As much as Naruto would have liked to make progress faster, he'd only really gotten a proper handle on his chakra by the summer before his ninth birthday. It was only after a couple years of basically all-day work with clones that he finally got the leaf-sticking exercise down, and he'd had to master the others first. Then Hinata had pushed him to be able to stick a leaf on every chakra point, a Hyuga training method for learning to expel chakra from all of your chakra points instead of just those in your hands and feet. This didn't come anywhere near as easy to him as it did for the Hyuga, but he'd eventually figured it out. The worst part was that only after mastering that could he manage the academy's clone and disguise jutsu.
If not for needing to keep his control up, he'd love to be done with chakra control exercises. But his capacity was growing with him, so he had to keep going and going and going...
At the same time, thanks to the Anbu he'd reached the point where he could mimic other people's chakra or blend into the background. That made his clones far more effective, harder to spot, and he'd celebrated by pranking the Hyuga elders. Having found out about the 'caged bird' seal a few weeks prior had made him feel a little vindictive. Pranking the Anbu to prove that he could like his parents wanted him to would need to wait a few weeks at a minimum.
He still had time to have fun, and his parents didn't know if they should be annoyed or not that he'd come up with 'turn into a naked adult to distract or knock out chunin and jounin' using the solid disguise technique. They'd been solidly in the 'annoyed' category when he'd first come up with it, but it had worked more often than not when used. Well, unless he tried it on a Hyuga. There the success rate was far lower, and he'd not made any attempt at using it around Hinata or Ko.
But today he was nervous. Hinata had recently gotten general permission to visit without Ko when she didn't have other training and he planned on revealing a little more to her...and asking for her permission for two different experiments. Kurama thought he was stupid for asking about one, but the other required her actual cooperation.
"Hello Naruto," Hinata greeted as she came into the Uzumaki compound. She'd gotten a lot less nervous around him over the past couple of years, but still had shy fits. Most of the time when they were in public, she'd gotten much better about them while it was only the two of them and Ko.
"Hello," he greeted in return.
She frowned and pulsed her byakugan. "Something is obviously wrong, because I think the only clone you have out is Yoko in the shrine."
"Er, well...I've been keeping some secrets..."
Hinata sighed. "We're supposed to keep secrets. I have to keep my clan's secrets and you have Uzumaki secrets."
Naruto scratched the back of his head. "This is a little more important than that." She didn't look convinced, so he double-checked that his pants weren't going to trap his tail and released his shapeshift.
Blinking, Hinata activated her byakugan, then tilted her head. "They...have chakra points."
"Yep."
"The solid disguise doesn't affect chakra points."
"No, it doesn't."
"...how?"
Naruto flipped the Tome to book form. "I used to have the nine-tailed fox sealed in me, but then this found me. It was broken, thought I was severely injured, and tried to heal me while fixing itself. I ended up part-fox and can change my shape while the fox and my parents ended up in the Tome. Er, the book is named the Tome of the Orange Sky, and is a lot more than just a book."
Hinata moved around him, staring with her byakugan active. Then she reached out and touched his tail, hand jerking back when she found that it was actually there. A moment later she blushed, her byakugan shutting off.
Since she wasn't freaking out...he hoped, he continued. "Um, as part of 'healing' me, the Tome did something to me that we think gave me better access to elemental chakra...and maybe even chakra chains."
"...chains?"
Naruto hadn't trained much with the chains yet as they didn't help much with chakra control and finding a place to train with them properly was problematic. There wasn't enough room in the compound. But he had enough control to make a short chain come out of the palm of his hand. "These."
"Oh."
"But, well, we're curious if we're right and want to see if the Tome can 'fix' others in the same way."
Hinata's blush deepened a little, but only for a moment before she visibly forced herself to focus. "Er, would I become a...kitsune?"
"We don't think so. This is just fixing a...'net' like thing around your chakra. Kinda? And we think that fixing it will let you increase your chakra capacity more over time."
She pouted at that, before it shifted into a blush and then she focused again. "Um, does it hurt?"
"It shouldn't, but you can be kept asleep during it and it should only take an hour."
He wasn't sure exactly what was going on in her head, but after a couple of minutes of various emotions she nodded. Gesturing to one of the houses, figuring that she should at least be on a couch, they headed inside.
