First Flight

I had to sometimes remind myself that even if I was inspired by other things, it wasn't actually the same.

Case in point, transforming into a raven did not mean I was a raven animagus or something. I had lamented to Shino that transforming into a raven made the most sense, even if I might have wanted an eagle or a hawk form, but that didn't mean I was strictly speaking forced to be a raven. I was doing the Transformation jutsu, meaning it was up to me to decide how it worked and to straighten out the kinks.

Which was to say, I didn't have to strictly limit myself to being just a boring old raven. If I wanted to fly faster or be more nimble in the air, I could do that. So long as I know how.

But that still meant I had to make compromises. Every pro had a con; a common raven form was perfect for spying, travel, and remaining inconspicuous even if I was doing something strange, like picking garbage or hanging around in loud places.

Ravens were smart bastards, everyone knew that.

But if I could break the sound barrier in a dive like a Peregrine Falcon or if I had razor-sharp talons that could tear off a man's head, someone would notice. So I had to keep to the basic appearance of ravens and not stray too far out with any improvements. I was pretty sure I was already stronger and faster than normal ravens were, as a baseline, though.

"What do I want...?" I mused, eyeing the paper on my dining room table, sitting cross-legged with a pencil in my hand.

Speech was a must, since communication was too important to pass on for a ninja. Even if I could just transform back, sometimes I might have to strap on a headset and talk while flying, or something. Besides, I had already named the jutsu after like the only piece of poetry I had ever bothered to remember, so I couldn't back out of the raven theme now. Besides I had put too much time and effort into learning how to fly to start over now.

I could probably figure out some way to enhance long-range travel speed later down the line, so trying to change the shape and form from that of a raven didn't make sense right now. Having insane diving top speeds like a hunting falcon was cool, but it wasn't particularly useful. Ravens were pretty fast, pretty skilled at doing tricks in the air, and were able to fly fairly long distances as it was, so there was no point in straying too far from that jack-of-all-trades build.

Especially since the Sharingan wasn't super helpful in copying other birds' flying technique for whatever reason.

Sure, I could analyze it in high detail and slow motion, but since there wasn't any chakra, I guess I couldn't just copy it completely. Or maybe it was because I wasn't a raven, so there was some kind of limit in my brain that kept it from being recorded and replicated. Because if I could copy a raven, then why not a cat or a cow or hell, anything and everything that moved? So no switching bird forms at will and need; I needed to learn and practice to master whatever form I used the hard way.

"Cheapskate superpowers..." I grumbled again.

One form I had considered before the raven had been the goshawk. Because those things were insane in the forest, not known as ghost hawks for nothing. But I was pretty sure most of their ability to fly through thickly grown forests stemmed from their incredible eyes.

So, I hoped that with my Sharingan and some practice I would be able to fly just as well through Fire Country's lush forests as a goshawk, or then maybe through hails of kunai and shuriken, someday in the future. Because at the point where I needed to get the hell out of dodge that fast, it probably didn't matter if people saw a red-eyed blackbird. As it was, I was getting pretty buff from all the flapping I had to do, which somehow was being translated into movements my own muscles did even through the transformation. It was just as well since flying was more fun than regular boring old calisthenics any day of the week.

Which just left...

"I need to catch an owl."

They were the silent swoopers of the forest, practically soundless when hunting. It wasn't just for my own transformation's sake either, though the thought of applying whatever trick the owls had evolved to my own form to achieve complete silence was certainly an attractive prospect. I also wanted to replicate it for my future arrow vanes' design. If I could eliminate all sound from my projectiles as well, that would make them that much more dangerous. Not that I knew what kind of owl I needed to catch or if any kind at all would do, or if there even were owls like that around here.

I just vaguely remembered that owls were very quiet swoopers.

"Was that all...?"

I tapped the paper with the end of my pencil. I couldn't think of anything else right now, other than to just keep practicing my flying.

Already it was one of my great passions, something I could always count on to make a day just that much better. My sessions with Shino had been evolving and changing since we had first started and by now we spent more time playing catch more than anything actually serious, since I hadn't fallen or accidentally lost my transformation mid-air in several weeks.

In comparison, taijutsu and shuriken training just didn't stack up. Outside of the Academy lessons, I hadn't bothered to train those at all. I couldn't do the kinds of crazy tricks I remembered that Sasuke had pulled off with wires and bouncing projectiles off of each other, sure, but I didn't particularly feel like I was missing out.

Because fuck you, I could fly.

And damn if I didn't just love flying. Not just soaring high above, but darting between trees and through bushes at top speed, pulling daring turns and loops with Sharingan blazing. I did it every day if I could, as much for the fun of it as for the physical conditioning it offered, and it showed. Gai and Lee could do all the handstand walking they wanted; it had nothing on the sheer upper-body workout flapping wings was.

That said, I had been throwing myself into ninjutsu practice like crazy after I had finally learned the Great Fireball jutsu, devouring every text even tangentially related to it that I could find. Mixing and matching chakra-to-air ratios, changing the shape and timing of the flames, creating long gouts and floating fireballs, trying to make it a long-range compact projectile that exploded on impact...

