Chapter 16

Two weeks. It took me two weeks to come to a decision on what to do with my stat points. I'd spent the last two weeks hoping and wishing that the first day was a fluke, but it wasn't. I was getting my ass kicked academically by these nerds, and the worst part was that they could see it just as clearly as I could. When the lecturer asked a question I couldn't answer, the deafening silence was all I needed to know how they mocked me in their heads. Whenever I answered, they didn't even bother to debate my answers, treating it like the barking of a dog in the middle of their serious academic discourse. The only place I bettered them was in the actual ninjutsu itself, but that was a small consolation prize.

Suna's program was aimed not just at building medical ninjas. It was ambitious in that it wanted to create fully fledged doctors who also happened to be ninja. If I failed the theoretical aspect, then no matter how well I did in the practical aspect, I wouldn't be graduating from this place anytime soon. That's also why I chose today to make the stat upgrades. The longer I waited, the more suspicious a sudden increase in intelligence would become.

Two weeks in, and it would look just like I needed some time to hit my stride. Any longer and I might find myself strapped to a table to be dissected. Now, wouldn't that just be funny? I pulled my stats and took a deep breath before I sent the intelligence stat soaring to a level of 100 by adding 43 of my accumulated 56 points to it. I could actually feel my brain twisting and changing to accommodate the sudden change, and that twisting dialed up to eleven before my entire world blacked out in pain.

When I regained consciousness, I could somehow tell it had been exactly two hours, 13 minutes, and 14 seconds since I'd made the increase. I looked around me and silently dispelled the orb of sand that surrounded me. If there was something I'd done right, it was picking a Saturday night for the upgrade. Sundays were the only days we had completely free from lectures. The others spent the day in their tents, studying in groups, and I did the same, studying alone. I was the only trainee given a separate tent, so it played well to my need for privacy but wreaked havoc on my possibility of socializing and maybe building a friendship with the others.

With my increased intelligence, once I turned my attention inward, it took virtually no time to puzzle out the meaning of my stats. Every interaction I'd had with the game since I was born was a data point I could rely on, and I quickly began to experiment. The first thing I did was try to add a single stat point to intelligence, and when it didn't work, it was another data point in my favor. My stats topped out at level 100. My best guess was that that was the literal human limit, and considering my physical stats had their own seemingly soft limits, I could tell that age was a factor, in those stats at least. No matter how I tried it, my dexterity refused to inch past forty. I shunted another 10 points into my strength to test the hypothesis, and it also refused to inch past forty. Nodding my head, satisfied with what I'd figured out, I picked up my books again, and as I studied, I planned for the future. Parallel processing seemed to actually be easy with my new brain power.

Graduating here in a year would be impossible. I could see it in the lecturers and how they behaved. This wasn't the academy. The goal wasn't to churn out doctors as quickly as possible. If I wowed all of them, all that would happen is that more and more would be piled onto my plate to fill up my time here. The only silver lining I could see was that I probably would not be forced to do the three years of practical residency at the hospital. After the attack those weeks ago, I was sure that if I showed up at the hospital, a riot might actually break down. Even before I'd unleashed Shukaku on the village, there had been fears about me entering the hospital through the actual front door. No. Practical residency wasn't in the future for me. I'd be sent back to the shinobi corps the moment my three years of theoretical training were up, and that was actually a good thing.

With the benefit of hindsight, graduating the academy so early might not have been the wisest choice. I could have spent the time doing my own personal training and preparing myself for the world instead of declaring myself ready because I felt it would be boring to sit with children. Now, I was getting a second shot at gaining the benefits of the academy. I could do all the training I needed to do in the next three years and then take the shinobi world by storm. Rasa had lied. I could see it now. He had no intention of making me Kazekage by naming me his heir, but I still longed for the seat. It wasn't entirely logical, but even at that, I could still see logical justifications. I'd be powerful. By the time I turned 12, I'd probably be Kage level. I'd probably be too powerful for the likes of Pein to take on single-handedly by the time Shippuden came along, but that mattered little when they could send endless Zetsu for me and hound me with Akatsuki members wherever I went. Eventually, I'd be tired out or even worse, forced so deeply into hiding that I'd never be able to enjoy whatever freedom I gained by leaving Suna.

