#Kouki is a bit more passive

[hawnkoii]

Urogi x Sumine twins <3

Kouki & Kae

They only exist in the modern verse when Urogi and Sumine are reincarnated though 😔

[sweethurtss]

When Chizuru was in her first year, she had met Yuto at a piano competition. In their first brush with each other, it had left Chizuru with a chip in her shoulder that he looked down on everyone who had obviously tried their hardest and practiced a lot - a stark comparison to his ‘lazy genius’. Disliking the way he spoke to people, putting them down for actually trying, she challenged him head on… and he won. The first time.

From that moment on, the two seemed to gravitate around each other, fighting through their instruments to take first place and prove the other’s philosophy was clearly inferior to their own. It typically went back and forth, the two of them competing on equal levels.

And begrudgingly, she had to admit that Yuto was handsome and cool… so when he made his move on her in the beginning of her second year, maidenhearted Chizuru fell hard in between the heat of their rivalry and their late night texts.

Wanting to be closer, especially at his behest, Chizuru fought hard to convince her parents to allow her to make the move to Tokyo for school - insisting that it would be easier for her to attend competitions, train with an esteemed pianist who offered to help train her, and that she would find a job there in order to afford extra expenses. And she really did want to train with the pianist, she admired them so much; but as a lovesick teen, she was also very interested in spending time with her new boyfriend. 

When she did make it to Tokyo, she had little time to settle into her surroundings before Yuto was constantly asking her to come over to his place, meet him out somewhere, and guilting her any time she said she wanted to stay home or to study or go to school. And the more she told him no, the more he distanced himself from her, spoke passive aggressively to her, and even ignored her for periods of time. It got to the point that Chizuru was an anxious mess, constantly second guessing herself and any plans that she made on her own.

Chizuru can’t honestly say how long she would’ve allowed it to happen if she hadn’t caught him making out with a “friend” of hers. Heartbroken, she called it quits between them and poured herself into the few things she had in Tokyo - work, school, and her instruments.

It even took her awhile before she went back to competing in piano competitions, aware that she would bump into him. But with the support of her closest friends, Kouki and Yuki sticking close to her side (Michiru also, when she had time in her own hectic schedule), Chizuru felt strong enough to finally get back to competing and ignoring any attempt Yuto made to talk to her.

Eventually, she stopped going to the competitions, a little bit because of Yuto, but mostly because she had decided to focus on violin and other hobbies.

[chemicalmagecraft]

Foresight is 20/20 Chapter 12

Chikage

I axe kicked a giant rock in half. That was fun. I also found floating around not with demon sage cores but with glittery red fairy wings made from demon sage chakra to be enjoyable as well. Because I was pure chakra, I was actually a lot better at handling natural energy than weak, inferior carbon-based lifeforms and could absorb more without any kind of negative effects. Sure, there was some instability if I went too high, but it was nowhere near as bad as the side effects on a human, and I could expel the excess pretty easily. "Dang," Kouki said from where he was sitting on another rock. I turned to face m-him. "So I guess you're just default a lot stronger than me. Makes sense, you're basically a mini biju." I could tell through our connection that he was a little off about how he couldn't access the red chakra that was now me, but that was mostly overshadowed by his marvel over the potential of Demon Shadow Clone Jutsu, the jutsu that created me. He fidgeted a bit, causing his arm to mutate slightly, red scales forming instead of the frog limbs that comes from using toad oil as a medium. "Dangit." The demon sage cores orbiting him sucked all of the natural energy out of him, setting him back to square one.

I grinned and "sat" on the air in front of him. "You having trouble, bro?" Kouki had decided that with the extra control granted to him whenever we were separate, combined with the fact that he couldn't fall back on red chakra without me, that he should finally learn how to make sage chakra the right way.

He glared at me. "You know as well as I do that this isn't easy to do properly."

I grinned and started telekinetically messing with a leaf using my sage aura. "Do I really?" I spontaneously combusted it.

"Haha." He closed his eyes and stuck his tongue out in concentration.

"Right," I said. "Imma go see what else I can do." I melted into the ground, merging the energy that made up my body with the shadows of the grass. It turned out that, while I couldn't move fast at all when projecting myself as a shadow that didn't already exist, whenever I entered a real shadow, I could move... well, I didn't know how fast exactly because I hadn't gotten around to figuring out how to calculate that, but at the very least it was fast enough that it looked like teleportation even when Kouki pulled a little trick with the Shoraigan to slow down the "footage."

So yeah, I got to the the trees pretty dang fast. I flew out of the shadows in my "biju form," which was really just me as a fox with fur the color of my clothes with the exception of a "mane" the same color as my hair, and sliced a tree in half with my claws. I opened my mouth, compressing red and blue chakra in a way that just felt... right. Even with sage mode it was small and a little draining, but it was still a biju dama. I launched it at a tree, obliterating it into smoking mulch. I sighed at the relatively small AOE, but then grinned about the fact that I just made a biju dama. Unfortunately, my victory was cut short by Kouki calling for me to come back through our telepathic link. That meant it was time for our experiment, which he wanted to be whole for just in case something went wrong. I shrugged. "Guess it's for the best," I thought to myself. "Was probably going to just throw around dama 'til I ran out of chakra." I melted into the shadows and zipped off to Kouki.

kukukuku~

I sighed as I felt Chikage returning to me. It was reassuring to have my red chakra back, even if I didn't really use it that much. Still, I suppose I did have the demon gems to fall back on, on account of how my connection to other sources of my own red chakra was uninterrupted. I crossed my arms behind my back and turned around, my eyes closed. "Finally," I said. "A project months in the making, about to be fulfilled. I'm assuming you're here to watch, eh, Tenko?"

Ai laughed. "That's a lot less intimidating if we know you can sense us, kid." I sighed and opened my eyes. "And wasn't it only one month?"

I shrugged. "Felt like more. Might just have been from that one part where they read my journal..." I held my hands out in front of me and the giant scroll I'd taken to sealing as much demon Sage chakra into as possible once I'd filled the demon sage seal on my body, the Scroll of the Demon Sage, appeared floating in front of me through a summoning instead of a sealing on account of how its power meant I couldn't seal it in my inventory scrolls and actually keep anything else in it as well. "This is it. What might be the second most powerful thing in Konoha." The scroll unfurled slightly, revealing a seal tag that as of then contained most of its power. Uzumaki are really good at handling stupid levels of energy, okay? At least I'd also managed to complete my first mini biju dama paper bomb... "Are you ready to receive this power?" I asked Ai.

"Is this really necessary?" Tenko asked, worried.

"No," Ai and I both said at the same time.

"But really, what's the point of amassing an insane amount of dangerously powerful chakra if you don't infuse as much as possible into the best known person for taking in stupid amounts of chakra just to see what happens?" I elaborated.

Ai nodded and gingerly took the demon sage seal tag from its place in the scroll. "Right, so I'm guessing you have somewhere you want me to stand?"

I slung the scroll on my back and pointed over to an area I'd prepared in advance. "There. I've already set up four cores with orders to use the Four Violet Flames Formation should anything go wrong." A nice thing about having multiple potent sources of chakra at my total command, I'd found, was the fact that I could potentially use collaboration nin- or genjutsu without actually having to collaborate with anyone.

Tenko sighed. "That's not reassuring."

Before Tenko could actually object, Ai slapped the tag on her chest. "Toolatealreadyusedit!" She quickly shouted. The red lines of the seal tag began to glow orangey-gold, then started to spread to cover her entire body in a thick chakra cloak. She laughed maniacally, floating into the air as nine tail-like chains made of the same chakra sprouted from her backside. The chains spread to curl around the entire training ground, a red, domed barrier coming into existence at the edges. I don't know if she meant to or not, but her barrier materialized just before the shinobi that I'd had posted nearby via Sandaime just in case of a worst-case scenario, cutting them off.

"Kouki-kun, what did you do to my wife?" Tenko asked worriedly.

I grinned. "'Wife?' So did either of you finally pop the question?"

She flinched, then blushed. "I... haven't yet... I do have the ring, though."

I shrugged. "Hope for the best with you two. And by the way, I'm sure it'll go over fine." Ai's maniacal laughter grew louder, causing me to turn my attention back to her. She put her hands in front of her, as if she was holding an invisible ball. Oh. "A thought occurs to me," I said, making sure to keep my voice calm.

"That doesn't sound good..." As if on cue, Ai started to slowly form a disconcertingly familiar-looking chakra ball in between her hands. In addition to that, countless streaks of energy began to slowly form in the air, gravitating to the epicenter. That epicenter being a modified biju dama.

"So there was this one clan with a Kekkei Genkai that allowed them to passively accumulate natural energy and then use that to mutate themselves. Because they didn't work for it, though, the natural energy caused them to become uncontrollable, entering homicidal rages. Because of that, they were almost completely wiped out." At that point, I started to feel a slight tug on my chakra, though I was able to resist it.

"So what you're saying is..."

"She's drunk on power, yeah. Whoops."

"How, exactly, did you not notice that'd happen with your eyes?"

"Figured out a way to make sure that nothing bad enough I can't fix it will happen while still not spoiling me on what happens. Use exclusively that for my experiments now," I explained. I noticed a bit of chakra chain straying near me and had an idea. "Hang on, let me fix this." I tried to grab the chain with a chakra thread, but it was just sucked in, so I aborted almost immediately and just lunged at it. It was starting to get to the point where I needed to have my demon gems actively cling to me to make sure they weren't sucked in. That would be bad. Thankfully, I managed to grab the chain and my theory was right. Just like how Kurama still held some link to my red chakra and Kaguya still had some link to his chakra, I could feel my connection to the chakra in the modified Adamantine Sealing Chain. I grabbed it with both hands, wrapped one side around my arm, then tugged the two sides in opposite directions.

With a bit of willpower applied, one link snapped and got spaghettified by the still-growing ball of impending doom, leaving me with a really long chain of chakra that I could control wrapped around my arm. "Right, let's hope this works or Konoha probably becomes partially made of smoking crater," I said, glad that I'd picked one of the farthest training grounds from Konoha proper, then pulled a leaf out of Ai's new book and sucked the chain into my body, making sure to strip enough natural energy off of it that I didn't become a glittery garden statue. "Oooh," I grunted, then sucked in a breath. I noticed that with one chain down, the chakra-sucking had slowed back down, though I knew it was going to pick back up if I didn't do anything.

"Are you okay?" Tenko asked.

"Yeah, just a bit of a rush," I said. "Sorry. Well, here goes..." I concentrated on the chakra that I'd absorbed. After a few seconds, I was able to form two purple chains of chakra that emerged from my sleeves. I drew on the power I'd stolen from Ai to lengthen the chains significantly, taking the shortest possible paths I could to intersect her chains with my own. Once I'd gotten all of her chains, I tugged on the chakra in them, converting Ai's golden chains to my purple chains. The effect cascaded, eating away at all of her chains until her chains were fully turned, making the barrier fall and stopping the suction effect fully. I jerked my arm, causing nine chains to sprout from Ai's arms and wrap around the biju dama. I started retracting the chains back into my body, removing almost every last trace of demon sage chakra from Ai's body. Thankfully, she didn't fall on her face, as she was able to recover almost immediately and shoot some now non-glowing yellow chains into the ground and lower herself down gently.

"I have no idea what just happened, but I'm assuming it worked because I can make chains out of my chakra now," she said.

I nodded, concentrating on the ball of dangerously explosive chakra I was slowly reeling in. "Tenko, I need you to take the scroll off of my back and open it up a bit." She did as I asked, holding the scroll up so I could easily access it. I slowly put my hands on the scroll, converting the chain into the seal. The chain, no longer attached to my body, continued to reel in the demon sage chakra. As it did that, I placed my hand on the chain, removing the impurities the chakra gained from being in Ai's system. I greedily absorbed those bits of chakra. As I suspected, my body accepted it as readily as it did Shukaku's chakra.

"What exactly happened there?" one of the shinobi asked now that they'd arrived.

"Science," I answered.

"What were we even supposed to do about that?"