I had burned more than one shirt in the past month.

Most had even been accidents.

But, I had been growing out of them anyhow. I wasn't a huge fan of the original Sasuke's fashion sense, but I could appreciate his shorts, given how just hot it could be the Fire Country. So I had gone to visit some seamstresses and put in orders for new clothes; dark blue long-sleeved shirts, light beige slacks and shorts, and then finally some white, black, and blue t-shirts, most without the silly high collars, and some protective mesh undershirts and new sandals. For all that fanfics made a huge deal about Naruto's orange jumpsuit—and I agreed; it was a blight on the eyes—I couldn't really fault him, given what other, more 'serious' ninja wore.

Like, canon Sasuke went through some weird phases.

I had started out finding his first get-up of a high-neck t-shirt and shorts a bit strange, but with every change, my initial reaction was nearly always, without fail: FUCK, GO BACK! The sole exception that I could remember, was his hospital garb right before he defected, and that was literally just sweatpants and a t-shirt!

He'd probably been put into them by some nurses while he was catatonic, too. So could you really count it in his favor? Fashion in the world was weird, anyhow. Maybe I could do a good deed for men everywhere, by introducing everyone to polo shirts? By describing it to my seamstress and ordering a whole heap of them, I mean. Because polo-shirts were fantastic. Literally, the level-upped version of t-shirts, except everyone pretended it was fancy for whatever reason. Also, usually better fabric than in t-shirts so they laster much, much longer so you don't need to buy new one's all the damn time.

Then again, it wasn't as if the dress code here was all that strict anyhow. It was like throwing on the flak jacket on top of whatever you wanted and presto, instant dress uniform for ninja. Maybe I should look into getting a good kimono later on...?

Anyhow, for now, I'd just be basing my clothes off of that initial set Sasuke had used.

Just... long-sleeved and legged instead of all the weird bandages. Light-coloured slacks with dark shirts of good cut and fabric were the kind of smart casual you could wear anywhere, regardless of what world you were in. One thing I noticed was that I had to get shorter pants than before. Not just in absolute length, but relative, too. I was used to shoes, so having a little bit of slack at the ankle. Not like 80's dress slacks or 90's baggy pants, but I'd rather not have them cut dramatically above the ankle either... The association of that style of pants with the metrosexual assholes who had more networking skills than actual ability was still just too strong. The always well-dressed, a touch too slick-types.

But with the footwear used here, it was probably better to err on the side of a slightly higher cut.

Speaking of, I'd probably be getting some custom sandals later on, too, since the common blue ones were just hideous.

They were like crocs, but somehow even worse, in my honest opinion.

I liked walking around barefoot, sure, but what's wrong with closed-toe shoes? Or socks? Whatever; I could still live with bandages in place of socks. They weren't too far off, and I had used small towels in place of socks back in the military, when I'd run out of clean socks, so that was nothing new. But I'd definitely get some better-looking custom sandals done at some point. All that Uchiha money had to be good for something.

Speaking of, I hadn't been sure how prominent the Uchiha logo needed to be, but apparently, with all the clans running around in Konoha there was a tasteful standard that I could fall back on, according to the seamstress, so I let her handle the details.

Clothes in the end were still just clothes.

So long as I didn't look like a complete fool and it did its job against the reigning elements, it was hard to really care too much. And since I could afford the better stuff, which also served as better protection, there was no reason to skimp out. Smart casual; the clothes for a man too smart to waste time worrying about what to wear. Except hadn't I just spent a whole day detailing everything to my seamstress like a ponce?

Even if I was just having her re-create the type of clothing I would have bought without a care at the supermarket before. Hmm, insistence on sameness and refusal to change. That does sound familiar...

Still, with the genin exams finally coming up it was time to get into the groove of things.

As for the weapons I was hoping to wield, it hadn't been difficult to procure a basic blade and I had started working on some drills with it already. Nothing complicated, just basic swings to strengthen the tendons. Your muscles could start showing improvement after a mere week after exercise, but tendons and joints took months. So you had to be careful, start slow and build them up.

But the matter of the bow had been proving much more difficult to tackle.

Most of the materials weren't a problem; high-quality ninja wire and any decent hardwood for the riser would suffice for a basic design, but it had been difficult to find craftsmen capable of making the cams or the limbs of the bow. Even if I settled for a simple single-cam compound bow, I would still need one lightweight yet durable cam and a pair of durable, lightweight and worst of all, flexible, limbs for it to work.

The exact shape of the cam and the need for the limbs to flex made it a job that not just any craftsman could tackle. Konoha's smiths were skilled metalworkers for sure, but few had any ideas on how to tackle my needs. As far as I knew, CNC milling wasn't a thing in Naruto either. In the worst-case scenario, I would have to learn how to use lightning chakra myself and then chisel out the cam myself before I could start making a compound bow.

So for now I had had to settle for another hunting bow, one matched to my current strength, along with a few orders of locally produced hunting arrows for practice.

