章 42: Chapter 042

Both his skills Tai and Boujutsu had increased. Naruto no longer had any trouble keeping up with Anko in a fight, at least he hadn't until Anko had upped her skill, making the blond realize she had been going easy on him the whole time. She had said that he was still at genin level, but if he gave it a month or two could possibly increase his skills to chunin at the rate he was learning.

His jutsu had made some decent improvement. Naruto had managed to learn two of the five jutsu he had set out to learn. The Fuuton: Daitoppa (Wind Release: Great Breakthrough), a simple C rank jutsu where the user sucked in air and blew it out to create a great force of wind that was used to knock opponents off their feet.

The Fuuton: Reppusho (Wind Release: Wind Gale Palm), another C rank where the user channel wind chakra to their palms and release it in a thrust. This could be used for either increasing the speed of thrown weapons, or to knock opponents off balance.

Because his clones had learned those jutsu, Naruto had delegated the thirty that finished the jutsu to work on the other ones until he had gotten them down.

Despite the progress he had made in those shinobi aspects, Naruto felt that his fuiinjutsu was where he had taken his largest leap in ability. Naruto's hand writing was finally good enough to begin working on seal creation. He had already made several that he had applied to his home. Like a basic security seal on his door that could only be unlocked through the use of his chakra, and a heating seal on his shower head to create hot water for his shower.

Naruto had also managed to place resistance seals on himself. The seals located on his wrists, biceps, calf's, thighs, chest and stomach. The resistance seals had a total of one hundred levels of resistance, each level the amount of resistance would double. So at level one it felt like he was wading through water, and at level two it would be like wading through a thick mud. Honestly, he could not really understand why the seals bothered having so many levels. Right now he was at level one, and it was ridiculously hard just to move. Naruto had found out that he needed to constantly channel chakra into his limbs to strengthen them enough to move through his exercises. Though the blond assumed that the idea was to slowly ween yourself off of using chakra in order to increase ones natural speed. And if this was just level one, he did not even want to imagine what level one hundred would be like.

The resistance seals were all connected to a master seal that controlled the resistance seals on his body. It was located on his right bicep and connected to his resistance seals with linking seals, which looked like chains that went to the resistance seals. Naruto had also ended up using a special genjutsu seal he had learned from the intermediate book to keep it invisible so others would not notice he had them.

He had also ended up created several containment seals, explosive tags and even a trap tag that released kunai when it detected a foreign chakra within a fifteen foot radius of it.

Finishing up his training and eating lunch Naruto created more clones to continue working while he headed into Konoha. Making his way down one of the streets of the village, Naruto ignored the hostile glares he got as he made his way towards the Higarashi Weapons store.

As he entered the store Naruto was surprised to find Tenten manning the cash register. "Hey Tenten!" Naruto greeted, causing the bun haired girls head to snap up.

"Naruto!" Tenten greeted as she came around the desk and walked up to him.

"Not with your team today?" Naruto asked, tilting his head to the side.

"It's my day off." Tenten shrugged before looking at him pointedly. "You know you haven't visited since that first time you came in here."

Naruto blinked and took a step back at the small glare she was giving him. "Er… well… I just got enough money to buy more equipment so..."

"So you have to have a reason to come to the store and visit?" Tenten asked, crossing her arms.

"Er… well… no! Of course not! It's just that…" Naruto stuttered, not really sure how to deal with girls. As far as the opposite sex went he had only dealt with Anko and Sakura, and one of them was completely psychotic, while the other liked to try and abuse him.

Tenten laughed and waved a hand in front of her face. "Relax, I'm just kidding."

"…Oh." Naruto said lamely, not quite sure what to make of her joke.

"So what are you here for?" Tenten asked.

"Would you believe me if I said I was here to visit you?" Naruto asked with a grin.

"Nice try." Tenten chuckled.

Naruto snapped his fingers. "Oh well… I'm here for some more equipment. Standard ninja tools for a C rank mission." Naruto said, getting down to business.

"You're going on a C rank? Already?" Tenten asked in surprise. Most genin don't go on C rank missions until they had at least four to six months experience.

"No." Naruto shook his head, wishing that he could be going on a C rank. "I just figured that the amount used for one should be enough for me to practice with for now."

"Well that stuff should be easy to get." Tenten said as she and Naruto went around grabbing the equipment he wanted. "So I take it you have your jonin sensei now?" Tenten asked after a while.

Naruto nodded. "Yep. My sensei is a guy named Hatake Kakashi." Naruto looked over at Tenten as she stopped. "You ok Tenten?"

"Kakashi huh?" She asked, looking at Naruto as he nodded. "I can't believe it." She muttered.

"Believe what?" asked Naruto in confusion.

"Kakashi is the 'eternal rival' of my sensei." Tenten said as she quoted the words eternal rival.

"Really? That's interesting. Who's your sensei?" Naruto asked.

"My sensei is Gai Maito." Tenten said as she restarted gathering Naruto's equipment. "He's a decent sensei if a little… eccentric." She shuddered a bit at the word. "He specializes in taijutsu, and he's good, I mean he's really good. He turned my teammate who is the dead last of our class into a force to be reckoned with."

"Taijutsu huh?" Naruto asked, looking interested. "Hey, do you think I can join you and your team for a training session?"

"Well… I don't see why not." Tenten said with a shrug as she led Naruto over to the cash register. "But aren't you supposed to train with your own sensei?" she rang up all of the equipment he had bought. "That will come to 4,000 yen."

Naruto reached into his pouch and pulled out gama-chan, his frog wallet. "I would train with my sensei if he actually trained us." He scowled. "So far all we've really done are 'teamwork' exercises as he calls them." he handed her the money. "I mean, we occasionally spar with each other, but he usually stops us after like fifteen minutes, and he doesn't even correct any mistakes we have in our form. The man is one of the laziest jonin I've ever met."

Tenten raised an eyebrow as she put the money away. "What exactly are teamwork exercises?" she asked.

"Well, I remember we've had to toss a ball to each other blindfolded. Then there was this one time he chained us together and we had to find him in the forest in order to get the key to escape…" Naruto shuddered. "It took us nearly an hour to find him."

"That's it?" Tenten asked, receiving a nod. "Then it sounds like your sensei is either really lazy or really stupid." She snickered a bit as Naruto muttered 'or both' under his breath. "Our team had already started on tree climbing by now."

"Yeah, I had to do tree climbing myself." Naruto said as he sealed up his supplies in one of his personalized sealing scrolls. "So I usually get away from my team at 3:00 pm."

"Then you're in luck since my team usually stays out until 6:00 am to 9:00 pm." Tenten said.

"Cool, so I'll see you tomorrow?" Naruto asked.