Shadowed Sun

We Can Go

"It's our first C-Rank mission; you'd imagine that Kakashi wouldn't be so late," I muttered to Sasuke, who gave an agreeing nod.

It was roughly about three weeks after we joined together as a team. In the morning, the three of us would arrive on time and knowing Kakashi would be late, we began with our own training.

Sasuke had mastered the Tree-Climbing and Water-Walking techniques within the first week, with Naruto a bit behind by about three days. My genjutsu had taken a better turn since Sasuke had loaned me the scrolls, and both him and Naruto became my test dummies—they needed practice escaping genjutsu anyway.

After the Tree-Climbing and Water-Walking techniques, Sasuke moved on to find his own style. At the moment, he was favoring a heavy ninjutsu arsenal along with very good taijutsu as a front-liner,but then I pointed out to him that his taijutsu was still average at best and until he could find a master (or Kakashi bothered to really teach any of us), he would have to train in ninjutsu only.

This was something I could help him in as I was able to get chakra paper once again. I had quickly confirmed my suspicions of him being a Lightning and Fire nature and loaned him my only lightning and fire jutsu scrolls. As of now, he was still trying to master the lightning jutsu.

Naruto was working hard at the training regime Sasuke had shown him and already, I could see the improvements showing. It was only a matter of time before he caught up.

In the end, between my genjutsu and ninjutsu training, my time was completely used up during these training sessions.

Then, when Kakashi finally bothered to show up, he would take us on two D-Ranked missions (or three if we finished particularly early). Knowing that the point of D-Ranked missions was to 'build up teamwork,' I explained that to the boys; and once I did, we quickly set out to prove to Kakashi that we could work well enough together, and move on to more challenging missions.

After exactly one week of D-Ranked missions, Naruto was more than a little fed up, claiming the missions were wasting our time and not allowing us to train. Sasuke agreed with Naruto and when we tried to discuss this with Kakashi, he completely blew us off.

So Naruto came up with a completely genius plan of training while we did D-Ranked missions. Of course, now we only took two certain kinds of D-Ranked missions.

Tora, and courier or messenger.

For Tora, it was an excellent training exercise for my tracking abilities.

But I was the only one allowed on the ground for this mission.

For Tora, both Sasuke and Naruto were not allowed to walk horizontally unless they were upside down. This forced them to rely on the Tree-Walking exercise, both techniques steadily increasing their reserves by constantly draining them as well as perfecting their chakra control. Soon enough, they would be comfortable with this exercise to use it in battle unconsciously—something that would prove most beneficial.

And while they were up there, it was their job to distract me from tracking—mostly by creating loud noises or, in Naruto's case, throwing the occasional stink bomb. This also helped me slowly to deal with my flinching and tracking.

For the role of messengers, it was naturally a race. We each split up the messages/packages among us and the first one to deliver them all without walking horizontally (unless upside down) won. We then asked Kakashi to make it more difficult for us by trying to throw us off our balance, either by throwing something at us or casting a genjutsu. Kakashi consented easily enough and through this, we were able to train our evasiveness and the ability to escape genjutsu as well.