Hiruzen looked over the latest summary reports from the academy, along with notes and requests from families. The latter generally fell into three categories, the most common split between clans asking that their members not be allowed to graduate early and civilian parents wanting their children to be in class or teams with specific clan students. Then there were the miscellaneous requests that made sense.
The requests that were complete lunacy never made it into the summaries.
For a number of reasons, he ended up focusing on Naruto's year. Not only did it have the largest number of potential clan heirs in it right now, but it also had Naruto himself. Since he was serving as Naruto's parent for the purposes of the academy, Jiraiya not being in the village often enough to do so himself, it only made sense to keep a closer eye on that class. Not that much had changed since the last batch of summaries.
The 'look underneath' scores indicated that most of the civilian-born were still going to fail out, but some were likely to at least make it to graduation before failing the sensei test. There were a couple of exceptions though, students that had learned something about themselves over time and had gained a better drive. If not for current policies on age of graduation outside of wartime coupled with parental requests most of the clan-born would probably have graduated already, Naruto included now that he had managed all three of the academy jutsu.
There were three new clan-originating requests. An adjustment in Sasuke's class placement had been made by Itachi, aiming to keep a couple of the more...enthusiastic fangirls away from the boy. Hiruzen had made a couple of similar requests on Naruto's behalf shortly after the chakra meter display. The Inuzuka had made their standard requests regarding a pet for Kiba, as whatever puppy the boy ended up with wouldn't be considered a nin-dog for a few years. And Hiashi had amended the standard request for members of the Hyuga clan to not graduate early to include an exception for Hinata, allowing her to graduate early if Naruto did.
It certainly made sense from the point of view of the Hyuga elders subtly supporting the girl's obvious crush in hopes of a long-term alliance with the Uzumaki. Something that had only really started after Naruto's accidental creation of an amazingly simple solid disguise jutsu by running the entire sequence of hand seals for the illusionary one backwards and mirrored, then figuring out the chakra flows to make it work. The jutsu had already made both the Anbu and the Hyuga noticeably more effective in the field, though Itachi reported that it was less useful for the Uchiha because it 'blurred' the sharingan.
Well, Hiruzen wasn't against Naruto graduating a year early, and that would help balance out some known issues in that year's class. And it was nice to see some actual subtlety with trying to build romantic relationships, since the clans at least generally recognized that being blatant with matchmaking made failure far more likely...
"I'm sorry!" Hinata said, crying lightly. "I didn't mean to!"
Naruto nodded, checking where the girl's chakra chain had pierced his arm. "I know. I put my first one through my own foot."
She blinked at that. "You...what?"
"I was trying to make a chakra string 'the easy way', but got a chain through my foot instead. Besides, I heal fast. See? Not even bleeding now."
"Oh."
"But hey, this means that one thing worked!"
That seemed to distract her a bit more. "One thing?"
He nodded. "Er, yeah. I want to try to teach you a spell, and, um..."
She sighed. "And what?"
"We think that we know how the byakugan works and I want to see if we're right? Well, I was also curious about the sharingan, but we think that they have some kind of 'connected to an external power source' thing going on instead of being internal..."
They stood there in silence for a minute while Hinata processed that. "Are you asking my permission to try to give yourself a byakugan?" He nodded, and she stared at him for a couple of minutes. Eventually she blushed and tapped her fingers together. "Would...would you lose your blue eyes?"
"Maybe only while I have them active? Um...assuming I can turn them off..."
"Why wouldn't you be able to turn them off?"
"I might have too much chakra, but if that ends up being a problem then we can undo the changes."
It took a moment, but she nodded. "You have me curious now, and you already gave me one of your clan's skills, so..."
He nodded, sitting down on the couch that she'd lain on while the Tome had worked on her. "This should only take a couple of minutes."
Going blind in one eye at a time, the blind eye itching horribly, was decidedly unpleasant. But ten minutes later he was able to see out of both eyes again...and honestly thought he was seeing better than he had before.
"Is it over?" Hinata asked.
"Yeah," Naruto acknowledged. "This is weird. I think I can see colors I couldn't before."
"I suppose that I have to teach you how to activate them to see if it actually worked."
