Title : A Lesson Of Common Sense
Summary : Being reincarnated as Naruto Uzumaki had its perk, and Alex, our new protagonist, was going to use them to its advantage. Weak to OP!Naruto-SI. Pairing up to vote.
Since I'm feeling generous, and I just finished revising the Chapter 2, I'm giving it out early !
Enjoy !
|~-X-~| ALOCS |~-X-~|
Chapter 2 : Report to Grandpa and 2 weeks of rest to make it count part 1 !
When Naruto was teleported to the Hokage's office, he fell on the ground gasping for air as he tried not to vomit on the pretty carpet.
His office smelled like old paper, pipe tobacco – probably because of the amount that old geezer smoked, and something underneath both of those things that Naruto chose to identify as institutional authority.
It was a large room. He hadn't expected that, exactly, the anime had conveyed scale but not the specific texture of it, the way the ceiling was high enough to make you feel appropriately small, the way the desk was positioned so that whoever sat behind it had the window and the village at their back. Whoever had constructed this room hadn't done this by accident. Every centimetre of it was deliberate. Yet, the small library on his right felt like it was something Hiruzen had decorated for himself.
The man himself looked old. Not fragile at all, do not mistake him, old the way certain things were old, the way mountains were old, worn down to something harder than what they'd started as. He was watching Naruto across the width of the desk with dark eyes that were doing a great deal of quiet work, and Naruto had the distinct impression of being assessed by something that was extremely good at assessing.
'Duh. He's the Hokage, the strongest Shinobi of his village' He thought to himself derisively as he berated himself for his useless monologue.
He was still shirtless. He hadn't thought about that until now. The ANBU had teleported him without ceremony and deposited him in front of the Hokage still bare-chested, still smelling faintly of copper and smoke and recently voided stomach marring with the remain of Mizuki's blood on the back of his neck and hands.
He was 13 years old in the body and 22 in the mind and deeply profoundly aware of both things simultaneously.
He stood straight anyway because it was the only choice that made sense.
"Naruto Uzumaki," the Hokage said. His voice was measured. Unhurried in the way of someone who had not needed to hurry in a very long time.
"Grandpa" Naruto replied easily with a grin as Hiruzen let a small smile appear on his face before he took on a more serious tone.
A pause. Not an uncomfortable one. The Hokage was not a man who used silence as a weapon, not with Naruto at least. He was either waiting to see his reactions – waiting for the usual outburst, or he was still a bit shocked on how he'd acted.
What he did was very un-Naruto like, and even an un-Alex like, but he'd been too confused between dream and reality to care at that point and had gone with the flow.
Naruto stood in it and waited him out, not giving the reaction he'd expected. He wasn't going to act like a fool just to please some people and act like the previous owner of this body did.
He wondered what the hell happened to Naruto though. He hoped wherever he was, he was happier than here, because Alex was slowly discovering that the world he'd thought was cool, was essentially a hell-hole ready to swallow him at a moment of weakness notice.
"You are aware," Hiruzen said slowly, "that what occurred tonight is somewhat outside the parameters of a standard Academy graduation examination" Naruto let out a snort at the polite reply.
"I had that impression, yes" A beat "Hokage-sama" He said with an exaggerated polite tone.
Something at the corner of the old man's eyes shifted. Not quite a real smile but the early shadow of one.
"Tell me, in your own words, what happened" Ordered Hiruzen as Naruto nodded and started his report.
So he told him. He kept it factual and sequenced, the way he'd learned to tell things from years of explaining his code to professors who had seen every kind of student obfuscation and were infinitely patient about cutting through it.
He'd recounted everything. From Mizuki's first approach after he failed the usual exam, the offer of the 'hidden' test, him sneaking in, learning the Shadow Clones and then Mizuki revealing the truth before he assaulted Iruka. Hiding the scroll. Returning to the clearing to help his wounded teacher. The confrontation. What he'd said to Mizuki, and why. The Shadow Clone Jutsu from the scroll.
And, finally, the explosive tags he'd placed inside his own jacket to trick Mizuki with his clones and his speech.
