A few minutes later, Naruto pulled his wits together to find Jiraya slowly going through hand seals and making notes in a fresh scroll. Since the old sage was in his serious mode, Naruto walked over to pay attention. Looking more closely, he realized that he already knew the seals being performed.
"EHH?" Wide eyed, he dropped his jaw and pointed at Jiraya's hands, forming the variant horse seal he'd called 'giraffe.' "You copied that just by seeing it!? But you don't have a Sharingan!"
Jiraya adjusted the position of his fingers slightly and felt the resulting chakra flow, then made another note and ran through the full six-seal series again, still molding just enough chakra to sense rather than trying to actually execute the jutsu. "Don't be an idiot, kid," he explained. "Anyone can copy a jutsu if you do it right in front of their face, it just takes a few experiments to get it right. Relying on a special eye just for that would be lazy! Besides, this proto-jutsu of yours needs refining before it's useful." He smirked and pointed two fingers at his student. "For one thing, it'd be a good idea to point it away from your own head when you use it," Jiraya jokingly advised, as the underpowered jutsu misfired with a tiny burst of smoke. Naruto jumped aside with a squawk, not wanting to be knocked silly again.
"Why are you bothering with that anyway," the blond grumbled, "it obviously doesn't work or I'd be back in Konoha right now."
"Eh? Oh, right, you said you thought it was a transportation jutsu, then shouted something from that trash manga you read. Actually it's -"
"Oi, OI! The writer of the infamous Icha Icha ero-ero series doesn't get to call anyone else's book trash!" Naruto interrupted to protest.
"Hah, with a main character who keeps feeling people up claiming he can't tell men from women by sight, and that girl who keeps flashing her bloomers it COULD have been fine literature, if this Takoyama or Toriyaki or whoever had gone a few steps more and included the real juicy stuff, but no, just hints and teases and back to the fighting. Why can't people remember, sex AND violence! Now that's entertainment!"
"Ero-sennin," Naruto deadpanned. "You're ranting again."
"Baah." After taking a moment to calm down and think about all the happy ryo in his bank account singing his praises for getting the formula right, Jiraya got back to his original point. "Anyway kid, if there's one thing you've actually mastered it's the shadow clone technique; after a bit of experimentation I've determined that your ... rubber chicken jutsu ... is like a bizarre hybrid of that, Shuriken Kage Bunshin and Bunshin Daibakuha. How the heck did a brat like you manage that? Sarutobi-sensei told me about your little adventure with the Forbidden Scroll, but since you wouldn't be able to resist bragging about it if you'd learned those at the same time I know you didn't."
Forcing a chuckle and ruffling the hair at the nape of his neck, Naruto admitted, "Well, I kind of remember something like that on the scroll, but I couldn't get them to work at all, so I kept practicing to get more clones with Taiju Kage Bunshin instead."
Jiraya nodded contemplatively, arms folded across his chest. "I see, I see. You said you came up with it in a dream... your subconscious memory of the scroll must have been enough to combine your understanding of Kage Bunshin and Taiju Kage Bunshin to create a new jutsu that's an inanimate projectile like the shuriken clone, blows up like an explosive clone, and has shadow clone durability somewhere between the two. I guess this proves it..."
"Eh? What's it prove, Ero-sennin?"
"YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS IS JUST AS BIG AN IDIOT AS THE REST OF YOU! You stirred up three A-rank kinjutsu, and made a stupid technique like something out of a comedy routine!" Grabbing the protesting genin in a headlock, he applied one of Tsunade's special 'idiot wrangler' taijutsu moves, an energetic noogie AKA '1000 Years of Regret.'
Annoyance suitably vented, he let Naruto squirm loose and dropped back to the ground, sitting with his legs crossed and reviewing his scroll of notes while waiting for the younger ninja to stop yelling pointless things and settle down again.
Seeing that he had Naruto's attention again, he tapped a finger against the scroll and said, "Since the schedule I set for you is so boring, today's lesson is on jutsu creation. In fact, every day's lesson is going to be on jutsu creation until you turn Rubber Chicken Bomber no Jutsu into a useful skill."
Recognizing the look on his teacher's face ('Sage Stands Firm as the Holy Mountain,' or 'Jiraya's Being A Blockhead Again' depending on who you asked) Naruto just hung his head and groaned before sitting down beside the older man and pulling the scroll of notes over so he could study it.
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(Posted Thu, 27 Aug 2009 21:49)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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