Chapter 16.1- Gamer of the Desert

Two weeks. It took me two weeks to come to a decision on what to do with my stat points. I'd spent the last two weeks hoping and wishing that the first day was a fluke, but it wasn't. I was getting my ass kicked academically by these nerds, and the worst part was that they could see it just as clearly as I could. When the lecturer asked a question I couldn't answer, the deafening silence was all I needed to know how they mocked me in their heads. Whenever I answered, they didn't even bother to debate my answers, treating it like the barking of a dog in the middle of their serious academic discourse. The only place I bettered them was in the actual ninjutsu itself, but that was a small consolation prize.

Suna's program was aimed not just at building medical ninjas. It was ambitious in that it wanted to create fully fledged doctors who also happened to be ninja. If I failed the theoretical aspect, then no matter how well I did in the practical aspect, I wouldn't be graduating from this place anytime soon. That's also why I chose today to make the stat upgrades. The longer I waited, the more suspicious a sudden increase in intelligence would become.

Two weeks in, and it would look just like I needed some time to hit my stride. Any longer and I might find myself strapped to a table to be dissected. Now, wouldn't that just be funny? I pulled my stats and took a deep breath before I sent the intelligence stat soaring to a level of 100 by adding 43 of my accumulated 56 points to it. I could actually feel my brain twisting and changing to accommodate the sudden change, and that twisting dialed up to eleven before my entire world blacked out in pain.

When I regained consciousness, I could somehow tell it had been exactly two hours, 13 minutes, and 14 seconds since I'd made the increase. I looked around me and silently dispelled the orb of sand that surrounded me. If there was something I'd done right, it was picking a Saturday night for the upgrade. Sundays were the only days we had completely free from lectures. The others spent the day in their tents, studying in groups, and I did the same, studying alone. I was the only trainee given a separate tent, so it played well to my need for privacy but wreaked havoc on my possibility of socializing and maybe building a friendship with the others.

With my increased intelligence, once I turned my attention inward, it took virtually no time to puzzle out the meaning of my stats. Every interaction I'd had with the game since I was born was a data point I could rely on, and I quickly began to experiment. The first thing I did was try to add a single stat point to intelligence, and when it didn't work, it was another data point in my favor. My stats topped out at level 100. My best guess was that that was the literal human limit, and considering my physical stats had their own seemingly soft limits, I could tell that age was a factor, in those stats at least. No matter how I tried it, my dexterity refused to inch past forty. I shunted another 10 points into my strength to test the hypothesis, and it also refused to inch past forty. Nodding my head, satisfied with what I'd figured out, I picked up my books again, and as I studied, I planned for the future. Parallel processing seemed to actually be easy with my new brain power.

Graduating here in a year would be impossible. I could see it in the lecturers and how they behaved. This wasn't the academy. The goal wasn't to churn out doctors as quickly as possible. If I wowed all of them, all that would happen is that more and more would be piled onto my plate to fill up my time here. The only silver lining I could see was that I probably would not be forced to do the three years of practical residency at the hospital. After the attack those weeks ago, I was sure that if I showed up at the hospital, a riot might actually break down. Even before I'd unleashed Shukaku on the village, there had been fears about me entering the hospital through the actual front door. No. Practical residency wasn't in the future for me. I'd be sent back to the shinobi corps the moment my three years of theoretical training were up, and that was actually a good thing.

With the benefit of hindsight, graduating the academy so early might not have been the wisest choice. I could have spent the time doing my own personal training and preparing myself for the world instead of declaring myself ready because I felt it would be boring to sit with children. Now, I was getting a second shot at gaining the benefits of the academy. I could do all the training I needed to do in the next three years and then take the shinobi world by storm. Rasa had lied. I could see it now. He had no intention of making me Kazekage by naming me his heir, but I still longed for the seat. It wasn't entirely logical, but even at that, I could still see logical justifications. I'd be powerful. By the time I turned 12, I'd probably be Kage level. I'd probably be too powerful for the likes of Pein to take on single-handedly by the time Shippuden came along, but that mattered little when they could send endless Zetsu for me and hound me with Akatsuki members wherever I went. Eventually, I'd be tired out or even worse, forced so deeply into hiding that I'd never be able to enjoy whatever freedom I gained by leaving Suna.

