Hogwarts' Shinobi

Chapter 2

Hagrid stared blankly at the girl who sat across from him. Her pink hair reached her shoulders and her green eyes almost seemed to glow ominously in the quickly fading light. He couldn't help but feel slightly unnerved by her relaxed posture as her eyes scanned the cabin in a studious way, as though she was memorizing every little detail in a matter of seconds. Of course, this probably wasn't all that bad, after all, she was going to be living here now, but still, he felt uncomfortable for some reason. He carefully pulled out the dictionary that Dumbledore had helpfully supplied him with. Opening it, he began to flick through it until he reached the appropriate page before he began to talk, "So, you need to learn English. Read this and learn the basics, we will work on speech when you're done." Hagrid slid the book across the table carefully before leaving the girl to read. There was a reason why he wasn't a language teacher. Meanwhile, Sakura was frowning, his Japanese wasn't all that good, his accent made it hard to understand and she was pretty sure he said something he didn't mean. But she understood the gist of it well enough to fill in the blanks. She was supposed to learn their strange language, not that was a bad thing, it would be useful to be able to understand them. Smiling to herself, she opened the book in front of her, this was going to be hard, but she was pretty sure that she would be able to get her head around it.

After a day and a half of reading the dictionary, she was starting to get frustrated. She was reading the Japanese to English section of the book, but the weird way of writing it was getting on her nerves. Frowning, she ruffled her hair in annoyance before closing the book. She was tempted to throw it across the room in annoyance but just managed to stop herself before she did. Whilst she may be in a child's body, that didn't mean she had to act like one. Standing up from where she sat at her desk, she wandered out of the building, spotting Hagrid working on a pumpkin patch. She smiled at the man before approaching him, opening her mouth, the multitude of pages she'd committed to memory flashing through her mind as she opened her mouth to speak. "I need... train... I go to the forest." Her English was very broken and her Japanese accent was thick, but Hagrid was more or less understood. This was probably how she felt when he tried to talk to her. "Okay, be safe and back by dark." Sakura nodded her head in agreement, still slightly embarrassed at her poor English. In school, she'd always been praised for her intelligence, but in this world, she felt so awkward, so out of place. When she got into the forest, she found herself relaxing, she felt at home in the woods.

Sakura found herself carefully walking across the top of the large lake in the forest. The ripples under her feet caused her to constantly keep her eyes on her chakra reserves. They were fluctuating under the pressure of sudden usage. She'd found a good way to build up her reserves was to almost completely drain them and then meditate. She had no idea why it worked, nor why it didn't always work on others, but it worked for her and that was all that mattered to her right now. As she settled herself down on the bank of the lake, she closed her eyes before focusing in on her chakra reserves and nothing else. She smiled as she felt herself tap into them and she gently tugged away at the pool edges. While she knew that this was not the actual appearance of her chakra, she found it easier when she could visualise something.

It was beginning to get dark and Hagrid was starting to worry about the girl put under his supervision. How was he supposed to explain to Dumbledore that he'd lost her on her second day here? He was about to leave his cabin when he spotted her stumbling down the cobbled pathway. Was she... drunk? He opened the door quickly and picked her up off her feet, "Oh... Hey..." she muttered tiredly, her eyes flickering shut and her breathing becoming shallow. Hagrid smiled to himself, Sakura was definitely going to be a handful.

The following week found Sakura training non-stop, her chakra reserves increasing at a rapid rate as she pushed herself further and further in her training. She could now release a steady stream of chakra through her feet for a solid few hours before exhaustion would begin to take its toll on her body. She was pretty proud of her improvement in the more spiritual aspect of things. She'd also taken up running laps around the academy grounds, how she managed this task was beyond Dumbledore's imagination as Hogwarts was no small school and yet the young pink-haired girl was able to make it look like she was just going for a light jog. Her English, however, was not as great as she would have liked. Her accent remained dominant causing others to struggle to understand and her sentences were broken and poorly formed. She'd begun to give up on learning the language, she could more or less understand what was going on around her and that was enough for her.

Dumbledore didn't take her lack of motivation lightly, instead, making he planned on having her continue her studies in the school itself, that way, she'd hopefully feel more obliged to do it. He'd chosen Snape to educate the young girl, all he had to do now was introduce them. He could only hope that the pair got along well, after all, they were going to be spending quite some time together and it would be awful if they spent too long arguing over petty topics.