Chapter 8: Advance
For a child, Jugo weighed a hell of a lot! I know that under normal circumstances, anyone who isn't Naruto Uzumaki with his plot armor, that anyone who has had their tenketsu points closed would immediately fall unconscious, but what I didn't know was the fact that waking someone up from this state was practically impossible!
Haku and I had tried everything. Slapping him, dumping water from the river on his face after Haku had chilled it, and I even reopened his tenketsu points with the Gentle Fist, but he still wouldn't wake up! So there I was, carrying a wet and sweaty child with one of my clones, walking back towards the village at an agonizingly slow pace.
Haku had initially wanted to help carry him, especially after she thought I was tired from my fight, but I disagreed. I said it was part of my strength and stamina training to do it, but in reality, I knew if I carried it with my clones rather than with Haku, the journey wouldn't take nearly as long.
Haku is a genius in terms of ninjutsu and competent with Taijutsu despite the fact that she hadn't been formally trained, but even still, she wasn't very strong physically. It probably had to do with the fact that her build was naturally slender, so she didn't have much muscle mass. I thought to myself that due to her reliance on stealth, mid-ranged combat, and high natural agility, she was more of a rouge class rather than a warrior class, so I should tailor the daily training she did to suit her more. Of course, we would be working on her physical strength too, but I decided which direction to take her in to effectively 'min-max her build'.
Despite the fact that we left in the early morning, it was late into the afternoon when Jugo finally woke up. Of course, he had to wake up when we were only a few hundred meters from the village and not the three to four kilometers since we first began the trek.
"Huh?... Where am I?" Jugo asked as he looked about. He realized that he was currently being carried somewhere by two people who he didn't immediately recognize, so he began to violently squirm.
"Let me go! Put me down!" He yelled.
"That works for me" I say.
Jugo, for a brief moment, recognizes my voice and is thrilled that not only am I alive and well, but he was also the one who needed to be helped after fighting me. Of course, all of this happiness lasted for less than a second, as he found himself falling towards the forest floor. Hitting it with a dull *THUD!*
"OW!"
I looked to him before dismissing my clone. All the while, Haku had covered her mouth and giggled a little to herself at Jugo's misfortune.
"Looks like your doing fine. I thought the infamous Orange and Grey Demon would be tougher than that" I say with a smirk.
Jugo looks at me for just a moment before tears well within his eyes. He covers his face with his arm and wipes away his tears before quickly standing up and bowing at a perfect 90-degree angle.
"THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!" He yells. I can hear a number of things within his voice. Gratitude and relief being chief among them.
'It is ironic. In western culture, where I grew up. Things like being shackled, just being used by someone for their own benefit, and being subdued by others is seen as a bad thing, but in this world, both Haku and Jugo are happy to be beneath me. To be shackled to a will that isn't their own. This will definitely take some getting used to.' I think to myself as I look at my newest companion.
"Don't think anything of it. I will be relying on your strength in the future, so I will help you learn to control yourself while in your demonic state." I say. I want Jugo to become dependent on me until we arrive at Konoha. After that, I want him to become able to contain himself while on missions, even if I am not there with him. To that end, I will be helping him control his emotional outbursts and channel them into productive duties as much as possible.
"My name is Haruka, and the girl to me left is Haku, my companion," I say, gesturing towards Haku.
"Hello, Mr. Demon. I hope we get along well as servants under the same master!" Haku excitedly greets Jugo. I am shocked at the second half of her statement and raise my ringer and open my mouth to say something before realizing.
'It's my fault! I told Haku I wanted to 'Tame a Demon' and she took my words as meaning that I wanted to get another servant! Dammit! And here I thought I was making progress towards removing her slave mentality!' I yell in my mind.
"Greetings Haruka-sama, Haku-san. My name is Jugo. I hope to live up to your expectations of me in the future". Jugo says as he bows.
'Don't just accept being my servant! I said I wanted a companion when I talked to you earlier!' I yelled in my mind, but my face held no visible emotion. I felt like a certain undead overlord while this skit was going on. I suppose my system agreed because I heard a *Ding* and looked to see I had a new skill called [Poker Face].
Although my face didn't show it, in my mind, I was looking with half-closed eyes at my system's screen. Somehow, someway, I just knew Rob was watching, and laughing at my misfortune.
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After retrieving George, we made our way back to our wagon and I decided that we were going to have a training day to practice our chakra control before we departed from the Land of Water. Once in the land of Fire, I had only a few weeks to get to Konoha and register for the ninja academy which starts in winter. I remembered that it was shortly after she enrolled in the academy that Hinata was first bullied, and it was snowing when this happened. I read that on the Naruto wiki. (A/N: True Story. Look on Hinata's page on Narutopedia. It was on the same day in fact.)
So I had until winter to get to Konoha, get permission to stay there, and register at the academy with all of my current traveling companions as well as all of the companions I am planning to get. I had to get in this year if I wanted to be in Naruto's class. That was the best place to be if I wanted to keep up with and progress events until Shippuden. I have already changed a significant part of canon because without Orochimaru finding Jugo, he can never create the Curse Mark, which will mean that he won't be able to tempt Sasuke out of the Village.
