Part 1: Saikyo's Story

When Naruto pushed the front gate of the tower opened, he was taken aback as not only Haku's team, but everyone of the Konoha 12 was all there.

"Ah, it's Naruto and his team," Shino said flatly. Naruto gaped.

"What the... how could you guys get here so fast?"

"Somehow we all found the forest littered with unconscious genin, with kunai, shuriken, burned explosive tags and many other things scattered around them," Shikamaru answered with a shrug. "It made everything less troublesome a little bit, though."

"Yeah, mmmm," Choji added, while chewing on his chips. "The one we found our scroll on looked like he took a kitchen sink and a toilet seat to the head, mmmm. Poor him..."

The other members of Team 7 shot glares at Naruto.

"What?" the blonde protested. "It's not like they were my fault! That just proves that my idea worked like a charm!"

"IT WAS YOU?!"

"Gah!"

Everyone hurriedly moved to pull Kiba away from Naruto when the Inuzuka's hands closed around the blond boy's neck and squeezed.

"Let me go! Let me go you idiots! Let me kill him!" Kiba screamed hysterically while struggling like crazy against the arms of Choji, Shino and Lee. "Release me! I order you! Release meeeeee!"

"What's wrong with him?" Sasuke asked Hinata, who was looking at her teammate with worrying eyes. The Hyuuga girl shook her head.

"Oh, Kiba-kun suffered quite badly with those traps," she explained. "He was stuck in a sheet of cloth drenched in glue, covered in tar and chicken feather, blasted in the face with a cloud of pepper and thrown into a river with all those on his body. Oh, and he ate a stink bomb by mistake."

"LET ME GO! LET ME AT HIM! I'LL KILL HIM!"

Everyone winced. "Poor him," Haku said sympathetically.

"Even to Kiba, that was still too much," Shikamaru added.

"Hmph," Neji, from behind, spoke up with a sneer. "Relying on petty tricks like that... How pathetic. That was the only thing a dead last like you was worthy of."

Naruto ignored him.

"LET ME GO! DAMN YOU! I SAID... guh."

That last sound was due to Sakura chopping him at the back of his neck, sending him into the land of unconsciousness.

"What the... what did you just do?" Ino gaped in horror. Sakura shrugged nonchalantly.

"Well, he's too loud; I just made him sleep for a while."

Meanwhile, Naruto was staring at Hinata as if she was an alien.

The Hyuuga girl blushed. "Um... what's wrong, Naruto-kun?"

"You just completed a very long sentence without any stuttering. That was awesome, Hinata-chan! You finally got rid of your bad habit!"

Hinata's blush deepened, but she didn't say anything else.

"Uh, guys," the voice of Tenten suddenly rose behind them. "What do you think we should do with these?" She held up the two scrolls.

Naruto grinned. "Open them up, of course!"

Shikamaru raised an eyebrow. "But didn't that proctor say that we couldn't open them?"

"That crazy lady only said that we couldn't open them until we get to the tower, right?" Naruto answered with another grin. "Now we're in the tower, why shouldn't we open them?"

"But what will happen if we open them?" Haku asked worriedly.

"Who knows? But that will make it more fun!"

Everyone shuddered. Naruto's definition of 'fun', after the forest event, has become something utterly dangerous in their point of view.

"All right. Here goes nothing..."

All the scrolls were opened at the same time. When exposed to the air, the inside parts of the scrolls started smoking.

"Wah!"

Startled, everyone threw their scrolls to the ground as if they were made of acid. The scrolls, lying on each other, smoked even more, and started glowing red. Everyone braced themselves, preparing for a fight when the scrolls exploded and covered the room with a cloud of white smoke.

When the smoke cleared, the genin were all treated with a bizarre, but pretty funny scene.

In front of them were their jonin sensei, well, most of them, sprawling in a clusterfuck on the ground.

Zabuza was at the bottom of the human pile; his face was planted to the ground by Asuma's butt. The latter was lying back first on the huge Kubikiribocho, facing Kurenai in a position that made their... ahem... rather private parts rubbing against each other, and her well-endowed breasts landing right on his hands (not that he minded anyway). And on top of them was Gai, lying across Kurenai's back with a dazed expression on his face.

