Naruto : Monsters

"Oh, of course I wouldn't mind if Shikamaru stayed out late to train."

Nara Yoshino, Shikamaru's mom and a retired kunoichi seemed wholly delighted by my request. We were standing at the front door of her house and, going by the white apron she was wearing and the iron skillet held in her hand, she had been in the middle of preparing lunch when we rang the door.

"In fact, I wouldn't even mind if you took him away for an entire month. Really, that boy of mine needs to get out of the house more often anyway."

"Thank you so much Yoshino-san." I bowed respectfully to Shikamaru's mom before flashing her my best smile. "Don't worry, I'll be sure to keep a close eye on your son and I promise to let you know if he's causing any trouble."

Yoshino cupped her cheek as she smiled happily, "Oh what a wonderful child, if only my boy was a bit more like you." Then her smile seemed to freeze, "Speaking of my boy."

I swear it was like watching Dr Jekyll turn into Mr Hyde as right before my eyes the sweet middle-aged mom transformed into a raging she-devil. Yoshino turned to her son and pointed her iron skillet at him, yelling.

"Did you hear me Shikamaru! I expect you to be on your best behaviour with your new teammates, and I don't want to hear so much as a single bad thing about you. Have I made myself clear?"

Off to one side, Naruto had to muffle her mouth with her hands to keep herself from breaking out in laughter. While Shikamaru, eyes twitching, just dumbly nodded to his mother before turning to look at me.

I just put on a big innocent smile, "You hear that Shika, you're mum said it was ok for you to stay and train."

Shikamaru gave a long thousand-mile stare for a long moment before he seemed to collapse into himself. Sighing, he lowered his head,"…Troubleso- NO!" His head shot up and he glared at me as something inside him snapped. "This has gone beyond being just troublesome. This is pure bullshit!"

"Shikamaru! Language!"

Naruto reached the end of her limits and let out a howl of laughter.

...

There comes a time, a single moment in your life when things simply start to make sense. You gain a certain sense of clarity and you look back at your life with wiser eyes as things that were once obscure and incomprehensible become painfully clear. 

Monks would refer to such a feeling as enlightenment and would dedicate their entire life in pursuit of it. Yet every now and then completely ordinary people going about their daily lives would stumble upon it by pure chance. 

Just like I did. And in my moment of enlightenment, when the world made infinitely more sense than it had just this morning and the truth was as clear to me as the sun blazing in the sky, I have come to a startling conclusion. I realized…

I was an idiot.

This fundamental truth has never been more clearer to me than it was now as I watched Naruto pace in circles, a constant stream of 'Late-late-late, he's late!' spilling from her lips and filling the air in what would have been a perfect re-enactment of yesterday's events were it not for our current surroundings.

It turned out that our training ground was located smack down in the middle of a large stretch of forested land, just on the outskirts of Konoha. Right now we were in one of the many clearings that dotted the place. 

I was sitting on top of one of the three training stumps while Shikamaru leaned on another from his place on the ground. Naruto, of course, was pacing the width of the clearing as she had been for the last hour.

It was the morning of our exam and we had stayed up most of the previous night scouting the area, finishing up the last bits of our preparation and double-checking our plans for any mistakes. When we were finished, it was well past midnight and we barely had enough time to sneak in a few hours worth of sleep before rushing over here.

We all had to be there at eight o'clock sharp if we didn't want to waste even a single minute of our exam time, which was why I had Naruto and Shikamaru crashed at my place. When it was time to wake up, I made sure to personally drag them out of their beds and all the way here, just in time for the start of the exam.

All in all, we should have started the exam nearly an hour ago were it not for one tiny little problem. You see, Kakashi… hasn't shown up yet… he was late… for the start of his own test…

Truly, I was an idiot.

'The exam won't begin until all of us arrive,' Kakashi warned us twice and yet at the time I still hadn't grasped that by us, he included himself. In my haste to make sure my teammates arrived on time, I had forgotten to drag the laziest member of our group.

And because of that mistake, we were now wasting precious time waiting for our instructor that we could have been using on the exam instead. And I had no one to blame but myself.

"What's taking that scarecrow so long to get here?" Naruto stopped her pacing and walked up to me, "Hey Hikaru, can't we start setting things up now? The scarecrow isn't here, he won't notice anything if we start early."

I shook my head, "It won't work," I had considered the option myself but after scanning the forest I had been forced to reconsider, "I've been spotting packs of dogs roaming the area. Not ordinary ones either, these have their own chakra networks so they must be nin-ken, ninja-dogs."

"Dogs?" Naruto frowned, "You mean like the Inuzuka's? How did the scarecrow ever manage to do that? Kiba doesn't even allow anyone to borrow Akamaru, he barely lets the puppy leave his sights, so how did the scarecrow manage to get a whole pack of their dogs?

"That's because they're not the Inuzuka's dogs but the summoned variety." I explained, "Kakashi is supposed to be the Dog Clan's head summoner, he's been working alongside them for years. 

Going by the looks of things he must have sent them on ahead, probably to scout the area for any traps we might have set up. 

They're keeping their distance but if we try anything unusual they'll notice, so we better stick to the plan. You and Shikamaru should stay hidden for now and wait until the fighting starts up before moving out."

Naruto looked away with a frown and crossed her arms, "I know, I know. It's just," she sighed, "I'm sick and tired of all this waiting. Why can't Kakashi get his ass over here so we can start already?"

From my perch on the log, I gave my blonde friend an amused smile, "You know, I never could understand that part about you." Naruto sent me a questioning look, "How can you wait so patiently during one of your traps but still be so impatient at any other time?"

Naruto had already been a prankster by the time we first met. Since her pranks had always been on the harmless side I never saw any reason to discourage her from continuing her hobby, other than making sure she avoided pranking my clan for obvious reasons. And it was a good thing I didn't because the skills she developed thanks to her pranks had ended up being invaluable.

Naruto has always excelled in three particular combat-related skills. 

The first was in taijutsu. She had a body that could soak up damage like you couldn't believe, an endurance that allowed her to run for hours without rest and phenomenal physical strength that could dish out damage with the best of them. Combined with years of experience from sparring with me, and you had one hell of a taijutsu fighter on your hands.

In a head-on fight, she was on par with the likes of Kiba, one of the top hand-to-hand fighters in our year, second only to me. The only reason why I had such a large lead on her in taijutsu was thanks to my skills in the Gentle Fist combined with my advantage in speed. The Hyuuga's fighting style was renowned as the strongest in Konoha for a very good reason after all.

Her second talent was in stealth. While her excessively large chakra signature made it impossible for her to hide from a sensor, against anyone else she was a ghost. 

I still had no idea how she did it but Naruto had a way of blending in with her surroundings that made her all but invisible. Whether it was in the middle of the village or the heart of a forest it didn't seem to make a difference, Naruto was equally skilled in hiding in both terrains. 

Even Iruka was stumped, he had no idea how she managed to get so good at it as it wasn't something that he taught her, no one did. Naruto just seemed to have picked it up on her own, she had a natural knack for it.

Her final skill lay in trap-making and it was here that her pranking experience came in handy, for what was a prank but a harmless trap? She took to it like a fish takes to water, and when she went to work on her traps it was like watching an entirely different person. 

The usual Naruto, the loudmouth with nigh endless energy was gone, replaced by someone with all the stillness and patience of stone. I had seen the girl remain perfectly still for hours as she watched over her traps, waiting for someone to spring it. She didn't move the entire time, didn't so much as twitch. It was almost scary to watch.

...

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