A smile slowly spreads across my face. A young man sits with his back towards me, appearing to meditate in between two large pine trees. I finally found him.
Careful to stay down wind from my target, I silently pulled three kunai from my bag. I get ready to run, knowing full well that as soon as my first blade is thrown my position would be revealed.
Peering around the large holly bush, I take aim and throw the first kunai. Not waiting to see if it found its mark I dart over to a boulder several feet to the right. I look at him again. Not a single scratch on him, and the kunai's nowhere to be seen. There wasn't even any signs that he had moved to block the attack at all.
After digging around in my bag I pull out a smoke bomb and a paper bomb. I quickly tie the paper bomb to one of my kunai and hurl the smoke bomb at the man. Purple smoke fills the air, and immediately I spring off the boulder. Something flashed in the corner of my eye, so I duck instinctively. My kunai that I'd thrown at him earlier embedded itself in the tree trunk were my head was moments earlier. He's not kidding around.
The smoke clears a little, and I see him sitting in the same spot as if nothing had happened. I throw my 'kunai bomb' at him then jump ten feet into the air, watching him for signs of movement.
There. He let the kunai hit him and explode, then he disappeared. Within seconds he's back, sitting unharmed in the same spot as before. So that's how you're doing it. What I thought was you was actually a shadow clone. You let your shadow clones get hurt, they vanish, then you made another one before I could notice. I landed on a boulder.
If that's the case, then you're real body must be around here somewhere; you have to be really close in order to summon a shadow clone. But where? I almost laugh aloud. I should have known. His real body is, of course, underground.
Focusing my chakra into my fist I punched the ground, creating deep rifts. I smirk, seeing the young man's actual body pull himself out of the ground. He barely had staggered upright before I materialized behind him, holding my final kunai to his throat.
"I win," I laughed. He held his hands up in surrender. "Good job! You've come a long way Akira!" When I don't move he sighs. "Now, will you please be so kind as to move the kunai from my throat? You wouldn't want to accidentally kill your teacher, would you?"
"Hansuke, can we have lunch now? I'm hungry," I whined.
"Yes, we can eat as soon as you get your knife off my throat!" He cried.
"Fair enough," I lowered my kunai. "Can we have ramen?"
"Ramen? We're fifty miles from the closest town, and you want ramen?" He sighed in exasperation, turned around and studied my face. He groaned when he realised I wasn't kidding. "Of course you do. I have a packet in my bag."
Hansuke made lunch while I drew my name in the dirt with my kunai.
あきら
"Is this right?" I asked him. Hansuke glanced over and nodded. One of my weakest points was writing and reading. Even though Hansuke had been teaching me how since I was seven, which was when the issue of my illiteracy got brought up, it never really stuck.
Fighting, though... Fighting and jutsu were the only things I was good at. I practiced writing my name over and over until the ramen was ready. As I ate, I noticed Hansuke looking at me strangely.
"What? Do I have something on my chin?" He shook his head. "No. I was just thinking about how much you've grown. When I first met you you could barely run without collapsing. Now you can take me down without using any jutsu."
"Well, I do have the best teacher in the world," I said with a grin.
Hansuke laughed. "Hardly! I'm glad you think I am, though." Shading his eyes, Hansuke looked up at the sun. "That was a good training exercise, but we've spent too much time here. Gather up your kunai and erase all signs that we were here; we're leaving."
I nodded. As I put out the fire and bury the embers, Hansuke pulls out a map and begins planning where we would go next. We were always on the move; the longest time we'd stayed in one place had been for two weeks, and that was only because I'd been too sick to move.
Soon it was if we'd never been there; I'd even fixed the cracks I'd made in the ground with some earth- style jutsu.
"Where to next?" I ask, peering over Hansuke's shoulder at the map he's studying. He points to a small spot on the lower left. It's dark green shading promised lush forests teeming with animals- and, of course, rogues. "We're here," he said. "I was looking through that bingo book we got from a crazy we killed a month or so ago, the one with the weird moustache and only used fireball jutsu. It has a couple of people with giant bounties on their heads who supposedly are around here," he tapped a spot north of us.
"How much are their bounties?"
