Naruto: God of Shinobi

Chapter 6: Squad Seven

The classroom had not changed. The same wooden desks with the same carved initials. The same chalkboard with the same faded smudges where Iruka had erased yesterday's lesson. The same windows looking out onto the same courtyard where Naruto had failed the graduation exam not once but three times. Everything was exactly where it had always been. The only thing that had changed was him.

He sat at his desk with his head resting on his folded arms and his breathing slow and even. The headband was tied around his forehead, the metal plate cool against his skin. He had been asleep for approximately forty five minutes. His snoring was quiet but persistent, a soft rhythmic sound that carried through the room like a small engine idling.

"Naruto. Wake up."

The voice came from somewhere above him. He did not move.

"I thought you did not graduate."

Shikamaru Nara stood over him with his hands in his pockets and his expression caught somewhere between curiosity and annoyance. He had been one of the few students who had never looked at Naruto with contempt. He had also been one of the few students who had never looked at Naruto with anything at all. His default state was a kind of horizontal disinterest that made him difficult to read and even more difficult to bother.

Naruto continued to snore.

Shikamaru sighed. He raised his hand and brought it down on the back of Naruto's head with a flat smack that echoed off the walls of the half empty classroom.

Naruto's eyes snapped open. He sat up straight, his hands already moving toward the kunai pouch at his thigh before his brain caught up with his body and told him there was no threat, just a lazy kid with a pineapple haircut and a troublesome expression.

"What the heck is going on?"

"What are you doing here?" Shikamaru asked. He tilted his head toward the headband. "Didn't you fail the graduation test?"

Naruto touched the metal plate on his forehead. The gesture was automatic, unconscious, the way you touched a scar you had had for years. "Can't you see the headband?"

Shikamaru looked at it. His eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. "Well I will be. Congrats, kid."

Before Naruto could respond, a flash of pink filled his peripheral vision. Sakura Haruno appeared at his side with the particular energy of someone who had been waiting for an opportunity and had just found one. She was not looking at him. She was looking past him, at the boy sitting in the desk to his left.

"Hey Sasuke. How are you doing? I heard you were top of the class."

Naruto stared at her. His gaze moved from her face down to her chest and then back up to her face. The journey took less than a second. He saw everything he needed to see.

"Didn't your parents tell you not to interrupt people's conversations, flat chest?"

The words landed like stones dropped into still water. Sakura's face went through three distinct expressions in rapid succession. Confusion. Recognition. Then a shade of red that did not occur naturally in the human complexion.

"Naruto!"

Her fist came at him with all the weight of her considerable frustration behind it. Naruto did not block it. He did not need to. He simply leaned back, a small movement, just enough, and her punch sailed past his face and continued on its trajectory until it connected solidly with the side of Sasuke Uchiha's head.

Sasuke, who had been sitting in perfect silence and perfect stillness, making no effort to participate in any of this, took the hit without flinching. His expression did not change. He turned his head slowly and looked at Sakura with the same flat disinterest he turned toward most things.

"Sakura. Your aim is terrible."

Shikamaru burst out laughing. The sound was loud and genuine, the kind of laughter that came from somewhere deep in the chest and could not be stopped. Naruto joined him a moment later, his voice quieter but no less amused, a sharp barking laugh that cut through the classroom noise.

Sakura was already apologizing. "Sorry sorry sorry sorry. I did not mean to. It was Naruto's fault. He made me. Sorry Sasuke."

Sasuke turned back toward the front of the room and said nothing.

The classroom door opened. Iruka walked in with a scroll under his arm and the particular expression of a man who had been doing administrative work for the better part of an hour and had forgotten to stop frowning. He stepped behind the teacher's desk and unrolled the scroll across the surface.

"Alright, settle down everyone. From today on you are no longer academy students. You are training ninja. Genin."

A murmur ran through the room. Some of it was excitement. Some of it was nerves. Most of it was the sound of children trying very hard to look professional and failing.

"As is customary, all genin are formed into squads of three and assigned a jonin, an elite ninja, as squad leader. Take your seats. I will start calling out names."

Everyone settled. Naruto found himself between Sasuke on his left and Sakura on his right. The arrangement felt less like a coincidence and more like the opening move in a game he had not agreed to play.

Iruka read the first six squads. Names were called. Disappointments were expressed. Relief was felt. The usual social geometry of a classroom reorganizing itself into smaller, more volatile units.

Then Iruka paused. He looked at the scroll. He looked up at the room. He looked back at the scroll.

"Squad Seven. Naruto Uzumaki. Sakura Haruno. Sasuke Uchiha."