No, becoming Kage was my only choice. Who said I'd ever be strong enough to match up with Pein? I had limits. Hard, actual limits. The Gamer seemed to give me quick growth but not limitless growth. I contained the weakest of the Tailed Beasts, and who was to say that even after I did my best and trained all my skills to the maximum, I'd be able to take on the leader of the Akatsuki. People in my old life had underestimated Pein. They forgot that he'd killed Jiraiya, a Kage-level shinobi, with no trouble. They forgot that he'd actually beaten Naruto, forced him to use the Nine-Tails and almost triggered a full-scale transformation just to escape the Chibaku Tensei, and then even after all that still had to be talked into committing suicide to grant Naruto the win.

The entire fight was plot armor taken to the max. I didn't have that. Pein scared me, for a good reason. Instead of heading to the wilds where he could hunt me at his leisure, I'd remain here in the center of the desert, at my most powerful, with an entire village of shinobi around me. I'd do my best to make myself as unattractive of a target as possible. Akatsuki had come after Gaara first, in canon, but by then I'd be more than strong enough to swat both Sasori and Deidara away. When I did, I just needed to make sure they decided I wasn't worth the effort of coming after.

Mind made up, I stretched my chakra into the sand around me and formed a clone. Not a regular sand clone with half my chakra. This one had three-quarters of my total chakra capacity, which had grown handsomely since Shukaku's escape for some reason, and was going to be sent on a completely separate mission. He had enough chakra to make five more clones with enough chakra to be useful in their own rights. He nodded at me and blurred away. His job was simple. He'd sneak out of Suna and into the deep desert to train. I had three years here, and while I couldn't do much for my taijutsu as it approached my body's limits, my ninjutsu had all the space to grow. That's what we'd be focusing on.

XXXXXXX

Three months in, and the first class rankings were posted on the walls of the cavern. I had joined my class two months late and had to make up for dozens of missed assessments, but I still stood at the top of the class with an average of 97%. The runner-up had 95%, and the numbers went down from there. Where my classmates had previously been content to ignore me, they now glared at me. Yesterday, two of our mates had been dropped from the program. Their scores were good. Definitely outstanding, but here, we were graded on a curve. I had thought, when I didn't notice any close friendships among my classmates at the beginning, that they were all simply antisocial creatures. But it turned out to be something even more insidious and much less innocent than that. The grading system meant we were all in fierce competition. The better your classmates did, the worse you did.

I struggled to come to terms with it in the beginning. The entire system seemed illogical to me, but I settled for not caring. If the corps felt this was the best way to create med nin, then I hadn't the energy nor the authority to argue against their methods. I closed my eyes and looked through my clones' eyes as he weaved through more and more seals before an actual dragon made of wind took shape around him and slammed into the sand, creating a dust storm of epic proportions. I smiled as the jutsu proved to be a success. Our foray into shape manipulation was beginning to bear more and more fruit. As I watched another clone lose a hand while trying to add the wind release to the Rasengan, I figured that we would need at least another three months to master that particular jutsu, unless we tried doing it with clones, but I was loath to rely on such a crutch.

I smiled as I noted a presence leaning over my head to peek at my grades. "Isn't that cute? Little Gaara-chan is top of his class." I just turned to Mebuki with a smile on my face. The teenager had grown on me over the month since we'd met. It was a few days after I'd turned seven, and I had run into her doing my own practical rotations of the training rooms. She had insisted on sharing a work table with me and had talked my ears off throughout. The girl was loquacious but still tolerable. I suspected her intelligence had something to do with it. She was an orphan, and only sixteen years of age, but still, she was already in her third year in the med nin training corps.

"So are you," I commented, ignoring the way she pulled on my hands as she led me to the mess hall.

"Obviously. Mebuki-senpai is awesome like that." I just nodded at her. She was so different from everyone else here. It was both a breath of fresh air and a ray of sunshine at the same time. She didn't bother with the toxic backstabbing and competition that filled the training corps. Of course, she didn't. She was so far above her classmates that she had no need to compete with them, and after a whole year of being shown up by her, they didn't bother competing with her either. Everyone understood their place when it came to her.

When we arrived, she didn't hesitate to pick up two plates and pile mine just as high as she piled hers, not caring for the fact that she was at least twice my size. I just nodded and accepted the food with a grateful bow. I had learned my lesson about arguing with her. She had been something of a big sister in the orphanage she'd grown up in and seemed to see me as one of her little siblings from the orphanage.

