章 10: Chapter 10

"Now now Shi-chan. You wouldn't want to leave Naruto here alone on his first day would you? What about all those voracious little aspiring kunoichi he'll have to contend with?"

Dan's voice announced their arrival to Shizune who turned around with a smirk for both of them. "Hey uncle Dan. Hi Naru-chan."

Her smile fell a bit when she noticed his sad face. "Huh? What's wrong?"

Naruto blinked for a moment, staring at her face, and struggled in those seconds struggled to push away the memory of her eyes open in death, of red blood staining her pale skin.

At those same eyes staring back at him from the opposite side of a battlefield...

He smiled as brightly as he could, greeting this expression like...an old friend...one he hadn't seen or needed in a long time. "Hey Shizune-neechan!" He stepped forward and hugged her, barely reaching her waist as she patted his hair. A lump formed in his throat at the familiar gesture.

"Those Kunoichi will have to deal with me before Shizune gets a crack at them." He heard Tsunade vow, and heard the swat of her hand against Dan's arm. "And don't you go sticking ideas in his head either."

The man chuckled.

Naruto let go of Shizune before the hug became awkward, looking up at the building.

Was Iruka a sensei here yet? Or...was that not going to happen at all?

It'd been so long since he'd come around here...

It'd been so long since this place was around to come to.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, turning to see Tsunade standing beside him, a serious frown on her face. "You okay kiddo?"

Once more...he smiled. "Yeah...just nervous..."

Tsunade's frown grew a little deeper. "You can wait you know. I'll talk things over with Oro-kun and-"

"No!" He interrupted, his voice pitching with the high notes of a four year old. "No. I can do it."

"We know you can."

This voice was familiar, and as far as he was concerned, still unwelcome.

The whole group turned to find Orochimaru standing not five feet away, seemingly conjuring himself from thin air, smiling with that serpentine upturn of his lips. "Have a little faith Tsu-chan." He drawled. "I wouldn't have nominated little Naru-chan if I didn't know he could handle it."

"He might be able to handle it but that doesn't mean he needs to! He's four!"

And Naruto could tell as the sannin shrugged that this was simply retracing the steps of an argument the two had held previously.

They were sannin...so neither of them would budge, one way or the other.

Orochimaru looked to him, his smirk becoming a little wider. "True. But it is his choice and... you and I can both see that he'll choose to go. Every time...

-0-

Shizune wasn't in his class.

He wasn't surprised. It was a four year program. Children entered when they were six or eight, took on the program for four years, graduated and became gennin. Shizune was on her last semester. He'd gotten in when he was six, being an orphan with no income outside of village funded programs and a trustfund left to the Hokage, he'd been eligible for the early enrollment.

It was a village hash tag to give orphaned children the "head start" of becoming Shinobi and getting paid as early as possible, a surefire way to keep themselves from starving.

In reality, it was the easiest source of new recruits considering how many orphans a military village had.

He'd failed the graduation exam twice and managed to get in on his third which is why his classmates and gennin team had been with people his own age.

This time though, this time he was starting absurdly early. The only person that had managed to get in this early was Hatake Kakashi and he was so good he'd managed to graduate in a single year. Getting on a team at age five! From what he could recall, the only one that could match that was Itachi and even he had gotten in at age six and graduated at age seven.

Hopefully, he'd be able to match Kakashi's little feat.

The way he saw it, if he could graduate by five, become a gennin, he could be a chuunin as early as six years old, and start training for the jounin trials to take them at eight or nine. With that rank it would be enough to wiggle himself into some of the village vaults to get access to techniques, techniques that would let him join the hunter nin squad by the time he hit twelve, which is when things should start kicking into the proverbial high gear.

The hunter nins, were the elite of the elite. The best any village had to offer they were the ninja, meant to kill other ninja on a daily basis. Konoha, at the height of its power held somewhere around one hundred Gennin, three hundred and fifty to five hundred chuunin, about a hundred and fifty to two hundred jounin and seventy to one hundred Anbu, but they only ever had twenty hunter ninja.

The reason for this was twofold. Firstly because they were just that strong and secondly because a hunter ninja's loyalty must be absolutely beyond question.

Given that they had to go on the most high risk missions, tracking down and killing other ninja, some of these A or even S class targets to bring in that money to the village coffers when they killed ninja from other villages that had posted the bounty, these ninja could be, and were in-fact authorized to be gone for months at a time.