The reaction was immediate and split cleanly down the middle. Sakura's half was joy. Pure, unfiltered, glowing joy at being placed on the same team as Sasuke Uchiha, the boy she had been chasing since the first day of the academy. Her hands came together in front of her chest and her eyes went wide and she made a sound that was not quite a word and not quite a squeal but something in between.

The other half was Sakura's reaction to Naruto. The joy curdled. The smile flattened. She turned to look at him with the particular expression of someone who had just been told that her dream vacation would also include a wasp nest.

"Seriously? I am stuck with you?"

Naruto stared at her. His gaze moved down to her chest. Then back up to her face. He did not say anything. He did not need to.

Sasuke said nothing at all. He sat with his arms crossed and his dark eyes fixed on a point somewhere above Iruka's head. He had not asked to be on this team. He had not asked to be on any team. He had his own plans, his own reasons, his own destination, and none of them involved the two people sitting on either side of him.

Naruto looked at his new teammates. Sasuke was cool. That was the word everyone used. Cool and talented and the last survivor of a clan that had been destroyed in a single night. He was the best student in the graduation class by every measurable standard. He was also closed off in a way that suggested depths Naruto did not yet understand.

And Sakura. Flat chest. Big forehead. More interested in chasing a boy than in becoming a ninja. She was not useless. Academy records showed her grades were excellent, particularly in chakra control and theoretical knowledge. But her priorities were misaligned. She wanted romance. He wanted power. Those two things did not occupy the same map.

He let out a long, exaggerated sigh that carried across the room and drew several glances.

Iruka finished reading the squads. Ten teams in total. Thirty genin. The beginning of something none of them fully understood.

"Break for lunch," Iruka said, rolling up the scroll. "Your jonin leaders will arrive after. Do not be late."

He left. The room emptied in a rush of noise and movement. Students gathered in small clusters, forming the provisional alliances that would either solidify into genuine bonds or dissolve into resentment over the coming months.

Sakura turned to Sasuke. Her voice was bright with hope. "Hey Sasuke, can we have lunch? As a new team, maybe we can get to know each other."

Sasuke stood up. He walked toward the door. He did not look back.

Sakura watched him go with an expression that was equal parts longing and resignation. Then she looked at Naruto. The longing disappeared.

"Not a word."

He had not been about to say anything. He said nothing now. He simply put his head back down on his folded arms and closed his eyes.

Hours passed. The sun moved across the windows. The shadows in the classroom stretched and shifted and eventually began to retreat. Students returned from lunch. Students left with their jonin leaders one by one until the room was empty except for three people.

Naruto woke slowly, the way he always woke now, without disorientation, without the soft confusion of someone who had forgotten where he was. His eyes opened and he saw the ceiling of the classroom and he remembered everything.

He sat up. He looked around.

Sakura sat at her desk with her chin in her hands and her eyes on the door. Sasuke sat at his desk with his arms crossed and his eyes closed, though Naruto suspected he was not asleep. No one else was in the room.

"Seriously, Naruto. What are you doing in the middle of the night to be sleeping the whole day?" Sakura's voice was sharp with frustration.

Naruto did not answer her. He looked at the window. The light was wrong. The angle was wrong. "What time is it?"

No one answered.

"Idiots."

He stretched his arms above his head. His spine cracked in three places. His shoulders rolled forward and back. The stiffness of prolonged immobility worked its way out of his joints in a series of small pops and releases. He stood up from the desk and stretched again, more thoroughly this time, his body folding and unfolding like a weapon being tested after storage.

He performed a backflip. Then another. Then a third, this one higher, his feet clearing the desk behind him by a comfortable margin. The movements were clean and controlled and completely unnecessary. He did them anyway because sitting still for hours made him want to move and because the looks on his teammates' faces were interesting.

Sakura's mouth was open. Sasuke's eyes were open now too, watching with the flat analytical attention of someone who was recalculating an assumption.

"This is getting boring," Naruto said. He did not direct the words at anyone in particular. He directed them at the empty space where a jonin leader was supposed to be. "Where is this supposed jonin?"

No one answered that either.

He walked to the window and looked out at the courtyard. The sun was low. The afternoon was almost gone. They had been waiting for hours.

Somewhere in the village, a man was probably on his way. Or not. Naruto did not care which. He would wait. He would train. He would become what he needed to become. A late jonin was the least of his problems.

He turned from the window and sat back down at his desk.

Then he put his head on his arms and closed his eyes.

The snoring started again within a minute.

Sakura stared at him. Then at Sasuke. Then back at Naruto.

"I hate this team," she said quietly.

Sasuke said nothing. But for the first time all day, the corner of his mouth twitched.

---

Next Time: The Mysterious Jonin

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