The forest behind Tazuna's house looked like every JRPG starter zone I'd ever seen.
Tall trees, mossy trunks, the air damp enough to frizz my hair into a halo of chaos. Birds. Bugs. The distant sound of waves. Also, three children about to commit chakra-related stupidity while a chronically exhausted war veteran supervised.
So, you know. Tuesday.
Kakashi stood in front of a tree with his hands in his pockets like this was just another day at the murder office. His hitai-ate was tilted just so, masking the Sharingan again. The lines around his visible eye looked deeper, but his chakra felt a little less like burnt toast, so that was an improvement.
"Alright," he said, in that bored drawl that somehow made everything sound more ominous, "time for step one of your intensive training."
Naruto bounced on his toes. "Is it a secret ultimate jutsu?!"
"Is it something that'll actually be useful?" Sasuke asked, which was technically the same question but with more edge.
Kakashi ignored both of them and slapped his palm casually against the tree trunk.
Then he walked up it.
Just. Walked. Up it. Feet flat, hands still in his pockets, like gravity was a rumor.
Naruto's jaw dropped. Mine probably did too, but I at least had the decency to pretend I'd expected it. Sasuke's eyes widened for half a second before he shoved the reaction back down into his "nothing impresses me" folder.
Kakashi kept going until he was standing upside-down on a branch. Leaves framed him against the gray sky.
"This," he said, "is tree-climbing practice. Using chakra."
He let that hang, then pushed off, flipping lazily to land in front of us again.
Naruto immediately started vibrating. "WE GET TO WALK ON TREES?!"
"Not yet," Kakashi said. "First you get to fall off of them. Repeatedly."
Naruto deflated. "You're doing that thing again where you make everything sound lame."
"It's a gift," Kakashi said. "Here's how it works."
He knelt and scratched in the dirt with a kunai, drawing a crude stick figure standing on a vertical line. Then little arrows, scribbled circles.
"Channel chakra to the soles of your feet," he said. "Too little, you slip. Too much, you blow yourself off the trunk. The goal is controlled output—steady, precise, consistent."
His eye flicked toward me as he said "precise," which was deeply rude but fair.
"Why do we need this?" Sasuke asked, already memorizing the diagram.
"Chakra control improves everything," Kakashi said. "Jutsu efficiency. Stamina. Speed. If you can't even manage this, you'll waste energy every time you fight. Or, say, try to walk on water and drown."
Naruto's hand shot up. "We can walk on water too?!"
"Focus on the trees first," Kakashi said.
He pulled out three kunai, tossing one to each of us.
"Your job," he said, "is to channel chakra to your feet, run up the tree, and mark the highest point you reach before you fall. Then repeat, trying to beat your record each time."
Naruto twirled the kunai dangerously. "Heh. This'll be easy. I'll be at the top before you losers even—"
He charged the tree mid-sentence.
No prep, no testing, just pure Naruto energy.
His foot hit the trunk, chakra flared loud and messy—and he shot up three steps before physics remembered he existed. Then there was a loud thump as he pivoted backward and landed flat on his back, arms spread, eyes spinning.
I winced in sympathy. "Wow. That's a new level of commitment to concussion."
"Shut uuuup," he groaned.
Sasuke snorted—quiet, almost involuntary—but his eyes stayed locked on the tree.
He walked up to it, concentrated, and placed his hand on the bark for a second, brows drawn. Probably feeling the texture, making some genius Uchiha micro-calculation.
Then he stepped forward and pushed his chakra down into his soles. The air around him tightened; his chakra was hot and sharp, focused like a blade edge.
He ran.
He got higher than Naruto—maybe ten steps—before his control slipped. His foot skidded, the chakra burst too bright, and he had to push off sideways to avoid Naruto's fate. He twisted midair and landed in a crouch, teeth clenched.
"Tch," he said.
"What did we learn?" Kakashi asked.
Naruto, still on the ground: "That trees hate me personally?"
"Too much chakra," Sasuke muttered, already turning back to the trunk.
I swallowed, adjusted my glasses, and took my own step forward.
I'd been low-key looking forward to this. Chakra control was the one area where I didn't feel like I was faking it entirely. Fine lines. Careful flow. My entire seal-based everything depended on not overdoing it.
Still. Walking up a tree was a very visible way to humiliate yourself in public.
"Any tips?" I asked Kakashi quietly.
"Don't fall," he said. "Hurts less."
"Deeply helpful, thank you."
He hummed.
