This story is now live on RoyalRoad, Scribblehub, Spacebattles, and Ao3. If you like the story, please consider giving it a like, follow, or review on those sites to help the story get more eyes on it. :) There will be one new chapter for the next five days! Enjoy! ---------------------------------------------------------During the weekends, when the academy didn’t have classes, Sano spent her time in the library or at training field thirty-nine, which was quickly becoming a second home.
There was something rewarding about improving herself. While she didn’t remember much about her Earth-self, she knew her Earth-self wasn’t as driven as she was here. Whether it be studious research about chakra, jutsu, or the history of shinobi; the physical training, perfecting the use of her small body, or partaking in inhuman levels of strength and dexterity... She thoroughly enjoyed it all.
About two weeks had passed since her run-in with her uncle Jogan and Tsunade, and today was the day she was supposed to meet her new Fuinjutsu teacher. Jiraiya, one of the legendary three Sanin. He was said to be a bit of a fool and a pervert, yet friendly and an expert on barriers. One of the best teachers she could ask for… Well, according to Jogan and the librarians she’d asked.
When the awaited knock on her door rang out through her small apartment, she scampered over, smothered down her trench coat, and tucked a few strands of loose hair behind her ear. First impressions were important, and she didn’t want to be a child in front of the man who could make or break her training.
She opened the door, crinkled her eyes into an eye-smile, looked up, and was immediately brushed past by a giant of a man. Jiraiya looked to be in his early twenties and stood a solid six feet tall, with a few inches thrown on top. He wore a suit of chain mail-esque armor under a white robe which was tied off at the waist with a simple belt. At the ends of the sleeves and where the robe transitioned into his pants, decals of flame licked upwards towards his elbow and torso.
His spiky white hair stood in stark contrast to the sharp lines of red makeup stretching diagonally down the side of his cheeks, angled outwards from the outward corner of his eyes. Eyes that barely spared her a glance before he strode into her room like he owned the place. Jiraiya took in her rolled up futon and the kitchen with barely a glance, shrugged, swiftly kicked the futon to unroll it, then slumped down to rest, head tilted back to bang on the wall.
Sano shuffled in after him and stood in the entryway, too shocked by his severe lack of manners to even contemplate signing a coherent response.
After a long sigh, Jiraiya cracked open one of his eyes to stare at her. “Listen kid, I just spent the better part of three years teaching a group of brats. I’m not really interested in this whole mentorship, but if I don’t at least try, Tsunade will kill me.”
After a quick jolt, she responded. ‘I can prove myself to you.’ She really didn’t want to let this opportunity slip through her fingers.
He sighed again, leaning forward to rest an elbow on his raised knee. “I don’t need you to prove anything to me. This is probably just not going to work out, so don’t get your hopes up. I told Hime that I’d give you at least a week. I’m not promising anything past that.”
With a loud crack of the neck, he gestured her over towards her. “Let’s get some questions out of the way. Firstly, why do you even want to learn Fuinjutsu? Normally kids go for flashy Ninjutsu.”
Sano sat down across from him on the edge of the rug that covered her apartment’s floor. ‘I’ve spent the last few weeks in the library learning as much as I can, but at the end of every single chapter, it says to never try Fuinjutsu without a mentor.’ She signed slowly, as longer sentences were much harder to convey. ‘The possibilities are endless with Fuinjutsu, and from what I can tell, it is the strongest ninja path to walk.’
“Hoh? Strongest you say?” Jiraiya smiled, but his eyes weren’t. “And what do you need this strength for?”
‘To be the best I can be.’ Was her immediate response. ‘Why would I not try to be the best? Nobody wants to be mediocre.’
“Kid, you’re what? Eight? Most kids just want to play around throwing fireballs, not sit in stuffy rooms working with seals. I’ll need something more than that.” He scoffed.
Sano frowned, looking down in thought. ‘Fuinjutsu can let me speak again. It would let me use all the elemental releases too?’
