patterns with perfect clarity. Her innate fire affinity handled the rest. By the end of day three, she was producing a fire dragon that, while smaller than Kakashi's, detonated with a force that made the ground shake.
Naruto learned it in five days. Slower, messier, more chakra-intensive — but he learned it. His fire dragon was wider and less controlled than Sasuke's, but the detonation was actually larger, because his massive chakra reserves translated into a bigger secondary pulse.
"That shouldn't work," Kakashi muttered, watching Naruto's Fire Dragon Flame Bomb obliterate a training dummy. "The technique isn't designed for that much chakra input. He's overloading it and somehow it's making it MORE effective rather than less."
She paused. Tilted her head.
"He's like a square peg in a round hole, except he makes the hole square."
She kissed him again after he mastered it.
Seven seconds.
Sasuke's Sharingan evolved to three tomoe.
Sakura cracked a boulder with her bare fist.
The boulder was forty feet from the nearest training exercise and had not been involved in any way.
"I'm fine," Sakura said, when Naruto asked why she'd punched a boulder. "Just practicing."
"Your knuckles are bleeding."
"I SAID I'M FINE."
Lightning Style came next. Kakashi, whose primary affinity was Lightning, taught this with particular enthusiasm and precision. She started with the fundamentals — how to convert chakra into electrical energy, how to maintain the charge without grounding it, how to direct the current.
"Lightning is speed," she explained, sparks dancing between her fingers. "It's the fastest element. Lightning techniques enhance your reflexes, your movement speed, your striking power. A shinobi who can channel Lightning through their body is faster than almost anyone without it."
She taught them Lightning Style: False Darkness — a spear of electrical energy that could be split into multiple projectiles. She taught them Lightning Style: Electromagnetic Murder — a wave of electricity that traveled through the ground and could hit multiple targets.
Sasuke took to Lightning like she was born for it — which, given it was her secondary affinity, she essentially was. The electricity responded to her with an almost eager quality, crackling around her hands and arms with a blue-white intensity that made her dark eyes glow.
Naruto struggled more with Lightning than with Fire. Lightning required precision — directing a current along a specific path, maintaining frequency, controlling voltage. These were Naruto's weakest skills. But he had the shadow clone method now — creating clones to observe himself, feeding the observations back, identifying errors he couldn't feel from the inside.
He also had stubbornness in quantities that defied measurement.
By the end of the second week, he could perform three Lightning techniques at a functional level. Not elegant. Not efficient. But functional.
Kakashi kissed him after each one.
She seemed to have established a reward system with absolutely no input from anyone else and no apparent awareness that it was driving two of her three students toward acts of violence that would be studied in psychology textbooks for generations.
Day Ten — Earth Style
"Earth Style: Earth Wall."
Sakura demonstrated this one. Her Earth affinity was strong — the strongest elemental compatibility on the team — and she'd been practicing independently since Kakashi introduced it. She slammed her hands on the ground, and a wall of solid earth erupted from the soil, ten feet high and two feet thick.
"Defensive technique," Kakashi confirmed. "Sakura, your wall is excellent. Very good density, good height, clean edges. Naruto, Sasuke — your turn."
Sasuke produced a wall that was slightly shorter and slightly thinner but structurally sound.
Naruto's first attempt produced something that could generously be described as "a hill."
"That's a hill," Kakashi observed.
"It's a WALL. It's just... horizontal."
"Naruto, that's what a hill is."
Twelve attempts later, Naruto produced a wall. It was crooked, uneven, and had a small hole near the bottom that may or may not have been intentional, but it was vertical and it was solid and it was a wall, damn it.
Kakashi also taught them Earth Style: Mud Wall, Earth Style: Earth Spear (which hardened the user's skin to stone-like density), and the beginnings of Earth Style: Underground Projection Fish Technique, which allowed the user to move through the earth like a fish through water.
