Naruto: The Outsider's Resolve: CH_217

Takuma woke up to see three iryo-nin around the bed he was lying on. He was completely naked, other than a towel draped over his groin and hips. The two genin iryo-nin were using iryojutsu over him, with the chunin iryo-nin looking over them, giving instructions. He closed his eyes and lay still, feeling uncomfortable about having his body in the care of someone other than Sango.

He wondered how she was doing, probably busy at her new job. She never gave him her address, so he didn’t have a way to send her a letter. He hadn’t seen her since the day of the assassination attempt—he wondered if her job took her out of the Hidden Leaf, which was why she couldn’t visit him in the hospital—or if he was the only one misunderstanding the closeness of their relationship.

She was his only iryo-nin, but he was not her only patient.

Takuma cracked his eyes open and was about to inform them that he was awake when they started to talk, and he decided to close his eyes and listen in.

“I wonder how he got all of these scars,” said one of the genin iryo-nin.

“Maybe he did it on his own?” said the other one.

“You mean he put these very obvious surgical scars on his own?” The first genin scoffed, freed one of his hands from the iryojutsu, and used a scalpel over Takuma’s body as a pointer. “Someone opened his chest up to get to his heart, there are scars on his side” — usually seen in lung surgery, thought Takuma— “look at this one under his chest” — liver— “scar tissue on right abdomen” — kidney — “and these cluster on his abdomen” — digestive system.

The second genin looked and sounded uncomfortable as he said, “I saw a long scar down the entire length of his spine… what was someone doing there?”

Every time they mentioned one of his scars, Takuma felt a stab of pain in his head. It was the pain that he felt every time he looked at his body in a mirror and ended up contemplating how his body got so many surgical scars. One would think that he would’ve gotten used to seeing them, but the lack of understanding made it really hard to get closure. What happened to the kid? And every time that question flashed through his mind, he was punished with searing agony inside his head.

There was a moment of silence before one of them turned to the chunin iryo-nin.

“Is there anything on his file?”

The chunin stayed silent for a moment before shaking his head. “Other than the mandatory check the Leaf Military Police Force made him do, there’s nothing of note on his file.”

“There must’ve been an identifying mark section—what was on that?”

“The two scars that start from his neck, over his collarbones, extending down his upper chest,” the chunin replied, pointing at the prominent scars.

“That’s it? And they bought it?” the second genin exclaimed.

“They must’ve allowed independent check-ups.” The chunin walked to a table in the room and picked up a file. “The name of the test administrator… here is it… Genin Sango. Must’ve been someone who doctored the report to leave out the heavy scarring and probably operations done on his body.”

Takuma had enough. This was precisely why he didn’t like iryo-nin other than Sango. He opened his eyes; the iryo-nin didn’t seem to notice, now engrossed with combat injuries that were more several and more prominent. Cosmetic healing wasn’t Sango’s specialty.

“Focus on the burns instead of the scars,” Takuma uttered, startling all three iryo-nin. They jumped in their shoes; one of the genin even broke his iryojutsu and had to recast it quickly under the baleful eye of the chunin.

There was a heavy air of awkwardness around Takuma’s bed. He let the iryo-nin stew in it for a long, excruciating moment.

“How’s Masumoto?” he asked. There was a curtain around his bed, blocking his view. But if he was in the medical building, Masumoto would be too.

“Exhausted,” the chunin answered.

“Chakra exhaustion?”

“Yes, he over-drew on his reserves.”

Takuma cracked a smile and got comfortable in the bed as he felt the terrible migraine subside.

“Where is he?” he asked.

The chunin stared at Takuma with an asking look. “Do I need to move one of you away into a locked room with a guard?”

“Not me,” said Takuma, but the chunin’s words told him that Masumoto was in the same room.

Takuma wriggled his toes, tapped his fingers, and did a quick check of his body. Other than his body feeling awful and heavy, which wasn’t anything new, he felt no other major problems in his body.

“How long have I been out, and when will he wake up?” asked Takuma. He noticed the chunin’s look and sighed. “I just want to talk to him. Don’t worry, we won’t do anything to each other as long as we’re under your care—under your command—if that’s what you’re worried about, sir.”

The chunin narrowed his eyes.

The two genin iryo-nin looked comfortable and chose to focus their attention on healing, but their eyes darted around.

“As long as you understand,” the chunin half-smiled. “You were out for two hours. As for Masumoto, given his condition, he won’t be up by tomorrow...”