Teaching him the normal sequence of hand signs for activating the byakugan, and explaining the relevant chakra flows, had taken half an hour. But he'd successfully activated them, only to be shocked by how much he could see. He could simultaneously see almost entirely around him and focus on specific things in significant detail, in addition to seeing the chakra of Hinata and a number of others in the area around the compound. Actually, he could see his own chakra too. Compared to Hinata, the Anbu, and a couple of civilians nearby it did look quite odd. Though he'd apparently done a good job of making Yoko look like a civilian as 'her' chakra didn't stand out.
"Are you going to try again?" Hinata asked.
He blinked. "It worked that time."
"...you don't have any bulging veins and your eyes didn't go white?"
"Um..."
"You have enough chakra to not need the extra blood flow," his mother explained. "And not having your eyes change should definitely help disguise what you're doing."
"Apparently I just have enough chakra to not need more blood feeding my eyes," Naruto said, shrugging.
Hinata pouted, but nodded. "Can you see my chakra points?"
"Yeah. It's like they're too small to see, but also highlighted as targets."
She frowned. "I don't know what the rules are for teaching someone outside of the clan the Gentle Fist. I know that it has happened, but not under what circumstances."
"Well, I can probably figure it out on my own if I need to."
"I'll ask my father."
He nodded, then grinned and grabbed the Tome. Flipping it open to the Knight Armor spell, he held it out for her to look at. "This is the spell I was talking about. There are a couple others that I haven't learned yet, but if you can cast this then you can probably learn the others too."
Hinata blinked and looked down at the Tome. "You said something about spells earlier. Shouldn't you mean jutsu?"
"They seem to use chakra, but in an entirely different way than jutsu do."
She took the Tome to look more closely. "Oh. What does this one do?"
He focused for a moment and cast the spell, with the 'generic shinobi outfit' template. A moment later his clothing had been replaced, and with the byakugan still active he could see the dozens of layers of chakra overlaid around him. They didn't seem to affect his ability to see through them, but that might be because they were his or because his eyes were inside.
Hinata activated her own byakugan, and her eyes went wide. "I can't make out your chakra points at all!" She pushed chakra into her hand and poked the layers of chakra, releasing a burst of her own to absolutely no effect. "That...it's like a perfect defense against the Gentle Fist!"
"My parents think it would stop most taijutsu-based fighting styles," Naruto admitted. "As well as anything relying on standard weapons, but the protection layers won't help as much with anything designed to be 'armor piercing'. Which I don't think describes the Gentle Fist."
"Well, it largely ignores most normal armor, but I know what you mean." She then looked down at the Tome. "And you think that I might be able to use that too?"
"Yep! We hope. It, er, took me a while to get it down, but we improved the instructions!"
Nodding, she sat down and started reading. He grinned, then realized that he should figure out how to turn the byakugan off...
It turned out that the basic forms of the Gentle Fist were routinely taught to trusted friends and teammates of Hyuga, though the degree of doing so varied, in order to permit a bait and switch on opponents that saw what they thought was the Hyuga in a group engaging them and would then ignore the actual Hyuga coming from another angle. This had been made even more open with the solid disguise jutsu allowing better deception as to who the Hyuga was in a group, so Hinata was permitted to teach Naruto anything she felt she was capable of teaching or he was capable of learning that was available in the clan's 'basic' archives.
Those rules did not seem to take into account the non-Hyuga being able to target chakra points themselves, and Hinata had apparently been very careful to not mention that Naruto would be able to. At the same time, the highest-level skills of the clan were passed down orally instead of written down and were thus not covered by the blanket permission for things in the archives. Not that Hinata knew any of those yet anyway.
They didn't go beyond starting Naruto on the 'precisely expel chakra from fingertips' exercises right away though, because Hinata had decided that they should see if she could cast the Knight Armor spell first. Naruto had been started on sealing and the basic 'bullet' spell while Hinata worked on that, getting the basic spell down fairly quickly but needing more time to learn how to make it not just a ball of light. His father had then taught him the shuriken shadow clone jutsu, only admitting that it was one of Old Man Hokage's after Naruto had learned it.
That thing was way too easy when you were already used to throwing piles of clones around, and it even worked on the spell-formed bullets if you released the jutsu and the spell at the same time. Naruto's main problem was keeping the number of duplicates down. It apparently wasn't 'mastered' unless you could seamlessly decide to make as few as three or as many as a hundred duplicates and he currently defaulted to around five hundred.
