A strange new life

Second year of academy came and went.

By now, I had relaxed somewhat. Wolf-san came to me a few times. Initiated our secret meetings with the S-rank code phrase. Asked about dreams. I couldn’t think of anything else urgent, decided keep just to those two lies. Must have looked strange. Code phrase and S-rank mission trigged my fan-girl side hard.

I didn’t meet with the Hokage again. Emosuke was still Emosuke. Naruto pranks increased. By now, most of the academy could read, except for Naruto. He still struggled with the words. I couldn’t blame the brat. He had no one to teach him. I tried, a not insignificant amount of times during our shared lunch. He couldn’t or wouldn't pay attention.

I had a passable relationship with all other kids. I was the bringer of sweets. I was the quiet girl that never bothered anyone. I had a pain in the behind Emosuke still trying to prove he was better than me in everything.

In the second year, Academy training morphed. Less games, more serious training. More focus on the shinobi rules as way of life. We had taijutsu lessons. Survival games. Camping. Throwing. The teachers also taught us how to meditate, how to sense our chakra. I used those moments to circulate my own chakra, soak my body in it between gruesome training. I think I was onto something. I was still one of the weakest in class regarding anything physical: I still refused to use chakra unconsciously like the other kids, but using chakra in between training to recover and revitalize made me capable of keeping up with class, even without chakra.

Might very well have been just the results of intense training. Placebo. I felt good about it. I thought it was working. That was enough for me.

I still kept with my chakra control training. I had something stuck to me all the time, beneath my clothes. It was second nature by this point. I didn’t even notice it anymore. I still had more active training, at least two times a week. Among the new exercises I got from the Hokage, there were these ones you needed to expel the chakra from your hand, interact with something at distance. From there, creating chakra threads. Use the threads to interact with stuff. There was even the origami folding exercise. All year long I toiled with those, improving bit by bit. When I finally mastered them, I went to see the old man again. Like before, Secretary-chan had another set of exercises for me. Alongside with those exercises, I just thought about things I couldn’t do with my chakra, and trained until I could do it.

My hair kept moving while I was wall-walking? Train chakra to keep hair and clothes unmoving. Add to that the normal sticking stuff exercise. Too easy? Add multiple stuff, of varying sizes. It took too much time to push chakra into the seal? Train fast expelling chakra without losing cohesion. And so on. Wherever I looked, there was something I couldn’t do with chakra that needed training.

My taijutsu still was a mess. I was weaker and slower. I know, my fault that. My way of fighting changed to something like reaction based combat. Combining what I remembered of the gentle fist, Konoha’s style, I created my own set of movements designed to deflect and evade. Redirect others attacks. Trim down necessary movements. That was the only way I could compete. Where others were faster and stronger, I moved less, redirected instead of fight it.

I still lost more often than not. Kids like Sasuke and other clan kids who had their parents to teach them often managed to kick my behind pretty easy. But others? Naruto was the easiest to defeat. He never planned his attacks. His movements were always exaggerated. Made it easy to redirect the flow. I couldn’t actually beat him on stamina. He would always get up. But our spars were often just a few minutes, not hour long slogs.

Second year of academy also introduced the kunoichi classes: Make-up, flower arrangement, tea making, music, the usual girl stuff. Between the many instruments available, I was drawn to the Koto, the thirteen string cumbersome zither instrument spoke to my soul. I couldn’t carry one with me, they were too big for that, but I was already making plans. If I created a big enough seal, I could store that baby and have it with me all the time. I could see it. Imagine Shino and Kiba’s face when I played Taylor’s Shake it off for them. I grinned. It was an evil grin. I couldn’t help it!

Of my other side projects I also saw improvements. I’ve taken to using Secretary-chan as guinea pig for my cooking experiments. Whenever I could extract squeals of food happiness from the teen, I knew I had the right recipes.

Not to say nothing happened this year. I heard rumors and gossips. Whenever I could, on my academy off days I went to a restaurant to eat, listen. Konoha’s relationship with the Kumogakure worsened. Some talked about war between the villages. I heard rumors things never calmed down after their head ninja was killed, with escalating hostilities.

I didn’t know if that was normal for the Naruto world, or if the manga just glossed over those details, since they weren’t important for Naruto’s story. I hope butterfly-chan wouldn’t be too cruel because of my actions.

In second year, Academy measured us based on scores. Between all the other classes in the same year. I was bottom of the barrel for anything physical. Not dead last, but close. Middle of the pack in others, with mental disciplines being the only I exceeded. That was fine by me. Even if that angered Emosuke to no end. He was top of the class, top of the year in everything. Except the subjects I still beat him. Take that, you jerk.

Of course things like that had repercussions. The damn brat rounded me at every moment. Be it to slap me in the face that he was better, or to try surpass me when he wasn’t. I didn’t care. The kid could do whatever he wanted. It was annoying, but since I couldn’t speak, and refused to write, he often got angry by himself and stormed off.

The gaggle of forming fan-girls however, started to give me stinky eyes. I mean, really? Aren’t these girls too precocious? I didn’t think it was anything romantic yet, but they must have grown listening to stories about the legendary Uchiha’s heir. My guess is their parents kept pestering them about Emosuke, since Uchiha Itachi was too old to be interested in these kids. Save me from impressionable children, please.