I shrugged. "Sorry, I didn't expect that to happen. I just figured Ai wouldn't have very good control of her chains at first. Turns out that that much sage chakra means going crazy, though."

"So I'm guessing I shouldn't use that seal for a super mode?" Ai asked after walking over to us. I swiped the empty tag that still stuck to her.

"No, if I segment it to lower the dosage, then it both becomes multi-use and lets you keep your sanity, at the tradeoff of power, obviously. Just make sure to use it for emergencies only. And while we're at it, I should be able to eventually teach you how to enter proper sage mode, which you could do any time with just a few minutes to charge up." I looked back up to survey the mostly concerned, but with one happy, faces looking at me. "I'd say that this little experiment has been a success."

kukukuku~

Yeah, I got chewed out by my dad. In hindsight, though, I really couldn't blame him. Thankfully, I was able to get off with just a tongue-lashing and promising to make absolutely sure to test out anything that could theoretically have a large blast radius by making a gem take it far away from Konoha and remote detonate it or just not do it at all. To be honest, though, I was bracing myself for a grounding, so I was actually fine with that. And he even organized a lesson on nature transformation for me. After giving me another lecture, this time on not doing things that could potentially destroy my hands or other parts of my body unless absolutely necessary. And so there I was, leaning on the wall of the Hyuuga compound courtyard. I'd made sure that there was a chain of shadows that Chikage could use to get away from me because I knew Kakashi was going to use that one chakra paper thing on me and I didn't want to have any interference from her/my power, yet still have her accessible once we started the lesson in earnest. "Sup," I said when Kakashi arrived.

"So you want to learn how to use nature transformation?" he asked.

I shrugged and licked my lips. "I already know how to use wind, but I'd like to learn at least the basics of the others."

"Right, learning it now if you have the chakra for it is actually probably a good idea." He pulled out a piece of paper. "I doubt you can do much with it at the moment, but at the very least, you'll be able to practice until you're ready for the big stuff." He used the paper, crinkling it. "This paper is made to test one's elemental affinity. Channel a light amount of chakra onto it and it'll react in different ways depending on what your primary affinity is. Mine's lightning, so the paper became wrinkled." He gave me a second piece of paper. "You try."

I complied, channeling a bit of my chakra into the paper. "Well what a coincidence," I said, referring to the fact that my paper was now as crumpled as his was. "We have the same element, don't we?"

"Yes, that's what that means. I suppose we'll start with the lightning exercises, then?"

I called Chikage back, and she reentered me without Kakashi even seeming to notice. For whatever reason, her chakra signature was muted whenever she was inside a shadow, and she could easily suppress her signature even more and spread herself out to lower the density of her chakra in the shadows, so the only way he would've noticed was when we joined or if his Sharingan was out. It would've been the perfect ability for stealth if not for the fact that she couldn't bring anything with her, and I was already trying to think of ways around that one little weakness. Well, there was also the little snag of how she needed shadows, but really, where aren't there shadows?

"Let's start this lightshow, then," I said with a smile.

kukukuku~

And now for something completely different.

A rabbit bounded across a field near End Valley. It did not know what its destination was, just that something was... calling to it. It stopped by the roots of a great tree and began to sniff at the ground. Whatever it was looking for, it was there. It found it after a few minutes of searching. A small red stone, barely a flake, that glowed with some unearthly light. Now that it could see it, the rabbit's every instinct screamed to get away, that this stone was a predator, but it couldn't stop itself. Its body wasn't its own anymore. The now-terrified rabbit tried to fight back with all its might as its head came closer to the gem, but to no avail. The stone already had a hold over it, it just needed to touch it and it would be over. A spectre of death seemed to emerge from the jewel of death, ready to embrace the rabbit. When the rabbit's head was close enough, the stone lifted from the ground and adhered to its forehead. The rabbit screamed as a foreign presence entered its body, burning away its very soul to make room for something else.

I grinned a rabbitty grin and hopped around a bit, testing out my new rabbity body. It was a shame that I could only gain a proper body by stealing it from a living creature, but what can you do? I sniffed at the ground with my new nose. The rabbit's sense of smell was different from my original's, but when I took over the rabbit's brain I gained complete access to all its memories, so I was able to adjust soon enough. Plus I noticed that I could understand rabbits now. I sent a telepathic message back to Kouki and Chikage.

"You find a body?" they asked.

"Yup. Rabbit. Surprisingly good chakra affinity, despite being wild," I replied.

"Cool. Right, you should probably act natural for at least a month, to build up plausible deniability." they instructed. "Then you can start doing supernatural stuff. Cannibalize the body and continue your mission."

I sent a scoff through our link. "I know what to do, I have all your memories."

"Stop being so sarcastic, you're not supposed to be me."

"Right."

"By the way, did you pick out a name?"

I gave a small rabbit grin. "Of course. If my first body after my 'resurrection' is to be that of a rabbit's, then why shouldn't my name be Usagi?"

"Cool. You'd better give at least one 'name of the moon' speech though."

"Certainly. I would never pass up such an opportunity." It may have purely been within my mind, but I was already preparing my cover by practicing my new mannerisms, at the very least those dealing with how I spoke.

"Right, I'ma get back to this stupid leaf, you go do your rabbit thing. Rabbit." I hopped around a bit, searching for some food. A deep cover assignment. It was going to be marvelous.

kukukuku~

I growled as I passed my chakra through the leaf. No matter what I did, it just wasn't getting wet!

"Did you try turning it off and turning it back on again?" Chikage asked me as she floated over me.

I rolled my eyes, cut off the flow, then let my chakra flow over the leaf like water once more. "Don't think that helped."

"Dude it's been a day," she said. "You're not Naruto, you don't have an army of clones to poorly manage yet still somehow get your thing done. Just take a deep breath, accept that this is going to take some time, and do the other three exercises that you actually did make some headway in. You don't have Tsunade-levels of control when we're unfused yet."

I stared at her for a second. "How are you taking this better than me?" I asked.

"I mean, two heads are better than one. I have the perspective that you're being a lil dummy."

I stopped trying to wet the leaf and started trying to set it aflame instead. Because I already had experience doing it with and as Chikage, it started to smoke after a few seconds. I removed my thumb, seeing a smoldering thumbprint on it. Chikage picked it up, then it just disintegrated. "Showoff," I griped.

[kotorisaka]

170620 Hori Miona Real Sound Interview Part 1

Precautions: 1. Translation is NOT 100% accurate. Refer to my blog’s description before reading. 2. Sentences which context I’m not sure about is marked with (?). 3. Original article here.

ー“Asahinagu” stage play, only Nagoya performance is remaining. (Interview takes place after Osaka performance) Yes, finally. 27 performances in almost a month and no day off between each performance in different places, so it was really hard.

ーYou’re given the role of Ichido Nene who is high-spirited. It was difficult to play because I have the opposite personality (laughs).

ーYou didn’t have much experience, right. Except for “16nin no Principal” and “Joshiraku” which was around 2015. Originally, were you interested in stage play and acting? I can’t speak loudly and bad at expressing emotions with my whole body, so I’m also not good in the stage play itself. I thought it’s gonna be hard, but there was an opportunity for me to watch a play called “Fushin” by Mitani Kouki. Detailed expression was perfectly performed on stage; even without too much exaggeration, I noticed that the feelings were conveyed to the audience. I then got to feel like trying hard.

ーIn addition to acting, you also have to learn Naginata this time. I observed the practice session, it seemed tough. I got buffer thanks to it (laughs). That’s why I can’t wear sleeveless clothes lately. I would look like some macho man in an American movie (laughs). It’s my biggest problem these days.

ーDancing uses different muscle, right. It’s completely different. Moreover, the armor itself weighs 10 kg; it feels like I was swaying the 2 meters sword while holding a baby. I was wobbly at first, but can overcome it in high spirits now.

ーHave you changed your consciousness for acting through this play? A lot. The director, Itagaki (Kyouichi), taught me many things about the play that I could make us of in the future. I learned a lot. I also try changing it by myself little by little every time because there are many performances (?). Compared to movie, stage play is a live thing and there are more room for improvisation; we do it on our own, if it isn’t good, we can reevaluate and make the best of it next time. This time there are also parts where it little bit feels like I’m just doing a club activity, to face the play everyday that way makes me happy.

ーActually I got an opportunity to interview Itagaki as soon as the practice session began. I asked his impressions on each Nogizaka46 member [who were involved] and regarding you, he said, “Hates to lose and has a strong eye-stare. She’s quiet, but her fighting spirit is burning.” Ehh, I’m glad (laughs).

ーDo you think that you hate to lose? I guess so. Perhaps it’s perfectionism. I don’t show it much, but I always feel like “this isn’t good enough” for many things.

ーYou have also been recruited as a regular model of female fashion magazine “ar”. Your individual activities are steadily increasing. Compared to one year ago, haven’t environment quite changed? A year ago… What was I doing a year ago?

ーBefore the 15th single “Hadashi de Summer” release (July 2016), your senbatsu comeback [on Harujion] were announced. I see. Well, I finally returned. However, I was still at the end of the third row that time, so I had to work harder from there. I realised that our worries change depending on the position. There’ll be troubles wherever you are, and also rewards. But, as expected, I think that I’m not satisfied.

ーWhat is the thing that you’re lacking the most now? I want to become more experienced, or precisely a stronger person. While talking more with people from across the world–for example, co-star and others from stage play or TV drama–taking into account their opinions a bit to the way of thinking and living that I had, maybe it’s not like I start becoming an adult, but… I guess that’s sort of important.

ーI see. So, with the increase of individual jobs, what changed the most? I must be even more responsible to meet the expectations of having so many things demanded from me. Whether it’s radio broadcasting or magazine photoshoot, I shouldn’t be too familiar with each work. Of course it’s important to get accustomed to, but if you don’t use a different and fresh approach every time, the other party might not want to work with you again. I always try providing topics and freshness from here as well, and I think that I must tell you that I’m motivated and want to do more things, so even though I’m neither passive or too agressive, I try little by little to get in to many places (?).

ーIt’s been 4 years since you joined Nogizaka46 in May. Yeah. It’s been long since it was unveiled at the Principal on May 5th, 4 years ago. Which means I’m aging, too (laughs).

ーI kept on thinking, amongst the 2nd generation, you had the most tremendous upheaval in the last 4 years. In autumn 4 years ago, you were airdropped as “Barrette” center (7th single released in November 2013); from there you had experienced being in various positions in senbatsu, then under, and even coming back to senbatsu again. It’s a special thing, isn’t it.

ーI think Nogizaka46 is also changing in the past 4 years because of you. Especially for the past year, the change is rapid. Graduation also constantly happened. I get “I saw Nogi on TV” or “You guys topped the music chart” a lot from people, so for just a little I realised that we’re riding that momentum, but for me, both as a member of the group and as an individual, I feel that I’m still lacking of so many things.

ーI see. Despite what others said, do you personally think that Nogizaka is selling out well now? For example when I recently saw Shiraishi’s (Mai) photobook scored a great record on news, it seems like she’s indeed a wonderful person (laughs). I didn’t feel that way first because we’re always together in the same group but when I see her objectively, she is amazing; I often talk with Kitano (Hinako).

ーBy the way, the other day I asked Shiraishi and Sakurai (Reika) a similar question and they answered, “I don’t feel that we’re selling out at all.” Everyone in Nogi still has a lot of such reactions. Perhaps one’s surroundings may have a big influence on such things. Say, as an actress in a play, I must do my best so I don’t lose to other actress–I have to hold on to such pride, or rather, I have to avoid from defeated by saying that says it all happened just because I’m a member of Nogizaka46 or just because I’m an idol.

ーBut, don’t you slightly feel wanted by the world? The number of people coming to handshake meetings and opportunities to appear in various CMs are increasing. That’s right. I haven’t heard much “I like Nogizaka” from my friend before but when I hear “Today, my best friend’s child who’s a Hori-chan oshi is coming” or “My ex-classmate will come with a Hori-chan oshi to watch” from “Asahinagu” co-star, I’m surprised that there are people who know me! In addition to it, they are also willing to like me because, say, they often watch me on TV; I feel like this is really happening (?).