He told it plainly, without embellishment, watching Hiruzen's face the way you watched a compiler for errors. A tad bit dumbfounded but fascinated all the same. When he finished, the silence this time was a different quality. Denser.
"You learned the Shadow Clone Jutsu from the scroll," Hiruzen said. "Tonight, and under 3 hours ?" He asked incredulously as Naruto nodded matter-of-factly. Well, he didn't learn it, Naruto did before he took his place, but he wasn't about to reveal that to him. Not now, probably never.
Alex/Naruto had no problem altering the future like most did in the few fanfictions he and his bros had read on. He was a 'Yes-man' through and through. If something could be bettered or changed in a good way, he'd do it in a heartbeat no matter the consequences.
But he wasn't about to tell his advantage to anyone, less he'd just be taken in interrogation and diagnosed as possess by the Kyuubi because he knew things he shouldn't.
"It didn't take me much time because the jutsu is simple in concept" Alex said. "The hand seal is straightforward. The difficulty is the chakra volume. Since I have a great deal of chakra volume –" He paused. "That's related to my tenant, I assume."
Hiruzen was very still.
Naruto met his eyes. It felt important to do that, to look at the man directly, to not flinch from anyone. He had already decided, in the clearing, standing over what remained of a man he had killed, that this conversation was one he could not afford to lose.
Not because he was afraid of punishment exactly, but because the shape of the next few years, the shape of his new life, his now, like it or not, was going to be substantially determined by how much of the truth he gave to the man sitting across from him.
He gave him enough already, no need to give him too much leverage especially since his time was counted unless he'd find a way to save him 'If I even want him alive' he realized with a thought as he'd a lot to think about.
"I've known about the Kyuubi for a while," he said. "The hatred from the village, my birthday, the date of the attack. The seal visible on my stomach when I was using Chakra. It – it wasn't a shock to hear it from Mizuki. I was more surprised by his confidence that it would be a surprise when it's the most unguarded secret of all time"
"And how long have you known ?" Hiruzen said, very quietly.
"Long enough to think about it," Alex said, which was technically accurate if you counted the last several hours of his existence in this body, and technically a lie if you counted anything else. He filed that under acceptable moral compromise and continued, "I had questions. I just didn't know who to ask for. I wasn't sure you'd tell me about it directly"
Something crossed the old man's face that was not quite guilt, and not quite grief, and looked somewhat like both of them wearing the same coat. He breathed out through his nose.
"You could have asked me" Hiruzen said as he looked at Naruto with his over sympathetic smile. He didn't like that smile. All old geezers in every story were villains in disguise. For the greater good, they'd say, but in reality – for their own good it really was "I would have told you" He added as Naruto nodded even though he wasn't convinced.
"I know that now," Naruto lied as Hiruzen accepted his response, although you could see him saw through his lies pretty easily.
Why ? Because he was, most probably, also playing a role. As he played the role of a 13-year-old who had been failed by the institutions who failed to protect him even though they swore to it, he was playing the hurt grandpa who failed to protected his grandson from danger.
Maybe he was a tad bit paranoid but seeing a man blowing up in pieces did that to people.
Hiruzen folded his hands on the desk and looked at him with the expression of a man arriving at a decision.
"Naruto Uzumaki," he said formally. "What you accomplished tonight constitutes the equivalent of a completed A-rank mission" His eyes widened as he looked at the scroll that Hiruzen put on the desk in front of him
"You secured the Forbidden Scroll against extraction from the village, you identified and neutralized a traitor operating within Konoha's ranks, and you protected a Chunin-ranked instructor under conditions that would have challenged a significantly more experienced Shinobi" He concluded with his usual grandfatherly smile whilst Naruto waited for the rest
"It would be somewhat absurd to then fail you out of the Academy now would it" Hiruzen said as Naruto smiled at the implication.
'Of course he's going to make you graduate, you're the Kyuubi's Jinchuriki' A thought had flashed in his mind before he dismissed it.
"Thank you, Grandpa Hokage" Naruto said with a smile as Hiruzen continued
This time the shadow of a real and genuine smile completed itself. It didn't last long, but it was real.