“He’ll be up in a few hours,” he said.

“Not likely,” said the chunin.

Takuma closed his eyes. Before long, he was sleeping again.

———

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A quarter of the day later, Masumoto opened his eyes, much earlier than the doctor’s expected time period. He squinted at the harsh light and groaned in agony from the pain in his shattered shoulder covered in hard plaster and stunts to keep it stationary, along with heavy bandages.

The genin on the watch sounded the alarm, and the iryo-nin were all over Masumoto, who lay there, letting them do their work. He just stared at the ceiling and answered their questions until they were done and left him alone.

“How are you feeling?”

The curtain around Masumoto’s bed was pushed aside, and Takuma walked in, rolling an IV pole with him. He was covered in gauge with medicine for his burns, and he winced with every step.

“Not now, fuck off,” Masumoto closed his eyes, an annoyed expression on his face.

Takuma ignored him and pulled a chair beside his bed.

“There’s never going to be a now,” Takuma said, sitting down with a throaty groan. “Let’s talk now when there’s no one to disturb us.”

“If you’re expecting some pathetic apology, you can suck my dick,” Masumoto spat.

“Your mamma lied to you. That little knob you got is a clitoris, not a dick.” Takuma chuckled, “I actually wanted to thank you… I was having a terrible time recently, but beating the crap out of you has been massively therapeutic.”

Masumoto scoffed.

“I got my revenge, flipped your little scheme on its head, impressed a whole bunch of people—probably a jonin as well. It’s been a good day,” said Takuma. “And I got to try a bunch of shit on you that I hadn’t tried in a fight—a good practice session.”

Masumoto opened his eyes and stared at Takuma unamused.

“Well, despite everything, you were stronger than me,” Takuma said, surprising Masumoto, “but I still defeated you, and that’s all that matters at the end of the day… I don’t know about you, but my grudge is over with you—but if you mess with Anko or Team-9 again, I don’t mind having a repeat of today.”

“…Don’t get overly cocky, boy. You got lucky today—I know it, and you for fucking sure know it,” Masumoto said with a nasty smile.

Takuma stood up and smiled down at Masumoto. “Only pathetic losers blame luck, Bishop, but I didn’t expect any better from you,” he said.

The short yet meaningful conversation came to an end with Takuma walking away from Masumoto’s team and running into the chunin iryo-nin.

“Told you he’d be up in hours,” said Takuma. “Tough bastard, that one.”

Takuma laid up back into his bed, his jovial front faded away, and he sighed in frustration.

…He was lucky.

———

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After dinner, Anko and Kameko visited Takuma for the second time in the day. The first time they went, he was sleeping, and they had to return without talking to him. Daiki had visited him before dinner and told them he was awake if they wanted to meet him.

They took permission from the chunin in-charge and entered the room to see Takuma sitting on his bed with a pile of scrolls on his side table with three spread open on his legs as he read another one in his hands.

“Did no one tell you that recovery is an important part of the training?” Anko clicked her tongue at Takuma. “Rest, god dammit!” She raised her fist as a threat.

“I am resting…. I’m just reading for pleasure,” said Takuma, putting down the scroll in his hand.

“And what does Genin Takuma read for pleasure?” Anko leaned to take a look. It took her a moment to process the complicated text. “Genjutsu? Huh… I didn’t know you were this involved with it. You only know two genjutsu, right?”

“I know six, only three of them have combat utility. I use two… the third doesn’t fit me,” said Takuma. “As surprising as it may sound, genjutsu is the topic I’m the most knowledgeable about.” He was tested every Friday with the threat that if he showed no meaningful progress, Mikoto would drop him as a student. It was just as, if not more, stressful as producing results with the Narcotics Taskforce.

Takuma looked at Kameko, who seemed confused by the gaze. “What?” she asked when Takuma didn’t say anything.

“Hmm… nothing,” he shook his head.

Takuma was actually wondering if Kameko knew that he was taught by Mikoto. It wasn’t a widely known piece of information outside the Police Force, but Arisu could’ve shared it with Kameko. However, seeing that Kameko didn’t say anything, she either kept it to herself or didn’t know about it at all.

“Anyway,” Anko quickly moved on, “congratulations for beating that jackass.”

“That jackass is in the room,” Takuma whispered and requested Kameko to draw the curtains around his bed.