By the end of the second week, Team Seven's jutsu repertoire had expanded from "Sasuke knows fireball, Sakura knows the basics, and Naruto knows Shadow Clone" to something that would have made most chūnin jealous:
Naruto's Arsenal (End of Week Two):
Shadow Clone Jutsu (his bread and butter, now used with tactical sophistication)Wind Style: Great Breakthrough (his first elemental technique, learned on Day Two — a powerful gust of cutting wind)Wind Style: Vacuum Blade (a wind-enhanced kunai technique that extended the blade's cutting range)Water Style: Water Dragon Jutsu (functional, if sloppy — required a nearby water source)Fire Style: Great Fireball Technique (oversized and chakra-hungry but effective)Fire Style: Fire Dragon Flame Bomb (same — big, expensive, devastating)Lightning Style: False Darkness (his aim needed work)Lightning Style: Electromagnetic Murder (his best Lightning technique, ironically, because it didn't require precision aiming)Earth Style: Earth Wall (crooked but functional)Earth Style: Earth Spear (excellent — his massive chakra reserves made his skin harder than anyone else's)Tree-walking and water-walking
For a genin who had been a dead-last two weeks ago, it was staggering. Impossible, really — or it would have been, without the combination of Kakashi's structured teaching, shadow clone memory feedback for accelerated practice, Uzumaki-level chakra reserves, and the kind of raw, stubborn, refuse-to-quit determination that couldn't be taught.
"You're a monster," Kakashi told him at the end of the second week, and she meant it as the highest possible compliment. Her visible eye was shining with pride. "An absolute, beautiful monster."
She pulled her mask down.
"Kakashi-sensei, please—" Naruto began, holding up his hands.
She kissed him.
Eight seconds.
Behind them, the earth cracked beneath Sakura's feet in a perfect circle, like a crater forming in slow motion. She hadn't moved. Hadn't stomped. The ground had simply yielded to the pressure of her killing intent.
Sasuke stood perfectly still, her three-tomoe Sharingan spinning at maximum speed, recording this kiss with the same methodical precision she would apply to recording an enemy's technique.
For future reference.
For countermeasures.
Day Fourteen — Tactical Training
"Now," Kakashi said, settling onto the grass with her scroll. Her massive ass compressed the earth beneath her, her thighs spreading wide, her breasts resting on her lap. She looked like a warrior goddess holding a PTA meeting. "We talk about how to fight."
This was different from jutsu training. This wasn't about what techniques to use — it was about when, where, why, and how. It was tactical doctrine. Strategic thinking. The invisible framework that separated a shinobi who knew techniques from a shinobi who won fights.
"Most genin — most chūnin, honestly — fight reactively," Kakashi began. "They wait for the enemy to attack, then they respond. This is the combat equivalent of standing in the rain and wondering why you're wet."
She pulled out a small board and began drawing diagrams with quick, precise strokes.
"ANBU tactical doctrine — the highest level of small-unit combat theory in the village — operates on three principles."
She wrote them:
1. CONTROL THE ENGAGEMENT
2. DICTATE THE TEMPO
3. END IT DECISIVELY
"Principle one: you choose when, where, and how the fight happens. If you're fighting on someone else's terms, you've already lost. Use terrain, use timing, use misdirection — make the enemy fight the battle YOU want, not the battle THEY want."
Naruto was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his blue eyes intent. He was absorbing this. Not just hearing it — absorbing it. The tactical concepts were clicking into place in his mind with a speed that surprised even Kakashi.
Because Naruto wasn't stupid. He had never been stupid. He had been untaught. He had been a processor running without an operating system — all that raw power, all that potential, just waiting for someone to install the software.
Kakashi was installing the software.
"Principle two: you control the speed of the fight. If you're faster, keep the pressure on — don't give them time to think, to plan, to recover. If you're slower, create distance, create obstacles, force them to come to you on ground you've prepared. The tempo is the heartbeat of the battle. Control the heartbeat, control the battle."
Sasuke was nodding, her Sharingan active, recording every word and diagram. She understood this instinctively — the Uchiha style was inherently about reading and controlling the flow of combat. But hearing it articulated, systemized, turned into a teachable framework — it gave her existing instincts a structure to build on.