New

I stared at her as she shoveled spoonful after spoonful of pepper soup into her mouth, and I did my best to eat my own food at a more reasonable pace, but still with good enough speed. When Mebuki finished her food, she began staring at me, and then I reduced my speed even more. Frustrating the teenage girl had become an irreplaceable part of my daily routine.

Eventually, I couldn't drag out the eating any longer, and I let her pull me up to wash our plates. From there, we had library time. It wasn't a real library, as the entire corps stayed in the same cavern. It was just a corner walled off with thicker curtains than usual. When we got there, her stack of books and scrolls would have intimidated the most dedicated of academics in my old world. With a similar stack, I joined her in studying. She was reading up on her schoolwork, and I was working on the second-year material, almost completely finished with it, actually.

Unable to use clones as I had to keep the ones in the desert active, I was limited to studying only when I could set aside my own personal time for it. With maxed-out intelligence, even those sparse minutes and hours across the month allowed me to push beyond my entire first year of work and enter into the second-year coursework.

If the first year was like jumping from middle school to college in terms of complexity, then the second-year coursework felt like jumping from high school to a doctorate. I could handle it, but the coursework was still imposing. Our number of courses was going to double, and each one was going to be twice as complex as what we were dealing with. I guess there's a reason Suna had so few medical ninjas.

I spent hours there, moving from treatise to treatise. Everything I needed to study was cataloged and then delved into. By the time Mebuki was dragging me off for dinner, I'd managed to complete two of the second-year courses and make it halfway through another. As I set back the scrolls in their proper places, Mebuki struck up a conversation. "You're a scary kid, you know that, right?" She asked, and when I didn't deign to reply, she continued as if she had never expected me to.

"I've never seen a Six-"

"Seven," I corrected absently, enjoying the way her eyebrows twitched.

"I've never seen a seven-year-old sit still and focus like that. You went through what? Two whole courses' worth of coursework in six hours? I can't do that. No one can."

"You'll give me a big head, Mebuki Onee-San," I replied in a sing-song voice and enjoyed the way she glared daggers at me.

"Onee-Chan," she said with emphasis.

"Say it with me, Onee-Chan!" I just chuckled and swept away from the library with her hot on my heels. The older doctors screamed at us to stop, but we were already out of earshot by the time they finished with their words.

By the time we got to the mess hall, Mebuki was already panting. "You've let yourself go, Onee-San," I mocked, and that set off another chase.

XXXXXX

One year and three months at the medical corps, and I could barely even recognize myself as I stared in the mirror I had hung in my room. Mebuki had bought it for my eighth birthday, thinking it atrocious that I had lived so long without one. My red hair reached past my shoulders now, and I tied it back in a ponytail with a bit of string. My clothes had seen little change. Mebuki had taken some convincing, but she had been willing to just buy me the same outfit I always wore, but a few sizes bigger.

My stats had seen similar explosive growth. Over a year in the desert, and my clones had taken my ninjutsu so far that it was clear that would be my major strength moving forward. I clenched my fist, focused my chakra, and then opened it again, enjoying the swirling Rasengan that appeared without any fanfare or noise.

It was silent. Apparently, the grinding noise it customarily produced was a result of inefficiency. Each strand of chakra grinding against the other produced the noise and also caused the noticeable aura bleed of the Rasengan. With a clone spending the better half of a year working on creating an elemental variant of the jutsu, I was probably the foremost expert on the Rasengan alive. No one could possibly have spent so much time directing so much brain power to a singular jutsu. Because of that, I had it easy manipulating the shape of the jutsu to my whims.

It suddenly flattened, turning into a disk—a perfect one, mind you—and then I snuffed it out as I closed my hand. The Wind Release Rasengan and its variant had just been mastered, so now my clone was working on doing the same with Fire Release, which was proving to be much more volatile. He had to be replaced 12 times already.

One thing I had noticed from having a clone active for so long was that my chakra never actually refilled fully. It was almost like all the chakra the clone took in formation could not return to me until I actually dispelled it. Considering I spent my days learning, studying, and meditating, it mattered little, but it was still something worth noticing. A weakness of my seemingly invincible clone jutsu. I walked out of the room and went straight to the grade wall again. We had started our second year here some months ago and had just finished our first round of assessments. My class of seventeen now numbered only thirteen, and more were sure to drop out this year.