I am uncertain whether or not I should intervene to save the Uchiha or not. While most of the Uchiha were innocent and probably didn't have anything to do with the coup, a large part of the police force and the ninja were aware of it, and, even if begrudgingly, were planning to try to take-over Konoha, which would plunge the village into war. All because Danzo hated the Uchiha and wanted to take their eyes. Hiruzen was either too weak-willed or too in-denial to see that his former friend had gone from one of the leaf's strongest assets to devolving into nothing more than a parasite, drawing strength away from the village just to sate his own lust for power.
I will have to see the Uchiha Clan first. There is no way to know the full scope of this thing just from the brief flashbacks, half of which, weren't even canon, that I can remember.
Snapping myself out of my stupor, I led Jugo, Haku, and George, who was pulling our wagon, towards the river that the village used for water. I brought us about an hour upstream to the base of a waterfall that I had found while scouting for Jugo with one of my clones. This was the perfect area for both Tree Climbing, Water Walking, Hot Water Walking, and Waterfall walking training. I would just have to heat the water with an E-ranked fire jutsu before teaching them.
"Alright!" Today, we are going to learn to walk on water!" I say excitedly to them.
Both Jugo and Haku look at me with anticipation as I finish. "But first..." I say, walking up to a tree.
"You need to learn to walk on trees without using your hands!" I say, beginning to walk sideways up the tree.
"I can already do that!" Haku states, bragging just a little.
"Alright then. Jugo! I will help you learn to use chakra like this while Haku will start learning to walk on water." I say.
"Yes!"
I am grateful for the fact that I have [Deva's Mind] once again. I learned the tree-climbing, water-walking, and hot water-walking exercises in a little more than a day with it and I have at least high-chunin-level chakra control because of it, but I was never able to learn waterfall-walking for the simple reason that, I never found any waterfalls! But now, I can train Jugo, Haku, and myself in how to do all of the exercises, but first! *Poof*
Twenty bone clones of me appear next to my location. I send one to teach Haku, one to teach Jugo, ten to practice waterfall-walking, and the rest of my clones I send off to either scavenge edible food from the forest or catch fish for dinner. I myself, then begin the process of learning the [Flying Thunder God] technique so that I can mark this location with it. It would be the perfect spot for training others before we get to Konoha and have their resources at our disposal.
And so, the day passed with all three children, learning and refining their chakra control.
Haku was a genius, probably rivaling the likes of Minato or Itachi, due to the fact that she nearly matched me and had started waterfall training with my clones in the afternoon, while Jugo had just barely begun his water-walking training. I had caught nearly a dozen fish and had scavenged a few basketfuls of food from the forest. Man the Byakugan is awesome!
I had made a breakthrough with my research into the [Flying Thunder God] and had understood everything from the principles of the technique, to how to use it, though I had run into another problem.
While the range of the [Flying Thunder God] is infinite, and because of my ridiculous amounts of chakra, the cost wouldn't be much of an issue, but what I dramatically underestimated was the chakra cos in proportion to mass teleported! I could easily teleport a pebble across huge distances, but if I try to teleport George the horse, for example, the chakra cost becomes exponentially higher. It seems my own incredible chakra pool will only allow myself to teleport me, or others like me (people of relatively the same size) a maximum of two times per day before running dry. While I can always pop a Senzu, it won't do me any good if I need to teleport to multiple locations in under a second like Minato does. This means that I can teleport to a friend, then either teleport that friend or myself away from an attack, but not both. Furthermore, I am always the epicenter of any teleportation, meaning that I cannot teleport things to me, I have to teleport to them before teleporting them away.
I really didn't expect such hefty drawbacks, even for an S-Rank Ninjutsu. With the chakra cost one would need, it is no wonder why no one other than Minato or Tobirama were able to make use of this technique in battle. Even the Hokage's elite guards all had to team up in pairs of three to teleport a person a reasonably long distance, and they still needed a minute, at least, to gather the chakra necessary to perform the jutsu. I guess I underestimated Minato's Chakra reserves, that guy has to have Tailed Beast Levels of Chakra to spam the Jutsu the way he does, or perhaps he has found a way to minimize or even eliminate the mass-chakra cost. That would explain why he was able to use the technique better than Tobirama, who should have severalfold more Chakra than Minato.
Either way, I wrap up my training for the night and head to bed with Haku and Jugo. George will be on the lookout once again.
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It was past midnight when I awoke. I had thought that I had heard a loud splashing sound coming from the small stream outside. I looked to my sides and found that both Jugo and Haku were gone.
At first, I was confused but then I decided to check out that splash. Perhaps Jugo was afraid of going to the bathroom in the dark by himself. I doubted it. He would have had to have been alone before I found him and his wiki, from what I remembered, said he eventually ended up living in caves before Kimimoro found him.
On a side-note, I had thought of whether or not to find Kimimoro before, but according to my compass, he is on another island that is very closeby to Kiri, and given the time between when I woke up, now, and when the Kaguya Clan was wiped out, he has probably already met Orochimaru, which means he is a lost cause.
