He'd only been back in the academy for a few days after the most recent break and the fangirls were already far too annoying. Most of them were horrible weaklings, and most of the other boys in the class weren't much better. All of them were holding him back by ensuring that the teachers had to teach to their level, and that was without the fangirls constantly trying to get him to pay attention to them.
Something had to be done about it. Preferably something that would get him left alone for a while and would get the rest of the class closer to his own standards. Though that did bring up the question of how to get the girls to take their training more seriously and the other boys to stop running entirely on arrogance. Well, except for the Nara, as a whole they seemed to run on laziness and only doing what they needed to. Shikamaru probably only did enough to not be the dead last. If the others picked up their slack then he'd have to pick up his own pace just to avoid the wrath of his mother.
It took Sasuke a couple of weeks before he came up with an idea. Iruka was chasing Naruto after the latter's morning prank Mizuki had gone to get supplies to clean up after said prank, and the fangirls had descended.
"Shut up," Sasuke said before his headache could properly develop, glaring at the group of girls around him. It was only as he did so that he noticed that the Hyuuga was still in the back of the room, and he had to tweak his wording a little out of respect there. Mainly by not referring to all girls in the class as useless. "None of you have proven that you're worth my attention. Do you realize how much of an insult it is being in this class? Being the rookie of the year when we graduate will mean nothing when people realize how poorly everyone else did."
The mix of sadness, shock, and indignation at that statement wasn't quite what he wanted, but it was close enough. Ino was the first to recover, anger taking over. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"A proper class would have everyone else, including the current 'dead last', pass their final year with scores high enough to make it obvious that any of them could've been the rookie of the year, ensuring that the actual rookie of the year is seen as obviously having earned their position. That none of you have realized this and worked to ensure that the entire class is up to that standard means that you're not worth my time. It makes me wonder how it is that you all score so well on the bookwork when you can't see something that obvious."
Left unsaid was that such a class would, by necessity, move a lot faster. That would get him stronger faster by association, and hopefully it would generate team members that were far more likely to actually be worth working with. Not that he felt that he'd actually pierced the fangirl delusions, even if he appeared to have stunned them enough to get them to shut up today.
The Sasuke fan club was meeting a couple weeks after Sasuke's statements, having decided to investigate things before dismissing Sasuke outright. Like they always did, even if most of the time their investigations just led to them deciding that Sasuke was cool.
Because he was.
"So what have we learned?" Ami asked.
"That Sasuke was right," Sakura answered. "Especially when it comes to rookie of the year. That's actually used as an insult when the rest of your graduating class sucked compared to you."
"And we were able to get everyone's current standings," Ino added, waving a sheet of paper. "Sasuke is on top, Naruto is on the bottom. Even discarding both of them as the notable outliers, the rest of the class doesn't measure up."
There was a moment of silence after that, before Kasumi spoke up. "Then what do we do about it?"
Sakura grimaced. "All of us need to get our physical scores up, several of us need to improve our theory work as well. A couple of older kunoichi gave me tips on the physical side of things when I asked, but the real challenge is going to be the others in the class. Not only do we have to improve, we need to get everyone else to improve. Which means interacting with the other boys and pushing them to do better, including Naruto."
More silence, and lots of grimacing, followed that. Right up until Fuki grinned. "Then again, if we can get even the class clown up to speed then we'll definitely have proven our worth to Sasuke, right?"
The grimaces turned to grins for a moment, before Ino frowned. "How do we accomplish that?"
"We need to learn more about our targets," Sakura answered. "Not just Naruto, but all of the boys. And Hinata, probably. Then we can work out what needs to be done to get all of them to improve. I think that will actually help us too, my parents claim that teaching others helps improve your own knowledge and skills as well."
Thus began Operation "Worthy Class" and a few of the most confusing years for academy instructors in Konoha.
Thanks to a group of mixed retired and active kunoichi, the girls had figured out how to properly watch their figures while still training properly for ninja life. That had included what kinds of things to prepare for others, overall meal plans for families, and a few related things. It had been a mental blow to their egos, but they'd recovered from it and dove into ensuring that they knew what they needed to. Both for themselves and to ensure that the others in class were also up to speed on it.
Finding out that Naruto was the only one in class that had been eating worse than the entire fan club had before those revelations was a shock. None of them could figure out where he got all of his energy, because his diet was atrocious. Worse, when they'd confronted him about it, and challenged him on the ingredients in the instant ramen he frequently made (while complaining that it was not, in fact, 'instant') they'd discovered that he barely knew how to read.
On the flip side, they'd expected that getting Naruto to do schoolwork would be a challenge. They'd been wrong there. Giving him any helpful attention at all had him jumping in with both feet. Pointing out that he could learn more by reading other books had helped as well, but they'd quickly discovered another problem. The library, and most stores, wouldn't let Naruto even enter them normally. Luckily, application of the transformation technique helped there, and the girls 'permitted' Naruto to use their appearances every so often for the purpose of purchasing things at fair prices.