Read the next part here.

[chemicalmagecraft]

Foresight is 20/20 Chapter 7

I groaned and yawned as I woke up with a fuzzy head. I started rubbing my eyes as I sat up a bit.

Then I went back down and almost fell asleep. I didn't actually fall asleep, however, because of a knock on my door. "In a minute," I managed to get out, then rolled off the bed. I eventually managed to get up and open the door to the sight of a woman of the main branch family, if I remembered right. "Sleepy," I blearily muttered as an excuse. I probably had bedhead, which added to the image.

She chuckled. "So this is why you don't let anyone in your room in the morning hours," she said jokingly.

I grunted, licked my lips, then said, "I must look like a little death, huh?" I snapped my fingers at my vanity and my brush and comb flew over thanks to the wind attribute in Kurama's chakra, then started un-messing my hair. She just stared at me incredulously. "So what do yo- ah!" I was interrupted by the brush trying to force through a particularly bad knot. They stopped long enough for me to sort out the knot, then continued. "I told you two to stop if that happens," I chided. I gave the woman whose name I couldn't remember at the moment a small, polite smile and explained, "A jutsu that I made that animates things. I unfortunately don't have enough enough chakra to use anything practical in a fight yet, but I can use it for laziness." I shrugged. "Sure, I have to charge them up every so often or they'll die, but they're pretty nice. So what do you need from me?"

"...Hiashi-sama asked me to give you this, and not to look inside it," she said as she handed me a messenger bag. I grunted a "thanks" and opened it to see a couple of scrolls, a large book, and a file. "If I might ask, what exactly is in that?"

"Top-secret fuinjutsu stuff," I muttered as I opened the file to see medical records and a picture of a small boy with red hair and shadows around his eyes. "If anyone asks, you never saw this. Talk to Father if you want to know why, but just know it comes from Hokage-sama." I put the file back and took the book out. I raised my eyebrows when I realized that it looked like a primer on the theory of poison. "Thanks... uh..." I thought for a moment. "Sorry, I should know this, I'm still a little asleep... Yuri-san?"

"It's actually Yuriko, Kouki-kun," she politely corrected. "I'm going to go now. Good luck with your project."

I sat down at my desk after she left and pulled out all of the scrolls and the file. I sorted through the scrolls, putting the jutsu scrolls back in the bag. When I was done I looked through the final scroll, which was about Gaara's seal. I frowned and ran my fingers through my hair when I was done. "This doesn't make any sense..." I muttered. "Either I'm missing something or Gaara really shouldn't be having as many problems as he has... Maybe it's something to do with Shukaku in particular? Maybe Kurama knows something." I opened the file on Gaara back up to see what I could gleam from that. "Nothing too useful, it turns out..." I sighed. I might have been able to do something with the stuff about his chakra and the symptoms that they knew for sure were from Shukaku, but I'd probably need to consult Kurama first, and he was... actually it was really surprising, but he was playing with Hinata, so I couldn't talk to him. Then I noticed a small sealing tag included with the papers. I picked it up and immediately recognized it as a used Inner Demon Calming Seal. A sticky note on it said that the Kazekage had Gaara use one for practice so I'd have a baseline, which was really good on his part. Would have to tell him he done good.

I took it, pulled out a blank scroll, put the tag on the scroll, and made a half ram seal. Words flowed out of the seal and onto the scroll, forming the statistics on Gaara. I nodded. It looked like the scan function was working perfectly, and the data I got from it was pretty good. I already had the beginnings of an idea just from that, though I decided I should probably consult Kurama before actually trying to work on it as a precaution. When I was done, I made a half dragon seal and pulled the tag from the scroll. The words peeled off with the scroll, and as I flipped the tag around and put it down, the words reconstituted into a sort of spherical barrier that allowed a ball of red chakra to emerge from the seal without dispersing into the air. I frowned as I saw the size of it. "The regulator's off..." The idea was that the seal would take only a little bit extra of Shukaku's chakra from what it was using to suppress Shukaku for me to play with, but there was a lot more than what I was expecting. "Orrrrr maybe it's just that Shukaku wasn't trying to break free or fighting at all?" I realized, then shrugged. "Meh." I made another half ram seal with my left hand and an empty sealing circle formed on it. I shoved my hand into the containment barrier and the red chakra flowed into the seal, forming a slash in the middle, the kanji for one.

kukukuku~

I knocked on the door. Thankfully, the seal on my hand had disappeared after it settled down just like Naruto's. That would've been hard to hide if it hadn't... Because I could feel that nobody was around, I revealed the seal for a bit to inspect it while I waited for someone to open the door. When I felt Tenko about to open the door, I let it fade again and shoved my hands into my pockets. "Hey, Uzumaki-san," I said with a small smile.

"Kouki-kun," she greeted back. "Are you here to see Naruto-kun?" I nodded and she let me inside. The house was nice. It wasn't nearly as big as the Hyuuga compound, for obvious reasons, but it was pretty big for a family of four. Probably because of the prestige of the Uzumaki clan, even if said clan was only the four members.

"How's he settling in?" I asked.

"Kouki!" Naruto shouted as he waved enthusiastically at me, then went back to climbing on Ai.

"Hey, kid," Ai greeted as Naruto managed to get to and start pushing on her face. "A little help, honey? Please?" Tenko giggled and picked Naruto up off of Ai, earning a peck on the cheek as thanks. "Thanks, sweetie."

I chuckled. "So he's settling in nice, then?" I inferred, then beckoned for Naruto. "C'mere, Naruto. I wanna tell you something."

Tenko put him down, but he frowned and didn't come to me. "Why do you have that weird feeling that all the mean people have, Kouki-kun?" he asked me.

I internally sighed and, not for the first time, was glad that my general lack of major emoting most of the time kept my annoyance from really showing. Naruto had noted feeling the malice of others recently, which was from my giving Kurama his yin power back. Still, though, it shouldn't have been strong enough to passively sense what little malice I could generate towards him... I extended my (unfortunately still weak passively) malice sense towards him, or rather his seal, and felt a sort of... "smug" malice coming from Kurama, which made more sense. I sent him a little message of "you suck" and told Naruto, "I dunno, but are you gonna ignore my advice?" He shrugged and walked over to me, allowing me to give him a light chop to the head. On the plus side, I was conditioning him to equate malice directed at him with pain, hopefully.

"Hey!" he complained.

"Don't throw away Gudo Dama, stupid," I chided.

"I don't even know what that is!"

"Powerful but finicky jutsu that you might get in the future if events line up, and in my visions you stupidly hamstrung your ability to use two fifths of it like an hour after getting it by throwing two of them into a Chibaku Tensei in another space-time. Don't do that for real."

"What happened to not punishing people for things they haven't done yet?"

I shrugged. "That was for having the potential stupid to throw away Gudo Dama. You don't even want to know what I'll do if I learn you do it without a good enough reason." Then, I heard the frantic footsteps of a young girl and turned around to see Tenten staring at me with an elated expression. "'Sup," I said.

"Naruto-kun said that you have healing powers!" Tenten said.

I shrugged. "Yeah, but not the kind just anyone can use, if that's what you're asking." Her face fell. "But if it's healing jutsu you want to learn, then you should know that you should have a bit of an advantage with yang release due to being an Uzumaki, which you need for medical release."

"Yes!" she shouted and threw her hands in the air. "I wanna be like Tsunade, she's this really cool kunoichi who's a really good healer!"

Ai pouted. "I'm a cool kunoichi too... And I have weapons... It's because I'm only a special jonin, isn't it?"

I nodded. "Tsunade's got some bad habits that I'm pretty sure your moms would like very much if you never pick up," they both agreed emphatically, "and you don't need to be a medic to be cool, but if you really, really wanna know how to heal people, then..." I took my hand out of my pocket, and a leaf appeared on it. "The other half of the equation is chakra control, so get cracking." I used a chakra thread to put it in her hands. "Well, there's knowledge needed too, but the biggest parts are yang release and plenty of chakra control."

"How did you do that?" Ai asked me, amazed.

I pulled down my sleeve, revealing a wristband with a storage seal on it that I'd made with Kurama's help. Really, why don't more people do that? It's awesome and useful. "I made a waterproof storage seal wristband with variable output, which is a lot more practical than you'd think if you do it right, by the way," I explained.

Ai gave me an eager look that made me feel like stars should have appeared in her eyes, and said, "Teach me your ways, master."

"Hey, I don't actually know how this leaf helps me with chakra control," Tenten complained.

"Naruto," I ordered. He took my meaning immediately and went over to help his new sister with her leaf. I turned back to Ai and said, "Right, so the first thing you need to know is that you can put waterproof seals on fabric surprisingly easily..."

kukukuku~

My eyes closed and my body absolutely still as I sat cross-legged under the shade of the tree, I pondered what Kurama and I had talked about in regards to Gaara's seal. "If I use it like that, the side-effects would actually be beneficial," I thought to myself as I formulated the beginnings of a plan. My thoughts shifted, however, when I finally managed to begin to feel the ebb and flow of the energy of the world around me after what felt like an hour of meditation. Without my eye's secondary powers, I doubted that I would've been able to stop fidgeting for that long...

Thankfully, the fact that I wasn't using toad oil to feel the natural energy meant that I didn't immediately start drawing on it, because at my chakra level, that would've probably been really bad. Without even opening my eyes, which I wasn't even sure I could do without breaking my tenuous natural energy sensing, I focused on the blue chakra in my hand. My idea was to combine the natural energy outside of my body until I felt I could do proper sage mode so as to circumvent the danger of using sage chakra.

Kurama had laughed that idea off at first when I'd told him, saying that there was no way I'd be able to add the natural energy to already-completed chakra until I'd actually managed to get the feel of sage chakra. I then told him that one of my failed attempts at yin-yang release involved me somehow managing to split my chakra back into its constituent parts and then recombining them outside of my body, which made him shut up. I thought back to when I managed to do it, then tried to recreate the feat. As is my curse, actually trying to do it somehow made it exponentially more difficult, though I just barely managed to puzzle it out. After that, I started working on recombining it, but with some extra natural energy. I almost got it... almost... almost...

"Hey, you!" Aaaand I lost it. I sighed, looked over the two chakra signatures that approached me, one of which had a suspiciously familiar signature to it that I honestly shouldn't have been too shocked about given who was writing the story, and opened my eyes to see a blonde girl about my age in front of me with a shy-looking pink-haired girl behind her.

"I-Ino-chan, you don't have to..." Oh, right. Sakura was really shy when she was a little kid. Seriously, though, how did she go from that to where she was at the start of the anime?

Actually it was probably the dumb fangirl thing. Would have to do something about that...

I licked my lips. "Nah, it's okay. I was almost done anyway... Whaddya want?"

"Why were you talking to that one kid earlier," Ino asked. She was referring to how Naruto was talking to me while I was meditating a bit earlier before going to play ninja with Tenten, Hinata, and Neji. "Our parents keep telling us not to talk to him."

I gave her my "I'm silently judging you" glare and said, "If anyone ever spent so much as two seconds getting to know Naruto they'd know he isn't a demon that has become quite jaded with most of humanity on account of their exploitative ways," eliciting a "What?" from both of them. "If either of your parents have problems not judging an innocent boy for events that happened literally on the day of his birth, then they can take it up with the Hokage." An idea came to me and I smirked. "Naruto's actually really friendly, you might like him. If you two want, I can probably get you in their game." I looked at Sakura and gave her a small, wry smile. "Plus, I think the two of you might be distantly related."

Ino sighed. "Why does everyone think that everyone with blonde hair is a Yamanaka?" she asked. "Not everyone with the same hair color are clan members!"

"I already knew that, Yamanaka Ino, heiress of the Yamanaka clan." I internally laughed at her face. "I think there are some redhead Yamanaka too, so explain that. Plus zero members of the current Uzumaki clan, despite three of them having chakra that suggests they inherited at least part of the bloodline, have the traditional Uzumaki red hair. No, I meant your pink-haired friend, who for some reason has a chakra signature that reminds me of members of the Senju and Uzumaki, plus with something else vaguely bloodliney that I haven't seen before. Probably foreshadowing for something."