“So? A jackass is still a jackass!” Anko turned her head and raised her voice to the other corner of the room. She turned to Takuma. “How are you feeling? It must be good to put such a show in front of everyone. A genin beating a chunin lead—now that’s a statement, a big one.”

“The optics of it all do indeed look good for the team…” Takuma said and looked down at the scroll in his hand.

Anko stared at Takuma. “And you don’t look happy about it. Why?”

He glanced up at her and shook his head. “No, it’s not like that. I’m happy. I went to rub it in Masumoto’s face the moment he woke up. It felt good alright…. but,” Takuma pursed his lips into a thin line, “it wasn’t how I imagined it would go. I did defeat him, but it wasn’t a victory—not for me.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Kameko, confused.

“Because I didn’t take him down, he dropped on his own,” said Takuma, irritated.

“So what? It was a battle of attrition. You out-endured him,” said Anko as she and Kameko took a seat beside his bed.

“Because that’s not how I was taught to fight!” said Takuma, forcefully—and he wasn’t talking about Masumoto or the academy—he was talking about Ring. The philosophy was clear—take out the enemy before they took you out; there was no waiting around for the enemy to tire themselves out of the fight. And he very much agreed with Ring’s philosophy. “Stretching combat encounters is almost always a bad idea. The longer the fight, the more the chances for things to go south…

“That’s not how I wanted this fight to go,” he sighed.

Takuma chewed on his lips, looking at the two, wondering if he should go into it. He almost decided to not say it and end the conversation but decided to share it with the people he was trusting his back in dangerous situations.

“I noticed that he was being hasty, but there was no reason—it wasn’t like I had the upper hand or anything—but then he continued to do so. I didn’t understand why he was doing it until he used that last jutsu. I realized why he was rushing… It was because he was running out of chakra,” said Takuma. He noticed that the chakra cloak would frequently go dim as though Masumto was trying to converse chakra—it didn’t match up with how aggressive he was being in that moment. “He probably has tiny chakra reserves, and that B-rank jutsu was him trying to end the fight before he ran dry.

“When I realized that, I turned to trying to keep the fight going until he was out and could no longer fight. I had no other choice; he was that good of a fighter that I had to keep running to win,” said Takuma, displeased.

He was well aware that there was no honor in a fight. There was nothing like a dirty move in a life-or-death battle. All that mattered was defeating the enemy and come out of it alive. But Masumoto put him in a situation where Takuma had to spend all his time on the backfoot because he wasn’t given any other choice.

As Masumoto said, he was lucky. He was lucky that nothing bad happened—one misstep would’ve meant Masumoto knocking him out with very powerful nintaijutsu that Takuma had no way of tanking.

“I’m sorry, Takuma, but I don’t think I see a problem,” she shook her head. “You said yourself, he was worried about running out of chakra and used the B-rank jutsu to finish the fight quickly. You say that he was strong and that he didn’t give you any choice but to fall to an endurance matchup—but you were strong enough that he had to use his most powerful weapon. And he still couldn’t wasn’t because you saw something that most would’ve missed—believe me, that takes impressive observational skills, a nimble mind to do something with those observations, and a capable body to make those thoughts into reality.”

Takuma appreciated the compliment, but he couldn’t smile and shook his head.

He wasn’t really upset about the fight. He was upset about what the fight represented.

“Roughly half a year ago, I encountered a rogue chunin on a case—Police Force,” Takuma added. “He was much stronger than Masumoto; it took eight total genin to bring that guy down… He was dangerous…. It was a valuable experience; it made me realize I had allowed myself to stagnate…”

The inception of the Narcotics Taskforce had shifted Takuma’s priorities, and he began pouring most of his time into building and growing the Narcotics Taskforce, which directly tied to his career in the Police Force. He still devoted enough time to training, but somewhere along the time, the focus of the training turned to maintaining his form rather than improving. In his nine months at the Narcotics Taskforce before the farm raid, Takuma had only learned one new jutsu—the Body Flicker Jutsu. That was the lowest since he began enough mission points to afford more jutsu. In that same period, the Ring fights had stopped being a challenge. 2v1 was the most Tsubura allowed, and none of them were ever ninjutsu-category fights because no ninjutsu-category fighter wanted to lose as it would hurt their inflated egos and their precious gambling odds. Somewhere along the line, they stopped being a challenge, and Takuma one-sidedly thrashed his opponent and collected his winnings once or twice a week.