The only one standing was Kakashi, who had his favourite orange book on his hand as usual.

"Well, that's weird," Kakashi noted in an amusing tone when realizing what happened to his fellow jonin.

"Owww..." groaned Gai. "What the heck happened? Why are we lying on top of each other like this? This is so unyouthful!"

A lusty moan from Kurenai answered him. It was because Asuma just squeezed her breasts.

All the genin blushed.

"Ew," Ino winced in disgust. "This is definitely not something I want to see."

Kakashi chuckled. "Kurenai, Asuma, would you mind if I say you should leave your intimate moment till you get back to your bedroom? Because you are scarring our students over there. Besides, I don't think Zabuza appreciates it very much."

"Mmmmmmpppppphhhhhh!" From below Asuma's behind, the Devil of the Hidden Mist screamed (or at least, tried to) in agreement.

Kurenai's face immediately reddened, and she jumped away from Asuma, so fast that she threw Gai off her back. The taijutsu master was flung away, his bottom slammed hard on the ground and his body skidded a few meters before stopping at a wall nearby.

Disturbingly, on Asuma's face was a happy, dazed expression.

"Uhh... what are you doing here?" Tenten asked hesitantly. Immediately, Gai flipped back up as if his back had a spring under it, and brandished his trademark youthful thumb-up.

"Ah, don't worry my youthful students! We are here to greet you and congratulate you for completing the second part of the Chuunin Exam!"

"Yosh! We finally did it!" Lee pumped his fist to the sky and hollered. Gai also howled, tears started falling from his eyes like two tiny waterfalls.

"I'm so proud of you Lee!"

"Gai-sensei!"

"Lee!"

"Gai-sensei!"

"Lee!"

"Ahh! What was that?" Haku's teammate, Chojuro, screamed when the "sunrise genjutsu" started forming on the background. Tenten sighed.

"Trust me, you don't want to know. Just ignore it."

"It's still kinda disturbing, though," Naruto winced. "How is it that I, the one completely immune to genjutsu, can see it so clearly and is completely unable to dispel it?"

"You're immune to genjutsu?" Shikamaru glanced at Naruto questioningly. The latter shrugged.

"It's a long story."

"Still," Asuma said, finally managed to get a hold of himself, "getting through the Forest of Death in just half a day is quite an accomplishment. How did all of you manage to do that?"

Everyone glanced at Naruto.

"Oh, come on! Why are you all glaring at me as if I was a criminal?!" Naruto protested, and Sasuke snorted.

"Because you are the one that caused all of this, that's why."

"Fuck you, Sasuke!"

"So you failed to capture Orochimaru."

"We're sorry, Hokage-sama," the ANBU captain with the owl mask bowed his head. "We tried our best, but Orochimaru ran away too fast. What we didn't understand was the fact that he ran away right after he saw us. Considering his ability, he might be able to hold himself against us for quite a while, or even outright defeat us."

"It's alright, I forgive you. But," the old Hokage continued in an amusing tone, "if you look at this, you will understand why Orochimaru had to run away."

The ANBU captain looked behind his Hokage's back, and his eyes widened. Had he not wearing a mask, everyone could have seen how many teeth he had in his mouth.

"Holy crap... what kind of jutsu can make this kind of damage?" he stuttered, pointing at the ridiculously large crater which he clearly remembered didn't exist in the forest the previous day. Lying inside it were fragments of something that looked suspiciously like a thirty-inch-thick door of a gate.

And that's why you don't mess with a jinchuriki with full control of his Tailed Beast, coming back from the future, Orochimaru, Sarutobi thought with a slight smirk.

Naruto was bored out of his mind.

No one had ever told him that he had to stay in the tower until the second task was over. It's not like they didn't have enough for him to live here, but seriously, it's so boring! They didn't even have ramen in the menu!

Right now, he was sitting on the bed in his team's room. Sasuke and Sakura had gone to the main hall for a spar. Having nothing else to do, he ran through the process of constructing a blueprint for Creation of All Things once again.

It's worth noting that Naruto couldn't do the technique with the original instruction from the Beasts. It's just too complex, too abstract for a slow brain like his to follow. So Naruto did something no one could ever expect: he copied the steps of a similar technique in a certain novel he had read to replace what the Beasts taught him.