I wasn't satisfied, but it would have to do for now.

At the very least, I had confirmed that the Sharingan was tailor-made for intuitive archery.

Just as with shuriken and kunai, with a bit of effort I could read even the most complex of trajectories even before loosing, making it child's play to get bull's eyes. But at the distances I was still practicing at, there was no point in taking a second for the perfect shot. I had to be moving and had to cut that time down to a fraction of that if I wanted to for it to be useful.

It had taken a while of testing out and comparing the hard data, but I had eventually been forced to conclude that at mid-range the bow wouldn't be able to stack up to mixed shuriken and kunai throwing. The rate of fire of kunai and all the possible arcing trajectories of shuriken were simply too versatile. They weren't the optimal tools for a lot of things, but they filled a very wide gap reasonably enough.

If you couldn't do short-to-mid-range harassment, then anyone and everyone who could would dominate you there. Kunai and shuriken had become universal shinobi equipment, despite their shortcomings, because if you didn't have them then you had to wade through your opponent's hail of bullshit before even reaching. It wouldn't necessarily kill you, but it would make a difference. They were sort of like the regular ki blasts in Dragonball, or something, in that they seemingly just filled a niche of useless-but-looks-cool, but actually having a very deep and intricate function in tactical flow and control.

Even my own half-assed and mostly copied skills dwarfed anything I could do with a bow right now, so I had been forced to shelve the bow for now.

But I wasn't quite ready to throw in the towel yet. Once I had a design that could loose arrows over half a kilometer or so with, then I was sure that its strengths would start to shine. So for now I trained by hunting in the forests for small game, thinking of that glorious future. Remaining hidden and unnoticed, finding my prey without being spotted first, loosing my arrows, and killing whatever I was going to eat for dinner before it even noticed me... It was all practice for what would come in the future. Even if it wasn't the exact thing, I knew it was challenging enough that it would suffice as training for now.

Back home some of the most deadly snipers had started out as mere humble hunters.

"...Maybe I should try to hunt in the air?" I suddenly thought.

I was able to hunt small birds if I was in their blind spot and they weren't flying around, but in the future the ability to shoot down messenger hawks might come in extremely handy. It'd be just like airshots with rockets in online arena games. Except that birds had near-Sharingan levels of dynamic vision and could freely dodge projectiles.

Oh, and I was actually kind of terrified to try and un-transform and then re-transform into a bird in mid-air to take a shot. Maybe I should invest in a parachute first. Even Shino would be hard-pressed to catch me un-transformed...

I sighed. I had thought I would have more time to accomplish everything before I graduated.

"Oh well—that's life, I guess."

I had taken to shadowing Mizuki during some of my evenings off as I noticed he had started staring at Naruto more frequently, just as Iruka had started warming up in turn to the orange menace.

It was great practice for my Midnight Nameless jutsu and for my general stalking skills, even if hadn't found anything useful while doing so yet.

The Konoha Library was a treasure trove of all kinds of neat information, almost as good as the internet had been back before, but it wasn't as if everything there was just up for grabs. I had found a few mentions of chakra suppression techniques, but very few practical outlines for how such a thing worked or how to do it. At best, I knew that by not using any jutsu, I would be less likely to be discovered.

It was a good thing Mizuki wasn't a sensor-nin.

I had identified what I thought were a few dead drop locations, but I hadn't dared to interfere with them yet, wary of seals or other security measures that could reveal my involvement. Besides, there was just as good a chance that it was some Konoha thing as it was something that Orochimaru had set up.

Because as far as I remembered—from that one filler where Mizuki turned into a bara tiger furry—it had been Orochimaru who had inspired Mizuki to make use of Naruto as a patsy in his bid for the Forbidden Scroll of Seals. But how he had gotten the idea and what he had planned exactly to do afterwards, wasn't something I was privy to.

The chuunin seemed normal enough outside of Academy hours.

He lived alone, ate alone, and trained alone. He had no real strengths and no real allies or connections, so it was pretty easy to see how he would get frustrated at his career prospects. In his place and without a Sharingan I might have done something similar. Probably not. Anyhow, I hadn't felt any guilt in ruthlessly stealing all of his fuuma shuriken techniques and the Earth Swim jutsu, since he was obviously skilled in both.

Unfortunately, I had little interest in the large shuriken and my affinity for Earth chakra was garbage, so I wouldn't be able to make much use of the Earth Swim.

I also got the feeling he had other, more deadly techniques he was practicing, but since he only ran through the handseals, I wasn't able to copy anything. I suspected they were genjutsu, since he couldn't practice them properly all alone. It was an annoyance I was familiar with, too, in that I had no one I could try my own hypnosis on. I wasn't even sure if at my current level of one tomoe I could even pull of something like that, either. Lastly, I added some more moves to my ever-growing taijutsu and throwing technique library. Nothing fancy, but a few good moves for reference that I might want to incorporate into my own style, like that underhand half-spin kunai throw.