As I meandered my way out of the wagon, I saw Haku and Jugo in the distance, continuing to train their water-walking. I was stunned!
'Why are they training now!? It's already dark and I have told them we can practice more on the ship when going to the Land of Fire!' I thought to myself. I watched them train for a little longer than an hour before they decided to take a rest on the shore.
I snuck closer to them, using the stealth that I had recently been practicing to sneak-up on Haku. She was a good training target due to her incredibly sharp natural senses and intuition, so I had gotten quite good at sneaking around her, though if she were actively keeping an eye out for me, she definitely would have detected me.
"Damn! I'll definitely catch-up to you and Haruka-sama tomorrow" Jugo said as he laid on his back, breathing heavily, soaked through to his bone.
"I doubt it. Haruka-sama is on another level entirely when it comes to learning things like this. I've seen him master entire jutsu scrolls in under a day." Haku said. She was less soaked than Jugo, as she had occasionally stopped her own training to give Jugo tips and pointers, making her less likely to fall in the water.
"Still though. Haruka-sama sure is amazing! He is so strong, yet he is only a little bit older than us. I think he said he was only a month older than me!" Jugo complained.
I was sitting in the bushes thinking to myself that I had probably become a monster to them in terms of potential and strength, even though, at best, I was at high-chunnin-level, even with my advanced chakra control and my the [Flying Thunder God] due to my lack of battle experience against other ninjas, and my lopsided knowledge of the shinobi world.
"I know what you mean," Haku said. "It's infuriating isn't it?"
"Haku?" Jugo said, with a slight amount of worry in his voice.
"He is just getting too far ahead of us! How can I serve and protect him if I am the weaker than him!" Haku began to rant. Her voice getting ever louder as she continued. "He has so much knowledge and is helping me in so many ways, yet all I am doing is being a burden on him!
Even today! When you were unconscious and he was carrying you. I know that he didn't let me help and preferred to do it himself because he knew he could do a better job! If he is so good at everything then what will he need us for! I'm useless to him! And if I'm no longer worthy of being his servant..." Haku started to yell, as tears formed in her eyes.
'I screwed up' I thought. 'I didn't know that Haku was feeling like this. I was over-reliant on my own physical capabilities and didn't allow Haku to feel like she was carrying her own weight. For someone whose entire self-worth is built on being useful to me, feeling useless must be like feeling constantly insecure about the future.'
Haku was silently crying to herself, and I saw that Jugo was in an extremely awkward position, as he had never needed to comfort anyone before, so he had no idea how to handle the current situation.
I felt extremely guilty about my actions, and how careless I have been for the last few days. I had learned so many new jutsu and techniques and had become more powerful so rapidly, that I had left Haku feeling like she had been unable to cope. If I wanted to avoid a 'Sasuke leaving the village' type of scenario, I had to cool my jets and become more reliant on my allies, to boost their confidence. No one likes to be a drag on the team after all.
I got up and began walking towards Haku, who noticed immediately, as Jugo had quickly snapped his head to look at me when I approached. She quickly stood and turned to me before attempting to bow.
"Ha-Haruka-sa..." Haku began to speak before I interrupted her by grabbing her and pulling her into my embrace.
"I'm sorry Haku. I didn't know that this was how you felt." I said as I began to pet her head.
Jugo must have awakened some sense of shame, because he had snuck off back to the wagon at some point during this exchange.
"Haku. I promise you this. From this day forth, you are my right hand. You are the shield that protects me from my enemies, and my sword that will cut down my foes. I will never leave your side, and you will never leave mine."
"Yes" Haku said meekly, nuzzling her head into my chest slightly. I could faintly tell, even in the darkness, that she was blushing hard from the looks of her reddish-ears. 'She must be too embarrassed to face me'. I thought.
Little did Haruka know, but while he was indeed correct, there was another reason for Haku's blush.
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A/N: So here is a brief training chapter as well as a little further character development between Haruka and Haku. I had decided early on that if Haku was a girl, that she would be the main heroine of this story alongside Haruka.
I wanted to do a little more with Jugo, but in the coming chapters, I will be adding a lot more characters to the group, and Jugo can have his chance to shine with character interactions then. Also, I know that I gave Haruka a new skill, but this won't be happening often, and I will try to use the gaining of new skills for comic relief in the future.
I had a hell of a time trying to come up with the name for this chapter because it was so long. At first, I named it Jugo, but then I decided to do a chapter about him during the Konoha arc, so I had changed the chapter to be more of a training chapter. Then I realized that it felt a little too filler-ish so I decided to do a character bonding and building moment between Haku and Haruka, since, in the next chapter, there will be a lot more characters to juggle and different dialogues to go over. Since the relationship between Haku, Haruka, and to a lesser extent Jugo has grown, along with their power, if only slightly, then I decided to name it 'Advance'.
I will also be trying to change perspectives next chapter, so I wanted to get all the experimentation out of the way first.
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
Golden_Slime
Golden_Slime Once again, this is a super long chapter, but I am too excited to get things done. I have so many plans and ideas that I just can't write them all down fast enough and more ideas come to me as I write, like Haku's slowly growing inferiority complex due to Haruka's super-fast growth.