"You are hereby promoted to the rank of Genin, effective immediately" Hiruzen said "You will be assigned to a team following the standard team-placement process, pending my review of appropriate jounin-sensei candidates" He paused "Additionally, you are entitled to the standard mission reward for an A-rank completion" As he gestured for him to take the scroll which he took "The accounting office will process the payment within forty-eight hours after you deposit this scroll to them"
Alex did the math on that automatically. A-rank mission pay was significant. Significant enough to matter and give him a very big headstart before Canon starts.
"Thank you, Hokage-sama" He said genuinely as he bowed down in a respective manner.
"Go home, Naruto" The old man smiled as he looked at him "Rest. You have had an eventful night. You earned it"
Naruto had just finished to close the door when Hiruzen's voice came again, and it had changed registers. It was more authoritative.
"One of you" the Hokage said to the ANBU positioned at the edges of the room "Please inform Kakashi Hatake that I would like a word with him immediately"
|~-X-~| ALOCS |~-X-~|
When Naruto had returned to his home, he didn't take into account for the lack of shirt he was faced with when he arrived naked to the torso and frightened the poor old Chunin woman who took the scroll in.
After that eventful night, he rested for two days, which was two more days than he wanted but approximately fourteen fewer than his body was lobbying for since the Academy announced a 2-weeks-notice before the Genin assignment.
The apartment was exactly what he'd expected from the show and somehow still worse in person. It was small in the way that things were small when the person choosing them had wanted to give the occupant as little as possible. It was functional, technically habitable, communicating a clear and sustained opinion about its resident's worth.
The furniture was old. The walls had been painted at some point and not again since. One of the window latches was broken. He wasn't going to waste money on decoration or tapestries but he'd at least pay to repair the broken window because it made the apartment feel like a freaking glacier.
He had sat in the middle of the floor the first night and done a comprehensive scan of what he had and what he was.
He was 13 years old and yet smaller than most for his age. He was also malnourished in the low-grade chronic way rather than the acute way. In resume, he wasn't only scrawny but he was underfed to the point of health-risks and the only thing that maintained him was probably Kyuubi's Chakra.
He could tell by the way his joints felt, the slight papery quality of the skin at his elbows. Chakra reserves that he could only describe as enormous, an ocean compared to what the Academy texts suggested a Genin ought to have, pressing against the inside of his skin like water behind a very thin dam.
When he'd close his eyes, he could feel the enormous pool of Chakra underlining inside him, flooding his being like a nuclear bomb ready to explode at any moment of notice.
Opposingly, his Chakra control was catastrophically bad.
His knowledge was mostly everything he'd watched from the series since the previous owner of this body was too dumb to think about learning anything remotely useful.
He remembered the broad shape of the plot, the significant events, the characters, but most fillers and secondary quests memories were flimsy at best.
He also has most of the relevant jutsu theory from the parts of the show that had bothered to explain it, which was less than he'd have liked.
He also has the specific institutional knowledge of a 22-old Computer Science graduate, which entailed algorithms, systems thinking, computer programming and the discipline of working through problems methodically, the particular skill of knowing what he didn't know and learning how to learn properly.
Learning how to learn properly was the best skills he ever gained in his 4 years in university. The curiosity of learning but also the methodical approach complex subjects like programming needed was important.
He'd hoped that it would help with Fuinjutsu later on.
On the second night he'd found Naruto's Academy textbooks in a stack near the window. He'd sat with them until 4 AM, reading. Some of it was revision. Most of it was new in the specific way that reading a thing properly was different from half-watching someone else engage with it on a screen.
He had thoughts about the chakra system. Specific, structural thoughts. He filed them for later to test out.
On the morning of the third day, he had received the A-rank payment from an administrative Chunin who had looked at him with the particular expression of someone who had received instructions they didn't fully agree with and had decided, professionally, not to have an opinion about it after glaring at him for the next 10 minutes.
He'd counted the money in the apartment afterward, alone, and sat with the number for a moment.