No, becoming Kage was my only choice. Who said I'd ever be strong enough to match up with Pein? I had limits. Hard, actual limits. The Gamer seemed to give me quick growth but not limitless growth. I contained the weakest of the Tailed Beasts, and who was to say that even after I did my best and trained all my skills to the maximum, I'd be able to take on the leader of the Akatsuki. People in my old life had underestimated Pein. They forgot that he'd killed Jiraiya, a Kage-level shinobi, with no trouble. They forgot that he'd actually beaten Naruto, forced him to use the Nine-Tails and almost triggered a full-scale transformation just to escape the Chibaku Tensei, and then even after all that still had to be talked into committing suicide to grant Naruto the win.

The entire fight was plot armor taken to the max. I didn't have that. Pein scared me, for a good reason. Instead of heading to the wilds where he could hunt me at his leisure, I'd remain here in the center of the desert, at my most powerful, with an entire village of shinobi around me. I'd do my best to make myself as unattractive of a target as possible. Akatsuki had come after Gaara first, in canon, but by then I'd be more than strong enough to swat both Sasori and Deidara away. When I did, I just needed to make sure they decided I wasn't worth the effort of coming after.

Mind made up, I stretched my chakra into the sand around me and formed a clone. Not a regular sand clone with half my chakra. This one had three-quarters of my total chakra capacity, which had grown handsomely since Shukaku's escape for some reason, and was going to be sent on a completely separate mission. He had enough chakra to make five more clones with enough chakra to be useful in their own rights. He nodded at me and blurred away. His job was simple. He'd sneak out of Suna and into the deep desert to train. I had three years here, and while I couldn't do much for my taijutsu as it approached my body's limits, my ninjutsu had all the space to grow. That's what we'd be focusing on.

XXXXXXX

Three months in, and the first class rankings were posted on the walls of the cavern. I had joined my class two months late and had to make up for dozens of missed assessments, but I still stood at the top of the class with an average of 97%. The runner-up had 95%, and the numbers went down from there. Where my classmates had previously been content to ignore me, they now glared at me. Yesterday, two of our mates had been dropped from the program. Their scores were good. Definitely outstanding, but here, we were graded on a curve. I had thought, when I didn't notice any close friendships among my classmates at the beginning, that they were all simply antisocial creatures. But it turned out to be something even more insidious and much less innocent than that. The grading system meant we were all in fierce competition. The better your classmates did, the worse you did.

I struggled to come to terms with it in the beginning. The entire system seemed illogical to me, but I settled for not caring. If the corps felt this was the best way to create med nin, then I hadn't the energy nor the authority to argue against their methods. I closed my eyes and looked through my clones' eyes as he weaved through more and more seals before an actual dragon made of wind took shape around him and slammed into the sand, creating a dust storm of epic proportions. I smiled as the jutsu proved to be a success. Our foray into shape manipulation was beginning to bear more and more fruit. As I watched another clone lose a hand while trying to add the wind release to the Rasengan, I figured that we would need at least another three months to master that particular jutsu, unless we tried doing it with clones, but I was loath to rely on such a crutch.

I smiled as I noted a presence leaning over my head to peek at my grades. "Isn't that cute? Little Gaara-chan is top of his class." I just turned to Mebuki with a smile on my face. The teenager had grown on me over the month since we'd met. It was a few days after I'd turned seven, and I had run into her doing my own practical rotations of the training rooms. She had insisted on sharing a work table with me and had talked my ears off throughout. The girl was loquacious but still tolerable. I suspected her intelligence had something to do with it. She was an orphan, and only sixteen years of age, but still, she was already in her third year in the med nin training corps.

"So are you," I commented, ignoring the way she pulled on my hands as she led me to the mess hall.

"Obviously. Mebuki-senpai is awesome like that." I just nodded at her. She was so different from everyone else here. It was both a breath of fresh air and a ray of sunshine at the same time. She didn't bother with the toxic backstabbing and competition that filled the training corps. Of course, she didn't. She was so far above her classmates that she had no need to compete with them, and after a whole year of being shown up by her, they didn't bother competing with her either. Everyone understood their place when it came to her.

When we arrived, she didn't hesitate to pick up two plates and pile mine just as high as she piled hers, not caring for the fact that she was at least twice my size. I just nodded and accepted the food with a grateful bow. I had learned my lesson about arguing with her. She had been something of a big sister in the orphanage she'd grown up in and seemed to see me as one of her little siblings from the orphanage.

A/N; I'm backkkkkkkk