If I had long sleeves, it could probably catch someone off guard nicely.

But since I kept my distance and only followed him a few hours at a time, that was about the extent of my findings. The last thing I wanted was to get caught spying and stealing techniques; I was the last of the Uchiha, so I had a reputation to uphold.

I was an unscrupled jutsu-thief, sure. But I didn't want everyone to know I was one—that would defeat the whole point of being an unscrupled jutsu-thief.

Same reason I hadn't gone about recreating the Rasengan yet, even if I was fairly sure that I could do it given enough time, and that it would give me a reliable one-hit kill technique that my current repertoire was desperately lacking. Too risky if I got caught. Better to wait until Naruto learned it and then do it.

The prize of messing with Naruto would be much sweeter that way, too.

So I flew back to the Uchiha compound under the dark of night, swooping soundlessly in through an open window and landing on the hardwood floor on all fours as I un-did the transformation. So cool. Looking at the clock on the wall, I decided that it was too late for a meal, deciding instead to just wash up and go to bed. Tomorrow's lecture would start early, and—

Someone has been here.

It was an instant realization as I looked at the floor, noticing just the slightest difference in dust patterns with my blazing Sharingan. A hand went to my thigh, drawing a kunai with the softest whisper of steel on fabric as I molded myself against the wall and stilled my breath.

Who...?

I lived alone in the Uchiha clan compound. I had no cleaners or deliverers or the like who would show up. Had it been the Hokage? Red eyes scanned the surfaces and tables of the room. Had it been an official visit in some unknown capacity, then there would have probably been some kind of note or letter left behind.

But nothing like that.

Had it been some relative, then? Or perhaps in the strangest case, Naruto, looking for some payback with a prank? Pupils returned to the floor. It was nearly indistinguishable from the normalcy of the house. But only nearly.

Someone had tried to remain unnoticed and barely failed.

I couldn't hear anything as I went through the house, room by room, scanning my traps and checking my things. I had nothing really valuable here, but it was still my damn house. After poring over every room and finding no one and nothing, I put away the kunai, annoyed that I didn't get to vent.

This was a ninja village.

I wasn't the only one who could go around snooping in other people's affairs. Was this a reminder by someone of that fact? As I went to lay down in my room, I triple-trapped every entrance and decided that I was going to start spending less time at the house from now on, its sanctity feeling somehow violated now.

"I need better security..." I muttered, shaking my head with disgust as I closed my eyes and dozed off.

"Iruka-sensei."

The teacher wheeled around, blinking owlishly at me.

Huh, I had never asked for help with anything, nor had I bothered with talking to any of the teaching staff before, had I?

"Yes, Sasuke?" Iruka asked with a warm smile as the others streamed out of the classroom, some giving us obvious looks of interest as they moved onto the next lesson, which would be outside with Mizuki.

"I want to learn sealing."

Iruka blinked, his eyes boggling slightly. "S-sealing? Isn't that a little much now, Sasuke?"

He tried to laugh it off, but noticing my frown he stopped.

To be sure, we had already long since gotten familiar with how to use various seals; explosive tags, small storage scrolls, blood-keyed intel scrolls were all a part of the standard curriculum for Academy students. But that was only in regards to using them.

As far as making our own seals of any kind went, I had no clue.

Which was why I was asking.

I had already tried the library and found nothing of use there and I couldn't exactly Sharingan my way through to competence in this area, so lacking any easily exploitable resources, I had decided to see if I couldn't go about learning it the way normal people would have.

But it seemed like sealing wasn't something taught at the Academy at all.

"What's brought this on, Sasuke?"

Grimacing, I decided to just tell him the truth and let him draw his own conclusions from there. "Someone broke into my house while I was away. I want better traps."

That made Iruka's face go carefully blank. He licked his lips.

"I don't think explosive seals are the answer...?"

"They're usually the question, yes." So the answer was usually an emphatic yes.

Iruka blinked again, but this time it looked as if he was in on the joke as he relaxed, chuckling a little.

"Well, be that as it may, unfortunately teaching written seals is restricted to genin and above. Most advanced seals are also only available to chuunin or above. It's a matter of village security, regarding the particulars of certain seals, you understand?" he explained. "But don't worry, once you graduate, I'm sure you'll have no trouble picking it up."

I frowned, but nodded, knowing that it wasn't the place for pushing. There weren't any examples or books about it at the Konoha Library, so the fact that it was restricted information didn't really surprise me. It was a bit annoying, but it couldn't be helped.

Getting a few months' headstart on sealing just wasn't worth it if Iruka was telling me no.

"But, if I may suggest something..." Iruka continued and I was all ears. "You may wish to brush up on calligraphy and buy a few books on seal script..." He grinned at his slight pun, before he continued. "In Konoha, we tend to use the lesser seal scripts, but greater seal script is also sometimes used. They are the old style of writing from which our modern writing styles evolved if you remember. But where common writing may change with time, with sealing you run into the risk of breaking known seals by trying to convert them into modern scripts, thus we stick to the older, less mutable ones."

