6 I Like That Sword

"God I love Konoha." I stated with a grin as Naruto kept the Daimyo's cat under control with his thousand yard stare, "This whole place looks like it was built by someone with no idea how structural loads work, and then got finished by people with no time to do anything more than slap something together real quick, the whole place looks like it is held together by grit, luck, and daring. Obviously the gods favor us, otherwise the village would implode. And that's why we always win kiddo's even when all the other villages want a piece of us we come out on top, because we roll with the gods. We're chosen."

We handed over the cat with little issue and the village received its payout, but when the Hokage availed us of other possible missions Naruto broke down, falling to his knees.

"Please Old Man, please give us something to get us out of this village. I can't take anymore of Kiba's training. I'll do anything, just no more in-village missions." Naruto begged the man who's eyes widened in surprise.

"Well, I do have a mission just like that…" the Hokage started.

"We'll take it! Please!" Naruto interrupted the man with grateful tears in his eyes.

"Team 7 is more than ready for any C ranks the village might have." Kakashi lazily stated.

"Please bring Tazuna in." the Hokage commanded.

We smelled the Super Bridge Builder before we saw him, even those without enhanced noses, for the man smelt like a walking brewery.

"Oh man, is this really the kind of ninja that a C Rank can buy?" the drunken man mused, "They look kinda scary."

Naruto and Sakura came a long way since our first training session together. Despite feeding them five times a day the pair looked even leaner than before. They weighed more, looked bigger too after their sixty day transformation under my patient tutelage, but had a hungered look to them. Like people starving, starving for war.

Naruto made the mistake of trading me the Shadow Clone Jutsu for the Flame Ball Jutsu and its flamethrower variant. With that technique in hand I put them through over eight weeks of omni-directional ass chewing as I never had less than three clones harassing the pair at any given time. It both acclimated them to high pressure situations and gave me angles to always catch their fuck ups as I put them through grueling strength and conditioning exercises and demanding taijutsu and bukijutsu drills.

Why not teach them ninjutsu and medical jutsu like their canon selves learn, one may ask? Because building a tower on a foundation of wet tissue paper is stupid. Naruto and Sakura both had so many foundational problems that teaching them advanced jutsu only made them bigger targets without making them more dangerous and capable shinobi.

So I taught them tactics and situational awareness along with geography and history while I taught them how to fight to kill with their hands and their weapons. I didn't do some trite shit like tell them to change their clothes and work hard and eat right. I drilled them hard and fed them right. I taught them about armor systems and proper equipment, and gave them a pair of short spears that doubled as quarter staves, because in six months of weapons training I needed an option that they could become absolutely deadly with, and spears are pretty much idiot proof and have the benefit of putting a long sharp stick between them and onrushing enemies, and the constant threat of them throwing it puts enemies on guard even out of their enhanced striking range.

Plus Naruto's clones all copy his gear and a thousand clones with spears in hand is a fucking nightmare even for people like me. The kid went from someone I was tossing around to someone I had to toss Ninjutsu at with just a week of practice. Its fucking remarkable how a person's threat level jumps up when you put a weapon in their hands. Good luck running up on the kid and his clones to lay hands when there are thirty or forty spears pointed at you at all times.

On the plus side with the addition of the Shadow Clones to my repertoire I was able to not only rebuild Naruto and Sakura's foundational skills into something worth believing in without cutting into my own training time, I expanded both my training and free time by delegating study and skill acquisition to teams of Clones. Using a well thought out schedule I never had to process more than fifteen minutes of information or practice at a time, cutting down on the possibly lethal headaches that Naruto gets to skate over as the Incarnate of Asura and the host of Kurama, but allowing me to take up multiple fields of study at a time.

I had teams of five clones working on each of the five Elemental Transformations and on Shape Manipulation, making particular progress in my native Earth Release. I'll be straight here and admit that I want all the jutsu. At the top end, all of the releases are fantastic. Obviously lighting release got all the best shit because the story should have been called Sasuke as he was obviously Kishimoto's favorite character, but as time went on the other elements got their fair shake of awesome with Donzo and his vacuum techniques making wind great again, Oniki flying around and lifting meteors with earth release, Kisame creating an entire lake's worth of water in an instant that forms a moving dome that traps people in it and weaponizing the ocean and shooting a giant shark bomb that absorbs other jutsu to make itself stronger. Fuck Kisame is the coolest water user ever, Tobirama has that neat vapor flex and is fast as fuck, but Kisame's feats with water are fucking bonkers.

Then there is Madara with fire release. He's pretty good.

I want to be pretty good, and I don't care how many clones have to dedicate their temporary existences to chakra training to get there.

So yeah… Tazuna is right. We are scary.

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The Demon Brothers found out how scary we are the hard way when they jumped out of their puddle and got impaled by Naruto and Sakura by reflex. Two perfect strikes to the heart introduced the men to a foot of sharp steel each, and the two follow up strikes to their lungs resulted in a pair of unambiguous kills with the head recognizable for bounty claiming, and since the pair died so fast the only reason Kakashi had to put the mission on hold was some brief first kill counseling.

And I mean brief. A thumbs up and an eye smile did not sort out Naruto and Sakura's stress response to the situation at all, but I let the more experienced shinobi take the lead here as there was no way I was dealing with that shit for them.

We took a boat across the misty sea out to the mangrove surrounded islands that make up Wave Country and caught sight of Tazuna's fabled bridge before landing. We passed under a wide sea wall with tunnels allowing passage into the harbor town Tazuna lived in. The boatman pulled back after letting us off at the docks and returned to sea, and a brief walk in the woods had us stopping to wait out a rustling in the bushes.