Sakura blinked. "I'm part of the Uzumaki and Senju clans?" she asked.

I shrugged. "Could be close, could be distant. Uzumaki's an offshoot of Senju and I've only ever felt three confirmed Uzumaki, plus I've got nothing to compare that third, totally-something-that'll-come-up-later bloodline to, so that could also be something. Heck, it's so much of a jumble I wouldn't be surprised if you're from a third line descended from Otsutsuki Ashura that I somehow don't know about."

"A what?" Sakura asked.

I hummed. "The only thing about that that you really need to worry about is that you more likely than not have a longer lifespan and life energy than your average person. And if you wanna be a ninja, I suggest looking at medical ninjutsu. Tsunade the medical genius got to be so good from a combination of her advantage in yang release granted by having a Senju and an Uzumaki as grandparents and her skill with chakra control." I pointed at Tenten. "That's Tenten. Speak to her if you're curious. She really likes Tsunade."

Sakura blinked. "Thank you."

"It's cool," I said. "I'm gonna play now. You in?"

kukukuku~

"Hey, you!" a voice that I'm pretty sure was Sakura's mom said. I confirmed with a bit of chakra-sensing.

I turned around to see her. "Hello, Haruno-san."

She flinched. "How did you know my name?"

"I may not look it, but I'm skilled with chakra-sensing," I explained. "You share a... peculiarity in your chakra with your daughter." So my theory about that third thing in Sakura's chakra having to do with Ashura was probably shot, considering the fact that her mom had it and not the Uzumaki and Senju stuff.

"Right, well I don't like you telling my daughter to talk to talk to that Naruto boy."

I gave her a faux-confused stare. "What's wrong with him?"

As I expected, she blanched. "Well... he's..."

I decided to push a bit further. "Give me one good reason for all the abuse he's had at the hands of the village. One thing he's done that would change my mind. Burden of proof." After some more of her grasping for a good reason, I continued with a glare. "I know about the Kyuubi, by the way, and that's not a good reason." I made sure nobody was around before elaborating. "He's not the fuzzball, and if it weren't for him neither of us would be alive. Nor would your daughter, your husband, or just about anyone you've ever known and loved. Why then?"

"I... I-"

I snorted. "Save it. You're not gonna rationalize your way out of that moral quandary." I pulled out the used Inner Demon Calming Seal tag, then replaced the used-up sealing formula with a fresh one with my chakra alone. "If it really bothers you that your kid's friends with the jinchuriki, this thing can be used to suppress Fluffy's chakra, at least as long as... it... is still at least partially in Naruto." Calling Kurama it felt dirty. That's probably a good thing. "It's practically the best thing you can have when dealing with an out-of-control jin...chu..." I trailed off as it finally hit me just what I made.

"Fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-" I internally screamed.

She blinked. "It's okay. I don't need this. You're right."

"-uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-" I put the seal back away and said, "Yeah that's probably for the best... Hang on, I need to make a call real quick." I closed my eyes and reached out with my telepathy to Sarutobi's office.

"I already took care of it," Hiruzen told me immediately upon picking up. He was getting real nonchalant about having someone randomly use telepathy on him...

"-uuuuuuuu... huh?"

"Do you think I didn't realize how Akatsuki could use your seal?" he asked. "Rest assured, I informed the Kazekage of the gravity of it and why he should be careful with who he gives that information to. I also managed to put a genjutsu on it that should hopefully use Sasori's jutsu to induce memory loss. Theoretically, anyway. I'm not the best at genjutsu and I haven't seen Sasori's jutsu."

"Thanks," I mentally sighed. "I really dropped the ball there, huh?"

He mentally chuckled. "To be fair, you are still a child. You might still want to check in on Sasori."

"Will do. Bye." I opened my eyes back up. "Right, where were we?" I asked before realizing she was gone. "Meh, I'm sure everything's fine now."

kukukuku~

I sighed and licked my lips as I looked at the two balls of "sage" chakra in my hands. One was blue and one was red, but I was a little disappointed with the conversion time of both, even after multiple days of practice. Almost five minutes for a small amount of blue chakra and a little over twice that for an equal amount of red. I wasn't going to be able to use that in combat anytime soon...

Though I suppose it was better than my first time of about an hour for blue.

"I guess it still works for what I need it for," I sighed, then shrugged as I considered the blue chakra. With Kurama's and my calculations, it was doubtful that I'd need any more than a small amount of blue sage chakra, so I just traded a bit of chakra between my hands and reabsorbed the mostly blue chakra. It wasn't much of a boost and therefore carried none of the actual risks of sage mode, but I definitely felt a buzz from it that felt pretty nice. After that, I pulled out the little bug cage thing I got for the other component I needed for the jutsu I'd thought of.

That other thing being the bugs that I had. Well, any animal would do, but I wanted to start small and with something that I would hopefully not feel guilt over killing. Of course, that meant that I barely had any material to work with, just a couple of flies that I'd managed to convince Hinata to catch while I was meditating. I looked at them for a few minutes, took a few deep breaths, and said, "Sorry, little guys." I channeled the demonic sage chakra into the bugs, pouring all of the chakra evenly into them. The flies took on a look similar to a stage two chakra cloak but without the tail before beginning to compress and converge on each other.

The idea was to use the mutative properties of natural energy overload to change them into something I could use. Theoretically, I could have used less demon sage chakra than complete saturation, but I decided that with how easy it was to saturate the flies, I would just do that and observe as best I could to see if I could glean the proper form for that and not have to go through trial and error. After about a minute, they had fully compressed and fused together into a small red crystal with a light glow. I sighed when I saw that it was pebble-sized, about a centimeter in diameter. Sure, I wasn't expecting to pull an adequately-sized crystal out of a few flies, but I was hoping for a little more... I ran my fingers through my hair and picked up the pebble. "I guess it's fine for now..." I muttered, then reached down my shirt to stick it on my sternum, hidden away. A seal blossomed on my skin, collecting the very minute amount of demon sage chakra that the stone was generating. Until I had a bigger one, that was the best use for it I could think of.

kukukuku~

Imagine that one French narrator voice from Spongebob saying "One month later."

"So that's probably a good structure for the seal, right?" I asked, swinging my legs in the air. I was honestly surprised that the blood hadn't rushed to my head yet; I was sitting upside-down on the couch. Something something tree-walking, probably.

Ai shrugged. "Probably."

"Yeah, Shukaku's a slippery bastard, but that should about do it," Kurama agreed, curled up on another seat.

"Seal team meeting adjourned?" I asked, then got nods from the both of them. "Adjourned. Now that we're done, I remembered something I wanted to ask you, Ai."

"Shoot, kid."

I smirked and picked up a cookie from the plate on the table (using chakra threads, obviously). I took a bite from it, then after I swallowed said, "Your wife makes amazing cookies."

She blushed lightly. "Okay first, you skipped over the question. Second, she's only my girlfriend. We're not even engaged yet." I gave her a flat look and raised an eyebrow, causing her blush to deepen to the proper Uzumaki shade of red. "I'm still looking for a ring..." she muttered.

I nodded. "Good, you two feel like an old married couple already. Now, what do you know about the Adamantine Sealing Chains?"

Ai sighed deeply. "I still can't figure it out, even after I asked Kushina for advice a few years ago," she grumbled. "I'm still not entirely sure it's a Kekkei Genkai and not a Hijutsu..."

"Technically it's both," Kurama said. "If I recall correctly, it's technically a Hijutsu that uses the special chakra of the Uzumaki. You should be able to figure it out eventually if you know enough of how to use it, though."

Ai frowned. "How did you... Right... Hey, if you know so much about it from Kushina, do you have any tips to using it?"

Kurama shrugged. "I didn't really pay too much attention to it because I couldn't think of any way I could possibly use it to break out of the seal, and that was really all I was thinking of at the time... I know that you should be able to do it more easily if you manage it at least once, but I can't help you with that."

"I have an idea," I offered.

Kurama sighed, got up, and said, "Why do I feel like I'm not going to like this?"

"If it's part Kekkei Genkai, then you might find it easier to do it if you have more power behind you instead of harder."

"The math checks out, but I still don't like where this is going," Kurama complained. The red gem I'd made, now completed, dropped from under my shirt and into my hand. It had that one gem shape, sort of like a kunai but without the handle, though it was about half the scale of a kunai. "FUCK. NO." Kurama looked at me with with what probably should have been abject terror if he had the ability to make expressions. "Kouki, no!"

"Kouki yes," I countered flatly.

"Fuck this," Kurama said, then ran for the opened door. He stopped at the doorway, said "Kurama is out. Peace," and noped off as fast as his little legs could carry him.

"Should I be concerned by Kurama's reaction to that?" Ai asked.

I shrugged. "Unless you have objections to temporarily gaining phenomenal cosmic power, not particularly. I'll use my eyes to make sure I give you about as much as you can take without adverse effects, maybe a bit less. Kurama's just a wuss."

She nodded. "Cool. So what is that?"

"Demon gem." I originally called it a demon sage core, but that's a mouthful so I shortened it to demon gem. "A special stone of my own invention that generates red chakra and fuses it with natural energy on its own."

She gave me a huge grin. "Sounds fun."

I activated my eyes long enough to check how it would go down. Turns out it was a good idea, worked well enough, but unless we had more, then Ai'd really have to try to finesse it to get the chains out, and that's boring. "Unfortunately, though, it's probably gonna take like a month to do that, even with a head start. You've got a lot of chakra capacity."

"Dammit."

[chemicalmagecraft]

I Would Totally Kick Jiraiya’s Butt Chapter 17

Neji said something. I don't know what, I wasn't really paying attention. Yeah, yeah. I know, I should pay attention to whatever it was my cousin-slash-brother said, but I was preoccupied. In five days, Hanabi would be born, and probably also Neji's sibling that I had yet to know the name of because they weren't in canon on account of a uncle Hizashi's death. It was something that I should've been excited about, but... How do you tell your adopted cousin that his aunt, and possibly also his mother, has a really high chance of dying in a week or so? How do you tell your adopted father his wife will die? Your uncle? It was a lot easier telling Dad his brother would have died if I hadn't intervened because, well, he hadn't and I'd been all hopped up on righteous indignation at the time.

But there really wasn't anyone to blame this time. I mean, Hanabi and (insert whatever aunt Hikaru and uncle Hizashi were about to name their kid here) didn't ask to be born, and nobody really knew that Mom wasn't really able to withstand the stress of labor a second time until I decided to check what, exactly, killed her. But yeah. Turns out that Mom had some kind of issue with her heart that was just minor enough that nobody ever noticed anything wrong, but still serious enough that at her age, a second child was kinda dangerous. And it was genetic. And aunt Hikaru was an exact genetic duplicate of Mom, as most identical twins are. You can see why I might be a little worried here, right?

So yeah. I mean, I probably should've told someone about said heart defects instead of simply passive-aggressively hinting about it, but I was kinda... scared to talk about it? Soooo instead I silently checked through all the possible forms of making sure someone doesn't die that I had available to me. Sage-enriched red chakra is pretty freaking good for the heart, especially when you throw in a temporary copy of the Uzumaki bloodline's vitality. So now that it was a week or so away from Hanabi's birth, Chikage was off grinding her power enough that she'd be able to cover both at once. She could split herself in two, but at the cost of both copies having half the strength of the original. So both Chikages were training at once to raise their capacity and power in our secret base. Well, two Chikages with most of the power were training, and then a much lesser Chikage clone who was rocking out in preparation for YET ANOTHER upcoming deadline, this time the Uchiha incident. Well, just before the Uchiha incident. We all agreed that one of our favorite songs would be very apropos in the event that we had to confront Danzō, and she was trying to figure it out because I never actually played it before. I liked it a lot, though, so I knew it by heart.

Okay, maybe there were better uses of our time, but with the power level of that specific clone, making and then playing the guitar was a surprisingly good form of training.

