16There was a problem. The stupid blood siphoning seal itched and tickled like mad. After an hour of physical training I just couldn't take it anymore and flickered home to remove it. Kami, but what a relief it was to do without it! The night's legion would definitely have to work on a better version, and by Kami test it on someone other than me! A pig would do.
A quick cold shower, and I was back outside, running rather slowly around Konoha. Ten laps took me over two hours, even channeling chakra to my limbs - though not using my secret speed technique, that wouldn't help with developing actual body speed and stamina, it was more of a cheat. There was a very good reason my father was infamous as the fastest shinobi ever, edging out even the current Yondaime Raikage and his lightning armor technique.
After a large meal, I took a rather delightful bath in female form with clone company. Beyond the raw pleasure, I was still getting used to touching someone and having someone touch me in return, someone who I knew with absolute certainty loved me with all their heart. It was pathetic really, I started crying on her shoulder when we were done, and instead of comforting me, she joined me in sobbing for a good ten minutes. It was nicely cathartic, but it also made me realize that I needed real human contact and the acknowledgement of at least a few people if I didn't want to go bonkers early. Unfortunately, the only female I spent any time with who was willing to talk to me was Sakura, and she wasn't an ideal candidate. Although… she was my friend once, before her mother turned her against me. She's a very lonely girl, and vulnerable. If I mastered at least a few seduction techniques, and used them against her when she was feeling in the dumps… like for example, when Sasuke put her down in a particularly brutal fashion, which was likely to happen rather soon as his rather limited store of patience ran out… I could have her, and it shouldn't even be difficult. As a kunoichi, she was accounted of age, so she could simply move in. That would be a really good revenge against her mother. If she proved loyal, I'd even start training her, though it would be a long time before she'd be any use in sparring.
I didn't really like it, but it was a good idea. It was even good for Sakura. Certainly, it would break her away from her fangirlish ways, and it would start her training and eating properly - I still remember how she and that crazy overbearing Ino girl were always talking about dieting, how stupid - this plan would likely save her life if it worked. And with me, she'd never be lonely, a good deal all around. While she'd achieved her academy rank almost entirely on academics, and mostly useless academics at that given the peacetime curriculum, I was pretty sure she had potential. If not, I'd convince her to apply for training as a non-combat medic-nin, definitely saving her life.
Done with the bath and feeling a bit more energetic, I summoned up five supercharged clones to work on seduction skills. I needed more skill and fast if I was to reel the girl in. Now wanting to look and get my blood heated, I headed to the apartment I'd revamped as a training room and worked on weights for a couple of hours, then enjoyed a chakra-enhanced massage from a couple of clones and another large meal. Another two hours of running, half an hour's break for shower and food - I was tired enough not to feel any real passion - and then another weight session, half an hour of massage and food, and one last run for the day. Even running myself to the ground like this, I could feel the weight and air resistance diminishing, though I was aware that it was actually my body improving. It was surreal, how powerful my regeneration was. In ten hours of exhausting exercise, I'd probably done more for myself than most shinobi could accomplish in a month of intense training.
Which reminded me that I needed to add acrobatic and flexibility training, perhaps a practical dodging exercise and some clone sparring. It was getting late and I was actually exhausted, but I knew that I needed a lot of energy if I wanted to summon a clone legion for the night's work, so I forced myself to eat and took a brief nap, having a clone ready to wake me - the one who cuddled up against me in bed. Never sleeping alone was a habit I could get used to.
I woke up to an ardent kiss and a pair of warm, moist lips sucking hungrily on my nipples. It got wilder from there, five Naruto girls wrestling in the nude. I very much needed a larger bed, another thing I'd have to learn how to make. They probably didn't have beds large enough for what I had in mind.
After I cleaned up, with company, and ate, I began absorbing memories. Reviewing the work sheets the clones prepared for the next month, I made a few corrections. In the main, they'd done excellent work, quite naturally. Increasing the training legion to three thousand, they put in five hundred clones day and night for skill training, e.g. construction or tailoring, and five hundred for spying. There was a reminder to send a clone to the owner of the building tonight, and I added a reminder to fix the blood-siphoning seal. Nice work, I nodded thoughtfully as I saw that a steadily growing group was dedicated to memory transfer, one that would work without the clone dispersing. It would vastly increase the efficiency of the training, as each clone who had any success or the most minor advancement, insight or idea could have everyone benefit from it immediately instead of the next session. At a guess, it might well quintuple the productivity of the training legion and the professional legion if not more, and it was also very useful for the spies and thieves.
Eventually, I planned on make clone battle-squads, and it would be incredibly useful there as well, and hopefully it would also work for blood clones, assuming that idea panned out. Another important note drew attention to the chakra shield technique the Hyuuga had insisted on naming kinjutsu and confining to the forbidden scroll, which would do a lot to mitigate the one-hit one-kill drawback of shadow clones. Definitely a priority for combat efficiency, but kinetic dissipation and elemental and chakra absorption and reflection seals would work just as well, if not better. Combined, I had no idea how anything less than a large army could even delay me a couple of years from now. Even Kage-level shinobi had limits and could be swamped.
I penciled in another five hundred clones for daily and nightly seduction training, deciding that I would eventually try it all. Being a girl was really nice, and girls were designed for penetration. Even if I wasn't physically attracted to my male self, it was something I should experience. If nothing else, there was no reason a female-shaped shadow clone couldn't have something extra down there. I also added a note to see if I could increase the number of clones every week or so. I was exercising my chakra quite ferociously, and my already kage-plus level reserves were growing… which naturally meant that chakra control would be even more difficult. Everything had a price.