Sakura was taking notes. Actual notes, in a small notebook, with color-coded sections. She was going to study these notes tonight. She was going to create flashcards. She was going to quiz Naruto on them tomorrow, and if he got them wrong, she was going to make him study until he got them right, and if he got them right, she was going to hug him, and her arms would wrap around him and his face would be in her chest and—
She lost her train of thought.
She went back to taking notes.
"Principle three: when you commit, commit completely. No half-measures. No holding back because you're afraid of overkill. In the ANBU, we had a saying: 'If it's worth killing, it's worth killing twice.' Every engagement should end with absolute certainty. If you're not sure the enemy is down, they're not down."
Kakashi looked at Naruto specifically when she said this.
"Naruto. This one's important for you."
"Why me?"
"Because you're kind." She said it simply, without judgment. "You don't like hurting people. That's a good thing — it's one of the best things about you. But in the field, mercy at the wrong moment gets your teammates killed. I'm not asking you to be cruel. I'm asking you to be decisive."
Naruto was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded, once, firmly.
"I understand, sensei."
Kakashi's eye softened. She reached out—
"DON'T kiss him," Sakura said sharply, her pen frozen mid-stroke.
Kakashi's hand paused. She looked at Sakura. Looked at Sasuke, whose Sharingan was spinning with that familiar, dangerous intensity.
Kakashi retracted her hand.
"Right," she said mildly. "Moving on."
She spent the next three hours teaching them tactical formations, communication protocols, and engagement strategies drawn from actual ANBU operational doctrine. She taught them how to set up an ambush. How to detect an ambush. How to break out of an ambush. She taught them two-person and three-person tactical movements — leapfrogging, bounding overwatch, the L-shaped ambush, the linear danger area crossing.
She taught them hand signals — the ANBU field communication system that allowed silent coordination across distances. She taught them twelve signals on the first day and added six more each day after.
She taught them how to read a battlefield — how to identify terrain features, sight lines, choke points, escape routes. She taught them to look at any environment and immediately identify three things: the best place to attack from, the best place to defend from, and the best place to run to.
She taught Naruto how to use shadow clones as a tactical network — deploying them as scouts, sentinels, and decoys. How to create a perimeter. How to feed information from multiple clone perspectives into a real-time situational awareness picture.
"You have an ability that most shinobi would kill for," she told him. "Shadow clones with memory transfer — that's not just a combat technique. That's an intelligence network. A sensor array. A force multiplier. Used correctly, you can have eyes everywhere. You can be everywhere. You can know everything."
Naruto's eyes were wide. Not with excitement this time — with understanding. For the first time, he was seeing the shadow clone technique not as "make a bunch of me and have them hit things" but as a tool with applications he'd never imagined.
"I never thought of it that way," he said quietly.
"No one taught you to think of it that way," Kakashi replied, and there was that anger again — not at him, never at him, but at the world that had handed a twelve-year-old a technique of extraordinary potential and never bothered to explain what he was holding.
She put her hand on his head. Ruffled his hair.
Didn't kiss him.
(Sakura and Sasuke relaxed approximately two percent.)
Day Fourteen — Evening: The Rasengan
It happened almost by accident.
They were cooling down after tactical training, sitting in a loose circle on the grass, drinking water. Naruto was lying on his back, staring at the sky, turning a leaf between his fingers. He was channeling wind chakra into it absently — a control exercise Kakashi had assigned — watching the leaf spin and cut and split.
"Kakashi-sensei," he said, still staring at the spinning leaf. "What was my dad's signature technique?"
The clearing went very, very quiet.
Kakashi looked at him. Her visible eye widened slightly.
"You know about your father?" she asked carefully.
"The Third Hokage told me. After the graduation." Naruto kept spinning the leaf. His voice was casual, but his eyes were not. "He said my dad was the Fourth Hokage. He said my dad had a technique that no one else could use."
Silence stretched across the training ground like a held breath.