Then he'd gone to the market.
He needed a plan. He had two weeks before team assignments, according to what he knew of the timeline, and two weeks was not very long and also the longest unstructured window he was going to get for a considerable time afterwards.
He knew what he needed to work on. He also knew that he needed to not look like he was working on it in ways that would attract attention, and he needed to be strategic about where he worked, what he shared with whom, and he needed equipment.
The market was busy in the mid-morning way of any civilian commercial district, which meant he could move through it without particular attention if he kept his head down and didn't meet eyes. The lack of orange in his clothes also helped as he'd discarded everything the previous owner had in his apartment and had taken out the sole blue navy short and black short sleeved shirt out.
He'd thought he might struggle with that, being in Naruto's body, carrying the specific social gravity of a pariah, but it turned out most people were not actively waiting to confront him except for a few hateful glances and whispers when he looked up too much.
They just moved around him the way water moved around a stone : without friction, without acknowledgment, as if he was a feature of the terrain rather than a person.
It was its own kind of unpleasant but it was better than getting glared from every side of the street like they did on his first day here.
Naruto halted. He almost walked past the shop.
The sign was hand-lettered, precise in the way that suggested its author had a professional relationship with precision. Tools and Sealing Supplies. There was Weapons, Training Equipment, Specialist Orders. In the window display: scrolls, practice weapons, a neat rack of what looked like weighted training vests.
He stopped. He looked at the sign for a moment.
Then he went in.
The shop was orderly in a way that felt personal rather than commercial. Everything had a place and was in it, but the logic of the arrangement was specific, the logic of someone who had developed a system through iteration rather than inherited it from a catalogue.
A girl about his age was behind the counter, brown hair up in two comical buns, a pink Kimono on top of tactical green pants, doing something with a partially assembled projectile weapon that she set down when he came in and the small bell above the door rang.
"Welcome, looking for something specific?" She asked with her usual bored expression as he stopped for a second.
He had not expected to find Tenten running her family shop at thirteen but on reflection he supposed he should have. He kept his expression neutral and gestured vaguely at the rack of training uniforms along the left wall.
"I need a few things but uniforms first" he said as he looked at her "Something comfortable and functional please"
She looked at him, spotted his headband wrapped around his forehead and then pointed at the pile of blue and black Ninja attires on his right "We've got standard-issue in navy, dark green, grey"
"I'll take Navy I suppose" He paused "Multiple. I'll need four at minimum."
She was already moving toward the rack, pulling sizes. She had good instincts about dimensions. She held one of the shirt against him once, made a small adjustment to her mental calibration, and from that point on didn't need to check.
While she was pulling the stack of uniforms together, he moved to the seal's display.
They were organised by function: storage seals, explosive tags, training aids, miscellaneous. The weighted seals were mid-rack. He picked up the sample, turned it over. There was a few pairs for the legs and others for the arms. The application instructions on the back were precise and well-written. He took a pair for both legs and arms and put it on the counter.
He continued his search. He'd found Chakra Affinity paper, pausing at the blank small piece of paper with interest, there was a small stock of it, bundled in sets of ten. He took one out and put it on the counter too before continuing again.
He took a set of blank sealing paper in several grades and a set of brush pens and standard sealing ink in two viscosities. He added them to the growing pile.
Tenten came back with 6 sets of the same uniforms – arguing that he'd need more than 4 and he accepted. She saw what he'd gathered, and did a fast mental calculation that showed briefly on her face. She was a bit perplexed at his order but cashed him in all the same.
"My teammate use this seals too" She tried to make a bit of conversation, like her father always told her to and Naruto looked at her with interest "It's pretty easy to use but be careful and do not overdo it uselessly. A lot of people get injured because they overestimated their own strengths"
He nodded. He wasn't convinced that something would happened to him with Kyuubi inside him but there was no reason for him to brag in front of her, especially when this boost was because of something that wasn't his directly.
She bundled it all efficiently. He paid without negotiating – the price was fair, probably the most fair price he'd ever paid, and he was not in the mood to spend social capital on small amounts of money.
