Chapter 5.1- Gamer of the Desert

Earth Affinity has gained a level

I smiled at the notification as I watched the wall that formed from my jutsu. The clone across from me moved to my signal and went through hand signs before blowing a near invisible series of bullets from his mouth. I smiled as I noted that the wall was undamaged from my side. I jumped over it and admired the marks the wind bullets had made as they ravaged the wall. They’d failed to penetrate, but they’d come quite close.

I exchanged a thumbs up with my clone as I finally considered myself passable with the earth wall jutsu. At least, now I had a good defensive option. With one of the jutsus in the scroll successfully learned, I opened it even further to look at the next one.

Instead of a defensive jutsu, this one was more supplementary and not for the first time, I wonderd where Rasa had gotten the scroll from. I wasn’t naive enough to think Suna ninja made it, especially when we had so few earth release users within our walls, and our environment made it close to impossible for anyone to actually build such an affinity to this level. The scroll went into a lot of detail on the jutsu themselves. It was clearly written by a master.

Now, the only thing I wondered was if it was written by someone from Iwa or Konoha. Those were the obvious suspects, and also the two villages Suna had most contact with.
We had an old rivalry with Iwa, and an alliance with Konoha. So the scroll was probably stolen from one of those villages. I leaned more towards Iwa since no one in their right mind would risk an alliance with the greatest of the Five to get their hands on some B and A-rank techniques. Yes, you heard me right. Greatest of the fucking Five. No matter how much the books might have tried to make me believe otherwise, knowledge of canon made it easy for me to detect the exaggerations in their portrayal of Suna’s role in events.

After all, one of the history books even went as far as saying the third kazekage was so feared by Suna’s enemies that they went as far as forming a coalition to assassinate him to challenge Suna’s dominance. Considering I knew Sasori was responsible for that particular death, and that there were lots of ninja in other villages who could have taken out the third kazekage with little trouble, I didn’t place much stock in anything the history books claimed as fact. Konoha won the third great ninja war, and even if they’d suffered from the Kyubi attack, and the Uchiha massacre, I was loathed to rule them out of the running for the position. Kumo was a strong contender, but I knew too much about the strength of Konoha’s monsters to give them the throne. After all, Tsunade was immortal, and Jiraiya had been able to give Pain a good fight with his sage mode. Those two, along with the God of Shinobi were enough to tip the scales in Konoha’s favour. For now, at least. I’d soon be stronger than them all. Okay, maybe not so soon, but eventually.

The Bastard whistled for me to join the caravans and I packed up as we made our way back to the road. Lord Chigiri was clearly enjoying this weather as he called for way more stops here than he had in Kaze no Kuni.

A/N; Start of the next chapter. Hopefully we finish this in the next few days.