I looked for my name and found it at the top, as had become customary. This time, instead of a 97%, a bright gleaming complete 100% stared back at me. I guess that's what had caused the commotion. As I walked to the mess hall, I noticed way more eyes on me than I was used to.

A shifting of my chakra, and suddenly there was a pillow in my place as Mebuki crashed into it from behind. "Gaara-chan," she whined out loud, and I only smiled at her. She had started part-time rotations at the hospital and had become a much scarcer sight as a result, but she always made sure to return here every Sunday.

"Mebuki-san," I said, giving her a formal bow that I knew would tick her off. A few minutes of playful chasing later, we were sitting together with our meals in front of us.

"Special Gaara-chan. Never expected you to actually get a perfect score. They used to say it was impossible. The best I ever hit was a 98%," she said, and I just hmmed along to her words. The exams had been easy. I had already covered the entirety of the coursework in my private studies, and I now spent my time studying rarer and more obscure scrolls outside the curriculum. The treatise on the Eight Inner Gates was something truly fascinating. With a medic's perspective on all that could go wrong with the gates, I was much less interested in messing around with them. Opening the gates wrongly even once could permanently cripple a ninja. It made it even more impressive that Rock Lee could open five of them after only a year and change of training. The genius of hard work indeed.

"Are you listening?" she asked, sensing that I had gotten lost in my own head again, and I quickly nodded to show her I was still with her. Mebuki could do strange things when she felt unappreciated.

"Good," she said, and then moved on to telling me all about the patients she had been working with. I just smiled and focused on her words. My thoughts could wait.

XXXXXXXX

Another failed meditation, I thought to myself as I stood up from my sand platform and jumped to my feet. Two years here, and six months of meditating whenever I was capable, and I still couldn't even sense the barest signs of nature energy. I was able to get the skill up to level 50, but all that had given me was increased chakra regeneration and faster healing while meditating. I hoped senjutsu would come at level 75, and not 100 like I was beginning to fear. I also hoped that just leveling up meditation would be enough to get some hint of how to achieve it after all. If a summoning contract proved necessary, I would be quite fucked.

My clones had been forced to move a bit away from the desert as my Earth Release had lagged too far behind the rest of my skills. Now, they spent their time in the mountains that bordered the Land of Earth. They had yet to be disturbed, but they had come close to encountering a few patrols. It was risky to remain there, but that risk was mitigated by the fact that they could simply dispel themselves if they were in any actual danger of being seen.

I stepped out of my tent and joined the rest of the class as we were escorted to one of our first human patients. Our subject was a shinobi. Civilians were treated at the hospital, and only shinobi with serious injuries were ever sent straight down here. The fact that we were being placed in charge of the patient meant things couldn't be that serious.

I swallowed my words as I approached the bed and saw a man whose stomach had practically been bifurcated. This was the first time we were left in charge, but not the first time we were working on a human, so all eight of my classmates barely even flinched as we got to work.

"Gaara, you take point," our instructor commanded, and I ignored the glares I received from some of my classmates as I got to work. I first started with a diagnostic. I ran it myself since I didn't trust the rest of them to not be incompetent and then began issuing orders. In virtually no time, I was holding a scalpel to his insides, searching for the bit of shrapnel that had gotten lodged in, while one of my classmates held a weaker variant of the Mystic Palm to his side to keep him from dying, and another held both hands to his head to maintain his unconsciousness. It would be really fucked if he woke up suddenly.

"Satoru, the bowl, please," I asked one of my classmates as I finally noticed the offending bit of metal lodged in my patient's large intestine. From there, it was child's play to use the Mystic Palm to clean up his wounds, seal the internal bleeding, and then seal the opening in his gut after we had stitched it up.

I nodded at my classmates, signaling that we were finally finished, as I examined his body one more time. Applause from the corner drew my attention, and I turned to find Rasa walking into the tent with Chiyo trailing behind him. "Well done, my son. Well done." The rest of the room dropped to their knees as they noticed the Kazekage. I didn't even bother to nod at him, keen on making my displeasure known.

"We have talking to do, Gaara," he said, the smile still pronounced but less honest. I nodded and followed him out of the tent.

A/N; New Chapter done, I guess. Yes, we sped through the years at the medical training corps. I did promise to speed through the period before canon, didn't I? But we still showed some of the progress before then, I hope.