That made sense. Sometimes the seals shown portrayed modern kanji, while at other times they looked like complete squiggly nonsense.

"Ah... I read somewhere that sealing is as much an art as it is a science. By that, do they mean 'guess what exactly this obsolete character means and hope it means what you think it means'?"

Iruka nodded and his amusement was plain as I let out an explosive sigh.

"Thank you, Iruka-sensei. I'll look into it."

The rest of the Academy lessons for that day went by in a flash, as I kept trying to think about how to go about approaching this new problem. I didn't even have the energy to bother messing with Naruto or Kiba, or showing off. Shino must have noticed my inattention since he was pushing up his shades more than usual and staring at me, but he couldn't speak up and tell me off because Mizuki kept droning on.

Tenten was probably my best resource at the moment for sealing, since she was also just a genin and it was something she had shown off in the Chuunin Exams. But she probably didn't know that much yet, if she had only recently gotten started. The previous genin exams weren't still that far behind us, so I doubted she was anywhere near as talented as she had been during the preliminary round against Temari.

Hmm, maybe I could approach her before the exams.

It would probably be worth a shot, depending on whether or not I passed Kakashi's test. Or bothered to pass. I was still undecided on that front, having looked into my options. The genin corps might not be such a bad place for what I had in mind; hadn't I been complaining about how little free time I had?

Being restricted to menial D-rank missions might not be so bad, since I knew what was to come anyhow. Who needed a jounin-sensei when field promotions were a thing? If I could get my archery down pat in time for the invasion, well...

Could you say 'target-rich environment'?

Just set up on Hokage rock, maybe with a few advanced clones for an even greater volume of fire, and then just start picking off ninja. If I took down any significant percentage of hostiles, I was pretty sure a promotion would be a guaranteed thing.

Of course, that meant leaving Wave Country to get crushed by that one criminal business tycoon what's-his-face guy. Which wasn't actually anything I cared about all that much. Sure, Naruto would lose out on character development™ and there'd be no Great Naruto Bridge... But when had any of that ever come up again? I couldn't remember. Did 'precious people' as a concept ever even matter in the rest of the story? For all the hype about Kakashi's creed about never abandoning teammates did Naruto ever have to face a decision like that where it mattered?

I couldn't remember, so I was going to go with probably not.

On top of that, the entire fiasco had come down to the wire far too many times to be worth a second attempt. I wasn't going to be willingly running up against a ninja of Zabuza's level on my first serious mission, knowing that Kakashi was probably going to screw it up, and I certainly wasn't going to trust in Haku's gentle heart to save me or for Naruto to have his Kyuubi-engine revved and ready in time for me to not actually die.

Too many variables with too many times things could go completely wrong.

Besides, when putting Zabuza and Haku on one end of a scale and then Tazuna, Tsunami and... Tizona? Izuna? Isaribi? No that was the filler fish girl, who somehow still managed to be more memorable than the bratty grandkid with the same I-am-so-hopeless-and-depressed-please-cheer-me-up-Naruto theme that got used with half a dozen filler arcs and movies re-used, whose name I can't remember for the life of me, and—where was I going with this? Oh, right. Having Zabuza and Haku survive at the cost of Wave Country didn't really bother me.

They were pretty much equally strangers to me and one side was just infinitely cooler.

It was one thing if I had shared all this knowledge with someone else and worried about their opinion, but on my lonesome? Zero fucks. And if I did start regretting the continued oppression and destitution of Wave Country, once I got a decent clone technique I could just send one flying off to go assassinate the fucker and then let the rest solve itself as his trading empire collapsed on itself.

And seriously. If they were living within such short distance of the Fire Country that they just could build a fucking bridge by hand, then they could damn well hop on over and rebuild their lives in whatever other podunk fishing village they managed to found. The business tycoon couldn't be that fucking bad, if they couldn't be arsed to make even that little effort to improve their lives.

I know they had boats; they were a fucking fishing village, sheesh.

I just needed to figure out a way to make sure some other rookie team didn't get sent to their deaths, since that might actually weigh on my conscience.

Really, what troubled me most was the possibility that if I didn't make it to team 7, that Orochimaru might call off the whole invasion thing. I had had the Sharingan for years now and no one had approached me on his behalf nor had I been kidnapped to get diddled by the snake himself. So, if I failed to stand out as competent enough to be worth wearing as a flesh suit, it was entirely possible that he wouldn't find it worth the effort of invading Konoha.

It wasn't as if I was certain that he wouldn't come, since he still had his beef with the old man, but I knew the Sharingan was one of his major priorities. So regardless of what I chose to do regarding team 7, I would be doing my own scouting flights once the Chuunin Exams started to get a handle on the changes I would have wrought.

It was why I had been training so hard to master my Midnight Nameless jutsu; information was always king.

Really it came down to what to do about Naruto.

