I groaned when I realized that he was right. “Ah man and here I was trying to show off a little!” I complained and the jonin just chuckled.
“So long as we have such youthful spirits in the village I think we will be just fine.” Guy said with a bright smile and thumbs up.
“But my savings!?” I complained.
“The price of youth is truly a heavy one.” he said still smiling.
“Ugh! I was so bloody close to being able to buy that land I had my eye on too, damnit all.” I whined upset at the set back.
I didn’t actually care all that much since the cost wasn’t likely to actually be all that high to fix the ceiling but that didn’t mean it didn’t sting a bit. Still I was able to console myself with a recent acquisition I had currently stashed away in my home. A red haired girl with glasses a couple years older than me that was a member of the Uzumaki clan, Karin. The rest of her team had gotten killed in the forest of death during the second exam and I had recognized her features from the history books on her clan and may or may not have kidnapped her a little.-
To be fair she actually seemed happy to come with me after I rescued her and explained how welcome she’d be in Konoha considering our deep ties to her clan. She cried when I examined her for injuries and got pissed at what I found. Bite marks all over her arms where the ninjas of Kusa ninjas had used her innate healing abilities caused by her extremely strong yang chakra to heal from their injuries. They did this through biting her which sent the yang chakra into their bodies.-
It was barbaric and cruel and it didn’t end there either as she was ostracized by the Kusa shinobi and treated as little more than an expendable tool from her childhood till now. Ironically it was this same poor treatment that saved her life as her team left her behind only to end up getting merc’d by Gaara who was in a bad mood for some inexplicable reason(cough*squirrel*cough). I currently had her waiting in my house with a mitosis clone for the end of the Chunin exams so I could sneakily bring her to the old man to accept into the village.-
There was one small issue however that I was having to deal with, she had princess syndrome BAD.
“Hey Kenzo-kun what’s your favorite color? What about your favorite food?” she bombarded me with questions in an obvious attempt to get closer to me.
Princess syndrome as I liked to call it was when a girl in danger gets rescued by a boy and immediately forms an attachment to him. As the rescuer in this scenario I was the target of her interest and annoyingly enough was helpless to tell her off.-
She had a lot of trauma and I WAS trying to give her a positive impression of the village for later which led to this awkward situation where I was unable to do anything beyond play nice. Thankfully she was only about as pushy as Naruto so I wasn’t too terribly bothered by her. Friend zoning her wasn’t really working and if anything seemed to make her MORE pushy for some gods awful reason. Yeah I had said we could be friends and she went nuts with the tears and the nonconsensual hugging and all that annoying stuff.-
I’m being dramatic here as it really wasn’t that big a deal but get attached to like this bothered me for some reason. It was one thing with Naruto who I grew up with but Karin was in all actuality a stranger, a new face. I didn’t know her at all really on any sort of personal level so her getting so clingy was uncomfortable. Despite her traumatic past she was a very outgoing person and absolutely loved to read and learn. She smiled all the time and even laughed freely when she found something funny.-
Funnily enough she and Akasha got along just fine as even when my clone was training or something she’d just sit up in my home with a book in one hand and Akasha’s head in her lap as she idly stroked her fur. Admittedly I had totally forgot to introduce Karin to my beasts so when I realized that Akasha had returned I was worried she might have killed her only to find the huge tiger lounging in the girls lap contentedly. I rectified my mistake and introduced the girl to my beasts so there was no misunderstanding in the future.-
I suppose I should specify that all of this was going on simultaneously with the other stuff involving the exam. Mitosis clones were useful at multitasking like this after all. Sure I ended up with my focus split up but the trade off was that I got so much more done this way than if I used mere shadow clones. One of the biggest flaws of shadow clones was that once they spent the chakra you gave them that was it, they vanished. Mitosis clones on the other hand regenerated their chakra and were not vulnerable to dispelling via minor injury.-
In theory I could even use a mitosis clone to learn how to wield a weapon or forge metal or some other labor and time consuming task. Moving back to the present time during the qualifying tournament the matches had began. Most of the matches were boring and not worth mentioning with the first exception being Neji VS Hinata. Let me tell you that boy has some serious pent up anger at the main family of the Hyuga clan as he absolutely destroyed her. She tried to fight back but Neji easily dealt with her resistance and cruelly made the fight as painful as he could by attacking her pressure points.-
Naruto was NOT happy about it as the Hyuga boy touched a nerve in the process by talking down to Hinata. My blonde friend gets that fights are not pleasant things but he had this sort of code that he held people to during a fight and Neji crossed a few lines in it. For starters he was kinda an asshole to Hinata the entire time. He called her pathetic, he aired his grievances about the caged bird seal on his forehead and how she didn’t have one despite being a talentless waste.-
All around the boy was not pleasant to watch for anyone from Konoha. The next fight worth mentioning was the one between Tenten and Temari. It was a bad matchup, plain and simple. Tenten’s fighting strategy revolved around throwing a whole bunch of weapons at her opponent but that didn’t really work against Temari who was a wind release specialist. All the thrown weapons got deflected by the winds while Tenten herself was slammed around by the winds like a kickball.