I placed my palm against the bark, feeling the texture—rough, cool, slick in places where moss clung. Then I took a breath and pulled chakra into my feet, the way I would into a brush, except more.
Not too much. Not too little. The Goldilocks of self-inflicted vertigo.
The bark gripped under my sandal. That weird sticky sensation hummed up my legs.
"Okay," I told my ankles. "Don't betray me."
I stepped.
One step. Two. Three.
The world tilted, shifting ninety degrees in my brain without warning. There's a specific kind of panic that hits when your inner ear files a complaint about your entire life. I pushed past it and took another step.
Four. Five.
My control held, but my chakra hissed through me faster than I liked. Each footfall smeared more energy onto the trunk, a thin film I had to keep refreshing.
By the time I hit eight, my legs were shaking.
"Mark, Sylvie," Kakashi called.
Right. The kunai.
I gritted my teeth, slammed the blade into the bark just above my head, and then pushed off. I twisted on the way down, trying to copy Sasuke's cool land-like-a-cat thing.
I landed on my feet. Mostly. Knees protested. My heart hammered.
Naruto sat up, squinting at my mark.
"Hey! You got higher than me!"
"You started with a flying leap of hubris," I said, wiping sweat off my forehead. "The bar was underground."
He pouted. "I'm gonna catch up."
"I know," I said, and weirdly, I did.
The next few hours were a blur of falling.
Naruto: run, shout, slam, groan, repeat. His chakra splashed out like a busted hose, half of it wasted, but he never stopped. He kept slamming into the trunk until the bark under his usual crash zone looked slightly flattened.
Sasuke: quiet, controlled, eyes narrowed, adjusting micro-amounts each time. His marks climbed steadily up the trunk, each kunai placement just a little higher than the last. The frustration when he slipped wasn't loud, but it coiled tight under his skin.
Me? I bounced between them, somewhere in the middle. Technically competent; practically limited.
My control was good enough that once I found the right "stickiness," I could maintain it. The problem was juice. My chakra reserves were not built for sustained wall-running marathons.
On my fourth attempt, I made it to the halfway point of the trunk. My lungs burned, vision fuzzing at the edges. My feet finally slipped when my chakra stuttered, and I slid down the bark, leaving a slightly charred-looking smear.
I hit the ground on my butt and just… stayed there.
Leaves whispered overhead. Naruto cursed in the distance, the sharp thud of another fall punctuating his swear. Sasuke exhaled sharply when a branch betrayed him and he had to spin midair to avoid face-planting.
Kakashi leaned against a tree with his ever-present orange book, completely ignoring it to watch us over the pages.
I tipped my head back against the trunk behind me and panted.
"Okay," I told no one in particular, "so it turns out I am not, in fact, a chakra battery."
"You're not supposed to be sitting!" Naruto shouted over. "We're still training!"
"You've eaten dirt like twenty times," I called back. "Let me flirt with hypoglycemia in peace."
He scowled; then I watched his lips start mouthing out 'hy-po-...hyp-o...' but then his gaze caught my kunai mark, which was still higher than his. His jaw set.
"Fine!" he said. "But when I get past you, I'm never letting you forget it!"
"I would be disappointed if you did," I said.
He grinned, wild and stubborn, and went back to throwing himself at the tree like it had personally insulted ramen.
I dug into my pocket and pulled out a crumpled scrap of paper and a charcoal stub. My hands were still shaking, but drawing settled them.
Okay. Chakra flow.
I sketched a rough cross-section of a leg. Foot, ankle, shin. Little arrows where chakra should pool. Lines for channels. Numbers where my reserves started dropping off. It was half anatomy, half fanart of my own circulatory system.
"This is what normal people do on their breaks, I'm sure," I muttered.
At some point, Sasuke walked past me, breathing hard. Sweat plastered his hair to his forehead. He glanced down at the paper, eyebrow twitching.
"What are you doing," he asked, flat but curious.
"Trying to quantify how much this sucks," I said. "If I pretend it's a math problem, I'm less likely to cry about it."
His mouth did that barely-there almost-smile thing. "Dobe's making progress," he said, jerking his head at Naruto.
I followed his gaze.
Naruto had gotten higher. Not Sakura-in-canon levels of cheating perfection, but the height of his marks was starting to rival Sasuke's lower ones. More importantly, his falls were less catastrophic. Instead of full-body flail, he was starting to push off deliberately when his chakra wobbled.
"Yeah," I said. "He is."
Sasuke's jaw tightened. "He's got more chakra than sense."