Jiraiya had also started teaching sealing when Naruto's birthday came around, with a very different style in both how he did things and how he taught it. Supposedly everyone who learned it adapted it to their own way of thinking, meaning that a master could examine examples of the same seal and generally identify who had created each just from the small details. But having official instruction in the basics justified Naruto buying supplies, which made practicing outside of the Tome's false world a lot easier to explain.
It was nearing the end of the year when Hinata finally got the Knight Armor spell working, not having the benefit of being able to connect to the Tome the way Naruto could. Just in time for her birthday. She complained that it took too much chakra right now, but also understood that working her chakra was the best way to increase her capacity. She explained the basics of the Gentle Fist's forms while getting used to the protections, and Naruto was finally able to see what they did to the byakugan from outside without it being his own chakra letting him see through it.
Thanks to deciding to keep the spell up inside the compound when not practicing the Gentle Fist, they quickly determined that Knight Armor wasn't perfect as well. It 'stored away' your pouches, making their contents inaccessible without dropping it. You either had to put those on afterwards or deal with not having your weapons and other supplies on hand. Like the pouch full of snacks they'd each had one day and couldn't access anymore.
Thanks to what was probably an abuse of clones, Naruto was pushing Hinata into learning more of the Gentle Fist by the time Spring came around. Then again, leaving a hundred to take different forms and train in the compound every morning allowed for an incredible amount of experience to build up across multiple fighting styles. Provided, of course, that he was ready to take a nap after classes let out. It was also helping him get experience with the taijutsu styles his parents were teaching him.
After his nap each day he still needed to do a bunch of physical training for real, of course, but he left clones doing his homework.
Hinata had also gotten the basic bullet spell down, but was currently planning on it being an emergency-only thing. It took her too long to cast and her chakra reserves hadn't grown enough yet. Maybe when she'd gotten to the point of being able to make a single paperwork clone she'd reconsider.
Today was one of the days that she was at home, a private gathering for Hanabi's birthday. Naruto had sent a gift along, but nobody outside of the clan had been invited for the celebration. Hell, most of those that were in the clan hadn't been invited either. In theory, that meant that Naruto would be woken up by the alarm he'd set or by his parents deciding that he'd ignored the alarm for long enough.
Being woken up because something was licking his face hadn't been something he'd expected, and he'd attempted to punch whatever it was. Missed horribly, but he'd tried. He'd blinked a couple of times as his byakugan activated and showed...a red fox. With a well-developed chakra network, wearing a vest, and looking far too amused, at least until the first set of kunai dropped from the ceiling.
"What the..." the fox said as it barely avoided being impaled, and a moment later it looked up to see the dozens of traps waiting to trigger along with the one currently activating. "Oh shit. Why do I never remember to look up before things like this happen?"
Observing the little fox trigger and dodge trap after trap was amusing. The only safe places in the apartment right now were the bed, the bathroom, and the path between them. How the fox had made it to the bed without tripping anything in the first place was an entirely different question though. Eventually the fox realized that the bed was the only place a trap wasn't pointed at and jumped back onto it.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" the fox asked. "Why would you have that many traps in your bedroom? Where you sleep!"
Naruto shrugged as he used a chakra string to flip the master safety switch for the room before getting off the bed. "I might have started a low-key prank war with some Anbu that figured out how to get in here. Why are you in my bedroom in the first place?"
The fox took a moment to realize that the traps were disabled before it followed him. "Do you know how long it took us to find you?"
"No, because I don't know who you are or why you care."
"...right. I'm Ushi, messenger of the fox summons. We've been looking for a child of the great fox for centuries."
Naruto blinked, and looked down at the fox. "What are you talking about?"
"Long ago it was decreed that only a child of the great fox could summon us."
"Huh."
"I don't know if I like this idea or hate it," his father commented from inside of the Tome. "On the one hand, I fully expect Jiraiya to offer you the chance to sign the toad contract."
"And on the other," his mother continued while Naruto silently agreed with his father. "Foxes sound a lot more fitting for a kitsune." Then again, his mother had a good point too.
"Yeah. Though I suppose the toads could still accept him even with another contract. I nearly ended up signing a second one myself, but we found a better choice."
"Foxes are far superior to toads anyway," Kurama added, as though to think otherwise was an insult. Which to him it probably was.