“I upped my training, but then the damned assassination attempt happened, and I couldn’t walk without a crutch for weeks. The month leading to me coming here was an absolute waste,” said Takuma. “I wasted a lot of time… and that hurt today. Masumoto’s the same type of fighter as me—primary melee range with a second mid-range supported by ninjutsu. But from the first moment, he was better than me. I tried to double-team him with a water clone, but that failed as well. He only used three jutsu, but each of them changed his fighting style in a way that just when I thought I had a handle on it, I had new problems.”

Fire Style: Twin Tiger Fist added power, overwhelming power, and some range to his taijutsu. Fire Release: Fox Fire gave him a long-range, allowed him field control, and multiple fight-changing explosives. Finally, the Fire Release: Chakra Mode turned everything to eleven and opened so many opportunities that Takuma had to keep himself running away.

“I fought Masumoto two years ago and he beat the crap out of me. There was no way for me to win, so I didn’t take it negatively—but it was a strong motivator for getting stronger. I think that fight was the reason why I fight like I do today… because I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t do anything, I thought that if I could do that to others, I would win every fight.”

That was more of a Ring thing than Masumoto, but Bishop was the one who made him utterly helpless. That was when Scars’ aggressive fighting style solidified with no chance of going back. What he felt in that fight had left too prominent of an impression.

“I didn’t think I would ever get to fight him, but there was this little hope. And when I got the chance today, I jumped at it,” Takuma looked at Anko, shrugging—he didn’t have the team’s best interest on his mind. “If I had not ignored my improvement, I would’ve possibly gotten out of the assassination attempt without needing rehab, and then would’ve more time to improve, and I wouldn’t have to wait for Masumoto to run out of chakra to defeat him.”

He lifted the genjutsu spread in his hand and threw it far on the bed in frustration. “I have been learning genjutsu for over a year and haven’t done anything with it. I know all of this theory, learned from a phenomenal jonin teacher—but it hasn’t done me any good—and I only have myself to blame.”

He had allowed himself to get comfortable.

He was proud of himself for becoming the first outsider (not Uchiha or their clan allies) to get a leadership position and a team in the Police Force. After shedding tears from two failed graduation tests, sweating in the Genin Corp, and bleeding in the Ring—he had made it and accomplished something substantial.

He had taken that accomplishment as an excuse to stop the pain—the pain that came from constantly trying to improve and getting stronger.

Takuma was always aware of the dangerous future ahead of him, he clearly knew that he lived in a dangerous world and that if he wanted to survive, he needed to get stronger to improve his chances.

But Takuma didn’t enjoy the process of getting stronger.

He was tired.

He didn’t like waking up early every day to train himself until his bones hurt, then doing it again in the evening, and on top of that, spending every free movement trying to learn things that would help him as a shinobi.

He liked his cabin in the Police Force headquarters and the tiny office space given to the Narcotics Taskforce. The job was time-consuming, but at least, he had a team to rely on, trusted people who could help him make something out of the Narcotics Taskforce.

But constantly trying to get stronger and improve himself as a shinobi was lonely. He had to do it on his own without any help. Even Mikoto could only guide him less than five hours a week. He was all alone, trying to move forward.

So, Takuma deceived himself.

He thought leading the Narcotics Taskforce was the best he could be doing when it was not.

“Chance comes only to those who are prepared enough to grab it… I fumbled it.”

“You still defeated a chunin,” said Kameko.

Takuma scoffed. “That doesn’t mean anything. I killed a Hidden Frost chunin on my way to Camp Banana without taking a single scratch.” And he was almost killed by another one in the gold mines.

“Masumoto is a Hidden Leaf chunin,” she said. “We are better.”

Takuma nodded, not disagreeing because it was true. The quality of shinobi of the Great Five was better than what the other smaller Hidden Villages produced.

But Takuma didn’t say that he didn’t think Masumoto was anything special. He had allowed Takuma to catch up to him in two years. Takuma didn’t think he was a prodigy by any means, and if Masumoto couldn’t keep ahead of him, then he was nothing out of the ordinary.

However, Masumoto was special to Takuma.

He had been a major influence on his fighting style two years ago, which Takuma appreciated a whole lot.

And today, Masumoto had helped him once again.

There was no stopping no matter how much he hated it.

He had to keep moving forward.

There was no other way for him to survive.

———

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READ THIS: I added an Interlude after I had already started ARC-07—so please read INTERLUDE_6.1 after this.

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AN: Too fucking messy. I did not enjoy writing this, not at all. I even re-wrote a lot of it and it still ended up like this.