And, surprisingly, it worked.

He concentrated on the image of a kunai in his head.

Judging the concept of creation. Hypothesizing the basic structure. Duplicating the material. These steps were easy. The kunai is so familiar a tool to shinobi that he didn't even have to wrack his brain for it. A knife. Steel. Twenty five centimeters long. Pointy at the tip, with a double-edge blade. Cloth wrapped around the handle.

Imitating the processes of its making. He struggled briefly as his brain attempted to recall every process perfectly. In his mind, the image of a blacksmith slamming his hammer down on the anvil flashed.

Sympathizing with the experience of its growth. Reproducing the accumulated years.

Naruto winced. These steps were always the most difficult. This is the main obstacle which hinders him from creating objects, or rather, recreating already existing ones. Try hard as he might, he couldn't seem to grasp all events the knife on his hand, or everything he wanted to create, had experienced during their lives. It was a step that was just beyond his ability. Because of that, he could never create anything which could be considered 'perfect'. Even the clothes he was wearing right now would just disappear after a month at best, and a few minutes at worst.

And he has to learn everything, yes, everything about the object he wants to create by heart if he wants to recreate it. The structure, the materials, the history, everything. It's not like he has an infinite library which can record everything he sees in a blink of an eye, anyway.

Luckily for him, he had managed to find a way around that. By altering the design of the thing he wanted to recreate slightly, for example, making a sleeveless and orange jacket instead of an originally black and sleeved one with similar design, he turned it into a completely new creation that never existed before, and thus had absolutely no history in its life; basically giving the creation the history it never had. Thanks to this, creating a blueprint became much easier for him.

Well, only if the design in his head was, fortunately, unique, anyway. There might be a chance that the design was used without his knowing. Therefore, his Creation of All Things didn't always work as it should be. And if he couldn't even do something like creating inanimated things properly, the higher levels like modifying his body, or creating living things would be next to impossible.

He sighed and relaxed, and the half-completed blueprint in his head faded away.

'Good job onii-chan, you already had a grasp of it,' Saikyo smiled her satisfaction.

'Yeah...' Naruto sighed. 'But this is still nowhere near perfect! If I cannot use it perfectly, how can I hope of creating awesome living things like the Sage or old man Hashirama?'

Not noticing the cringing of the slug at mentioning of the name, Naruto blurted out what he just remembered. 'Speaking of old man Hashirama... Saikyo-chan, how did he die? He is so incredible his power was enough to subdue Madara, and he also had someone like you with him... Saikyo-chan? Saikyo-chan, are you there?'

No answer. The connection between Naruto and the slug was completely cut off.

Naruto started panicking. What the heck had happened to her?

'Do you even have to ask? You screwed up. BIG.'

The voice of Kurama suddenly rising in his head made him jumped from the bed.

'Kurama! What do you mean I screwed up?'

The vixen sighed. 'Come into your mindscape and I will explain.'

"So what did I do wrong, Kurama?"

The vixen didn't give a straight answer. Rather, she asked.

"Do you know about the Uzumaki clan, Naruto?"

Naruto was startled. The Uzumaki clan... it was his clan. The clan with exceptional mastery in fuinjutsu. The clan with the powerful chakra and life force, together with incredible longevity. The clan which has the deepest alliance with the Senju clan and Konohagakure since the beginning of the village. And the clan which was wiped out sometimes after his mother, Kushina, settled in Konoha.

But what does it have to do with Saikyo...?

As if understanding what Naruto was thinking, Kurama said. "The destruction of the Uzumaki clan and Uzushiogakure is very famous. However, there is another battle involving the Uzumaki clan which was never shown in any historical document. It was the battle that took the life of Hashirama."

Naruto's curiosity was aroused. "What happened there?"

Kurama closed her eyes. "It was during a visit of Hashirama and his wife to Uzushiogakure when he was still the First Hokage. In this day of destiny, an alliance of Kumogakure, Iwagakure and Kirigakure decided to attack the village. Being the ally of Uzushiogakure, of course Hashirama and Mito went to help. With the assistance from the man called as the God of Shinobi, Uzushiogakure managed to hold them in a stalemate, and nearly turned the table..."

"Wow! Old man Hashirama was awesome!" Naruto cheered happily, pumping his fists.