"Those might be the same stat for him," I said.
Sasuke snorted and headed back to his own tree.
Once my head stopped buzzing quite so much, I pushed myself back to my feet.
"Round… whatever this is," I muttered, brushing dirt off my shorts. The pink stripes were permanently stained; my inner fashion gremlin screamed and then shut up, because life-or-death training trumped outfit maintenance.
An idea had been poking at me for a while.
Seals.
Of course.
I dug into my pouch and pulled out a small brush and a tiny pot of thick, dark ink. The smell hit immediately—sharp, a little chemical, with that undertone of soot and something medicinal I'd come to associate with "this will absolutely stain your soul and your fingers."
"Please tell me you're not about to graffiti the training field," Kakashi said mildly.
"I would never," I lied. "I'm doing science."
I dipped the brush, careful not to load it too much, and then knelt to paint a thin, looping pattern along the edge of my sandal soles. A simple traction seal—sticky spiral, tethered to the current flow of my chakra. Not enough to override the tree-walking technique, just… assist.
Like crampons, but for cheating.
Naruto padded over, curiosity overpowering exhaustion.
"What're you doing?"
"Improving my odds," I said. "Or giving myself tetanus via fumes, hard to say."
He sniffed. "Smells weird."
"That's the smell of innovation," I said. "Back up. If this explodes, I want plausible deniability for you."
He did not back up.
Of course he didn't.
I capped the ink carefully. The seals glistened wet-black on my sandals, the tiny symbols for "grip" and "flow" tucked into the curves like secrets.
"Okay," I told my feet. "You and me, we're in this together."
I stepped up to the tree.
Chakra to soles. Different, this time—caught by the seal, redirected in a small loop along the spiral before sinking into the bark. The sensation changed: more even, almost adhesive. Less mental juggling to maintain.
I climbed.
Five steps. Six. Eight.
Ten.
My lungs burned. But my feet felt more secure. The seal was doing some of the constant output adjustments for me, smoothing out hiccups.
"This might actually work," I gasped.
Then the bill came due.
The seal didn't generate chakra; it just redistributed it more aggressively than my body was ready to support. My reserves dipped fast, like someone had punched a hole in my tank. By step twelve, my head was buzzing, vision greying around the edges.
"Mark!" Kakashi called.
I fumbled my kunai up and stabbed the bark just above my previous highest point. My hand shook badly enough that the blade went in crooked.
On step thirteen, the world did a fun spinny thing.
"Oh, that's—"
My foot slipped. The seal sputtered as my chakra stuttered. For a second I was weightless and then I was falling, and my stomach tried to exit through my mouth.
I hit the ground shoulder-first, rolled, and somehow ended up flat on my back staring at the leaves.
"Ow," I informed the universe.
A second later, Naruto's worried face filled my vision, upside-down.
"SYLVIE!"
"I'm alive," I croaked. "Mostly. My dignity died, but that's fine, it's died before."
He hovered. "You okay? You look kinda… pale."
"That's just my soul leaving my body," I said. "Give it a minute, it'll boomerang back."
My whole chakra system felt like I'd run a marathon. My limbs were jelly, my brain cotton. The seals on my sandals had gone dull, the ink lines flaking at the edges like overused stickers.
Kakashi appeared over us, hands in his pockets, head tilted.
"Creative," he said, glancing at my sandals. "Fuinsjutsu-assisted tree climbing. Effective, short-term. Terrible, long-term."
"Yeah," I wheezed. "I noticed. Ten out of ten for height, negative three for not dying."
"You got higher than before," Naruto pointed out. "That's good!"
"And then almost passed out," I said. "Less good."
I flopped an arm over my eyes and groaned. "Okay. Verdict: no seal crutches during missions. If I do that in an actual fight, I'll black out halfway up a cliff and splatter."
"Please don't splatter," Naruto said, horrified. "We just became teammates."
"Yeah," I said softly. "I'll try to avoid permanent decorative stains."
Kakashi crouched down, his tone a little more serious.
"This is exactly why we train," he said. "Better to hit your limits here than out there with someone's sword in your face."
"Zabuza's sword," Naruto muttered. "We're gonna beat him next time. For sure."
His chakra flared hot again—determination and anger and something else, something bright. Sasuke glanced over from where he was catching his breath at the base of his own tree, eyes narrowing at the tone.
I pushed myself up to sit. The world did only a small wobble this time.
Naruto stomped back to his trunk like it had insulted his ancestors.