Kakashi's hand went to her chest — over the breast closest to her heart — and pressed there. Her eye closed. Opened.
"The Rasengan," she said softly. "A-rank technique. Pure chakra manipulation — no hand seals, no elemental conversion. Just rotating chakra compressed into a sphere."
She held out her hand.
Blue light spiraled into existence above her palm — a sphere of churning, violent, beautiful energy that hummed like a living thing. The Rasengan. Compact, devastating, and deceptively simple in appearance.
Naruto sat up.
His blue eyes reflected the blue light.
"Teach me," he said, and it wasn't a request.
Kakashi looked at the Rasengan in her hand. Looked at Naruto. Looked at the Rasengan again.
She thought about Minato. About his smile. About the way he'd held this same technique in this same hand in this same training ground twenty years ago.
"It has three stages," she said, and her voice was rough. "Rotation, power, and containment. Your father took three years to develop it. Jiraiya took—"
"How long did you take to learn it?"
"...A while."
"I'll be faster."
It wasn't arrogance. It was certainty. The quiet, absolute certainty of someone who had spent two weeks discovering that he could learn anything — anything at all — if someone just bothered to show him how.
Kakashi closed her hand, and the Rasengan dissipated.
"We'll start tomorrow," she said. "First stage: rotation. I'll bring water balloons."
Naruto's grin was blinding.
Kakashi did not kiss him. She wanted to. She wanted to very badly. She wanted to pull her mask down and press her lips to his and taste the determination on his mouth and feel the warmth of his smile against her skin.
But Sakura was watching with the focus of a sniper.
And Sasuke's three-tomoe Sharingan was spinning like a buzzsaw.
So Kakashi settled for ruffling his hair and saying "Your father would be proud of you," and watching the way his blue eyes went bright and wet for just a moment before he blinked it away and grinned.
"Yeah," he said. "He would."
The walk home that evening was quiet. Naruto walked between Sakura and Sasuke — a formation that had become their default, the two girls flanking him like bodyguards, their massive bodies creating a wall of soft, protective flesh on either side.
Sakura was carrying three empty bento boxes — hers, Sasuke's, and the one she'd brought for Naruto's lunch. Her enormous hips swayed with each step, her thighs pressing together with soft, rhythmic sounds. She was humming.
Sasuke was walking close enough to Naruto that her arm occasionally brushed against his. Each brush was calculated. Each contact was deliberate. Each touch sent a spark through her nervous system that her three-tomoe Sharingan, still faintly active, recorded with perfect clarity.
"Today was good," Naruto said, his hands behind his head, staring up at the evening sky. "Today was really, really good."
"You learned four new jutsu," Sakura said, her voice warm with pride. "In one day. That's incredible, Naruto."
"You used the shadow clones brilliantly," Sasuke added quietly. "The self-observation technique. That was... clever."
Naruto's ears turned pink. "Yeah, well. Kakashi-sensei's a good teacher, you know? When she actually shows up."
"Speaking of Kakashi-sensei," Sakura said, and her voice shifted to something that was carefully, precisely, dangerously casual. "She seems very... affectionate."
"Huh? Oh, the kissing thing?" Naruto shrugged. "I think that's just how jōnin teach. Like a gold star, but with your face."
Sakura's left eye twitched.
"That is not how jōnin teach," Sasuke said flatly.
"How would you know? Have you ever had a jōnin sensei before?"
"I have one now, and she's KISSING YOU ON THE MOUTH."
"Yeah, because I did a good job! It's positive reinforcement!"
"THAT'S NOT WHAT POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT—" Sakura caught herself, took a breath so deep her enormous breasts rose like twin moons cresting the horizon, and exhaled slowly. "You know what? Fine. It's fine. It's a gold star. With your face."
"Right?" Naruto nodded, vindicated. "It's just a teacher thing."
Sakura and Sasuke made eye contact over Naruto's head.
The look they shared could have curdled milk at fifty paces.