"You know," Naruto said, making a clone to go swap out with the Yoko clone currently in the shrine so that he could find out if anything interesting happened there. "I don't think that either of my parents was a fox."
"We know," Ushi replied. "But you were reborn with the great fox's power. It just took us a bit to track you down once we'd noticed."
"...so you know that I'm not centuries old?" And damn, he'd just realized that he probably shouldn't have just casually made and sent off that clone in front of the little fox. He was still half-asleep, apparently.
"Duh."
"So what's in it for me to become your summoner?"
Ushi stared at him in response. "Huh. Supposedly most people get really excited to get an offer of being a summoner."
"I'm expecting a competing offer in a few years."
"Really?"
"Yep."
The little fox rummaged around in a pocket on his vest, which looked odd given that it was using its muzzle to do so, and produced a scroll. That was tossed onto the table. "That's a copy of our summoning rules, general capabilities, and a twelve-hour provisional summoner contract for visiting before deciding to sign the full one."
It didn't take long to read over things, which seemed incredibly straightforward in most respects. They generally preferred to stay out of direct combat, instead preferring disguise and infiltration or support roles. A preference was stated that if you were going to set out to kill someone then it was better to do so through infiltration and subterfuge than through direct combat, though they also had no problem with larger-scale battles either as your enemy rarely let you dictate the terms of combat. On the support role side, they claimed to be some of the best hunters as well as in the top three for healing list as well, and insisted on their summoners learning to hunt as well as being able to heal to at least 'stabilize injuries in the field' proficiency. Naruto had no problem with learning hunting and healing, but they also seemed to want their summoners to keep a personal summon around at all times. Well, when it wouldn't be a problem for a mission or similar, because needing to bring a fox on an infiltration where a fox wouldn't be expected was a bad idea. And their example of when the personal summon didn't need to be around, in fact.
"I don't exactly have permission to bring a pet to school with me," Naruto noted. "And...I've not actually figured out how safe foxes will be here at all? I've not seen or smelled one in the village until, well, today." And his parents had previously admitted to not really knowing how the populace would react to foxes in general either, for that matter, never having seen one near the village either.
Ushi tilted his head. "You smell like one? Somewhat, though befitting of being a child of the great fox."
"And I'm not counting myself as a full fox, so I think my point stands."
"Okay, yeah. Our less intelligent cousins aren't stupid enough to intrude on the home territory of a hundred-plus aggressive dogs. They've marked quite a distance around here, but they're also intelligent enough to recognize allies. You carrying a personal summons around would help them figure that out, which is part of the point."
Naruto raised an eyebrow. "Part of the point?"
"Well, we foxes tend to either be loners or form close bonds with a small number of others. I like to wander on my own and chose to be a messenger to see new places. My brother settled into territory on our borders with his mate instead and rarely wanders at all. We find that some of that stems from interactions as a kit, so having one around for a few years should create a better bond. Hopefully."
"You don't actually know?"
Ushi...shrugged, Naruto supposed. "We've never had a summoner, though we've worked with humans on a regular basis in other ways. Lots of theory from a very long time thinking about things, very little practical experience."
"Oh."
Double-checking the 'provisional summoner contract' took longer and was mostly handled by the Tome. Naruto had already been taught that you couldn't trust the words compared to the chakra, but did hope that the 'guaranteed safe return' aspect wasn't a lie. While that was happening he got the memory dump from the clone that had been Yoko, flinching as he'd left 'her' active all day until now. A couple of visiting merchants had stopped by the shrine, one of whom had some nasty plans of some kind for Yoko but hadn't been able to act on them.
One of the downsides of running around as a girl when you could sense negative emotions were the horrible creeps out there, and the older he (and thus Yoko) got the more of them he ran into. Most commonly visiting merchants, who usually weren't around long enough to properly research and prank either, but he'd dropped hell onto a chunin a couple months ago.
"So do you have any other comments to make?" Ushi asked.
"Ask me when I've woken up properly," Naruto replied, then frowned. "Actually, how does your clan get along with the toads?"
"We aren't allies, but they let any non-antagonistic clan train with them in the sage arts and we've gotten a couple of sages out of the deal. Why do you...huh. Are you potentially in line to sign their contract?"
"The toads have a history with Konoha, including helping the last time the 'great fox' attacked."