Neji hit me lightly to get my attention, bringing me back to the present. "Were you paying attention?"

"Muh..." I muttered. "Not really."

He sighed. "I asked if you wanted to spar? You looked worried about something, so I figured I'd take your mind off of it."

I shrugged. "Sure, why not?"

kukukuku~

I nervously bounced my leg. Today was the day. My sister and cousin were going to be born within the hour and I wasn't entirely sure Mom and aunt Hikaru would be alright. Yes I could see the future, but my own actions, and consequently Chikage's, were what changed the outcomes I saw, meaning that until Chikage pulled it off and it wasn't the future anymore but actually set in stone, I could see both the future where they survived and the future where they didn't, meaning either outcome could happen.

After a while of tense waiting with my family in the hospital, I felt a burst of information. One of the two Chikages just depleted herself, and like a shadow clone that meant her memories returned to me. A few moments later, the other other me died as well. With its fate no longer in my hands, the future I wanted to see wouldn't branch out, and... success! I closed my eyes and breathed out a sigh of relief. Two healthy baby girls, born to two nearly-identical sets of parents. I practically melted in my chair, the tension I'd been feeling for weeks suddenly draining away. "Fate averted," I sighed, then yawned. When was the last time I slept? "Hey Neji..." I murmured, my eyes heavy. "Wake me up when..." I closed my eyes and let sleep take me.

kukukuku~

Someone was shaking me. "Kouki!" Neji shouted.

"Mmmh." I rubbed my eyes. "Why are you yelling?" I muttered.

"I've been trying to wake you up for ten minutes!"

I licked my lips. "What do you need me for?"

"Did you forget about how our sisters were just born!?"

I nodded blearily. Then I remembered three separate sets of memories of agonizing over the impending doom of loved ones. "Oh."

"Yeah. Uncle Hiashi told me to wake you up." It looked like he didn't notice the trauma. To be fair, I was pretty drowsy. He offered me his hand and pulled me up. I swayed on my feet a bit. "Are you okay?"

"I... haven't slept in... I dunno, probably a week?"

Neji sighed. "You're sleeping when we get back home."

"'Kay..." Neji dragged me by the hand to the right room. It looked like Mom and aunt Hikaru were in the same room. How coincidental. Neji led me to my mom. Or at least, I think she was my mom. Normally I was a bit better about that, but I was so tired that I was having issues sensing the difference between my mom's and aunt's chakra signatures. Really, having an aunt and uncle who are both almost identical to my parents is really annoying sometimes.

"Kouki," she said, smiling. I grinned back at her and looked at the bundle of cloth in her arms. "Do you want to hold your sister?" She handed her to me. I looked at the baby in the bundle as a sense of calm washed over me. To be honest she didn't look like much, as is the case with all newborns, but she was my sister! "Her name is Hanabi." She gurgled at me, and I gave her a small grin as I placed her back in Mom's arms.

"Do you want to see your cousin?" aunt Hikaru asked me. I calmly walked over to her and accepted the proffered child. She looked exactly like Hanabi, though to be fair that wasn't saying much at the moment. "Her name is Hanako." I snorted. That was probably planned. Hanako grabbed my finger, and something hit me. Hanako was an original character. Her parents were dead in canon, and the only reason they weren't in our... timeline(?) was that I showed up one day and sliced a guy's leg off. And just now, my aunt's life was almost traded for hers, had I not... taken it upon myself to stop her death while shying away from the simple option of telling my family about the impending doom. I really need to work on my social skills...

My eyes blurred, and I sniffed. I'd almost lost my mom. Again. I'd almost lost my aunt. Why couldn't I say anything? I quickly handed Hanako back to aunt Hikaru as the tears started streaming down my face. "Kouki?" she asked. I sobbed and bit my lip.

"Kouki, are you okay?" my dad asked me. I shook my head. "Do you want to talk about it?" I shook my head.

After a few moments of sitting down and breathing deeply, I managed to calm down enough to talk. "I'm fine now..." I muttered. "Need to sleep though. Got a headache."

"Fine, but we will talk about this later." I nodded.

kukukuku~

I'm sure you guys would prefer not to hear about how I told my dad talked to me about that whole debacle. Suffice to say, though, there was some crying and on my part and a few stern and then reassuring words on his.

On a completely unrelated note, Hanabi and Hanako were born like a few days before the first day of our second year of school. Yaaaaaaaay.

"I don't wanna go to school!" Naruto griped. He and Tenten met up with Hinata, Neji, and I while we were walking to school.

"Too bad!" Tenten, who was carrying him like a sack of potatoes, shouted.

"I'm sure it won't be too bad, Naruto-kun," Hinata offered. "If you want, you can... sit next to me?" Naruto was still squirming around in Tenten's grasp and it didn't look like he noticed her.

I heard a laugh. "Is Naruto being difficult?" Ino asked. She and Sakura walked up to us. "Isn't he heavy, Tenten?"

Tenten blushed. "I'm-" she shouted, then sighed. "I can hold him."

Ino shrugged. "Suit yourself. I'm pretty someone else here can carry him if you need a break, though. Not me, but..."

"I-Ino..." Sakura muttered.

"I was thinking more like Neji or Kouki, Sakura-chan," Ino assured her.

"I can carry him!" Tenten shouted.

We chatted all the way to school.

kukukuku~

Chikage

I decided to shadow Hinata's class for the first few days, I guess mostly out of boredom and curiosity than anything else. Naruto was a lot of fun to watch simply from being an idiot, plus this timeline Iruka got to yell at Naruto because his mom was a teacher. It didn't help, but it was funny.

The only really interesting event was, once again, the sparring matches. To be honest, I was a little excited to see how this would go. In canon, Sasuke wrecked Naruto. But now, Naruto was the son of not only a ninja schoolteacher but also a special jōnin, both of whom taught him some of what they knew. And then I made him train a bit. So odds were Naruto would at least give Sasuke a run for his money. "Start!" Iruka commanded. Naruto charged at Sasuke almost immediately, but instead of getting immediately knocked over he caught Sasuke with a feint. Then he punched him in the face. Naruto did eventually lose, but Sasuke looked genuinely worried about Naruto's ability to fight at points. After the match, Sasuke begrudgingly acknowledged the fact that Naruto was a bit of a tough opponent instead of just being a little jerk.

Next up on the list of noteworthy fights, Hinata versus some kid. Some kid got beat up rather easily, which made me proud. Next, Sakura versus Kiba. I shifted my position a bit to get a better view, a smirk on my nonexistent face.

Kiba grinned and cracked his knuckles. "Sorry, Sakura, but it looks like you're doomed." Sakura whimpered, but clenched her fists. Kiba shrugged. "It's not your fault, of course. It's not like a girl like you could beat up me. Tell you what, I'll give you the first shot." He just stood there with a stupid grin on his face.

Sakura hesitated for a moment and took a deep breath. Then, with a determined look on her face, she cocked back her fist, shouted "Shannarō!" and punched him in the gut with about one fourth of her full strength. Kiba was sent flying.

"I... guess... Sakura wins?" Iruka said after a few moments of stunned silence. Sakura blushed as she bashfully returned to where she was sitting and Iruka made sure Kiba was alright. Everyone crowded Sakura, asking her how she did that and calling her awesome. It looked like she was starting to enjoy the attention, at least from the smile she had. I hoped it wouldn't go to her head, though...

kukukuku~

I reclined on the sofa in my secret base's living room and opened up my compact. I could't see how our timeline would go down as far as the Uchiha Massacre yet, but from what I could see that still hadn't stopped being a thing. Foundation plants riling up the Uchiha police force, spreading gossip among the civilian population, and even outright killing people on both sides and framing the others for it pretty much assured that. Even though Chikage was able to pick them off from and into the shadows when nobody was looking with her new Claimed by the Shadows Jutsu (which allowed her to seal objects and even people in her shadow body), they just seemed to keep coming! And of course, while we were able to at least legally detain the insurgents, we couldn't interrogate them, even after I broke their seals. The brainwashing was strong with those guys, and even Yamanaka Inoichi couldn't break their psychic defenses. I guess they were the most prepared for that, having access to Yamanaka of their own...

The portal to the living room opened, and a moment later the Hokage stepped in. "Hokage," I said, then stylishly shut my compact. "Should I offer you something to drink?"

He grunted. "Kouki. What do you have?" I rolled off the couch and flew over to the minifridge.

"Right, let's see..." I opened the fridge and rifled through its contents. "I've got water, milk, chocolate milk, soda, juice, aaaand that's about it on the drinks. I could boil you some water but I don't have tea leaves or anything. Just hot chocolate."

"Is that all you have?"

"Okay in my defense, I don't like tea. And if you mean all I have period, because I recognize that judgy tone of voice, the big fridge over there contains actual food." I pointed to it. "And yes, at the request of my parents that includes veggies. So what do you want?"

"I'll take a water, then." I grabbed a bottle of water for him and a bottle of chocolate milk for me, then went back to my couch. Sarutobi had taken a chair on the opposite side of the table from my couch. I tossed him the water, sat down, and took a sip of my milk.

"So..."

"It's not your fault, you know."

I shrugged. "It'd have happened without me, and I did manage to take out some Foundation stooges. Speaking of which..." I tossed three sleeved cards at him. The good thing about shuriken training was that I could also throw cards at people. "Today's catch."

He examined the three cards, though he made sure not to take them out of the opaque sleeves. "They're getting more active." The cards, by the way, had special seals in them that let me dump things Chikage caught, then remove the Chikage part of the shadows without destabilizing the jutsu. The sleeves kept them in shadow, which was needed to have the jutsu stay once Chikage left.

"I suspect at least some of them are trying to investigate the disappearances." I chuckled. "Danzō's whole 'no individuality' thing is actually biting him in that regard. Most of the Foundation that I've spirited away are nobodies, right?" He nodded. "So he can't use them against us without revealing his entire organization and incriminating himself. And the others have already gone 'missing,' thanks to him. That's the problem with having an organization in the shadows. You're likely to get eaten by a grue."

"Right, well... Are you okay?"

"What do you mean?"

"You've been trying to stop this for over a year now, and from the way things are going it looks like the massacre will still happen."

I shrugged. "This might sound bad, but... well, I've gotten over it? It's looking more and more like we can't prevent the Uchiha massacre no matter what. I mean, I haven't quite given up yet, but if we can't save Shisui then I'll hopefully be fine with just making the massacre not as bad as it could be."

"I see. I suppose your maturity is natural considering your ability to see the future."

I licked my lips. "And the fact that I have, like, seventy-two hour days."

"That too."

I got up and clapped my hands. "Right, unless you have anything else you need me for, I have to go work on homework."

"Congratulations again on getting a younger sister."

"Thanks."

[chemicalmagecraft]

I Would Totally Kick Jiraiya’s Butt Chapter 12

A/N: Just in case you didn't read the A/N from the last chapter, anytime any version of Kouki that isn't Kouki Prime has the spotlight, like the next scene, it will be noted before the scene begins to clarify.

kukukuku~

Chikage

I axe kicked a giant rock in half. That was fun. I also found floating around not with demon sage cores but with glittery fairy wings made from demon sage chakra to be enjoyable as well. Because I was pure chakra, I was actually a lot better at handling natural energy than weak, inferior carbon-based lifeforms and could absorb more without any kind of negative effects. Sure, there was some instability if I went too high, but it was nowhere near as bad as the side effects on a human. "Dang," Kouki said from where he was sitting on another rock. I turned to face m-him. "So I guess you're just default a lot stronger than me. Makes sense, you're basically a mini bijū." I could tell through our connection that he was a little off about how he couldn't access the red chakra that was now me, but that was mostly overshadowed by his marvel over the potential of the jutsu. He fidgeted a bit, causing his arm to mutate slightly, red scales instead of the frog limbs that comes from using toad oil as a medium. "Dangit." The demon sage cores orbiting him sucked all of the natural energy out of him, setting him back to square one.