Jiraiya laughed, leaning forward to rest his chin on his knee and arm. “That’s more like it.” This time, his eyes followed along with his smile. “So, Tsunade-hime said you had a bunch of questions?”
With a speed that Jiraiya hadn’t expected, Sano whipped out her scroll and flung it open. ‘I have so many…’
—----------------------------------------
“Yeah you can, but why would you layer the seal and add unneeded complexity when you could widen it, rework it, and make a larger one? It’s not like your idea needs to be small, if it will even work to begin with.” Jiraiya sat hunched, fist on his chin as he contemplated her questions.
She’d gotten him thoroughly invested with many of her questions, and it now felt like a back-and-forth conversation rather than a lecture. ‘Because my body only has so much canvas.’ Sano signed back, eyes locked onto him as she studied his every movement.
With a small hidden smile, she watched as Jiraiya short circuited. He blinked like that famous meme, four times, then swiveled his incredulous gaze to meet hers. “Your body? You want to put this on yourself?” He scoffed. “Are you insane?”
Sano slapped the scroll, then signed. “And if it works? You said it could work…”
“Kid, you haven’t even made an explosion tag. You’re getting way ahead of yourself.” Jiraiya tugged the scroll from out under her palm, then read over it once again. He ran a hand down his face, eyes flicking from the scroll to her occasionally, before he looked annoyed. “I’ll come by tomorrow at noon. We’ll work on some smaller explosion tags to get you started.”
Sano was giddy, but Jiraiya spoke before she could get more excited. His tone was serious. “You have potential. I will admit that much… but potential is only that—potential. If you don’t live long enough to rise to what you can be, then it’s meaningless. We don’t even know if you’ll be capable of making half the stuff you’ve been thinking up, and it’s not like you’ll be finding out anytime soon by the looks of it.”
“So, anything else you want to learn? I assume Genjutsu is one, going by some of your hypothetical seal ideas.” He asked, rolling up the scroll to place by his side.
‘Yes. Genjutsu would allow me to speak as well. Much easier too, I think.’ Sano paused, then added. ‘The skills needed for Fuinjutsu and Genjutsu overlap. They also complement each other.’
Jiraiya hummed in thought. “You’re not wrong, but learning from the few Uchiha capable of using Genjutsu to a satisfactory degree would be hard. They rely too much on their Dojutsu. While you could learn, there would always be a gap between you.”
‘What about the Kurama? One of my classmates is from the Kurama clan.’ Sano signed.
“The Kurama, eh? Not a bad idea. I don’t know too much about them. They’re pretty small? They would be better if you can get them to teach you… It’d be more of an even playing field. If you had a Sharingan, then the Uchiha would obviously be the better option.”
‘Do you know any Genjutsu? I’ve never actually seen anyone use one before.’ She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t curious to know what it felt like to be under one.
“I know one or two. Again, not my specialty.” Jiraiya narrowed his eyes in her direction.
‘Use it on me?’ Sano signed, putting on her puppy-dog eyes as she wiggled back and forth, begging.
With a lightning fast Tiger hand sign, Jiraiya did something as he muttered under his breath. Suddenly, Sano was caught mid wiggle, paralysed. She tilted over, shoulder thumping onto the hardwood floor. It reminded her of when she had first woken up in this world, but unlike that time, there wasn’t any pain and she could move her eyes to look about with ease.
“Pop quiz! See if you can break out of it by yourself. You’ve read enough Genjutsu books to know how. Now, put it into practice.” Jiraiya said calmly. With a mischievous grin on his face, he stood up. “I think I’ll make us some dinner while you practice! Let’s see what you’ve got in here…” Jiraiya opened her fridge, then carelessly dug through her food stash. “No booze?”
I’m eight! Sano wanted to sign, but she was paralyzed… Put two and two together.