The emergence of a white bunny lowered the guard of the jumpy Naruto and Sakura, but the whirling of a thrown weapon brought them back into focus. I smashed the sword out of the air with my Kanabo hard enough to destabilize the clone that threw it, and Kakashi intercepted a second water clone that came after Tazuna while the first tried its distraction. Sakura popped the clone with a quick poke, and a third emerged from the foliage.

"Give up the old man." demanded the shirtless man in pinstripe pants with an anime oversized carving knife resting over his shoulder.

"That's a nice fucking sword. I like that sword." I told the water clone while my nose sussed out the locations of the real Zabuza and his partner Haku, "Tell you what. Leave the sword with me and I'll let you and the trap walk."

As I said this my arm hidden under the glory of Lord Fluff Fluff connected chakra strings to my favorite puppet and I channeled Earth Chakra Flow to it, allowing it to slip into the ground like swimming through water.

"You think you're a funny kid, some kind of joker?" Zabuza's water clone growled, "We'll soon see how far that sense of humor can stretch when your team is laid out on the ground before you in as many pieces as possible."

Zabuza and Haku leapt from cover when the Octoblender emerged from the ground and tried to turn them into kebabs. As they flew through the air I angled my kanabo to point at Haku, resting in the crook of my elbow while I sent the Octoblender after Zabuza.

His senses sharp, Haku flew through hand signs to get some ice between us as the tip of my kanabo slid down and a shower of senbon shot out of the barrel of my weapon. Like the Ami Umbrellas, my spring loaded senbon could pierce five mil steel plates, so Haku's ice mirror shattered under the assault and the boy behind it ate shit as my senbon tore him apart. Zabuza didn't even see the death of his pupil as he frantically fought off the Octoblender, but once he caught sight of the aftermath he froze for just a moment and a bladed tentacle slipped into his belly followed by another in his chest. My favorite puppet pulled its limbs in opposite directions and pulled the man's torso apart with them.

I put down my kanabo and walked over to the wreckage of the former Jonin, using my chakra strings to pull his body back together for transport in my storage scroll along with the Demon Brothers.

"I was right." I announced as I heaved up Kubikiribocho, "This is a nice fucking sword."

I kicked my kanabo up and landed it back in it holster while carrying Kubikiribocho on my shoulder as I approached Tazuna, "That's a Jonin and three Chunin." I declared with a frown on my face, "Now… stop me if I am wrong here Kakashi… but defending a client from a Jonin and three Chunin makes for an A rank mission. Now Zabuza was kind enough to let us know that he was sent specifically for you. How bout you do us the common fucking curtesy of telling us the exact situation you 'hired' us for."

Tazuna delivered his tragic spiel and I got to watch it work its magic on Naruto and Sakura as they put the earlier killings behind them and grew into the role of heroes for this backwater nation. Kakashi'd been their and done that, and I'd been through this arc enough between the manga, anime, and fanfiction to know the gist by heart.

"I appreciate your fucking candor, Tazuna, here in the eleventh hour that it comes." I patted the old dude on the shoulder, "It takes a brass sack to walk into Konohagakure and lie to us. If your lucky we won't take that brass sack away from you."

The elderly man transitioned quickly from smug to terrified having realized not everyone cared about his sob story.

"You're getting blacklisted for this, possibly imprisoned, possibly fined heavily. Whether or not that happens is a matter of how much you owe us." I drolly commented, "So that'll be a C Rank escort, and an IOU on an A Rank Escort, an IOU on an A Rank Assassination, and an IOU on an A Rank Peace Keeping mission."

"Assassination? Peace keeping?" Tazuna gaped in confusion.

"Why the fuck would Gato even need to kill you if he has enough men to take over all the ports on this group of islands?" I barked at the man, "Even if you finish the bridge he'll just set up a toll station and you are back to square one and you still have a pissed off rich dude with an army of goons occupying your country. So you need us to kill Gato and his goons. Assassination and Peace Keeping."

"Ahhhhhh…" the man groaned, "I really should run my ideas by a five year old before I start building bridges as some kind of effort to free my country from tyranny."

"Yeah, and since you now owe us for three A Rank missions, you are going to have to get up and attem making money, old timer. We gotta a lot of hard men in Konoha's penal system, so you better pray that this bridge of yours gets a lot of traffic. Otherwise your ass will." I glared at the man and continued our march up the path to his house.

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Now normally I don't do this. I love hearing back from my audience, but for the first time I want some people in my audience to shut the fuck up. And it is all the people who want to Kiba to betray Konoha.

You dumb mother fuckers know nothing of espionage and defection. You are all that dumbshit traitor that gets his the ultimate reward of 'DEATH' for all your hard work. Madara fucking Uchiha betrayed his village for no reason other than he is a gaping asshole and spent the rest of his life living under a fucking tree. Orochimaru had it best out of all the traitor characters and he is like the smartest dude in the setting.

First off, you never betray your country without committed enticement from a foreign power. And I'm not talking promises, I am talking regular hefty payouts leading up to your defection. You need to have made the expense of buying you so high that it would be insanity to betray you after the betrayal just from the sunk costs.

You never just run off and go to Kumo and whine that Hiruzen was mean to you. That is fucking insane. You are now for the rest of your life a deserter and a traitor, and you have set the bar for your betrayal at minor aggravation. No one will ever trust you again. You will spend your life in the mother fucking wilderness as an outlaw, and outlaw living fucking sucks.

So shut the fuck up. All of you. You people have no idea how betrayal works. Literally all the missing nin live shit lives, and that is for a very good reason.