Conjuring everything left me nearly wiped out. A clone flickered with me to bed, and I was out like a light.
It was official. D-rank missions were a drag. Hunting down the Daimyo's wife devil cat took over three hours, mostly because I didn't want to flaunt my shadow clones. Or, quite honestly, waste that much chakra for such a trivial reason. Seeing why the cat ran for its life was quite hilariously satisfying, however. Sasuke was being very hostile and very obvious about it, Sakura naturally taking her cues from him. That was another reason not to showcase my talents, I didn't want to waste my time sparring with the rookie of the year. Honestly, he wasn't worth my time. Oh, his taijutsu was better than mine, he probably had better skill with ninja tools, and his fire jutsus were superior to mine - but for all that, he was too slow and weak to be interesting.
His taijutsu was better because I had no one who would teach me or spar with me in the academy, and before I had my clones practice it, I needed to find a style or three that would suit me. I would surpass his skill with tools and the element of fire in a week, at the very most. He was very skilled for a genin, but he had nothing that could help me improve other than providing someone to spar with and test myself, and he simply wasn't good enough to do it well. More than that, his ego was such that a defeat would simply make him more annoying rather than less, or so I suspected. I wasn't even jealous that he had the absolute favor of the civilians and a legion of fangirls, or at least not very much. Sasuke was obviously a deeply unhappy person who seemed to wallow in his own misery and hatred, and I wanted no part of that.
Amusingly enough, he was more interested in me than the other way around, but genius was something he couldn't readily copy, even had he awakened his Sharingan, the copy-wheel eye bloodline which made the Uchiha justifiably infamous. The less raw power, skill and ability I showed around him, the better off I'd be, or he wouldn't leave me alone. Which reminded me of the need to study security seals and workarounds for them. Having no choice but to be patient was just so incredibly frustrating.
Clone-sex was a really good way to blow of the steam. After a shower and a meal, I upped the weight of the gravity and resistance seals, and repeated yesterday's ten hours of torture, falling asleep exhausted to the bone. I was careful only to have the gravity seal active when actually training, knowing that even with regeneration overusing it could damage my body and stunt my growth. Eating as well as I did and working out so rigorously, I was only a bit shorter than Chouji, definitely the largest genin of our age-group, and my shoulders were almost as broad.
The next day Kakashi actually decided to offer us some training - in remarkably silly team exercises that were supposed to improve our teamwork. Of course the idiot wouldn't even try to work on the underlying reasons we did not, and weren't going to, work well together. So much for seeing the underneath, let alone beneath that layer.
Of course, since he was so late, we drew a particularly unpleasant D-rank, four hours of pure suffering I don't even want to think about. When we were done, I approached him, "Yo, Kakashi, as you probably know, I'm an orphan and I can always use more money. The bastard civilians are always overcharging me, they call it a demon tax, that's when they even allow me to enter the store," yes, the sob story did have a point to it. "Is there any chance I can do more D-rank missions on my own time? With shadow clones, I can finish them up real quick."
"Why aren't you using shadow clones to help with team missions?" he retorted.
"Well, if I complete the mission with shadow clones, it's not really a team mission at all, is it now?" I asked innocently. "I thought the purpose of D-ranks was to practice teamwork," I threw his tiresome mantra right back at him.
"Hmph," he breathed out, reminiscent of Sasuke. "Very well, you have my permission," he turned to leave.
"Wait, Kakashi! That's not going to be good enough for the mission desk, you know that. Here's the note I want you to sign," it really was worded innocently and he signed all three copies, keeping one for himself.
"Why three copies rather than two?" Kakashi inquired.
"It's a bureaucratic procedure. Who ever heard of a form not filed in triplicate?" I looked at him wide-eyed. "Ahem," I moued in mock sadness when my attempt at humor failed spectacularly, "one for each of us and one to file with the mission desk, I keep one in case they mysteriously 'lose it', you know."
And so my nefarious plan was put into practice. I marched into the mission desk with my minions behind me in groups of ten, smirking at the stares, and presented the permission slip for filing.
"Genin Uzumaki requesting ten D-rank missions," I picked ten easy ones from the list, handed the papers to the ten teams of ten, and ran off to practice avoiding becoming a pincushion with increased gravity and resistance seals. An hour later I was back in the mission desk, asking for another ten, after presenting the signed mission scrolls for payment. Quite deliberately, I left exactly one unpleasant mission for each active genin team. Since we would come in last, we'd be chasing Tora again. Just for the fun of it, I had my clones catch the cat and hide her at the hidden lab. The Naruto with team seven today would be a clone and the joke would be on them. Since I'd learned the chakra shield jutsu, if not quite mastered it yet, I was a lot more sanguine about having it impersonate me. More than that, I was happy because for once, the night's awareness exercises had gotten positive results. Eventually, I hoped to be a capable chakra sensor, developing that potential was worth a lot of investment.
Oh well, no team-play, so I had the entire day for grueling, tortuous physical training. What fun.
Most of all, I was happy because of information I'd found. Legally, it turned out that Hinata's problem had a solution. The Shodaime Hokage granted clans a lot of leeway in his efforts to coax them into joining Konoha, but he drew the line at actual slavery of clan members. It was probably meant to be cosmetic, but it was nonetheless a binding law of Konoha. Any member of the Hyuuga clan could renounce the clan and be immediately disowned, as long as they bore or accepted the caged bird seal and never bore children. The law was quite clear, and I had a simple way around it, since it didn't prevent Hinata from getting pregnant or children of hers from being born, nor did it force the former-Hyuuga to keep bearing the slave seal. In practice, all I had to do was transfer her unborn child to another woman to bear, and undo her seal. Not easy by any means, but little worth doing ever is.