Reaching For A Dream by Noodlehammer

Chapter 17

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Naruto was making his way home, having just finished his debriefing with Tsunade. The busty Hokage had not been particularly impressed with the way he had handled that battle.

That was perfectly understandable, since Naruto wasn't all that impressed with how he had handled it either. There were quite a few things he could have done better in that fight, but he'd just been so eager to test out the strength seal that he had deliberately prolonged it. He could have just thrown Hidan into the distance at the start or broken him in half and he wouldn't have been an issue, but he had played with the religious nut instead.

Still, the fight was won, the strength seal tested and if the memories of his shadow clone were anything to go by, an immortal test subject was secured. All in all, things had turned out quite well.

Now it was time to get back home and finish what he and Xanna had been doing before Ino had interrupted.

He entered his apartment and called out in a deliberately overly cheerful tone.

"Honey, I'm home!"

The half amused, half derisive snort that came from the living room told him where his lovely demoness was. But what the hell was that stench? The answer to that question became obvious once he stepped into the room.

Naruto gazed at the four corpses layed out on the floor, three of them with large holes in their chests and a fourth that looked as if he'd been set on fire from inside and then doused before he could be too badly damaged. Their ABNU style gear wasn't really painting a very comforting picture.

Xanna was apparently just relaxing and enjoying the breeze, with three empty tubs of ice cream next to her

"What happened?" He asked.

"Danzo sent these four puppets to bring me to him. As you can see, I took exception to that." The demoness explained with an amused smirk.

Naruto twitched with well contained fury at the sheer gall of the man, trying to abduct the woman he loved for whatever idiotic reason he had. It didn't matter that the old bat had chosen the absolute worst possible target, what mattered was that he had tried to take away someone that was dear to him.

"I see."

So Danzo wants to play hardball does he?

Apparently it was about time that Danzo learned that he wasn't the only one capable of ignoring the law when it became inconvenient.

Well, Naruto hadn't done anything but send his clones to snooze on council meetings so far anyway. He had no interest in all in the political goings on of the village, nor did he have any kind of political agenda, so snoozing was the only thing they could do.

But clearly, it was time to make a political statement and by political statement, Naruto meant assassination.

By the time he had decided on this course of action, his mind had already sifted through the resources available to him and what he knew of Danzo. The conclusion was, that an assassination was most certainly doable, he just needed to get a few things in place first and wait for the proper time.

But he needed to get rid of these corpses first, before they started stinking any worse. It was a good thing that Xanna had kept the windows open, or else the apartment would reek worse than a morgue by now.

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The training of Team Gai was something that nobody ever wanted to get close to, which is why they weren't used to being interrupted. Even though Neji and Tenten weren't as obsessive with their training as the two green beasts, they still made sure to train together often so that their teamwork was top notch.