True Potential By DryBonesKing

Part 12//The Need To Become Stronger

The tokubetsu jōnin looked around at her surroundings frantically. Instead of the battlefield by the Tenchi Bridge, she was in her bed in her apartment in Konoha. There was no battlefield, no missing ninja, and no corpses of her students. She sighed in relief.

"Okay...everything's okay. They're okay. They're alive." She told herself, breathing hard. "...dammit! That nightmare gets worse each night!"

Ever since the battle against Kakuzu and Nasumareta, Anko had been having nightmares. They all involved her students dying at the hands of Nasumareta and always end just as the man is killing her. The nightmares got worse with each subsequent one. This one in particular surpassed the others when the image of her former sensei, Orochimaru, appeared in her dreams in place of Nasumareta.

Anko immediately got out of bed, grabbed a glass bottle of sake from her kitchen, and walked out into Konoha. It was early morning: the sun was just starting to rise. The tokubetsu jōnin walked while drinking her sake, trying to clear her mind. She was currently mulling over the reason she believed she was having the nightmares.

'We should have died. We got so lucky that it isn't even funny!' Anko thought bitterly. 'If Naruto didn't release the Kyūbi at that moment...if Nasumareta hadn't wasted so much chakra in the fight...if Han didn't stop the Kyūbi from taking complete control over Naruto...if any of that didn't happen, we'd all be dead!'

The snake summoner started to chug on her bottle. After finishing it off, she crushed it in her hands. Glass punctured her hand, but she was too deep in thought to care. 'I couldn't do a damn thing! I got paralyzed and that was it for me! I couldn't help them...I couldn't save my students. It's my job to protect them and I failed...heh. Some sensei you turned out to be Anko!'

Anko's walking soon turned into running. She was now heading in the direction of training ground forty-four.

'I fucked up badly. Now it's time to fix that! I have to make sure I can get stronger so something like that can never happen again! I have to get stronger to protect them, and I have to get them stronger to protect themselves!' Anko thought. All of the rage over her nightmares and the incident were converted to determination.

Her speed increased as she continued to head to the training ground, ready for a workout of her own before she met up with her students.

Naruto, Hinata, and Shikamaru could tell there was something wrong with their sensei. She was acting funny when they met up for their daily training sessions. On a usual day when they arrived early, the members of Team Three would sit and chat before starting the warm up. Today, Anko immediately had them start their warm up.

Anko, herself, didn't look to be in good shape. The woman had bags under her eyes and bruises on nearly every part of her body. Her right hand was bleeding as well. The woman seemed to not notice her condition, or she didn't care about it. She was more focused on the warm up.

The warm up, in itself, was also odd. Anko had doubled the work she traditionally assigned. It could be compared to the work Gai assigned to his team. This caused her students a lot of pain.

The three genin were in the middle of push-ups when Hinata fell to the ground in exhaustion. She didn't have time to rest, however, as Anko had tossed a kunai right in front of her.

"We aren't over yet. Keep up the work!" She ordered.

"Eep!" Hinata gasped as she continued her work, breathing hard and being very slow with it.

"Give her a break Anko-Sensei!" Naruto said while doing his push-ups. "After all the running, the sit-ups, and all the other crap you've had us do, we are exhausted!"