Sasuke watched him for a second, then stood and went back to his tree without a word.
Something shifted between them then. It wasn't visible, not if you were just looking at flailing limbs and kunai marks. But if you watched the way their chakra moved…
It started to sync.
No, that's not quite right. They were still very different—Naruto all messy bursts and overflowing reserves, Sasuke sharp and controlled, precise lines of energy—but their spikes began to answer each other.
Naruto would push higher than he had any right to, slip, and catch himself a little better each time. Sasuke would grind his teeth, adjust, and make damn sure he climbed at least a little further than Naruto's last mark.
Their rivalry became a feedback loop, each jump dragging the other upward.
I watched, sweaty and aching, and something loosened in my chest.
Right. This was how it was supposed to go.
Kakashi wandered back to his leaning tree, flipping his book open one-handed, though I noticed he wasn't actually turning pages.
His gaze flicked to me.
"You're not going back up yet?" he asked.
I shook my head. "If I try again now I'll fall asleep halfway up and you'll have to chisel me off."
"Efficient way to train core strength," he said. "But I suppose Tsunami would complain."
I snorted.
He watched Naruto slam into the bark, watched Sasuke run higher in stubborn silence, then glanced back at the diagrams on my crumpled paper.
"You gave up your turn to watch them," he said. Not accusing. Just noting.
I shrugged. "I'm not giving up, I'm… reallocating resources. If I can see what works for them, I can adjust my seals later to complement it."
His visible eye crinkled at the corner. "Complement, huh?"
"Yeah," I said. "I'm never going to hit as hard as they do. Or last as long. But I can make sure they get to hit where it counts. And that somebody's around to tape them back together after."
Kakashi studied me for a long moment.
"Support role," he said eventually. "Tactician. Medic. Fuinsjutsu."
"Control freak with a pen," I said. "Same thing."
He huffed a quiet laugh.
"There's more than one way to be a shinobi," he said. "Just don't forget to pull yourself up with them. Tools that only work for others tend to break."
I thought about Inari's tiny room and the crooked courage charm on the nail. About Naruto screaming that he'd never run away again. About Sasuke's promise to kill "a certain man."
I thought about myself in another forest once, bleeding and small and alone.
"Yeah," I said. "I know."
Naruto yelled triumphantly.
We both looked over.
He'd made it past my mark.
He grinned down at us from halfway up the trunk, one foot braced, kunai buried in the bark above his head.
"See that?!" he shouted. "I told you I'd get higher than you, Sylvie!"
My first instinct was petty: to shout back that I'd done it with science and he'd done it with brute force and we both had our methods.
What came out instead was a laugh.
"Hell yeah, Naruto!" I cupped my hands around my mouth. "Keep going! Don't let Sasuke catch up!"
Sasuke's glare could have cut steel. He turned, pushed off, and ran. His chakra sharpened, slicing up the trunk. He planted his own kunai just above Naruto's mark, then dropped back down, landing in a smooth crouch that absolutely screamed "I planned that, shut up."
Naruto bristled. "You bastard! You did that on purpose!"
"Obviously," Sasuke said.
Naruto threw himself back at the tree, swearing.
Kakashi shook his head, amusement and something softer threading through his chakra.
"They're going to kill themselves over a kunai height," I muttered.
"Maybe," Kakashi said. "Or they'll drag each other to a level they couldn't reach alone."
I watched them race, fall, get back up.
For a second, the forest blurred. Not from tears—my body was too dehydrated for that—but from the weird, aching joy of recognition.
In my first life, I'd watched stories like this from the outside. Safe, distant. Screen between me and the kids bleeding for their village.
Now I was here, bruised, tired, ink-stained. Watching two idiots I cared about turn a tree into a battlefield and a ladder at the same time.
I pressed my palm to the bark of my own tree again.
"Alright," I told it. "One more run. I'm not letting them have all the dramatic growth moments."
My chakra flickered, then steadied. Not much left, but enough for a careful climb.
I wasn't the main character. That belonged to the loud blond disaster currently yelling about being Hokage.
I didn't need to be.
I could be the girl with paint on her fingers and seals on her shoes, who knew how to read the room and nudge things just enough that heroes didn't die alone.
I took a breath, pushed chakra to my soles, and stepped onto the trunk.
This time, I climbed until my legs shook and my vision went spotty and I had to stab the tree and jump off before I embarrassed myself.
When I landed, my new mark sat just under Naruto's latest one and a few feet below Sasuke's.
It felt right.