Because as long as he had the Shadow Clone jutsu, he was going to be fine fighting potential-wise. Jiraiya would sooner or later show up and with the Sexy jutsu the Rasengan and Summoning jutsu would be in the bag. And as for his mentality... he already had a will of steel. All he needed was to get a little bit blooded and he distinguish himself in the eyes of the villagers and he'd be well on his way to greatness, as far as I saw it. The exact way it happened didn't really matter as much.

"Sasuke-kun! You can do it!"

I looked up, blinking like an owl to see everyone looking at me.

Mizuki smirked as he walked up to me, as if he had been waiting for this a long time. He was obviously annoyed with how I had been ignoring him the whole lesson. "Since you obviously already know how to do it and didn't see fit to listen to a word I said, Sasuke, why don't you show the rest of us how it's done?"

I blinked again, looking at the large fuuma shuriken he was holding out to me, the other hand pointing towards a bull's eye painted behind a line of wooden posts, making it so that it would be too narrow for the big shuriken to pass through them horizontally, being wider than the distance between the posts was.

Hadn't this been what Mizuki had been practicing recently when I had been spying on him? Throwing the fuuma shuriken so that it spun around its axis so that it could go through narrow gaps?

"Alright," I said with a smirk, accepting the weapon and weighed it in my hand.

"Serves you right, y'now! You think you're so cool!"

Ah, there was Naruto, always setting himself up for disappointment.

"Stupid Naruto! Sasuke-kun can totally do it!"

And there was the reason I didn't feel like doing it anymore...

Eh, whatever. Mizuki's disappointment will be worth it, if nothing else. I thought about using his exact technique, but then thought better. Wouldn't do for him to suspect that I'm stalking him.

A simpler variation would have to do.

I spun on my heel, arm lashing out like string winding up a spinning top as the fuuma shuriken was loosed like a spinning buzz saw, screaming through the air as it turned around on itself, perfectly passing through a pair of the posts and embedding itself into the bull's eye beyond.

The silence was deafening.

Had I done the wrong thing? No, wait, Mizuki's brow was twitching.

"Hn." I turned around and shoved my hands into my pockets as I returned to the crowd, cheers erupting from the loonies to match the groan from Naruto.

I love my Sharingan so much.

Uchiha Stronkest! Number One!

I did twenty push-ups on top of the water, before jumping up back to my feet as I continued my jumping warm-ups and stretches.

The Uchiha lake—or perhaps pond, given its size—had quickly become my favorite training spot. It was wide, flat and always open, being a body of water on private property and all, giving me a chance to not only practice and train normally, but hone my chakra control while I was at it. And when I got bored, there was always the small patch of trees to the side, which served as variation when I wanted to do something else, like tree walking.

Water walking had honestly been a lot easier than tree walking, but I think that was mostly because I had to learn how to expel chakra from my feet in the first place for the latter while the former only required a little variation in how I did it.

I had been messing around with various chakra control exercises since then, but nothing really challenged me in the same way that tree walking had initially.

I had of course trained to stick to surfaces and to keep myself afloat with any part of my body as well, but since the feet were the hardest, it was really easy-peasy in comparison. Things like making things float on the palm of my hand and spinning them around came next, a form of Rasengan precursor that I allowed myself to try out, but it was pretty boring and hardly useful given how weak it was.

The most challenging thing I tried out was trying to send shuriken spinning out of my hand without touching them, but it was less a problem of control and more about just straight up having enough power to match the power of a normal throw. I figured that maybe I could develop an enhanced throw the same way an overpowered expulsion of chakra from the feet could be used to run and jump faster and further.

Unexpectedly, the practical side of training wasn't interesting me nearly as much as the theoretical was.

Settling down on the water and allowing it to settle in turn, I raised one foot in the air and close my eyes. Immediately I almost fell, but after a shaky second, I found my balance. I did ten pistol squats with the one leg, then switched to the other, repeating the shaky centering of my balance.

I had never been good with pistol squats before, so doing them now was kind of fun.

By now adjusting the chakra control for one or two feet on the water was easy. I could practically feel the surface tension giving way before it happened, allowing me to correct for it immediately. It was already second nature, meaning that I could get knocked off my feet and still not lose control and get submerged. It was something I wondered about, whether I could turn that into some kind of combat sensory technique. Something like an aura around me that would cover my blind spots and tell me where an attack was coming from.

The same worked with tree walking when I wanted to change what stuck to the wall, but I couldn't think of a way to apply it to incoming attacks quite yet. Merely expelling chakra around me achieved nothing other than making me exhausted. It wasn't even a pseudo-Kaiten, or anything. Just wasted chakra.

I had tried a lot of strange things to see if I could turn them into chakra control exercises, but so far there hadn't been many good ones. I didn't really remember that many variations from fanfiction, either. I vaguely remembered stuff like trying to go up waterfalls, or maybe trying to roll up waterfalls...? Anyhow, a lot of inane ideas were tried and forgotten after I had figured out water walking.

One thing I was keen on trying to figure out to see if it was possible, was what I had dubbed in my head as air walking. No one in the series had done it as far as I could remember, so it probably wasn't possible. But since I was already flying as a raven, I had hoped to figure out if I could boost my flying speed by expelling chakra against the air like a rocket, or then to slow myself down if I was un-transformed and fell in the air or something of that nature.