I grinned and "sat" on the air in front of him. "You having trouble, bro?" Kouki had decided that with the extra control granted to him whenever we were separate, combined with the fact that he couldn't fall back on red chakra without me, that he should finally learn how to make sage chakra the right way.

He glared at me. "You know as well as I do that this isn't easy to do properly."

I grinned and started telekinetically messing with a leaf using my sage aura. "Do I really?" I spontaneously combusted it.

"Haha." He closed his eyes and stuck his tongue out in concentration.

"Right," I said. "Imma go see what else I can do." I melted into the ground, traveling through the shadows of the grass. It turned out that, while I couldn't move fast at all when projecting myself as a shadow that didn't already exist, whenever I entered a real shadow, I could move... well, I didn't know how fast exactly because I hadn't gotten around to figuring out how to calculate that, but at the very least it was fast enough that it looked like teleportation even when Kouki pulled a little trick with the Shōraigan to slow down the "footage." 

So yeah, I got to the the trees pretty dang fast. I flew out of the shadows in my bijū form, which was really just me as a fox with fur the color of my clothes with the exception of a "mane" the same color as my hair, and sliced a tree in half with my claws. I opened my mouth, compressing red and blue chakra in a way that just felt... right. Even with sage mode it was small and a little draining, but it was still a bijū dama. I launched it at a tree, obliterating it into smoking mulch. I sighed at the relatively small AOE, but then grinned about the fact that I just made a bijū dama. Unfortunately, my victory was cut short by Kouki calling for me to come back through our telepathic link. That meant it was time for our experiment, which he wanted to be whole for just in case something went wrong. I shrugged. "Guess it's for the best," I thought to myself. "Was probably going to just throw around dama 'til I ran out of chakra." I melted into the shadows and zipped off to Kouki.

kukukuku~

I sighed as I felt Chikage returning to me. It was reassuring to have my red chakra back, even if I didn't really use it that much. Still, I suppose I did have the sage cores to fall back on, on account of how my telepathy to other sources of my own red chakra was uninterrupted. I crossed my arms behind my back and turned around, my eyes closed. "Finally," I said. "A project months in the making, about to be fulfilled. I'm assuming you're here to watch, eh, Tenko?"

Ai laughed. "That's a lot less intimidating if we know you can sense us, kid." I sighed and opened my eyes. "And wasn't it only one month?"

I shrugged. "Felt like more. Might just have been from that one part where they read my journal..." I held my hands out in front of me and the giant scroll I'd taken to sealing as much DSC into as possible once I'd filled the demon sage seal on my body, the Scroll of the Demon Sage, appeared floating in front of me through a summoning instead of a sealing on account of how its power meant I couldn't seal it in my inventory scrolls and actually keep anything else in it as well. "This is it. What might be the second most powerful thing in Konoha." The scroll unfurled slightly, revealing a seal tag that as of then contained most of its power. Uzumaki are really good at handling stupid levels of energy, okay? At least I'd also managed to complete my first mini bijū dama paper bomb... "Are you ready to receive this power?" I asked Ai.

"Is this really necessary?" Tenko asked, worried.

"No," Ai and I both said at the same time.

"But really, what's the point of amassing an insane amount of dangerously powerful chakra if you don't infuse as much as possible into the best known person for taking in stupid amounts of chakra just to see what happens?" I elaborated.

Ai nodded and gingerly took the demon sage seal tag from its place in the scroll. "Right, so I'm guessing you have somewhere you want me to stand?"

I slung the scroll on my back and pointed over to an area I'd prepared in advance. "There. I've already set up four cores with orders to use the Four Violet Flames Formation should anything go wrong." A nice thing about having multiple potent sources of chakra at my total command, I'd found, was the fact that I could use collaboration nin- or genjutsu without actually having to collaborate with anyone.

Tenko sighed. "That's not reassuring."

Before Tenko could actually object, Ai slapped the tag on her chest. "Toolatealreadyusedit!" She quickly shouted. The red lines of the seal tag began to glow orangey-gold, then started to spread to cover her entire body in a thick chakra cloak. She laughed maniacally, floating into the air as nine tail-like chains made of the same chakra sprouted from her backside. The chains spread to curl around the entire training ground, a red, domed barrier coming into existence at the edges. I don't know if she meant to or not, but her barrier materialized just before the shinobi that I'd had posted nearby via Sandaime just in case of a worst-case scenario, cutting them off.

"Kouki-kun, what did you do to my wife?" Tenko asked worriedly.

I grinned. "'Wife?' So did either of you finally pop the question?"

She flinched, then blushed. "I... haven't yet... I do have a ring, though."

I shrugged. "Hope for the best with you two. And by the way, I'm sure it'll go over fine." Ai's maniacal laughter grew louder, causing me to turn my attention back to her. She put her hands in front of her, as if she was holding an invisible ball. Oh. "A thought occurs to me," I said, making sure to keep my voice calm.

"That doesn't sound good..." As if on cue, Ai started to slowly form a disconcertingly familiar-looking chakra ball in between her hands. In addition to that, countless streaks of energy began to slowly form in the air, gravitating to the epicenter. That epicenter being a modified bijū dama.

"So there was this one clan with a Kekkei Genkai that allowed them to passively accumulate natural energy and then use that to mutate themselves. Because they didn't work for it, though, the natural energy caused them to become uncontrollable, entering homicidal rages. Because of that, they were almost completely wiped out." At that point, I started to feel a slight tug on my chakra, though I was able to resist it.

"So what you're saying is..."

"She's drunk on power, yeah. Whoops."

"How, exactly, did you not notice that'd happen with your eyes?"

"Figured out a way to make sure that nothing bad enough I can't fix it will happen while still not spoiling me on what happens. Use exclusively that for my experiments now," I explained. I noticed a bit of chakra chain straying near me and had an idea. "Hang on, let me fix this." I tried to grab the chain with a chakra thread, but it was just sucked in, so I aborted almost immediately and just lunged at it. It was starting to get to the point where I needed to have my sage cores actively cling to me to make sure they weren't sucked in. That would be bad. Thankfully, I managed to grab the chain and my theory was right. 

Just like how Kurama still held some link to my red chakra and Kaguya still had some link to his chakra, I could feel my connection to the chakra in the modified Adamantine Sealing Chain. I grabbed it with both hands, wrapped one side around my arm, then tugged the two sides in opposite directions. With a bit of willpower applied, one link snapped and got spaghettified by the still-growing ball of impending doom, leaving me with a really long chain of chakra that I could control wrapped around my arm. "Right, let's hope this works or Konoha probably becomes partially made of smoking crater," I said, glad that I'd picked one of the farthest training grounds from Konoha proper, then pulled a leaf out of Ai's new book and sucked the chain into my body, making sure to strip enough natural energy off of it that I didn't become a glittery garden statue. "Oooh," I grunted, then sucked in a breath. I noticed that with one chain down, the chakra-sucking had slowed back down, though I knew it was going to pick back up if I didn't do anything.

"Are you okay?" Tenko asked.

"Yeah, just a bit of a rush," I said. "Sorry. Well, here goes..." I concentrated on the chakra that I'd absorbed. After a few seconds, I was able to form two purple chains of chakra that emerged from my sleeves. I drew on the power I'd stolen from Ai to lengthen the chains significantly, taking the shortest possible paths I could to intersect her chains with my own. Once I'd gotten all of her chains, I tugged on the chakra in them, converting Ai's golden chains to my purple chains. The effect cascaded, eating away at all of her chains until her chains were fully turned, making the barrier fall and stopping the suction effect fully. I jerked my arm, causing nine chains to sprout from Ai's arms and wrap around the bijū dama. I started retracting the chains back into my body, removing almost every last trace of demon sage chakra from Ai's body. Thankfully, she didn't fall on her face, as she was able to recover almost immediately and shoot some now non-glowing yellow chains into the ground and lower herself down gently.

"I have no idea what just happened, but I'm assuming it worked because I can make chains out of my chakra now," she said.

I nodded, concentrating on the ball of dangerously explosive chakra I was slowly reeling in. "Tenko, I need you to take the scroll off of my back and open it up a bit." She did as I asked, holding the scroll up so I could easily access it. I slowly put my hands on the scroll, converting the chain into the seal. The chain, no longer attached to my body, continued to reel in the demon sage chakra. As it did that, I placed my hand on the chain, removing the impurities the chakra gained from being in Ai's system. I greedily absorbed those bits of chakra. As I suspected, my body accepted it as readily as it did Shukaku's chakra.

"What exactly happened there?" one of the shinobi asked now that they'd arrived.

"Science," I answered.

"What were we even supposed to do about that?"

I shrugged. "Sorry, I didn't expect that to happen. I just figured Ai wouldn't have very good control of her chains at first. Turns out that that much sage chakra means going crazy, though."

"So I'm guessing I shouldn't use that seal for a super mode?" Ai asked after walking over to us. I swiped the empty tag that still stuck to her.

"No, if I segment it to lower the dosage, then it both becomes multi-use and lets you keep your sanity, at the tradeoff of power, obviously. Just make sure to use it for emergencies only. And while we're at it, I should be able to eventually teach you how to enter proper sage mode, which you could do any time with just a few minutes to charge up." I looked back up to survey the mostly concerned, but with one happy, faces looking at me. "I'd say that this little experiment has been a success."

kukukuku~

Yeah, I got chewed out by my dad. In hindsight, though, I really couldn't blame him. Thankfully, I was able to get off with just a tongue-lashing and promising to make absolutely sure to test out anything that could theoretically have a large blast radius by making a sage core take it far away from Konoha and remote detonate it or just not do it at all. To be honest, though, I was bracing myself for a grounding, so I was actually fine with that. And he even organized a lesson on nature transformation for me. After giving me another lecture, this time on not doing things that could potentially destroy my hands or other parts of my body unless absolutely necessary. 

And so there I was, leaning on the wall of the Hyūga compound courtyard. I'd made sure that there was a chain of shadows that Chikage could use to get away from me because I knew Kakashi was going to use that one chakra paper thing on me and I didn't want to have any interference from her/my power, yet still have her accesible once we started the lesson in earnest. "Sup," I said when Kakashi arrived.

"So you want to learn how to use nature transformation?" he asked.

I shrugged and licked my lips. "I already know how to use wind, but I'd like to learn at least the basics of the others."

"Right, learning it now if you have the chakra for it is actually probably a good idea." He pulled out a piece of paper. "I doubt you can do much with it at the moment, but at the very least, you'll be able to practice until you're ready for the big stuff." He used the paper, crinkling it. "This paper is made to test one's elemental affinity. Channel a light amount of chakra onto it and it'll react in different ways depending on what your primary affinity is. Mine's lightning, so the paper became wrinkled." He gave me a second piece of paper. "You try."

I complied, channeling a bit of my chakra into the paper. "Well what a coincidence," I said, referring to the fact that my paper was now as crumpled as his was. "We have the same element, don't we?"

"Yes, that's what that means. I suppose we'll start with the lightning exercises, then?"

I called Chikage back, and she reentered me without Kakashi even seeming to notice. For whatever reason, her chakra signature was muted whenever she was inside a shadow, and she could easily suppress her signature even more, so the only way he would've noticed was when we joined or if his Sharingan was out. It would've been the perfect ability for stealth if not for the fact that she couldn't bring anything with her, and I was already trying to think of ways around that one little weakness. Well, there was also the little snag of how she needed shadows, but really, where aren't there shadows?

"Let's start this lightshow, then," I said with a smile.

kukukuku~

And now for something completely different.

A rabbit bounded across a field near End Valley. It did not know what its destination was, just that something was... calling to it. It stopped by the roots of a great tree and began to sniff at the ground. Whatever it was looking for, it was there. It found it after a few minutes of searching. A small red stone, barely a flake, that glowed with some unearthly light. Now hat it could see it, the rabbit's every instinct screamed to get away, that this stone was a predator, but it couldn't stop itself. Its body wasn't its own anymore. The now-terrified rabbit tried to fight back with all its might as its head came closer to the gem, but to no avail. The stone already had a hold over it, it just needed to touch it and it would be over. A spectre of death seemed to emerge from the jewel of death, ready to embrace the rabbit. When the rabbit's head was close enough, the stone lifted from the ground and adhered to its forehead. The rabbit screamed as a foreign presence entered its body, burning away its very soul to make room for something else.

