Naruto : Monsters: Chapter 45

I always found it weird how some people looked so different from what they weighed. During my past life, I once had a classmate that had been a total bean pole, the skinniest kid I knew. 

The boy had been so tall that he towered over the rest of the class but was as slender as a twig. He was so thin that I could hold both of his wrists in one hand, the guy was practically anorexic. Yet despite that, the kid had somehow managed to outweigh me. 

It could have been his height coming to play or maybe he had more muscles underneath those baggy shirts he wore than I gave him credit for but put him on some scales, and he would somehow manage to outweigh all but the largest boys in class.

Then there was the opposite end of the spectrum. Not so much here in the Elemental Nations but back in my old world, obesity was beginning to become a serious problem. And among those people there were several individuals who, how should I put this lightly, wore shirt sizes with more 'X's in them than I had fingers but somehow weighted nearly half I would have guessed them to be given their bulky bodies.

What I was trying to say is that there were a lot of people out there who weighed far less than they appeared to be.

And Kakashi was not one of those people.

Every breath I took burned but, fighting through the pain, I forced my aching arms to straighten, pushing myself up off the ground. Sweat ran down my face and dripped off my nose as I held the plank position, staining the already damp ground beneath my face, and after sucking a shaky lungful of air I once again bent my arms and lowered myself to the ground.

Only to repeat the entire thing all over again.

"How much does your fat ass weigh?" I managed to wheeze out between breaths as I forced myself to finish another push-up.

"I resent that," with my Byakugan turned on, as it always was during training, I could tell that Kakashi never took his eyes away from the book he was reading from his place on my back, "I'll have you know that I do not have a fat ass. As a matter of fact, my ass consists of 70% pure muscles, 20% pure fine and 10% sheer awesome, making it a 100% certified badass. And it is not, in any way, fat."

"Then how come you weigh so goddamn much?" I groaned back, forcing myself to work through the burn. After all the training I had suffered through during my second childhood, something as easy as push-ups was child's play for me. 

With chakra to enhance my body, I could have burned through a hundred of these without breaking a single sweat. Or I would have, if I didn't have a grown man sitting on my back who, thanks to a combination of unnaturally dense muscles and the equipment he carried, weighed a shit ton more than he looked.

"That's because of all the awesomeness I'm carrying," turning a page, Kakashi giggled perversely at something he read before answering. "It's clear to me that all of that awesome is too much of a burden for a little kid like you, so it's weighing you down."

"Are you sure you're not heavy because you're so full of shit?" I had to pause speaking for a sec as I forced myself through another push-up. "Because that's all I'm hearing every time you open your mouth."

"The only piece of shit around here is the one that's clinging to the bottom of my ass," Kakashi absentmindedly ruffled my hair, "Though keep trying with the comebacks, you might even get good enough to give me a challenge someday."

Instead of rising to the clear provocation, I resisted the temptation and decided to save my breath instead by ignoring Kakashi. The training was hard enough as it is without his wisecracking added in.

For the next few minutes, the Team 7 training ground was almost blissfully silent. Nothing could be heard but the sound of my low panting and the quiet muttering of Naruto and Shikamaru from the other side of the training field. It was actually kind of a nice change of pace after all of the hectic days I've had to go through since becoming a Genin.

Naturally, Kakashi had to ruin it.

"How did you learn it?" My Sensei asked me out of the blue.

"How did I learn what?" I grunted out, trying and failing to pretend that my nose didn't itch as much as it did. The temptation to stop and scratch it was almost overwhelming, but I resisted. Instead, I focused on lowering myself as close to the ground as possible before pushing myself up again, trying to get the most of my workout.

Grey hair filled the front of my vision as Kakashi leaned over my head, looking me straight in the eyes. "The Rasengan, how did you learn it?"

That actually caught me off guard, and I paused halfway through another push-up to process what he said. When I realized how guilty that made me look I forced myself to continue, "What makes you think I even know how to use the Rasengan? It's Naruto's technique, ask her."

"I did," Kakashi straightened up and crossed his legs, making himself more comfortable on the middle of my back.

"And?" I asked as I completed another pushup, giving him so much of my attention that I hardly noticed the exertion of the workout anymore.

"She told me she learned it from a dream." Kakashi let out a thoughtful hum as he scratched his chin through his face mask. "Which reminds me, I'm going to have to teach Naruto how to lie properly. She's really terrible at it, isn't she?"

"That she is." I agreed as I lowered myself to the ground. While Naruto has always been good at bluffing she has never been able to get the knack of lying, at least not straight to your face. It was her eyes, they were too emotional. They always seemed to show what she was thinking. "But that doesn't explain why you think I would know anything about the Rasengan?"

"Well, she had to learn it from somewhere. Naruto is too much of a kinesthetic learner to understand how to create her own jutsu. And the Rasengan is far more complex than it looks, it'd take a lot of advanced chakra theory to figure out how it works let alone how to recreate it. 

That means someone had to teach it to her and, as far as I know, there are only two people alive that are supposed to know that technique. One of them is me and the other is Jiraiya, the Fourth's Sensei." 

Kakashi flipped through another page, looking as casual as he always did though I had no doubt in mind he was completely focused on me, "Jiraiya-sama hasn't been in the village for a long time now. Years if I remember correctly. And I know I haven't taught it to her so that only leaves you."

"Again, why me?"

"Well, out of all the people that she spends time with you are the only one that has a habit of stealing other people's techniques." He pointed out casually and I knew he was talking about the Chidori. Huh, if I didn't know any better I'd say he was feeling a little sore about that. "So quit stalling and spill. How did you learn it?"

Were I not so out of breath I might have sighed.

I guess it was too much to hope that the Rasengan wouldn't be traced back to me. And I knew there was no way I could talk my way out of this, not when Kakashi was so invested in figuring out the mystery. Whenever he got like this Kakashi was like a dog with a bone, he just wouldn't let go. That he waited until nearly the end of my training to spring the question on me, when I was too exhausted to properly think up a lie, was proof that.

It was a good thing then that I already had one prepared when I decided to teach Naruto the jutsu.

"It was the Kaiten." Kakashi's face popped back in front of me, his upside-down features strangely intense as he looked me in the eye.

That was something that I had noticed other people do, even when they knew I could see them no matter where they stood around me with my Byakugan, they still tried to make eye contact whenever they spoke with me. "The Gentle Fist technique that's exclusive to the Hyuuga main house? What does that have to do with anything?"

"Everything," I replied, "the Kaiten works using the same basic principles as the Rasengan. Both techniques require the user to release a large amount of raw chakra before using it to create a rotating sphere of energy."

I paused in the middle of the next push-up so that I could talk without interruption. "The only major difference between the two is that the Rasengan is used for offensive purposes while the Kaiten is used primarily for defence. 

Well, that, and the Kaiten requires the entire body to spin to help create the rotation while the Rasengan is done purely through chakra manipulation. Once I realized that it was easy to reverse engineer the Rasengan and figure out how the technique worked."

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