Chapter 44: Fledgling
Teammates...
Sasuke pressed his lips together and turned his head slightly to the side, suddenly unable to meet Sakura's eyes head-on.
Watching the closet-tsundere routine play out, Sakura turned to Naruto.
"The river trash will still be there whenever we get back. Let's go try the tree-climbing first."
It was just a D-rank. They could finish it after training, no harm done. And tree-climbing and water-walking, with Sasuke and Naruto's natural talent? Wouldn't take long.
"YES!"
Naruto immediately bolted for the bank. Sasuke was right on his heels.
Kakashi watched the two of them charge off and pulled a long face as he sidled up to Sakura.
"Uh, hey, Sakura, about this mission~~~"
Sakura cut him a sideways glance.
"If I hadn't brought it up, when exactly were you planning to start teaching them?"
"Uh, ha, ha ha, I'm just toughening up their characters~~~"
Kakashi smiled awkwardly at the small girl now frowning at him.
"Kakashi. You are their sensei. Teaching them is literally your job."
"And the Chūnin Exams are around the corner. If you keep coasting on this lazy attitude, are you actually fine watching the two of them get knocked out by some no-name foreign genin nobody's ever heard of?"
Sakura kept her brows knit at the silver-haired man currently trying to weasel his way out of accountability.
Kakashi met the lecture and found he had nothing to say back.
Were Naruto and Sasuke weak?
Honestly, no — at the genin tier, neither of them was weak. Naruto had Multi Shadow Clone Technique and could grind down any same-rank opponent through sheer attrition. Sasuke had the Uchiha shuriken technique plus a solid Fire Release repertoire and could defeat plenty of genin at his level too.
But Sakura wasn't grading them against the genin curve. She was grading them against Neji. Against Rock Lee. Against Gaara.
At their current level, Naruto and Sasuke would get bled by any of those three. They might not even win two-on-one.
"..."
Kakashi's eyes drifted off awkwardly under Sakura's stare.
There it was. The exact scenario he'd most wanted to avoid...
The moment he'd learned Sakura would be slotted into Team Seven by mission order, he'd known this day was coming. He just hadn't expected it to come this fast.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it..."
Kakashi caved with a sigh.
It looked like, with Sakura around, his coming days were going to be considerably less restful.
Sakura folded her arms and watched the two boys in the distance subtly racing to see who could climb higher up the tree.
"Give Lightning Cutter to Sasuke."
"I'll go to the old man and get Rasengan for Naruto."
Kakashi's head snapped around.
"Sakura, are you serious?"
"Lightning Cutter is an S-rank technique!"
"Handing it over at this stage — isn't it too soon...?"
Her green eyes met his disbelief, calm.
"The Fourth Hokage rescued his future wife from Cloud shinobi at age twelve."
"You invented Lightning Cutter at age twelve."
"I was an ANBU squad captain at age twelve."
"Why do you think it's too soon for them? From where I'm standing, the timing is just right."
Kakashi had no rebuttal.
The Fourth had been a once-in-a-generation prodigy. Sakura had been hand-picked by the Third himself. And Kakashi — not to brag — but very few twelve-year-olds in Konoha's history could've matched him.
Was Sakura really putting Naruto and Sasuke in the same category as those names?
Did she trust the two of them that much?
Kakashi remembered the recent mission report on the Mizuki incident.
So Sakura genuinely believed Naruto had inherited the Fourth's will.
"Naruto, fine, given his... lineage."
"But why do you trust Sasuke this much?"
Kakashi's gaze landed on the boy who had, just now, eaten dirt off the tree and immediately scrambled back up to try again.
"Sasuke is a special case. You and I both know exactly what kind of hatred he's carrying."
"If we don't make him strong, then he'll go chase strength on his own. Relentlessly. By any means necessary."
Sakura watched the boy now nearing the top of the tree — only to overload his chakra output and slam back down to the ground, hard.
"While he's chasing power, we should be steering him, step by step, down a path we chose for him."
The girl's tone was level. Kakashi's chest was anything but.
"You mean to say..."
Sakura kept going.
"This Chūnin Exam is a large-scale joint event we're co-hosting with the Hidden Sand, the Hidden Stone, and several smaller villages."
"Once a fledgling has glimpsed how vast the sky is, how is he going to stay content with a nest the size of a single palm?"
Kakashi looked silently at the stubborn boy in the distance. He stayed silent for a long moment before he finally spoke, slowly:
"Sakura. Is this also how you see it?"
"Konoha — the strongest of the five great villages — in your eyes is just a palm-sized nest?"
Sakura looked at him as if he were an idiot.
"That kind of thing depends entirely on the person, obviously. I got lucky. The old man took a liking to me."
"For Sasuke, this place might be a nest. For me, it's the board I get to put my pieces down on."
Put pieces down...
Was Sakura already, in her own mind, a player capable of moving the entire shinobi world's game state?
Kakashi felt, suddenly, that there was something arrogant — and dangerous — about that level of self-conception.
Sakura didn't elaborate. She just turned to him.
"So are you teaching them or not?"
"Even if you don't, I can squeeze Lightning Cutter out of the old man myself. Just a bit more annoying."
Kakashi looked at the little Aunt-Master next to him and, in something close to a tone of total surrender, said:
"I'll teach them."
"There. Happy? I'll teach."
"But this still has to wait until Sasuke's chakra control is at least somewhat there. It is, after all, an S-rank."
Sakura raised an eyebrow at the very limp man beside her.
Honestly? Kakashi was a world-class slacker.
In the original timeline, across three students, all he'd taught them before the Chūnin Exams was tree-climbing and water-walking. And that was only because the Land of Waves mission had thrown them in front of Zabuza and Haku — emergency-level heat. Then before the actual exams, again, nothing. It wasn't until he found out Sasuke was up against Gaara that he panic-taught Lightning Cutter at the eleventh hour.
As for Naruto and Sakura? Squat. Diddly. Nada.
Naruto at least lucked into Jiraiya happening to be back in the village. As for Sakura...
Honestly, Sakura was holding back from giving him a couple of solid punches to the ribs purely out of respect for the fact that his sensei had been the Fourth.
"Pick something with some teeth for the next mission."
"I was just flipping through the mission roster — isn't there a Zabuza job in the Land of Waves?"
"Talk to the old man and get it bumped down to a C-rank. Let Naruto and Sasuke cut their teeth..."
"You and I are there as the safety net."
Sakura's airy little remarks had, just like that, settled Naruto and Sasuke's near future.
Kakashi was speechless. From any angle you looked at it, Sakura was the actual sensei of Team Seven...