Nobody else in the class needed a significant change to their diet, much to the chagrin of the fan club, but getting the other boys in class to take their academic lessons seriously was more problematic. Naruto had been easy, Kiba and Shikamaru were terrors. The only ways to improve Shikamaru's grades were to have his current performance risk being seen as the 'dead last' and to threaten to provide evidence to his mother that he wasn't trying enough. Kiba, on the other hand, had only been willing to consider working more on the bookwork when the girls had claimed that their theory grades going up was linked to their improved practical performance.
Well, that and Naruto's practical performance had skyrocketed while he was now seen reading books, making it even more obvious that there might be a link.
The rest of the class had required far less effort, merely arranging for actual study sessions to significantly improve their scores. The fan club had the most improvement after Naruto, finding that they needed to be much more on top of things to run those sessions. They'd also discovered that Naruto's grades had been lower than they should've been, even with all of his problems, and had exposed Mizuki as intentionally sabotaging Naruto for unknown reasons. The man's replacement was watched carefully for signs of doing the same.
When it came to the practical front, there were two main categories that everyone had to improve in. Physically, the fan club girls were doing far better with their new diet. They had pushed forward with the intent of giving Sasuke as close to a 'proper challenge' as possible, even knowing that they'd never truly match up to him. That improvement had dragged the weaker boys along as they worked to prove that they weren't weaker than a bunch of girls. Whether it was stamina, accuracy, taijutsu technique, or physical strength.
Chakra, on the other hand, was a problem. Not for the fan club itself, who had decent control already and were seeing far more capacity as their physical fitness improved. It wasn't even a problem as far as most of the rest of the class was concerned. No, the biggest headache there was Naruto. He had far too much chakra and far too little control. He'd also somehow butchered his hand signs and yet still managed to get the transformation and replacement techniques down. Something was going to have to be done about his clone technique, but nothing the fan club had tried worked.
First they'd tried having Naruto do the leaf sticking exercise on every release point on his body simultaneously, on skin and through clothing. Then they'd start changing leaves out for rocks and kunai. When he had that down in pretty much all combinations they'd started tying ropes to the kunai handles and randomly pulling on them until he could keep himself anchored and not have the kunai pulled off.
They'd learned, and taught Naruto, the tree climbing technique to improve his chakra control. He'd picked it up almost instantly because he'd accidentally taught himself to keep himself standing when they were pulling on the kunai, and as such that hadn't helped. They recreated the water walking technique from the barest of descriptions and taught that to Naruto, then had him doing that with kunai, leaves, and rocks all over his body. That had finally been enough to get his clones to form significantly less deformed.
Not enough for the clones to pass, but it was an improvement.
To the fan club's surprise, Naruto had also ended up teaching them a number of things. He'd figured out a rudimentary form of chakra strings so that he could more easily read books while working on other things. It was a crude and chakra-hungry method, but a couple of the girls were able to learn it as well. In addition to that, Naruto had essentially accidentally taught himself one-handed hand signs. Initially from partial lessons when he was only able to look into the classroom window, and then because he wanted to practice while a hand was already occupied. The fan club had very carefully examined his work, documented it, and was working on making it work for themselves.
Shikamaru had been the first outside of Naruto and the fan club to lay eyes on those notes, and he'd seemingly uncharacteristically dove right in to find out what was going on. That had led to the 'study clubs' merging far more than they had been, the occasional study groups or practical practice sessions expanding greatly. What had been primarily Naruto with the fan club turned into essentially the entire class learning what they could to keep up and all working to find a solution to Naruto's 'clone problem'.
None of the girls noticed when their crushes on Sasuke slowly faded, eventually turning into disdain. By then the boy was the only one in the class not participating in the overall improvement attempts. If he was so much better than them then surely he could contribute some of that experience to help his comrades, right? Instead they'd all become much better friends with each other and their non-Uchiha classmates. They still continued to use the excuse of ensuring that Sasuke didn't have the stigma of weak classmates to placate their parents, especially when it came to helping Naruto, but instead they'd come to the conclusion that they needed to actually get better than Sasuke in order to take him down a couple of pegs.
Shikamaru was the one that came up with the plan for doing so, though they'd need at least some help. To that end they'd done two things. First, they'd recruited the aid of the clan parents in figuring out what had to be done about Naruto's clone problem. That had led to an appeal to the Hokage, who had examined Naruto himself and personally taught the boy the Shadow Clone.
To ensure that they wouldn't be stupid, the rest of the class, minus Sasuke, had been present for a demonstration before Naruto's lessons. That demonstration had been a combination of showing them the relative chakra levels for creating a single normal clone versus a single shadow clone and showing them the relative chakra levels of Naruto versus the rest of the group. It had taken a minimum of six of them to pump enough chakra into the demonstration seal to make a single shadow clone, and that left them drained. Naruto had barely noticed the drain when he'd tried.
