Our training for chunin exams started. As for my opinion about participating in Chunin Exams, I was a little mad that someone made this decision without consulting us.
Naruto and the rest of his gang had the choice to sign a form to participate in it.
That meant one of two things in my head. The someone who wanted us to participate in the Chunin Exams was Danzo. Either Danzo wanted us dead or Danzo wanted to get our teammate killed so that our genin team would be suspended and he could get us to Root somehow. There wasn't much in between.
Our new training regimen was hard. I'd expected as much, but it was one thing to know something intellectually and another to experience it first hand.
In the morning, we ran laps around all of Konoha while Ren threw practice kunai, shuriken and senbon at us.
The speed we ran at increased daily. Ren had said we were too slow and needed to increase our speed and reflexes. His training was working, but it was hard.
After we were all exhausted from running, Ren had us fight him as a team, utilizing everything at our disposal. As time wore on, he started calling in other people for us to spar.
The masks these individuals wore clued me in to the fact that they were black ops of some kind.
Given the suspicious nature and rudeness of the announcement we would be attending the Chunin Exams in Iwa, I guessed that the 'ANBU' we were sparring were actually ROOT, and that Ren had them on loan from Danzo.
I didn't know if Ren was a former ROOT agent himself or if Danzo just wanted to help him train us, but I grew far more cautious of Ren sensei after the first 'ANBU' came to train with us.
I was pretty sure that most of them were Root trainees themselves as none of them felt like an adult judging by their physical stature and strength. And Danzo could not waste agents of higher strength on training us. I am pretty sure that he should have various illegal things for them to do.
As for them being Anbu and not Root, I ruled that idea out easily. Firstly, Anbu were more busier than Root agents and would not just train a genin team. Secondly, Shikaku did not say anything about this which probably meant he was unaware of this.
But all of this made me relax a little. If Danzo's goal was to kill us, he would not be sending his agents to train us.
And from what the profile of Danzo that I have built in my mind, he did not eliminate Konoha shinobi just because they have a strong ability and could become a threat in the future. Well, this excluded Uchiha but we can blame that on him interiting Tobirama's paranoia of Uchiha.
Danzo loved Konoha and he would not just kill every strong person it has. No, he would want such strong people to make a mark on the world and make the other great villages fear Konoha.
And considering that Iwa was not a friendly shinobi village, Danzo wanted us to go there and win the Chunin Exams.
He was not someone who would want me to hide my Kekkei Tōta. Instead, he probably wanted me to flaunt it in front of the only other known user of a Kekkei Tōta, the third Tsuchikage.
Well, if he was so invested in making us stronger and win the Chunin Exams, I wouldn't be mad. But at least, he could have given us some secret jutsu or the information about location of Orochimaru and if my parents were alive or not.
Anyways, hellish as the training was, you couldn't argue with the results it produced. All three of us were far faster and more reactive than we had been at the start.
Kenji was still the slowest of us, but his stamina had improved to the point where he could keep up with Misa and I if we slowed our pace a bit.
Kenji had also gotten better with chakra strings and thrown weapons in general. He could pinpoint a moving target while he was moving at top speed, delivering his explosive tag wherever he wanted.
During days where he trained alone with Ren, Kenji also began branching out into more esoteric branches of fuinjutsu. He was proficient enough now to use basic suppression seals and barriers in spars, but they were low-level and easily dealt with.
As he got better, they'd be a more viable way to fight, but for now, he was focusing on explosive tags and traps. At least, Fuinjutsu was as cool as ninjutsu in Kenji's opinion and thus he no longer was jealous of me and Misa about our Kekkei Genkais.
Misa had been working with her lightning jutsu. I wasn't sure of the name of the technique, but she had this trick where she could create a ball of electrical energy and throw kunai through it. The lightning stuck to the kunai and increased its speed and killing power.
Most of my improvement came in the form of the fundamentals – speed, taijutsu, reaction time – but I did learn some new tricks from Shikaku on the days I trained with him.
He opened up the Nara library, letting me learn every shadow technique we had. I had some ideas for new ones to make, but I didn't have the time to dedicate to research with our rigorous training schedule.
In fact, during the nine month period we trained for the exam, I only had one day off that wasn't a mandated rest day. It came one week before we were scheduled to leave, and it wasn't a pleasant break.
---------Author Notes--------
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