He watched her hands while she processed the purchase, noting the particular competence with which she handled the seals, the way she packaged the weighted ones separate from the others without being asked.
"Thank you very much –" He stopped as if waiting for her to reply with her name
"Tenten" She said simply with a small smile forming on her face as he smiled at her brightly 'Cute' She thought with a small blush adorning her face.
"Well thank you Tenten ! Name's is Naruto, I'll come and visit you soon !" He waved at her as he turned around, took his things and went on his way before she could reply.
|~-X-~| ALOCS |~-X-~|
Training Ground 7 was going to be his eventual assigned place to train according to what he knew so he obviously didn't go there for now.
He went to Training Ground 34 instead, which, according to the information he'd extracted from what Naruto could remember using, had been unused for approximately 5 years due to a drainage problem in the eastern quadrant that no one had gotten around to fixing yet. Private, structurally sound in the parts that mattered, accessible, and unlikely to attract supervision.
He arrived at dawn.
He spent thirty seconds studying the tree line, the light, the way sound moved in the space. Then he made around a thousand of Shadow Clones.
He felt them leave him — a specific pulling sensation that he was still getting used to, the chakra expenditure of mass clone-production. With his reserves it was nothing critical. Like draining a litre from a lake.
He still noted it carefully, the specific sensation, filing it against the theory he was building in the back of his mind about chakra control being fundamentally a matter of throughput management rather than absolute quantity.
He dispatched 300 of them to the trees along the eastern edge to start on the Tree Walking Exercise. They all had the little knowledge he had on it anyway. The other 700 he distributed through the rest of the space.
He pulled out the chakra affinity paper and held it flat between both palms.
He'd done the theory in his head on the walk over. Chakra affinity was genetically inherited, broadly speaking, with the primary affinity being dominant. The only thing he needed to use this was to channel his Chakra through it and see the magic operate.
Naruto's documented affinity in the show had been wind even though he learned how to use them all after the end of the series.
Alex's own chakra, whatever fragment of him that had transferred into this situation along with his consciousness, was an unknown quantity, but if it had influenced the system at all, it should show right now.
He pressed his chakra into the paper gently. Felt it resist, then accept.
The paper split.
He looked at it. A clean vertical tear down the centre, the two halves separating neatly, which was wind, categorically, precisely as previously documented in his mind.
Then he looked, fascinated, as the two parts wrinkled.
Lightning.
He turned the two halves of the paper over in his hands and thought about that for a while.
'Naruto had only wind' He thought. The lightning came from somewhere else. From whatever I brought with me, or whatever I am in this configuration. Both.
From the 700 remaining, he set 500 of them to the Academy textbooks he'd brought in his pack — every subject, distributed evenly. They spread out across the training ground, sitting cross-legged in the grass with their books, and began reading. The other hundred he sent to the trees.
Tree Walking was the foundational chakra control exercise. He knew the theory precisely. It needed continuous, modulated output to the soles of the feet, adhesion without overload or underload, requiring the kind of fine-tuned expenditure that his reserves made naturally catastrophic.
Every clone that attempted it and failed, and they would continue to fail for a lot of time but they would dispel and flood him with the experiential memory of exactly where the regulation had broken down. He would learn the texture of the failure from a hundred angles simultaneously, which was his most precious hack.
"Don't forget to sprint and try to get as high as possible" He warned them as they all started to ran on the trees and marks them with Kunais instead of trying to move up from him.
He walked away from the base of the nearest tree himself, placed his right foot flat forward and then rushed to the tree and pushed.
He went up 2 steps before the chakra spiked, blew the adhesion, and deposited him on the ground with a sensation like stepping on ice that had decided to stop existing.
'Right' He thought, from his back, staring up at the canopy 'That's the problem in physical terms. Good to know'
He used the remaining 200 clones to work on calligraphy, as apparently, Naruto hadn't thought about this as something important but for him ? If Fuinjutsu worked like he thought it did, it would be his biggest weapon.
He stood up. He had better things to do.
He put the weighted seal now.
