Son of the Sannin(Back)

Academy Days, Part II

Author's note: Okay, before we start, I'm going to address an issue, namely, what happened to other Uchiha children, or how is that I never mentioned them.

The answer is that, by the time of the Uchiha massacre in canon, bot in the manga and the anime, we never see any other kid Sasuke's age or younger. If anything, there are a couple of guys who are Itachi's age, but that's about it. And thus, I decided to stick with this interpretation. It is stupid? Probably, the idea of Sasuke being the only kid in a clan that probably numbers in the hundreds is hard to swallow, but I did this for two reasons:

1-To avoid creating a number of unneccesary Uchiha children OCs that wouldn't serve any purpose other than slow the story (and given the hell a lot of people gave me over Hagane and Kaida, who will serve many purposes in future arcs, I'm not going through that again).

2-To not only avoid having innocent children killed in the story (yes, this story is rated M, but even I have my limits) but not to acknowledge that Itachi did kill innocent children in canon.

That's my answer, and it's final. I'm not going to reply to that question anymore.

Eleven years after the Kyubi attack

Two years had passed since Jiraiya had implemented his educative reform in the Ninja Academy, rising the standards significantly. Many students weren't able to keep with the new standards for long, so they dropped out and moved to civilian schools. As a result, Naruto's class was reduced to merely twelve students, Naruto, Hinata, Sakura, Sasuke, Ino, Shikamaru, Choji, Kiba, Shino, Tamaki, Haku and Karin.

Of these twelve, Sakura was the only one not being born to a ninja family –technically speaking, Tamaki didn't have a human ninja family either, but she had the benefit of being trained by ninja cats–, but this didn't deter her. After all, she was the best kunoichi of her class.

That didn't last long. In fact, these two years were horrible for the pinkette.

As the classes moved less from theory –a field in which Sakura excelled thanks to her book smarts– to a more practical approach, Sakura's grades started to fall. While she was pretty good at chakra control and the few classes that still required to study books, on everything else she was a total mess. While she was moderately good at kunai and shuriken toss, she found that it was much harder to it with moving targets, and/or when she had to move. While she mastered the three E-Rank jutsus with little difficulty, D-Ranks gave her a harder time. And obstacle courses were simply a nightmare.

But the worst part was taijutsu spars. Just like Naruto marked Sasuke as his rival, Sakura did the same with Hinata. But while Naruto was slowly closing the gap with the Uchiha, each time the pinkette and the bluenette clashed, Hinata took each time less effort to defeat Sakura.

After admitting that Hinata was too strong for her to beat, Sakura lowered her standards and aimed to defeat her former friend turned rival, Ino. But the results were the same. Even if Ino wasn't as skilled or strong as Hinata, Ino still ended up kicking her ass. It didn't help that unlike Hinata, who actually showed some restrain, Ino took sadistic glee in beating Sakura. Given that Tamaki was aiming to become a close quarters fighter, she didn't even attempt to fight her either.

So far, the only other kunoichi that she managed to beat from time to time was Karin. And even then her victories were short lived, as Karin also managed to surpass her over time. Ino even replaced her usual "forehead girl" nickname for "the pink punching bag". And her parents suggested her that maybe she wasn't cut to become a kunoichi, and think in other possible career paths.