It only made sense to prepare for the eventuality.

But it wasn't easy.

Chakra didn't act like a compressed gas, even if it might look like it when I used the overpowered form of tree walking to add a burst to my step, it only looked like that when it interacted with air alone. It was more like the two materials themselves violently repelled each other. So the idea of jet propulsion seemed out for now. Maybe wind-nature chakra was different, but regular chakra certainly didn't work like that. Chakra could hold onto solids and disperse into liquids, but with gases the best I had managed was to simply push it away, ruffling hair, clothes, and grass around me.

But just because I could push air away didn't mean I could push myself against the air; I didn't seem to experience any real feedback from the air, regardless of how much I pushed out. So, even if I acquired immense chakra reserves, it didn't seem possible for me to go around flying like Superman. Or rather, Goku. How did Superman fly anyway? Forget it.

My only lead so far was that I remembered Temari being able to fly on her big ass fan. But she wasn't here and wouldn't give me the time of day anyhow. Which was a shame because she was hot and cool and kinda scary in the right way.

Anyhow, for the moment, air walking was a complete bust.

But the implications of how chakra interacted with the different mediums—matter in its different phases—was what intrigued me. The fact that I could latch onto or push away solids and liquids with chakra alone explained quite a bit about my anime physiology.

If a normal human being could stand on a wall or the ceiling, it wouldn't end well for them. right? Their ankles would snap or the blood would pool in their head, all kinds of weird things would happen. But with an excess of chakra within my body, something fundamentally changed there. Like how I could stick to a surface, so too could the various bits within my body stick to where they should be. It was like each individual bone, vein, tendon, muscle, and organ had their own seatbelts of sorts.

It was that small wonder that meant ninja could get punted through trees or could move so fast that they seemed to be teleporting around without constantly exploding into bits of bone and blood from the stresses.

Would probably be pretty useful in space, too.

No ninja astronauts, though.

Switching back to the first leg, I continued doing pistol squats, alternating between left and right leg in sets of five until finally it started to burn in my quadriceps. Opening my eyes I lowered the other foot to the water and shook both legs one by one for a few seconds. Then before my legs could fully recover, I started jogging around the lake at a normal pace. I kept the tempo low enough that I wasn't tiring myself out but high enough that my legs didn't have time to recover, prolonging the weakness so that I'd get used to running on shaky feet and push through to wobbliness.

The ability to keep going even through exhaustion was in my opinion more valuable than just basic conditioning, as no matter how hard I trained and no matter what level I reached, there was always a little further where I would exhaust myself. But if I could keep going despite it, then that might just be the difference between life and death. Slowly, I upped my speed, pushing against the limbs that wanted to give up and stop moving.

Actual physical conditioning could come after puberty, for now, mental conditioning would serve me better.

After half an hour of running, I finally gave in to the urge to stop and wobbled back to the pier, sitting down so that my legs could hang in the cool water and rest. Closing my eyes I gauged my stamina and finding it still at satisfactory levels, raised a hand and began to focus my chakra into the palm of my hand.

I didn't have a leaf, but I didn't think I needed it for the change in chakra nature exercise. The Great Fireball jutsu was pretty easy for me, so I figured I had a decent affinity for fire-natured chakra. So if I could learn how to change the chakra nature without handseals, that would make the Great Fireball that much easier to pull off. It was the first step to cutting down on necessary handseals, I'd guessed.

That, and I wanted to be able to snap my fingers to create fire.

Just because.

But like a lot of my projects—the ones that didn't involve copious use of the Sharingan to steal jutsu, anyway—it was slow going.

Sighing, I let the chakra in my hand disperse into the air.

Okay, hypothesis time: chakra acts like electric fields. When the right amount of chakra is infused into another object, it creates a bond similar to two magnets stuck to each other. Just, without having to worry about polarities?

Which would explain how your ankles didn't snap under the strain of standing side-ways up a wall, or how the blood didn't rush into your head and make you lose consciousness. The chakra inside of you acted exactly the same as the chakra did outside of your body against the solid surface you were sticking to. Inside of you each vein, bone, muscle, tendon, ligament, organ, and what-have-you were tied to each other like that, as if each had a tiny, personalized safety belt to keep it strapped down.

Hence ninjas were superhumanly tough and didn't break a leg every time they dropped down from a rooftop.

But an excess of this infusion is like reversing the polarity on one of the magnets, causing the two to start repelling each other?

That was where the electric field theory fell through - there was nothing about polarity, just the intensity of output, that affected this exercise.

I wonder if Tsunade's monstrous strength comes from performing that repulsion within her own body? Like lining up the bones from the ground up to her punching hand, and then just letting it rip in sequence? Maybe keeping her feet stuck to the ground with chakra for more leverage...?

Seemed like a good way to blow out your own limbs.