He'd read the instructions twice and then did his own analysis, because the instructions were written for the average Genin and he was fairly confident average did not apply to this situation in either direction.
He calibrated to ten kilograms to start, the minimum, applied it to his arms and legs over the new and stood up.
It was fine. A tiny bit uncomfortable but very manageable.
He pushed more of his chakra inside and looked at the number that showed fifteen.
Still fine. He adjusted his posture.
He added more Chakra, pushing as much possible until something in his knees sent him a pointed and professional complaint.
He lowered it a bit. Totalled 100kg distributed across his frame, which was insane if you compared it to his previous normal human limits but with Chakra inside his body?
He tried to walk.
He managed four steps before he had to stop, readjust his centre of gravity, and rethink everything he thought he knew about moving through space.
He lowered it to 90kg and felt like he could move without being crushed by the weights.
'Good' He thought with a smile 'This is the right level of difficulty'
He stood in the middle of the training ground for twenty minutes, just standing, getting used to the weight distribution. The clones were still working, he could feel them at the edges of his awareness, dozens of parallel processes, reading, practicing his writing and tree-walking and failing and collecting more data.
Then he started to move in the basics movements he learned as a boxer. Not the Academy Taijutsu Naruto learned.
He started with the Muay Thai basics he'd drilled since he was five years old, the foundation stances and the fundamental guard positions, the weight distribution for the clinch and the hip rotation for the roundhouse.
It was immediately specifically wrong.
Not wrong in the way that a bad habit was wrong, but wrong in the way that a correct method was wrong for a different system. His old body had been 22, adult, governed by normal human physics and lack of magical energy outperforming any juiced athlete by bound and leaps.
This body was too young, growing, and it had access to something his old body had never had: Chakra-Enhanced musculature that was currently unenhanced because he couldn't control it properly yet, but the capacity was there, the potential built into every tendon.
He could feel it the way you could feel an engine idling.
The Academy Taijutsu he was also carrying in Naruto's muscle memory was, as he'd suspected from the brief test-runs, genuinely poor. Not fundamentally flawed, just underdeveloped, designed for the lowest common denominator, for the average Academy student with limited chakra control and no peculiar clan background.
It was functional in the way that a disposable tool was functional. It would not do, not for him.
But Muay Thai wasn't right for this body either. Not yet. Maybe not ever in its pure form.
Muay Thai, or the art of the 8 limbs, worked with the 8 weapon of the body. The 2 legs, 2 hands, 2 knees and 2 elbows. There was no specific Katas to follow nor was there any special combos to follow except for a few bases to master.
For that, it made him a very unpredictable style – especially for people who are used to using Katas and patterns
He planted his feet, his dominant side – left, behind, whilst his other side – right, was forward.
He shifted his hand, his right one protecting his head whilst his left one protected his rib.
Then, he sent a mean upward elbow from his left.
The torque was different. His hips rotated faster than he expected because the body was lighter and the chakra in his system was doing something ambient to the muscle response even without active channelling.
He over rotated. He caught himself, recalibrated, tried it slower.
There it was. Slightly faster on the extension, more rotation available than his old body had allowed, the strike landing in a different configuration than what he was used to.
Interesting, he thought.
He spent two hours on foundations.
Just foundations. Just learning what this body could do and building a mental map of how the movements would need to be adapted.
The weighted seals were brutal, and by the end of the first hour his thighs were shaking with the sustained effort of basic movement, but the weight was making every correct adaptation immediately obvious, because only the correct adaptations were sustainable under load and he needed to be as slow as possible during his movements to make sure he was making no mistakes.
He was going to need to build a new vocabulary from the intersection of what he knew and what this new body is capable of.
He found that he was looking forward to it in a way that surprised him slightly as he smiled.
'If only my bros could be with me or at least see me' He thought with nostalgia before focusing on the task on hand again.
|~-X-~| ALOCS |~-X-~|
The clones memory hit him in the late afternoon like a migraine that had been waiting patiently for the right moment.
He'd dismissed the thousand active clones at once, which had been, in retrospect, an error in judgment.
He sat down hard in the grass and pressed both hands over his eyes.