"Really?"
"Yep."
Half an hour later Naruto had woken up properly, been teased by his parents for his not-quite-awake actions, and they'd decided that there shouldn't be a problem at least meeting the fox clan leaders as the short-term contract had checked out. Naruto signed it, made a couple of clones to hold down the fort, and Ushi did something that caused someone at the other end to 'reverse summon' them. Which was a weird thing to say, because it was still summoning them?
They appeared on the edge of a forest, with a single other fox standing there. For all of a second before it darted off.
"This way," Ushi said, heading away from the trees.
Naruto followed, and it only took a couple of minutes to come to the mouth of a cave with two larger foxes in front of it, though only around the size of some of the larger dogs the Inuzuka had, and a single small toad that felt far more powerful than you'd expect. One that almost looked like it had purple hair in rollers.
"So this is the child of the great fox," the brownish fox on the left said. "Smells right, at least, but doesn't look the part."
"Looks can be deceiving," the toad said. "The Great Toad Sage says that young Naruto here wisely disguises himself."
"Oh?"
Naruto sighed, checked his pants, and released his shapeshift.
"Ah!" the more gray-colored fox on the right exclaimed. "That looks more like it. Hmmm. And passes the second test, actually."
"Yes," the brownish fox said.
"Second test?" Naruto asked, confused.
"There are three tests to become a summoner of our clan," the gray fox answered. "Being able to disguise your nature like that means you pass the second."
"The first is to appear in two places at once such that outsiders cannot tell which is actually you."
Ushi snorted. "He left some kind of solid clones to clean up his apartment and take his place before we were summoned here."
"He has taken that creation of Tobirama's to a level few do," the toad agreed. "We frequently have problems identifying where he is when observing him, latching onto his clones more often than not with the viewing technique."
They stood there in silence for a moment as the two foxes took that in, then the brown one shook its head as if to clear it. "Okay, I don't think the founders of our clan expected that. I guess that leaves any questions the kit has before we move to the final test?"
"Does a toad being here mean that signing their contract won't be a problem later?" Naruto asked.
"It does indeed," the toad replied. "I don't think Ushi here was told that we informed Naoko and Toyoko about Naruto. Though we do have a request for Naruto, to keep our part in this secret from Jiraiya. We wish to see what he comes up with to 'convince' us to accept one with an existing contract once he finds out you are already working with the foxes."
Naruto could tell that whatever reservations his father had about this were gone, though that had annoyed Kurama. Nodding, he looked at the larger foxes. "But you said there were three tests?"
"The last test is the most important," the gray fox said. "Signing the contract."
"Come," the brown one said, turning and heading into the cave. Naruto followed, the rest trailing behind him. They passed through at least two chakra barriers before coming to a chamber with a large stone in the middle of it, writing covering the top.
"There are many reasons for this," the brown fox said from behind them. "And I'm sure that Naoko would be willing to elaborate later if you asked him."
"But if you want to hear it then that would be a tale for later," the gray fox said. "Other summoning clans are happy with ink and blood on paper. Their rules are occasionally intentionally vague so that they have wiggle room, and at least one clan is fond of stating that their rules are not carved into stone."
"Our rules are simpler and are carved in stone."
"And to sign our contract, you must have enough chakra to sign your name on the stone. It does not require elemental manipulation, but to succeed you will need to demonstrate that you have enough chakra to summon half the clan at once if needed."
The toad snorted. "Trust me when I say that Naruto won't have a problem there. Before his...changes he would have struggled to control his output, but he has grown quite a bit."
Naruto read the carvings in the stone while the Tome examined the chakra version. The writing at least said exactly what they said it would, and it didn't take long for his parents to tell him that the chakra version was essentially identical. They seemed more interested in the way the signing worked, so he focused chakra into his finger and placed it against the stone. The surface rippled, pulling on his chakra as he carefully wrote out his name. Enough chakra for a couple dozen paperwork clones was needed before he was done, his name left behind in a slightly-glowing crystal-like form.
"You are going to be interesting," the gray fox said. "We'll give you a week before bringing you back to see which of the kits resonates with you."
"We'll smooth things over with Hiruzen," the toad added. "By the time you're ready to show him your new partner he should be ready. Oh, and due to the foxes' contracts not requiring blood, you can probably summon yourself with your clones."