To break out of Genjutsu, you first needed to know how Genjutsu worked. Genjutsu uses the casters Chakra to manipulate the targets, controlling it to provide an array of effects—mostly dealing with the five senses. So, to break out of Genjutsu, one has to purge the chakra manipulating them out of their system, or disrupt their own chakra flow in a sudden irregular spike and hope the rapid change will throw off the enemy casting the jutsu. If you didn’t know you were in a Genjutsu, that’s obviously much harder to accomplish.
There was the third option of inducing severe pain to shock someone out, but as Sano was paralysed, that wasn’t an option.
This brought up another facet of Genjutsu—Chakra Control. If one does not have a level of chakra control higher than the targets, then the Genjutsu will fail, or in a best-case scenario, be discovered instantly.
Needless to say, Jiraiya had her beat in the chakra control department. This wouldn’t be easy.
It took only a second to find her chakra, which she followed along until she sensed the disruption. Of course, as Genjutsu deals with the senses, it was disrupted around her head—the Tenketsu points, or smaller chakra nodes, flared and pulsed in her mind's eye.
It was said that you should make the Tiger sign and surge your chakra to break the disruption while shouting ‘Kai’, but that was difficult as she was paralysed. She couldn’t move her hands to make the sign, so she’d have to try the hard way. The Tiger sign wasn’t strictly needed, but if you had control of your hands, there wasn’t much of a point to not use the training wheels it provided.
Thankfully, Jiraiya wasn’t actively controlling the chakra disrupting her normal flow. If he was, she’d probably be at his mercy for as long as he wanted. She tried forcing her chakra to circulate, but that didn’t work as well as she’d hoped. Next, she tried to gather her chakra in her head, but again, that didn’t seem to work either.
Finally, Sano sent a massive spike of chakra through her pathways, speeding up her flow to three times its natural speed in less than a second, before returning it to normal.
With a thunk on wood, her no longer stiff neck flopped down to bang her head onto the floor.
Jiraiya was halfway done making some scrambled eggs and had already plated two plates of cooked rice by the time she’d broken free. He heard the thunk and looked over his shoulder at her as she gingerly rubbed her temple. “Hoh? Free already are you? Good job, kid. Just remember, if you don’t break out of that in less than a second you’ll already be dead. Good motivation to learn, no?”
‘Teach me that.’ Sano signed after she stood to stretch her sore muscles.
“Sure, but maybe after dinner.”
—---------------------------------------
Sano stood opposite her opponent for her last spar of the day. Unfortunately, she was going to lose. Badly. Kazuya Uchiha was the best of their class, and not by a small margin either. While not bigger than the others, he was better at Taijutsu than the second and third best put together. Why was she put against him? Bad luck of the draw. Simple as that.
Tanaka-sensei knew that she was going to lose, but had the grace not to say anything about it. Like he’d said before, this was about learning. This wasn’t about winning to prove anything, even though the rest of the class obviously had their little rankings in mind.
“Seal of Confrontation.” Tanaka ordered, and Sano and Kazuya obeyed. With a raise of the hand, Tanaka started the match. “Begin!”
Kazuya was at her side in an instant, thrusting out palms and strikes faster than she could react. As she turned to block, he circled her, always keeping away from her front as he surgically pummeled her shoulder and side. After getting stomped out by nearly everyone in class repeatedly, she’d learned that you would never win by being only on the defensive. Offence offered defence as your opponent needed to block, which then relieved pressure.
Knowing that she was durable, slightly more so than her classmates, Sano ignored one of Kazuya’s strikes, taking it fully as she sent a backhand toward his face in retaliation. With a bend of the neck, Kazuya avoided the strike all together and still landed one of his own with full force. Another twenty seconds passed without getting a single hit in, before she flopped onto the ground, giving up.
“Stop!” Tanaka-sensei always called the end of their bouts, as she couldn’t sign her forfeit in the heat of battle. Kazuya was sweating, but it was more because of the physical activity than because of strain. He stopped with a fist inches from her head. Slowly, he pulled back and returned to his starting position.