None of the group was surprised when Naruto had no problem creating shadow clones after his training was complete. Kiba was the one that pointed out that the memory transfer trick meant that Naruto could finally stop reading books instead of sparring, only for Naruto to take that as a challenge and start reading books while sparring. The Hokage was one of the only ones amused by the unintentional mimicry of one Kakashi Hatake.
As for the rest of Shikamaru's plan? The entire rest of the class started holding back around Sasuke, to keep him from realizing just how much they were improving. After all, ninety percent of the rookie of the year grading was pulled from the second half of the final year. The rest of the class improving in secret, and then letting loose the day the true rookie of the year contest started, would show Sasuke just what he was up against without giving him time to adapt.
Sasuke had been surprised when the fan girls had stopped bothering him. That surprise had settled into a new normal before it had returned with interest as the overall grades of the entire class started going up. To the point where he had to put in extra effort to maintain his own lead, something that pleased him because he was obviously getting stronger faster but annoyed him because it showed that he wasn't strong enough if the others in class could even start catching up to him. He'd refused every offer to join the various 'study groups', barely noticing that the offers had eventually trickled off and stopped.
His decision not to join the study groups had been proven correct when the improvement of the rest of the class stagnated. Sure, they were all much closer in rank now than they had been before, but they still didn't get anywhere near to his own level. They even seemed to regress to a less capable point, falling to the dobe's admittedly improved level more than anything else. Even better, though, was that not being in the study groups meant that he basically didn't see any of his classmates outside of the academy itself.
It was very nice being able to train on his own without any interruptions from his classmates, and even when he was in class the others left him alone like he preferred. There were still a bunch of civilian fangirls, as well as some from other classes, but they were all far easier to avoid and as such far less annoying.
That all ended the first day back from the mid-year break of his final year at the academy. To his shock, everyone in the class had gotten a perfect score on the written 'did you study over the break' test. Even Naruto. Worse, he'd come in last in the practical sessions that had followed barring ninjutsu practice. Even then, the only reason he hadn't come in last in the latter case was because Naruto still couldn't make worthwhile clones. They'd improved, but they were still failures.
Sasuke had gone from top of the class to equal to everyone else in the theory work and from the top of the class to the bottom in practicals, and he had no clue how it had happened. He didn't even have time to be properly annoyed by the change because he had far too much catching up to do all of a sudden, exhausting himself in training and studying every day to have a hope of reaching the level that the rest of the class had suddenly reached.
It wasn't until the final grades came out of the academy that the civilian council learned that anything was wrong with the last Uchiha. Finding out that he'd come out as the dead last of his year had shocked them, though they enjoyed the confirmation that civilian-family students could outdo their clan-born counterparts. Admittedly, despite being the dead last, Sasuke had still had grades that could've seen him as the rookie of the year in almost any other year. Instead, Ino Yamanaka had pulled rookie of the year status, one point ahead of Shikamaru Nara.
Thanks to the class standings, the normal trend of putting the rookie of the year with the highest-scoring member of the other gender along with the dead last had been discarded. The Akimichi, Nara, and Yamanaka families were far too influential to allow the Uchiha to end up on a team instead of forming a team with the three families represented. Teams were instead built on belief of who could and would work together, both from a skills point of view and in the traditional teamwork test for new genin.
Even there they ended up having two problems. The first was that the class had the wrong number of graduating students, there was going to be an odd person out for forming three-man teams. An attempt was made to force Naruto Uzumaki to be that odd one out, but the official policy was that the lowest ranking students had to be dropped first. They couldn't drop anyone because Sasuke was first on the chopping block. The other problem was that nobody who had worked with the class felt that Sasuke Uchiha would be able to function with anyone else in the class.
In the end the Ino-Shika-Cho team got a second generation. Naruto was paired with Hinata and Shino under Kurenai Yuhi, with a hope that Kurenai could improve Naruto's weakness with genjutsu. Kiba had paled when he'd been assigned to work with Fuki and Sakura, knowing how much the girls would likely continue to push him. He was also on the only team with two girls from the class. The rest of the civilian-born were on teams together.
As for Sasuke, he ended up 'filling a hole' in a team formed the previous year. The kunoichi of his new team had taken serious injuries and he ended up taking her place, to much teasing from the other two genin that he was now 'the girl' of the team. His resentment would only increase when the chunin exams came to Konoha and every one of his classmates was entered while his sensei refused to allow his team to enter.
Being told that it didn't matter if the rest of his class had graduated the academy with chunin-level skills, Sasuke wasn't skilled enough had caused him to lash out at and need to be taken down by the rest of his team. Only the threat of being sent back to the academy worked to get him to shut up, at least until he was approached about other ways to get power...