Because the repulsion seemed rather violent, like an overpressurized container breaking and spewing out its contents. But where the electric field analogy failed to clearly explain repulsion, the high-pressure gas or liquid analogy completely failed to explain how to stick to things.

I was leaning more towards the electric field theory, but I needed to be sure. Even if I merely disproved both that would still give me some peace of mind.

So how would I devise a test for either explanation?

I draw a kunai from my pouch and raised the ring-hilt to my eye level, staring at it intently.

Hmm, what if...

I extend a finger and touch the ring, infusing a very deliberate amount of chakra into the metal. Then, I pull back the finger, trying to draw it away from the kunai without—Ah, damn, it just came loose as if I had used too little chakra in the tree walking skill.

It took a few careful tries but eventually the thing I had been trying to accomplish happened; the chakra infusion in the kunai remained there as I pulled back the finger, but at the same time remained in my finger as well. It was like chewing gum, stretching out and creating an invisible thread between the finger and kunai.

"Heh, so this is how chakra strings work."

Looks like a plus one for the electric attraction hypothesis.

If chakra within my body could pass through and hold me all together on the inside—even between the various tenketsu points where chakra naturally coalesced and flowed—and I could extend it to stick to a tree with my foot... then couldn't I simply extend my chakra through other things outside my body and have those stick to things, too?

I let the kunai fall from my hand and as expected the thread connecting it to my finger kept it in the air, as if there was a physical string tied to it. Moving my free hand between the strings, I frowned as the thread moved with my hand, only to realize that of course it would: my hands were full of chakra.

So I took another kunai and tried to pass it through the chakra string.

It passed clean through.

Then, a second later the chakra string snapped, having still been weakened slightly by the second kunai's passing. So it likely wasn't the air carrying my chakra - it was probably free-floating electrons or something else I couldn't see with the naked eye.

"Working theory: chakra works like electric fields and can be transmitted or extended. Like... a daisy chain of electrons."

Holstering one kunai, I re-applied the chakra string to the other and let it hang again. Then with a furrowed brow, I tried to reel in and out the string, raising and lowering the kunai in the air almost as if making it levitate. It was a fancy party trick, but little more.

Gravity was pulling down the kunai, rather than me pushing it in any way. So I probably couldn't make stilts out of chakra. Then what about the repulsion effect from too much chakra?

Could I pass along a surplus charge through this chain into the kunai?

I frowned, pushing outward, and—

"Ah!"

Splashing my feet in the water as I jerk with surprise, I barely catch the rapidly spinning kunai before it falls in.

It definitely did start moving before it snapped loose from the chakra string as if it had been repelled. But it wasn't as potent as what I could do against the ground or anywhere near as controlled.

Another 'needs Tsunade-tier chakra control to make work'-idea. One that I could maybe take another look at later, once I had a better handle on the basics.

Okay, then how about the water walking skill? How does that fit the theory, since I'm releasing a constant and changing amount of chakra into the water, unlike with the fixed amount necessary for maintaining a tree walk.

I poked at the water.

Nothing.

I poked at the water again.

Scowling, I poked at the water again, but this time I only managed in pushing it away beneath my finger as if I had been blowing at it very hard. A second later the surface returned to its normal shape, tension resuming equilibrium.

"So, I can't put a chakra string onto a liquid. The chakra floats away and vanishes, but not as quickly as in the air."

Which meant that I wasn't actually walking on the water, I was walking on the chakra I was pouring into the water, having it repulse the chakra within myself or something. Which neatly explained why it was so easy to remain on the surface, so long as I knew the right amount to constantly release into the water. I didn't have to compensate by doubling the rate of chakra infusion into the water when I raised one foot immediately but slowly, because the chakra still remained in the water for a while.

So depending on how many points of contact with the water there was and the internal movement of the water moving away the chakra being infused, the amount needed constantly changed but only very slowly, compared to the immediate need to adjust if switching from two feet on the tree to just one.

Maybe.

So what did it mean for air walking? Chakra dispersed too quickly into the air for that to work.

Well, maybe I can create some form of chakra stilts to walk on, pushing off against the ground and then maintaining my position with a chakra string at the same time, like some sort of maglev train. Chakra levitation?

Pushing and pulling at the same time couldn't be easy, though.

I shook my head. "Well, at least I learned how to use chakra strings."

Maybe Kankuro would agree to show me some techniques when we met. Or then I could steal his skills if he tried to kill me. That sounded fair. And much more likely. Maybe I could bring along a puppet in a sealed scroll by then, just to mess with him.

Besides, I could think of at least a half-dozen applications for the chakra strings which bore testing.

It was kind of interesting reverse engineering jutsu and skills like this, knowing that they had originally been thought up by a mangaka, probably without all the internal consistency and verisimilitude that I was discovering, but rather inspired by other things and mish-mashed together into one setting. I had to wonder just how far along I could take thing kind of thing?

Could I, by following the path of history and the logic of chakra, re-create all jutsu?

Eh, enough channeling Orochimaru for one day. I'm hungry. I got up and returned to my house, heading straight for the bathroom to wash up.