They walked in silence for a while. The streets of Konoha were quiet, the evening settling in, lanterns beginning to glow along the main roads. Civilians nodded to them as they passed — some with the usual wariness toward Naruto, but increasingly, with something else. Curiosity. Respect, even. Word was spreading, slowly, that the Uzumaki kid was training with Kakashi of the Sharingan, and that something was... different.
They reached the intersection where their paths diverged — Naruto's apartment to the north, Sakura's house to the east, the Uchiha compound to the south.
"Same time tomorrow?" Naruto asked, grinning.
"I'll bring lunch," Sakura said.
"I'll bring snacks," Sasuke said.
"You guys are the best!" Naruto waved and jogged off toward his apartment, his orange jumpsuit bright against the darkening street.
Sakura and Sasuke stood at the intersection and watched him go.
"I'm going to kiss him first," Sakura said, her voice low and hard.
"No," Sasuke replied, her Sharingan spinning. "You're not."
"Watch me."
"I am watching you. With these eyes. I'm always watching."
They stood there for a long moment, two ridiculously thick, impossibly beautiful, deeply unhinged girls united by one thing and divided by another.
Then they walked home. In opposite directions. Each one planning tomorrow's bento with the intensity of a general planning an invasion.
Naruto arrived at his apartment to find that Anko had already let herself in — through the window again, despite the fact that he'd given her a key three days ago — and was in the kitchen doing something complicated with pork belly and a blowtorch.
"Welcome home, Naru-chan!" she sang out without turning around. "Dinner's in twenty. I'm doing chashu torched tableside tonight because I found a culinary scroll in the jōnin library and I am now unstoppable."
Naruto dropped his training weights by the door — they hit the floor with a thud that shook the walls — and collapsed onto his couch.
"Kakashi-sensei kissed me again," he said to the ceiling.
The blowtorch sound stopped.
A pause.
"She WHAT?"
"She kissed me. On the mouth. Like, four times today. I think it's because I learned new jutsu? It's like a reward system."
Another pause. Longer this time.
Naruto heard the blowtorch being set down with very deliberate care.
He heard footsteps.
He looked up.
Anko was standing over him. Her expression was calm. Perfectly calm. The kind of calm that, as he was learning, preceded dangerous things.
"Naru-chan," she said sweetly. "Tell Anko-nee everything about your day. Every detail. Don't leave anything out."
Naruto told her.
He told her about tree-walking and water-walking. About the jutsu — the Water Dragon, the Fireball, the Fire Dragon Flame Bomb, the Lightning and Earth techniques. About the tactical training. About the Rasengan.
He told her about the kissing.
He told her casually, obliviously, the way you'd tell someone about the weather.
"And then she kissed me when I did the water-walking thing, and then again after the Fireball, and then again after the Fire Dragon, and then she was gonna do it after the tactical stuff but Sakura and Sasuke looked really mad so she didn't, but then—"
Anko listened to all of this with an expression that journeyed through several stages: surprise, confusion, calculation, jealousy, rage, acceptance, more rage, strategic contemplation, grudging respect, and finally arriving at a destination that could best be described as "murderous with a side of competitive admiration."
"I see," she said when he finished. "So Kakashi is using positive reinforcement conditioning through physical affection to establish herself as your primary emotional anchor while simultaneously training you to associate achievement with her approval."
Naruto blinked. "She's giving me gold stars with her face."
"THAT'S WHAT I SAID." Anko took a breath. Released it. Her enormous breasts rose and fell like tidal forces. "Okay. Okay. This is fine. This is manageable. Kakashi wants to play teacher? Fine. She can be teacher. But I—" She placed her hand on her chest, her brown eyes blazing with a fire that had nothing to do with the blowtorch. "I am the one who FEEDS him. I am the one who CLEANS for him. I am the one who lives in his apartment and cooks his dinner and killed his sentient mushroom and I am NOT going to be outmaneuvered by a woman whose most creative use of her mouth is READING PORN IN PUBLIC."
She turned on her heel — her massive ass swinging in a wide arc that nearly knocked a plate off the counter — and marched back to the kitchen.