"...until Madara appeared."

Naruto's hands froze in midair. "What?"

"You heard me," Kurama nodded bitterly. "Madara was the one behind the attack. And unlike before, this time he had awakened the Rinnegan from the piece of DNA he took from Hashirama during the battle at the Valley. Like that wasn't enough... he also managed to seal me into him. Yeah, Hashirama didn't reclaim me after the battle at the Valley as many had mistaken."

Blood in Naruto's veins went cold after this declaration.

"That's right," Kurama continued. "With the Rinnegan and my chakra, his power finally surpassed Hashirama. He would have completely flattened Uzushiogakure with his Chibaku Tensei had Hashirama not taunted him to lure him to the sea outside of the village. And they fought."

"Then? What happened next? Did old man Hashirama win?" Naruto asked in thrill, and Kurama nodded with a sigh.

"Yes, he did. Even overpowered, Hashirama managed to defeat Madara, again. But that victory came with a heavy price. Right before he could land the killing blow on Madara, he hesitated. I didn't know what he was thinking, but his hand just stopped before his final jutsu landed on Madara. And that's what that despicable Uchiha had been waiting for. He took the opening Hashirama made to impale him and tried to pull his soul out with the Human Path. But Hashirama's extreme willpower, or maybe Saikyo inside him, I don't know, somehow held his soul back long enough for him to perform a jutsu that ripped me off Madara's body."

If Naruto's shock and awe had been great before this, it was nothing comparing to how he looked now. The expression in his face was a mixture of horror, amazement and curiosity.

"Then..."

"He died," Kurama answered curtly. "That final jutsu took everything left in Hashirama's body, and his soul was pulled away. But that didn't make Madara the winner. You already knew what would happen if a Tailed Beast was ripped off the jinchuriki. Madara, thanks to his Rinnegan and Hashirama's DNA, didn't die, but his body was so messed up that he couldn't even use another simple jutsu just to take himself out of there. Even the Rinnegan couldn't fix his body after that. Had it not been for me... well... going rampage after that, and someone rescued him, he would have been killed by Mito and the Uzumaki clan. I'm sorry," she added with a hint of embarrassment and regret in her tone.

"So that's how Mito-baachan became your jinchuriki..." Naruto mumbled, and Kurama nodded.

"Yes. After that, leaders of the five Great Shinobi Villages and the Uzumaki clan had a meeting. The Mizukage, the Raikage and the Tsuchikage didn't want to admit their fault. They were too embarrassed to admit the fact that not one, but three Kage of Great Villages were tricked and controlled by one man so easily and effortlessly. After three days of argument, they finally came to an agreement that the event would not be recorded into history, and no one would ever speak about it again. That's why only very few people knew about it, and most of them were dead already."

"I see... But what does that have to do with Saikyo-chan anyway?" Naruto asked in confusion.

"Because Saikyo thought that it was her fault Hashirama died."

Naruto jumped. The other beasts had come behind him since who knows when.

"After she revived, she was nothing like the Saikyo we knew any more. She became shy, withdrawn and cold to nearly everyone. When she was with Utakata, she seemed to open herself a little bit... but now, after his death... I don't know..." said Matatabi sadly.

"How did she work that one out?" Naruto asked, horrified.

"Well, she was together with Hashirama-san when they fought Madara, right?" Chomei shrugged... well, sort of. "I think she feels that if only she had worked more perfectly with the old man, Madara couldn't have murdered him."

"Yeah," Kokuoh agreed. "And I think that's why she can't use her power like she used to. It's just like... she's having trouble with it. Before, whenever we went rampaging, she would always be there to stop us. After Hashirama's death..."

"Really? I thought she's awesome as she is now. Didn't she use her Wood Style to restrain Kurama and Chomei before?"

Kurama rolled her eyes. "She used to make the whole forest around Konoha together with Hashirama. Now she could only make mere vines. Is that what you call 'not having trouble', Naruto?"

"That's right," Matatabi added. "And that's only when she's in a good mood. When her mood's down, she couldn't use her power at all. It just doesn't manifest, no matter how hard she try. Poor girl..."

Naruto's brain went numb and frozen. If what the beasts said was true, he really did screw up.

"No, no, wait," Naruto suddenly waved his hand