Follow the Sun (Naruto fan-fiction)

Chapter 12: A real 'C-ranked' Mission?

Kakashi is in a foul mood. A month almost passed since the survival training and he understood less and less about his team. Lord Third assigned them around 3 to 4 D-ranked missions every week while the rest of the days were used for training. Their teamwork improved greatly and Sakura was more eager to learn and train for the rest of the days. The missions they had were finished rather quickly courtesy of Naruto and his famed Shadow clones making the jobs proceed faster and efficiently. Thus, making more time for training.

What made Kakashi frustrated was, Naruto (blood clone) and Sasuke (blood clone) duly kept their stat as Genin (as per ordered by the originals) and revealed nothing. They were so normal that it seemed......abnormal. During training, they had followed his training instructions without much protests and completes them. Kakashi managed to questioned them on certain things like "You know how to use the sword?" or "What else can you do?" but they always dodged the subject or shrugged it off saying, "What do you think?" or "guess!" or "what makes you think I should tell you?" never really giving him an answer. They always had this playful smirk on their faces that infuriated him. (Guess who said which sentences!)

Other times, Kakashi tried to prod them into sparring with him so he could gauge their strength. The spars were......unsatisfactory......if he had to say anything about it. Not that he wasn't impressed, but he had the feeling that they were holding back. They were many times than he could count that the two surprised him. In fact, what irked Kakashi was that, whatever he did, he could not incite them to go all out and showcase their true abilities. That's right, even when he had to use the sharingan. What does that mean? To Kakashi, it meant that he wasn't good enough. Sasuke didn't react much to him having the sharingan either.

Kakashi felt like, while he spends the time training them, he never really got close to knowing them, or even gained their trust. Kakashi realized that apart from Sakura, the other two have not open up to him, despite his many attempts, making him feel miserable. Regarding training, Kakashi mostly worked on their stamina and body building, increase their proficiency in handling the kunai and shuriken and master the three basic ninjutsu; substitution, transformation and clones. In addition to Sasuke's training regimen, the training was helpful for mostly Sakura. Naruto and Sasuke simply found it boring and completes them without much feelings. But of course, for the two most powerful shinobi in the world, such meager level training would not arouse such excitement.

"Sakura's training is turning out well...should I move on to chakra control exercises next?" Kakashi mused. Kakashi had thought of giving each of them their own training regimen to develop their own fighting style. But the problem was, he still hasn't grasp Naruto's and Sasuke's combat prowess and their limits to start working on it. Since he lacked that knowledge, he couldn't begin. He could only work on their foundations. At the very least, Sakura benefited a lot from it so far.

At this dead end, Kakashi could only sighed in defeat and forwarded his concerns to the Third Hokage.