"Dinner will be SPECTACULAR tonight," she declared. "I'm adding a SECOND COURSE. And DESSERT. And after dinner, I'm teaching you the Snake Fang assassination technique because if KAKASHI can teach you jutsu AND kiss you then I can teach you jutsu AND — AND—"
She paused.
Turned back to Naruto.
"Naru-chan."
"Yeah?"
"Did you like it? The kissing?"
Naruto thought about it. Actually thought about it, which was unusual for him regarding anything that wasn't ramen or becoming Hokage.
"I dunno," he said honestly. "It was weird. But Kakashi-sensei seemed happy, so... I guess it was fine?"
Anko stared at him for a long moment.
Then she laughed. A genuine, full-body laugh that made her breasts bounce and her thighs jiggle and her eyes crinkle at the corners.
"You beautiful, oblivious idiot," she said fondly. "You absolute disaster of a human being."
"Hey!"
"I love you."
"WHAT?"
"I said dinner's ready. Wash your hands."
Naruto washed his hands.
He ate an incredible dinner — torched chashu over rice with pickled ginger and miso soup and a green salad that Anko insisted he finish despite his protests that "vegetables are just crunchy water."
After dinner, Anko taught him the Snake Fang technique — a close-range assassination strike that targeted three vital points in rapid succession. It was brutal, efficient, and designed to end a fight in less than a second.
She did not kiss him afterward.
She wanted to. God, she wanted to. She wanted to grab his stupid beautiful whiskered face and press her lips against his and show Kakashi and Sakura and Sasuke and every other impossibly thick woman in this village that Mitarashi Anko was HERE FIRST.
But she didn't.
Because Naruto was yawning, and his eyes were heavy, and he'd had a long day, and he needed sleep.
So she ruffled his hair, cleaned up the kitchen, and settled onto the couch with her blanket.
"Night, Anko-nee," Naruto mumbled from his bedroom.
"Good night, Naru-chan," she whispered.
She lay on the couch in the dark, staring at the ceiling.
"Girlfriend is inadequate," she murmured. "Wife is inadequate. Kakashi is unacceptable. The pink one and the Uchiha are threats. The Hyūga is a wild card."
She rolled onto her side.
"But I'm the one who's here. Every night. I'm the one who feeds him. I'm the one he comes home to."
She closed her eyes.
"I'm winning."
A small, satisfied smile curved her lips.
Outside the window, on the roof across the street, Sakura and Sasuke were once again maintaining their nightly vigil. Sakura had brought a blanket this time. Sasuke had brought binoculars.
"She's on his couch again," Sasuke reported.
"We need to address the Anko situation," Sakura said.
"Agreed. But first — the Kakashi situation."
"Right. The kissing."
"The kissing must stop."
"How?"
"We could kill her."
"Sasuke!"
"I'm weighing options."
"We are NOT killing our sensei."
"I said I'm WEIGHING. I haven't DECIDED."
They lay in silence for a while.
"We could kiss him first," Sakura said quietly.
The silence that followed was different. Charged.
"Tomorrow," Sasuke said. "Before training."
"Who goes first?"
"...Rock paper scissors."
"Deal."
Somewhere below them, Naruto slept peacefully, dreaming about mastering the Rasengan.
His life had become something that he didn't understand and couldn't see and would probably never figure out.
But he was learning the Rasengan.
He was learning his father's technique.
And for now — for right now, in this moment, in this small apartment in this strange, thick, adoring village — that was enough.
That was everything.
End of Chapter Three
Author's Note: Sasuke's Sharingan awakening through jealousy is now canon in this fic. Kakashi's "reward system" is under review by multiple parties. Anko is winning (she has decided this unilaterally). Sakura and Sasuke will play rock paper scissors tomorrow morning. The results will be catastrophic regardless of outcome. Gerald the mushroom is still dead. Naruto has learned more jutsu in two weeks than canon Naruto learned in two years. He still thinks the kissing is a gold star system. He will never stop thinking this. He is perfect and he is free.