Not helping her up was an insult, but not one anyone seemed to question. She’d seen all of his bouts, as had everyone else, and he’d always helped everyone up when he’d beaten them… just not her, it seemed. She ignored the shame pooling in her gut as she pushed herself off the ground and took her starting spot.
“Sign of Reconciliation.” Sensei ordered. They signed, and walked off to take their seats as the next group was called forward.
Murakuma gave her the classic ‘I told you to be careful’ look as she plopped down beside him. “Good try.”
With her keyring, she found her reply instantly. ‘No.’
Losing day in and day out sucked, but wasn’t unexpected. She was getting better, but she’d learned that the clan kids had their own Taijutsu teachings and the non-clan kids had the pre-appointed Konoha village Taijutsu style, taught at the very beginning of the academy. She—or Old-Sano—had once known it, but now she was using some bastardized Karin Kazuki Street Fighter style that she didn’t even know how to use. She’d never asked why they didn’t stop to teach her the Konoha style of fighting, but she was smart enough to guess that she just didn’t have time to start over from scratch. If she’d started in the first year again, then they would have. Being two years behind her peers was a big detriment.
Once all the sparring was over, Tanaka-sensei had a final word before ending class for the day. “After the weekend, we will begin to incorporate ninja tools and jutsu into our spars. He scanned over the still sitting class as many of the children grew excited. “Prepare yourselves and rest. Have a good weekend.” He ended with a kind smile.
Tanaka was a good teacher; kind and caring. He obviously had their best interests in mind… but she couldn’t help but think of how her and the non-clan kids were going to get stomped even harder. If she had insects, she would be able to use the Aburame clan jutsus (even though she didn’t even know them anymore), but for now she’d only be able to use those she learned in class as well as the Paralysis Genjutsu Jiraya had taught her… but she had an idea to help her out.
—------------------------------------------------------------------------
Late at night after her after school training as the bright stars of the sky shined and the gentle cool breeze of the village flowed through her open window of her apartment, Sano sat over a scroll as Jiraya pointed and lectured. “Explosive tags are unique, yet simple. This swirl, or Whirlpool, is the activation mark. The rest is a carefully mapped out self destructive sequence, which ends in an explosion. Simple in design, yet meticulously made.”
She nodded at the design. While all Fuinjutsu were complex, the Explosive Tag was the basic of them all. It was even simpler than the Storage Seal, but it was by no means not complex. She could see why Fuinjutsu wasn’t something taught to children at the academy. All they needed to know was ‘push your chakra here’ and be done with it. If she wanted to make her own seals, barriers, and tags, then she needed to know them inside and out.
In her mind, Fuinjutsu wasn’t too dissimilar to how a computer worked. You had all these bits and pieces you could swap out to perform different functions and series of outputs. Most Fuinjutsu had a large swirl, hexagon, or circle as its base, which she mentally thought of as a computer tower case. Inside, there were numerous other symbols which connected the base, which held the chakra inside, to perform different tasks. There were symbols that acted as a CPU, which amplified or subdued/throttled chakra input and outputs, along with many other relevant crossovers in her mind. Figuring out how to get the seal to do something you wanted required immense understanding, and she was still dipping her toes into the field.
She understood the Explosion Tag, but if she was truly eight years old, then it would be beyond her.
She held up her hands, which drew Jiraya’s immediate attention. ‘I understand this. If I make one, can you help me make some Chakra Sealing Tags? I want special ones.”
It took her a few seconds to sign the long sentence, but Jiraya understood. “Why?” It wasn’t a harsh why, but one filled with confusion. “You do know that if you use those on your classmates that you’d be expelled in seconds, right?”
She sent him a flat stare. ‘I’m not a bully. They’re for me.’
Jiraya copied her stare and threw it right back as he crossed his arms. “You want to put them on yourself? For training, I assume?”
‘Yes.’ Sano nodded as she signed. Before he could look away from her hands, she carried on. ‘Uncle told me no, but I can handle it.’