I grinned a rabbitty grin and hopped around a bit, testing out my new rabbit body. It was a shame that I could only gain a proper body by stealing it from a living creature, but what can you do? I sniffed at the ground with my new nose. The rabbit's sense of smell was different from my original's, but when I took over the rabbit's brain I gained complete access to all its memories, so I was able to adjust soon enough. Plus I noticed that I could understand rabbits now. I sent a telepathic message back to Kouki and Chikage.

"You find a body?" they asked.

"Yup. Rabbit. Surprisingly good chakra affinity, despite being wild," I replied.

"Cool. Right, you should probably act natural for at least a month, to build up plausible deniability." they instructed. "Then you can start doing supernatural stuff. Cannibalize the body and continue your mission."

I sent a scoff through our link. "I know what to do, I have all your memories."

"Stop being so sarcastic, you're not supposed to be me."

"Right."

"By the way, did you pick out a name?"

I gave a small rabbit grin. "Of course. If my first body after my 'resurrection' is to be that of a rabbit's, then why shouldn't my name be Usagi?"

"Cool. You'd better give at least one 'name of the moon' speech though."

"Certainly. I would never pass up such an opportunity." It may have purely been within my mind, but I was already preparing my cover by practicing my new mannerisms, at the very least those dealing with how I spoke.

"Right, I'ma get back to this stupid leaf, you go do your rabbit thing. Rabbit." I hopped around a bit, searching for some food. A deep cover assignment. It was going to be marvelous.

kukukuku~

I growled as I passed my chakra through the leaf. No matter what I did, it just wasn't getting wet!

"Did you try turning it off and turning it back on again?" Chikage asked me as she floated over me.

I rolled my eyes, cut off the flow, then let my chakra flow over the leaf like water once more. "Don't think that helped."

"Dude it's been a day," she said. "You're not Naruto, you don't have an army of clones to poorly manage yet still somehow get your thing done. Just take a deep breath, accept that this is going to take some time, and do the other three exercises that you actually did make some headway in. You don't have Tsunade-levels of control when we're unfused yet."

I stared at her for a second. "How are you taking this better than me?" I asked.

"I mean, two heads are better than one. I have the perspective that you're being a lil dummy."

I stopped trying to wet the leaf and started trying to set it aflame instead. Because I already had experience doing it with and as Chikage, it started to smoke after a few seconds. I removed my thumb, seeing a smoldering thumbprint on it. Chikage picked it up, then it just disintegrated. "Showoff."

[chemicalmagecraft]

I Would Totally Kick Jiraiya’s Butt Chapter 7

I groaned and yawned as I woke up with a fuzzy head. I started rubbing my eyes as I sat up a bit.

Then I went back down and almost fell asleep. I didn't actually fall asleep, however, because of a knock on my door. "In a minute," I managed to get out, then rolled off the bed. I eventually managed to get up and open the door to the sight of a woman of the main branch family, if I remembered right. "Sleepy," I blearily muttered as an excuse. I probably had bedhead, which added to the image.

She chuckled. "So this is why you don't let anyone in your room in the morning hours," she said jokingly.

I grunted, licked my lips, then said, "I must look like a little death, huh?" I snapped my fingers at my vanity and my brush and comb flew over thanks to the wind attribute in Kurama's chakra, then started un-messing my hair. She just stared at me incredulously. "So what do yo- ah!" I was interrupted by the brush trying to force through a particularly bad knot. They stopped long enough for me to sort out the knot, then continued. "I told you two to stop if that happens," I chided. I gave the woman whose name I couldn't remember at the moment a small, polite smile and explained, "A jutsu that I made that animates things. I unfortunately don't have enough enough chakra to use anything practical in a fight yet, but I can use it for laziness." I shrugged. "Sure, I have to charge them up every so often or they'll die, but they're pretty nice. So what do you need from me?"

"...Hiashi-sama asked me to give you this, and not to look inside it," she said as she handed me a messenger bag. I grunted a "thanks" and opened it to see a couple of scrolls, a large book, and a file. "If I might ask, what exactly is in that?"

"Top-secret fuinjutsu stuff," I muttered as I opened the file to see medical records and a picture of a small boy with red hair and shadows around his eyes. "If anyone asks, you never saw this. Talk to Father if you really want to know, but just know it comes from Hokage-sama." I put the file back and took the book out. I raised my eyebrows when I realized that it looked like a primer on the theory of poison. "Thanks... uh..." I thought for a moment. "Sorry, I should know this, I'm still a little asleep... Yuri-san?"

"It's actually Yuriko, Kouki-kun," she politely corrected. "My mothers had a laugh at that one..." I thought about asking about that, then decided that that'd be prying a bit and just gave a small, flat, "Ha." She smiled and said, "I'm going to go now. Good luck with your project."

I sat down at my desk after she left and pulled out all of the scrolls and the file. I sorted through the scrolls, putting the jutsu scrolls back in the bag. When I was done I looked through the final scroll, which was about Gaara's seal. I frowned and ran my fingers through my hair when I was done. "This doesn't make any sense..." I muttered. "Either I'm missing something or Gaara really shouldn't be having as many problems as he has... Maybe it's something to do with Shukaku in particular?" 

I opened the file on Gaara back up to see what I could gleam from that. "Nothing too useful, it turns out..." I sighed. I might have been able to do something with the stuff about his chakra and the symptoms that they knew for sure were from Shukaku, but I'd probably need to consult Kurama first, and he was... actually it was really surprising, but he was playing with Hinata, so I couldn't talk to him. Then I noticed a small sealing tag included with the papers. I picked it up and immediately recognized it as a used Inner Demon Calming Seal. A sticky note on it said that the Kazekage had Gaara use one for practice so I'd have a baseline, which was really good on his part. Would have to tell him he done good.

I took it, pulled out a blank scroll, put the tag on the scroll, and made a half ram seal. Words flowed out of the seal and onto the scroll, forming the statistics on Gaara. I nodded. It looked like the scan function was working perfectly, and the data I got from it was pretty good. I already had the beginnings of an idea just from that, though I decided I should probably consult Kurama before actually trying to work on it as a precaution. 

When I was done, I made a half dragon seal and pulled the tag from the scroll. The words peeled off with the scroll, and as I flipped the tag around and put it down, the words reconstituted into a sort of spherical barrier that allowed a ball of red chakra to emerge from the seal without dispersing into the air. I frowned as I saw the size of it. "The regulator's off..." The idea was that the seal would take only a little bit extra of Shukaku's chakra from what it was using to suppress Shukaku for me to play with, but there was a lot more than what I was expecting. "Or maybe it's just that Shukaku wasn't trying to break free or fighting at all," I realized with a shrug. "Meh." I made another half ram seal with my left hand and an empty sealing circle formed on it. I shoved my hand into the containment barrier and the red chakra flowed into the seal, forming a slash in the middle, the kanji for one.

kukukuku~

I knocked on the door. Thankfully, the seal on my hand had disappeared after it settled down like Naruto's. That would've been hard to hide if it hadn't... Because I could feel that nobody was around, I revealed the seal for a bit to inspect it while I waited for someone to open the door. When I felt Tenko about to open the door, I let it fade again and shoved my hands into my pockets. "Hey, Uzumaki-san," I said with a small smile.

"Kouki-kun," she greeted back. "Are you here to see Naruto-kun?" I nodded and she let me inside. The house was nice. It wasn't nearly as big as the Hyūga compound, for obvious reasons, but it was pretty big for a family of four. Probably because of the prestige of the Uzumaki clan, even if said clan was only the four members.

"How's he settling in?" I asked.

"Kouki!" Naruto shouted as he waved enthusiastically at me, then went back to climbing on Ai.

"Hey, kid," Ai greeted as Naruto managed to get to and start pushing on her face. "A little help, honey? Please?" Tenko giggled and picked Naruto up off of Ai, earning a peck on the cheek as thanks. "Thanks, sweetie."

I chuckled. "So he's settling in nice, then?" I inferred, then beckoned for Naruto. "C'mere, Naruto. I wanna tell you something."

Tenko put him down, but he frowned and didn't come to me. "Why do you have that weird feeling that all the mean people have, Kouki-kun?" he asked me.

I internally sighed and, not for the first time, was glad that my general lack of major emoting most of the time kept my annoyance from really showing. Naruto had noted feeling the malice of others recently, which was from my giving Kurama his yin power back. Still, though, it shouldn't have been strong enough to passively sense what little malice I could generate towards him... I extended my (unfortunately still weak passively) malice sense towards him, or rather his seal, and felt a sort of smug malice coming from Kurama, which made more sense. I sent him a little message of "you suck" and told Naruto, "I dunno, but are you gonna ignore my advice?" He shrugged and walked over to me, allowing me to give him a light chop to the head. On the plus side, I was conditioning him to equate malice directed at him with pain, hopefully.

"Hey!" he complained.

"Don't throw away Gudō Dama, stupid," I chided.

"I don't even know what that is!"

"Powerful but finicky jutsu that you might get in the future if events line up, and in my visions you stupidly hamstrung your ability to use two fifths of it like an hour after getting it by throwing two of them into a Chibaku Tensei in another space-time. Don't do that for real."

"What happened to not punishing people for things they haven't done yet?"

I shrugged. "That was for having the potential stupid to throw away Gudō Dama. You don't even want to know what I'll do if I learn you do it without a good enough reason." Then, I heard the frantic footsteps of a young girl and turned around to see Tenten staring at me with an elated expression. "'Sup," I said.

"Naruto-kun said that you have healing powers!" Tenten said.

"Yeah, but not the kind just anyone can use, if that's what you're asking." Her face fell. "But if it's healing jutsu you want to learn, then you should know that you have a bit of an advantage with yang release, which you need for medical release."

"Yes!" she shouted and threw her hands in the air. "I wanna be like Tsunade, she's this really cool kunoichi who's a really good healer!"

Ai pouted. "I'm a cool kunoichi too... And I have weapons... It's because I'm only a special jōnin, isn't it?"

I nodded. "Tsunade's got some bad habits that I'm pretty sure your moms would like very much if you never pick up," they both agreed emphatically, "and you don't need to be a medic to be cool, but if you really, really wanna know how to heal people, then..." I took my hand out of my pocket, and a leaf appeared on it. "The other half of the equation is chakra control, so get cracking." I used a chakra thread to put it in her hands. "Well, there's knowledge needed too, but the biggest parts are yang release and chakra control."

"How did you do that?" Ai asked me, amazed.

I pulled down my sleeve, revealing a wristband with a storage seal on it. Really, why don't more people do that? It's awesome and useful. "I made a waterproof storage seal wristband with variable output, which is a lot more practical than you'd think if you do it right, by the way," I explained.

Ai gave me an eager look that made me feel like stars should have appeared in her eyes, and said, "Teach me your ways, master."

"Hey, I don't actually know how this leaf helps me with chakra control," Tenten complained.

"Naruto," I ordered. He took my meaning immediately and went over to help his new sister with her leaf. I turned back to Ai and said, "Right, so the first thing you need to know is that you can put seals on fabric surprisingly easily..."

kukukuku~

My eyes closed and my body absolutely still as I sat cross-legged under the shade of the tree, I pondered what Kurama and I had talked about in regards to Gaara's seal. "If I use it like that, the side-effects would actually be beneficial," I thought to myself as I formulated the beginnings of a plan. My thoughts shifted, however, when I finally managed to begin to feel the ebb and flow of the energy of the world around me after what felt like an hour of meditation. Without my eye's secondary powers, I doubted that I would've been able to stop fidgeting for that long... Thankfully, the fact that I wasn't using toad oil to feel the natural energy meant that I didn't immediately start drawing on it, because at my chakra level, that would've probably been bad. Without even opening my eyes, which I wasn't even sure I could do without breaking my tenuous natural energy sensing, I focused on the blue chakra in my hand. 