The information was the problem, the pain too but something was wrong with his method.
The fact was that the information was arriving from too many angles simultaneously and his processing capacity was not designed for this kind of throughput.
He could feel the texture of each individual experience, which was useful, but at a thousand units of input colliding at once, the usefulness was buried under statistics.
He held very still and breathed and let it sort itself.
After about ten minutes, his head had stopped trying to exit through his ears and he could think again. He pulled the insights out carefully.
Tree Walking progress had been slow.
The clones had collectively determined, through a hundred individual iterations of failure, that his chakra output was not consistently maintainable in its current form.
Not impossible, especially toward the end of the session since three clones had made it to the fifteen-step mark, which was about a third of the way to the top, before losing adhesion. The failures were documenting themselves into a clear pattern and progress was real but slower than he'd expected with this amount of clones.
On the textbooks side, he had, in a single afternoon, the equivalent of ¼ of reading everything cover to cover once, rapidly but completely, across all the Academy subjects. His integration of the information was imperfect, absorbed at speed through the filter of clone experience was not the same as reading it himself, but the structural bones were there. He could revise from a baseline now rather than a blank but he didn't like the result either as with half of the clone he summoned, he just got ¼ of everything he had to know and in blurry details.
'This won't do' He clicked his tongue as he analysed the rest of the information.
Calligraphy progress was non-existent.
He had attempted to write practice seals with 200 clones, and had watched all of them produce lines that would have embarrassed a first-year civilian student. Naruto's fine motor control was functional but undeveloped in this specific way, and sealing was entirely fine-motor-control-dependent, and this was going to be a problem.
He looked at the sky through the trees for a while.
The fundamental issue, he'd worked out, was that volume was not the same as efficiency. A thousand clones – in hindsight, were too many, but at least he tried.
The information came back in a flood that was difficult to process, and the distribution of attention within each clone was too thin. They were not learning deeply, they were skimming through it.
Multitasking at scale was not the same as skill acquisition at scale. He should have known this. He worked in computer science. He knew what thread-bloat looked like.
'It's like sending a DDOS attack in a server and expecting it to work normally' He thought with a snort as he resumed his thoughts.
He needed a different approach with a clear architecture.
He sat with the problem for twenty minutes, the same twenty minutes he used to sit with debugging problems that weren't obvious, letting his brain approach it from multiple angles without forcing.
'Of freaking course' He groaned as he berated himself. The answer was simple : groups.
Small, focused groups. Fifty clones per skill maximum. But within each group, not all of them doing the same thing at once — that was still distributed thin.
Instead, one clone will actively attempt the skill whilst four other clones will observe that attempt, discussing it between them and give insights to the clone who is doing it, building a model of what was happening and where the errors were.
The observer-clone insights would be incorporated into the next attempt. Every hour, he'd dispelled the clones who practiced, letting another take his place as he produced one more clone for each group, always keeping it at a 4vs1 ratio.
Like this, the doer will dispel and report back, the discussion clones updated their model, new clones would be summoned with that updated model already in their foundation.
It was slower per clone. It was enormously faster per unit of learning.
"Just basic freaking arithmetic" He muttered to himself as he tried not to slap his own face because of his earlier greedy attempt.
He stood up, brushed the grass off his new navy trousers, which were, he noted with private satisfaction, a completely neutral colour that did not aggressively announce his location from three hundred metres like orange would, and made 150 new clones.
He observed the new shift with satisfaction for the past 3 hours whilst performing as much pushups and situps and pullups as possible and running around them – taking the opportunity to check on every group individually whilst doing his exercise.
He took one group as an example. One stepped up to the tree. The other four gathered at a small distance where they could observe the foot placement and the chakra output, and they began to talk to each other in low voices, cataloguing what they were seeing.
He watched this for a moment. The observing clones were already arguing quietly about the angle of the adhesion failure, one of them making a precise gesture with his hand to indicate something about the chakra distribution through the arch of the foot.
'Yes' he thought with a huge 'That's perfect'
He went back to his own tree and started climbing after 3 hours of his clones practicing the skills.