He stared at her for a moment, taking in her measure. With a sigh full of exasperation, he ran a hand through his spiky mane of hair and ruffled his head in frustration. He leaned back onto his elbows. “Tell you what,” He nodded to the scroll before them. “You make an Explosion Tag on your first try, and I will make a Chakra Sealing Tag here and now so you can know what it feels like. Then, you can see if you can truly deal with it or not.”
‘Deal!’ Sano signed quickly, her butt already scooting forward to grab one of the small pieces of paper to the side to begin her task.
Copying what was already there in the scroll on the floor was a non-issue. The scroll was written with non-chakra infused ink to prevent any explosions and would never activate and was the simplest seal she’d ever seen. The hard part was infusing her own chakra into her own writing with the special ink Jiraya brought alongside him. Through the entire process of copying the Explosive Seal, she needed to channel her chakra through her hands and never have it waver. With her still burgeoning control, she took multiple breaks, pausing well before she felt her control would slip.
It took five minutes, but by the end, she was confident in her seal. She slid it over to Jiraya who had been drawing a seal of his own in the meantime while also carefully watching her work. The man could multitask, she’d expected nothing less for someone in his position. He picked up his own seal and blew on it a few times to dry, then took hers from the floor. His eyes shifted from it to her as he hummed in calculation.
Without a word, he stood up and walked toward the open window, then threw it outside. She balked at him throwing away her work, then heard the Explosion a second later. She tugged one-armed at his sleeve in a panic, but he never turned to look at her hands as she signed. What was this idiot doing? He sent an explosion in the middle of the village?!
“Hmmm,” Jiraya rubbed his chin, pretending to be a sage. Suddenly, several ninja appeared on rooftops and on the branches of trees, gathering to where the explosion went off. Sano shrank back with her head in her hands at how much trouble she was going to be in.
“Gotta show up faster than that!” Jiraya shouted out as he pointed at the gathering shinobi, laughing.
Sano peeked through her fingers as many of the shinobi scoffed at the sight of Jiraya and turned around. One of them shouted back. “Usually we have a little bit of warning! Idiot!”
“Who said that?!” Jiraya held up a hand to his brow and scanned the scattering ninja, face promising vengeance. Before long, they all scattered and went back to whatever they’d been doing.
Sano punched his arm as hard as she could. Jiraya didn’t even flinch. ‘You’re an idiot!’
“I’m actually very wise! I’ll have you know, I just tested you, your tag, and the surrounding shinobi at the exact same time! A great success!” As he turned around, he slapped her on the shoulder.
An icy chill trailed down her body, not from fear or any pain… but the loss of that sixth sense she’d grown accustomed too since she awoke. She blinked in mild confusion and shock, then turned to Jiraya. He was watching her like a hawk. There was no joviality in his face, only that of a hardened ninja who survived a war and lived. In a flash, the look was gone. “Well, then. That’s unexpected.”
Turning her head, she spotted the small tag that Jiraya had made as she made her Explosive Tag. The Chakra Sealing Tag was stuck to her shoulder, near her collarbone. The feeling was uncomfortable, but it was the uncomfortableness of reverting back to ‘normal’ human limits and a little sick. She felt like Superman when exposed to Kryptonite. The mild sickness and weakness wasn’t anything debilitating, only very uncomfortable.
‘How much is this sealing?’ She signed as Jiraya looked her over. His face was unreadable.
“Standard amount. I didn’t have time to change the seal to something lesser.” He replied.
The standard amount was around 95% sealed, as that prevented the vast majority of ninja to lose all grasp of their chakra and their ability to form it into jutsu that would use way more than what was sealed. She peeled off the tag and felt the rush of her sixth sense return, then slapped it back on to feel it fade away. ‘It’s not that bad. Uncle made it sound like torture.’
Jiraya walked over to the rug to sit back down in his spot by the scroll. “A deal is a deal. How many and at what strength level do you want?”