My idea was to combine the natural energy outside of my body until I felt I could do proper sage mode so as to circumvent the danger of using sage chakra. Kurama laughed that idea off at first when I'd told him, saying that there was no way I'd be able to add the natural energy to already-completed chakra until I'd actually managed to get the feel of sage chakra. I then told him that one of my failed attempts at yin-yang release involved me somehow managing to split my chakra back into its constituent parts and then recombining them outside of my body, which made him shut up. I thought back to when I managed to do it, then tried to recreate the feat. As is my curse, actually trying to do it somehow made it exponentially more difficult, though I just barely managed to puzzle it out. After that, I started working on recombining it, but with some extra natural energy. I almost got it... almost... almost...

"Hey, you!" I lost it. I sighed, looked over the two chakra signatures that approached me, one of which had a suspiciously familiar signature to it that I honestly shouldn't have been too shocked about given who was writing the story, and opened my eyes to see a blonde girl about my age in front of me with a shy-looking pink-haired girl behind her.

"I-Ino-chan, you don't have to..." Oh, right. Sakura was really shy when she was a little kid.

I licked my lips. "Nah, it's okay. I was almost done anyway... Whaddya want?"

"Why were you talking to that one kid earlier," Ino asked. She was referring to how Naruto was talking to me while I was meditating a bit earlier before going to play ninja with Tenten, Hinata, and Neji. "Our parents keep telling us not to talk to him."

I gave her my "I'm silently judging you" glare and said, "If anyone ever spent so much as two seconds getting to know Naruto they'd know he isn't a demon that has become quite jaded with most of humanity on account of their exploitative ways," eliciting a "What?" from both of them. "If either of your parents have problems not judging an innocent boy for events that happened literally on the day of his birth, then they can take it up with the Hokage." An idea came to me and I smirked. "Naruto's actually really friendly, you might like him. If you two want, I can probably get you in their game." I looked at Sakura and gave her a small, wry smile. "Plus, I think the two of you might be family."

Ino sighed. "Why does everyone think that everyone with blonde hair is a Yamanaka?" she asked. "Not everyone with the same hair color are clan members!"

"I already knew that, Yamanaka Ino, heiress of the Yamanaka clan." I internally laughed at her face. "I believe there are some redhead Yamanaka, so explain that. Plus zero members of the current Uzumaki clan, despite three of them having chakra that suggests they inherited at least part of the bloodline, have the traditional Uzumaki red hair. No, I meant your pink-haired friend, who for some reason has a chakra signature that reminds me of members of the Senju and Uzumaki, plus with something else vaguely bloodliney that I haven't seen before. Probably foreshadowing for something."

Sakura blinked. "I'm part of the Uzumaki and Senju clans?" she asked.

I shrugged. "Could be close, could be distant. Uzumaki's an offshoot of Senju and I've only ever felt three confirmed Uzumaki, plus I've got nothing to compare that third, totally-something-that'll-come-up-later bloodline to, so that could also be something. Heck, it's so much of a jumble I wouldn't be surprised if you're from a third line descended from Ōtsutsuki Ashura that I somehow don't know about."

"A what?" Sakura asked.

I hummed. "The only thing about that that you really need to worry about is that you more likely than not have a longer lifespan and life energy than your average person. And if you wanna be a ninja, I suggest looking at medical ninjutsu. Tsunade the medical genius got to be so good from a combination of her advantage in yang release granted by having a Senju and an Uzumaki as grandparents and her skill with chakra control." I pointed at Tenten. "That's Tenten. Speak to her if you're curious. She really likes Tsunade."

Sakura blinked. "Thank you."

"It's cool," I said. "I'm gonna play now. You in?"

kukukuku~

"Hey, you!" a voice that I'm pretty sure was Sakura's mom said. I confirmed with a bit of chakra-sensing.

I turned around to see her. "Hello, Haruno-san."

She fliched. "How did you know my name?"

"I may not look it, but I'm skilled with chakra-sensing," I explained. "You share a... peculiarity in your chakra with your daughter." So my theory about that third thing in Sakura's chakra having to do with Ashura was probably shot, considering the fact that her mom had it and not the Uzumaki and Senju stuff.

"Right, well I don't like you telling my daughter to talk to talk to that Naruto boy."

I gave her a faux-confused stare. "What's wrong with him?"

As I expected, she blanched. "Well... he's..."

I decided to push a bit further. "Give me one good reason for all the abuse he's had at the hands of the village. One thing he's done that would change my mind. Burden of proof." After some more of her grasping for a good reason, I continued with a glare. "I know about the Kyūbi, by the way, and that's not a good reason." I made sure nobody was around before elaborating. "He's not the fuzzball, and if it weren't for him neither of us would be alive. Nor would your daughter, your husband, or just about anyone you've ever known and loved. Why then?"

"I... I-"

I snorted. "Save it. You're not gonna rationalize your way out of that moral quandary." I pulled out the used Inner Demon Calming Seal tag, then replaced the used-up sealing formula with a fresh one. "If it really bothers you that your kid's friends with the jinchuriki, this thing can be used to suppress Fuzzy's chakra, at least as long as... it... is still at least partially in Naruto." Calling Kurama it felt dirty. That's probably a good thing. "It's practically the best thing you can have when dealing with an out-of-control jin...chu..." I trailed off as it finally hit me just what I made. "Fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-" I internally screamed.

She blinked. "It's okay. I don't need this. You're right."

"-uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-" I put the seal back away and said, "Yeah that's probably for the best... Hang on, I need to make a call real quick." I closed my eyes and reached out with my telepathy to Sarutobi's office.

"I already took care of it," Hiruzen told me immediately upon picking up. He was getting real nonchalant about having someone randomly use telepathy on him...

"-uuuuuuuu... huh?"

"Do you think I didn't realize how Akatsuki could use your seal?" he asked. "Rest assured, I informed the Kazekage of the gravity of it and why he should be careful with who he gives that information to. I also managed to put a genjutsu on it that should hopefully use Sasori's jutsu to induce memory loss. Theoretically, anyway. I'm not the best at genjutsu and I haven't seen Sasori's jutsu."

"Thanks," I mentally sighed. "I really dropped the ball there, huh?"

He mentally chuckled. "To be fair, you are still a child. You might still want to check in on Sasori."

"Will do. Bye." I opened my eyes back up. "Right, where were we?" I asked before realizing she was gone. "Meh, I'm sure everything's fine now."

kukukuku~

I sighed and licked my lips as I looked at the two balls of "sage" chakra in my hands. One was blue and one was red, but I was a little disappointed with the conversion time of both, even after multiple full days of practice. Almost five minutes for a small amount of blue chakra and a little over twice that for an equal amount of red. I wasn't going to be able to use that in combat anytime soon... Though I suppose it was better than my first time of about an hour for blue. "I guess it still works for what I need it for," I sighed, then shrugged as I considered the blue chakra. With Kurama's and my calculations, it was doubtful that I'd need any more than a small amount of blue sage chakra, so I just traded a bit of chakra between my hands and reabsorbed the mostly blue chakra. It wasn't much of a boost, but I definitely felt a buzz from it that felt pretty nice. 

After that, I pulled out the little bug cage thing I got for the other component I needed for the jutsu I'd thought of. That other thing being the bugs that I had. Well, any animal would do, but I wanted to start small and with something that I would hopefully not feel guilt over killing. Of course, that meant that I barely had any material to work with, just a couple of flies that I'd managed to convince Hinata to catch while I was meditating. I looked at them for a few minutes, took a few deep breaths, and said, "Sorry, little guys." I channeled the demonic sage chakra into the bugs, pouring all of the chakra evenly into them. The flies took on a look similar to a stage two chakra cloak but without the tail before beginning to compress and converge on each other.

The idea was to use the mutative properties of natural energy overload to change them into something I could use. Theoretically, I could have used less demon sage chakra than complete saturation, but I decided that with how easy it was to saturate the flies, I would just do that and observe closely to see if I could glean the proper form for that and not have to go through trial and error. After about a minute, they had fully compressed and fused together into a small red crystal with a light glow. I sighed when I saw that it was pebble-sized, about a centimeter in diameter. Sure, I wasn't expecting to pull an adequately-sized crystal out of a few flies, but I was hoping for a little more... I ran my fingers through my hair and picked up the pebble. "I guess it's fine for now..." I muttered, then reached down my shirt to stick it on my sternum, hidden away. A seal blossomed on my skin, collecting the very minute amount of demon sage chakra that the stone was generating. Until I had a bigger one, that was the best use for it I could think of.

kukukuku~

Imagine that one French narrator voice from Sponebob saying "One month later."

"So that's probably a good structure for the seal, right?" I asked, swinging my legs in the air. I was honestly surprised that the blood hadn't rushed to my head yet; I was sitting upside-down on the couch. Something something tree-walking, probably.

Ai shrugged. "Probably."

"Yeah, Shukaku's a slippery bastard, but that should about do it," Kurama agreed, curled up on another seat.

"Seal team meeting adjourned?" I asked, then got nods from the both of them. "Adjourned. Now that we're done, I remembered something I wanted to ask you, Ai."

"Shoot, kid."

I smirked and picked up a cookie from the plate on the table (using chakra threads, obviously). I took a bite from it, then after I swallowed said, "Your wife makes amazing cookies."

She blushed lightly. "Okay first, you skipped over the question. Second, she's only my girlfriend. We're not even engaged yet." I gave her a flat look and raised an eyebrow, causing her blush to deepen to the proper Uzumaki shade of red. "I'm still looking for a ring..." she muttered.

I looked up/down at her and interlaced my hands. "Good, you two feel like an old married couple already. Now, what do you know about the Adamantine Sealing Chains?"

Ai sighed deeply. "I still can't figure it out, even after I asked Kushina for advice years ago," she grumbled. "I'm still not entirely sure it's a Kekkei Genkai and not a Hijutsu..."

"Technically it's both," Kurama said. "If I recall correctly, it's technically a Hijutsu that uses the special chakra of the Uzumaki. You should be able to figure it out if you know enough of how to use it, though."

Ai frowned. "How did you... Right... Hey, if you know so much about it from Kushina, do you have any tips to using it?"

Kurama shrugged. "I didn't really pay too much attention to it because I couldn't think of any way I could possibly use it to break out of the seal, and that was really all I was thinking of at the time... I know that you should be able to do it more easily if you manage it at least once, but I can't help you with that."

"I have an idea," I offered.

Kurama sighed, got up, and said, "Why do I feel like I'm not going to like this?"

"If it's part Kekkei Genkai, then you might find it easier to do it if you have more power behind you instead of harder."

"The math checks out, but I still don't like where this is going," Kurama complained. The red gem I'd made, now completed, dropped from under my shirt and into my hand. It had that one gem shape, sort of like a kunai but without the handle, though it was about half the scale of a kunai. "FUCK. NO." Kurama looked at me with with what probably should have been abject terror if he had the ability to make expressions. "Kouki, no!"

"Kouki yes," I countered flatly.

"Fuck this," Kurama said, then ran for the opened door. He stopped at the doorway, said "Kurama is out. Peace," and noped off as fast as his little legs could carry him.

"Should I be concerned by Kurama's reaction to that?" Ai asked.

I shrugged. "Unless you have objections to temporarily gaining phenomenal cosmic power, not particularly. I'll use my eyes to make sure I give you about as much as you can take without adverse effects, maybe a bit less. Kurama's just a wuss."

She nodded. "Cool. So what is that?"

"Demon Sage Core. A special stone of my own invention that generates red chakra and fuses it with natural energy on its own."

She gave me a huge grin. "Sounds fun."

I activated my eyes long enough to check how it would go down. Turns out it was a good idea, worked well enough, but unless we had more, then Ai'd really have to try to finesse it to get the chains out. "Unfortunately, though, it's probably gonna take like a month to do that, even with a head start. You've got a lot of chakra capacity."

"Dammit."

kukukuku~

A/N: Yeah I was actually really salty when I realized that NARUTO THREW AWAY TWO OF HIS AWESOME JUTSU BALLS WHY!?