38 Ichikishimahime

Since signing their names on the contract, both Mizuki and Anko had been relentlessly practicing the technique non-stop.

Orochimaru was being surprisingly accommodating, and gave them both a week off to master this jutsu, as he said it is "essential" for his apprentices to know how to effectively summon snakes.

Similar to Naruto in the anime, when the duo began their training, they could only summon relatively useless snakes, those such as babies or garden snakes.

Although, as the days progressed and the duo grew more familiar with the jutsu, it became apparent that they were vastly improving.

This improvement happened as the chakra they required for the jutsu slowly decreased as they grew more familiar with it, whilst also being able to summon larger and more dangerous snakes.

Eventually, as day four rolled around, Mizuki celebrated in rejoice as he completed the summoning jutsu.

Mizuki weaved the hand signs that had become all but second nature to him after his days of non stop practicing before biting his thumb to draw blood and slamming his left hand on the ground.

Mizuki: "Summoning Jutsu!"

A puff of white smoke appeared as the jutsu took affect and slowly dispersed as it revealed the outline of a relatively large snake.

Mizuki, expecting failure, didn't even pay attention to what he had summoned assuming it to be a failure, until he heard a loud hiss and looked towards his now visible summon.

The snake he had summoned was approximately two meters long, with dark grey scales, resembling armoured plates decorating it's body.

It's yellow slitted eyes stared towards Mizuki as it slowly hissed as Mizuki felt another presence inside of his mind.

Unlike the toads of Mount Myoboku, only the highest level snake summons could talk out loud.

However, they made up with this downside by an arguably even more powerful ability, the ability to telepathically communicate with their summoner.

As of the snake in front of Mizuki though, whilst he could use telepathy, it could only communicate using very broad and unspecific concepts, showing that the snake was not very powerful in the grand scale of the hierarchy at Ryuichi Cave.

Seeing the result of his summon, Mizuki released the jutsu, forcing the snake back to where it came from in a puff of white smoke.

Although he was still a long ways off from finding his "partner", Mizuki was still overall relatively happy.

Now that he could summon actual snakes, he could still learn multiple jutsu based on merely that from his sensei.

Seeing as he met his temporary goal, Mizuki went up to Anko who was currently undergoing the same ordeal that Mizuki was.

After eating lunch and hanging out with her whilst she trained for a couple of hours, she was able to reach the same level of Mastery that Mizuki had, with her summoning a snake slightly larger than Mizuki's with dirty snow coloured scales.

Seeing her success, similar to Mizuki she immediately dissolved the jutsu and allowed the snake to disappear back to Ryuichi Cave in a puff of white smoke.

Seeing as it was still the middle of the afternoon, and they would not see their sensei until the next day, they both decided to hit the library that Orochimaru gave them access to.

After becoming Orochimaru's assistants, Mizuki and Anko finished the deal they made by negotiating which forbidden jutsu they could learn.

They came to the agreement that twice every year, Orochimaru would give them a list of forbidden jutsu that he could teach them by giving them a scroll for.

Naturally, the first jutsu they chose was the shadow clone jutsu.

Whilst they already knew it via Shisui, they could not reveal that to anybody, especially not their Sensei.

Therefore, Anko and Mizuki chose to learn the shadow clone jutsu again from their sensei in order to create an Alibi for being able to use it.

After all, being able to use the jutsu in public would allow for them to drastically increase their training speed.

They both decided to finally "learn" the jutsu in the next two weeks.

After losing a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors to Anko, It was determined that she would finally be able to cast the Jutsu at Day Eleven whereas Mizuki would have to wait until Day Fourteen.

(A/N: I get that Naruto learned it in one night, but that is because he had a shit ton of chakra. Plus, they are trying to stay low-key).

The duo passed the remainder of the day in the library, doing a mixture of reading over the books they had on Fuinjutsu, and observing the shadow clone technique and creating faulty shadow clones.

Seeing as it was getting late, Anko and Mizuki closed their books and put them back where they found them before getting up and leaving the "lab" and going to grab something to eat at Ichiraku.

Since becoming genin, Mizuki was seeing the other members of his friend group less and less frequently, as they were all busy training and absorbing all of the knowledge that they could from their senseis, knowing that they would be sent into a war within the next year.

Thinking about the war, Mizuki realized that they were approximately two years away from the fateful mission which would begin Obito's arc as a villain.

Surprisingly, Mizuki and Anko had also seen little of Idate.

He certainly wasn't dead yet, as they had seen him in the training room a couple of time in the past week, and even Orochimaru was not crazy enough to kill/kidnap one of his students so soon after coming under his wing.

Although that did not mean that he was idle. When he saw Idate, Mizuki started to scan him, looking for what the snake had done to him only to see a mark along the back of his neck.

Orochimaru had given his teammate the curse mark.

The Next Day, when Anko and Mizuki approached Orochimaru with their results, he told them to go back and continue practicing.

Orochimaru: "Whilst you have no doubt made great progress in this jutsu, it is still not far enough that you can move on. Learning who your partner will be is integral to progressing your summoning to the next stage"

Orochimaru: "Alternatively, you could focus on summoning more of those lower ranked snakes more efficiently, which would allow for you to learn several new jutsu"

Seeing as their sensei deemed their progress unfit for moving on, Mizuki and Anko went back to the training room.

Seeing as they had four more days to practice the jutsu, Mizuki and Anko were relentless in their training schedule, going from sunrise until sunset with practicing their jutsu in the underground room.

Both Mizuki and Anko had decided to go for the harder path and try to summon snakes that would act as a familiar of sorts.

However, they were both having little to no luck as the days passed without progress.

Finally, on the seventh day, a tired Mizuki performed the summoning technique again.

He had been awake for thirty six hours, constantly training this one jutsu, he had lost count of how many times he had performed it.

However, this time unlike other yielded results.

A small snake, about the length of half of Mizuki's arm was summoned.

It had crystal clear, white scales that were only just starting to grow, showing that the snake was still maturing.

However, what made this snake different was the fact that it could communicate perfectly with Mizuki.

Mizuki: {Hello, I am the one who summoned you, my name is Mizuki}

??: {Hello Mizuki, My name is Ichikishimahime}