He rushed toward the tree and leaped.
He made it to step 9 before losing adhesion this time, backflipped out of falling down like an idiot as he used a tiny bit of his Chakra.
He noted the improvement, catalogued the specific texture of the failure, and started again as he fully focused on his physical training this time, only taking a few seconds to reform the needed clones after an hour or so.
|~-X-~| ALOCS |~-X-~|
He stayed until the light started to fail.
When he left, he was walking at a slight angle, the weighted seals making the end-of-session trudge substantially more eventful than he'd have preferred, and his hands had acquired fresh callouses in new configurations from the adapted Muay Thai work and all the pullups on the tree's branches. His calligraphy clones had produced something approaching a legible practice stroke in the last hour, which was not impressive for most but he counted it as a huge win;
He had also, by the end of the session, made it to step 20 on the tree and was already almost half through the way of the tree he was using.
He walked back through the village in the deepening dark, carrying his empty pack, and thought about two things.
The first was the Lightning affinity, and what it meant structurally, whether it could be developed alongside Wind or whether the competing affinities would create interference, and what the precedents were in canon for that kind of dual development. He came to a provisional conclusion that it was something he'd take on asking to Kakashi later since he was a bit of an expert in that department.
He knew the first two steps of winds of course but he didn't think he'd have time to master even one of them before the 2 weeks ended.
The second thing was Kakashi himself.
He didn't know what shape Kakashi would arrive in. Would he still be the chronically late version, the mask and the Sharingan and the depressed stares? Or would he be more motivated and a real teacher ? If it was the former, he'd have to find a way to make him change because he needed the man at his best if he hoped not only to survive but to thrive.
And also, would the team change ? Would it still be the original Team 7 ? From what he could gleam through Naruto's memories and what he observed in the last 2-3 days, nothing changed from Canon but you'd never know.
He didn't know if Kakashi had even agreed to take the team. He didn't know how much of Naruto's file Kakashi had read, or what conclusions he'd drawn, or whether his opinion of the student in that file was going to survive contact with the actual person occupying the body in question.
What he did know was that Team 7's exam, the Bell test, was specifically designed to require cooperation and the abandonment of individual achievement in favour of collective success.
He had a few thoughts about that.
He also had, at this moment, nearly two weeks to make a difference and make sure – whoever was with him, that he'd be strong enough to convince them to lead them to victory instead of total doom like it almost happened in the series.
He knew Kakashi wouldn't fail the Genin Team where his Sensei's son and the Last Uchiha was but still, you'd never know with that depressed crowhead.
He turned into the alley toward his apartment, put his hand on the railing of the exterior stairs, and looked up at the window. The broken latch was still broken. The light inside was off.
He was going to need to fix that latch. And buy furniture that worked. And figure out a cooking situation because Naruto's diet had apparently involved a great deal of instant ramen, which was fine as an occasional proposition but not as a nutritional strategy for someone trying to rebuild a body's baseline from the ground up.
He'd also need to think about whether he was going to attempt contact with any of his future teammates before the bell test, and what the calculus on that was.
He went upstairs.
He boiled water for the ramen because tonight the ramen would do, and sat at the small table by the window while it cooled, and let himself think about all of it properly for the first time. Not in the narrow, focused way he'd been thinking all day, tactical and practical, but in the larger way. The full scope of it.
A world. His now. A life that came pre-loaded with a story he knew and a future he partially did. A body of a future saviour he wasn't – or not for now.
He ate the ramen. It was not great. It was hot and it was food and it was his 'That's all that matters' He tried to recomfort himself, reminiscing of the exam days where they'd gather around their small kitchen and laugh at their own misery.
He looked at his hands. They'd still occasionally tremble with the ghost of things he'd decided not to think about until he'd had enough sleep to think about them properly.
'Two weeks' He thought determinedly as he clenched his hands in fists 'Then Kakashi and the Bell Test'
Sighing, he washed the bowl and went to bed.
|~-X-~| ALOCS |~-X-~|
Chapter two is done ! Let me know what you think, votes for the pairing are still open !