Going back to Sakura, she was lying on her back at the foot of a ginkgo tree, breathing heavily.
"Huff, huff…"
"Not so easy being Naruto, is it?" Kakashi said as he leaned over her. "How are you feeling?"
After a few hours of chakra control training, the only thing Sakura had learned was that Naruto had it even harder than she could have possibly imagined. It was not laziness that had caused him to struggle so much in school as a child. It was actually a testament to the sheer amount of hard work he had put in that he could even function as a shinobi despite his enormous vitality!
"Annoyed," Sakura huffed and puffed. "It took Naruto his entire life, plus two and a half years of training with Jiraiya, to even reach the starting line… how he didn't give up before then is a miracle."
It would take her more than a few hours to learn to command such a vast ocean of physical energy with any degree of precision… but if Naruto hadn't given up, neither would she.
"Remember, the Hidden Leaf Village is counting on you, Sakura," Kakashi-sensei said encouragingly. "Everyone's hopes are riding on your continued success…"
"I know, I know," Sakura grumbled. "There's no way I'm giving up, ya know! Being Hokage might have been Naruto's dream, but it's my responsibility."
One does not simply become a Hokage just by wanting it very badly. One is thrust into the role and accepts it reluctantly… or at least, that was Sakura's experience. Everyone but her and Minato seemed to have obtained the job through nepotism.
"Come on, Naruto mastered this in a week," Sakura said through gritted teeth as she hopped to her feet and approached the only tree in the copse that she hadn't knocked down yet. "I may not have twelve years of experience being Naruto, but I'm still a genius kunoichi, believe it!"
Perhaps Naruto would have been as naturally talented as his father or his future son had the Nine-Tailed Fox never been stuffed inside him as a baby, and had he grown up with his family instead of being constantly bullied and belittled as a child… but even so, Sakura had to believe she was more talented than Naruto; otherwise, what would she have left but her System?
Sakura started her ascension.
One foot in front of the other.
The layer of chakra under the sandals had to be just thick enough to stick to the bark. Not so thick that she would blast off into the Body Flicker Jutsu, but not so thin that she would slip and fall…
One foot in front of the other.
Remove the chakra when lifting the foot, recoat the soles when placing the foot back down…
One foot in front of the other.
Naruto's legs trembled like that of a newborn fawn's as she climbed, leaving deep imprints in the tree's bark. She was still using too much chakra, but at least she wasn't slipping any more. As she approached the top of the tree, she found that looking back, the footprints she was leaving behind were less and less noticeable…
"Just like riding a bicycle," Sakura muttered to herself. "You never forget…"
"I didn't know you owned one," Kakashi commented. "They're rather rare."
"Hup!"
Sakura backflipped from the treetop and landed next to Kakashi.
"Not bad, I suppose," Kakashi commented. "Try not to leave any footprints at all, next time… this level isn't good enough yet for water-walking training."
Now that she had reached the minimum threshold of competence, she could finally begin summoning Shadow Clones… after all, she didn't have a week to train, let alone two and a half years. Now that she had got rid of her bad habits, experience multiplication training wouldn't reinforce any negative traits she didn't want to keep, and it would only further refine her precision.
"Shadow Clone Jutsu!"
With a series of loud bangs, Sakura produced a thousand Naruto lookalikes. Since she was currently occupying Naruto's body, the Shadow Clones she produced were Naruto doppelgangers, since the technique could only produce duplicates from snapshots of her current body.
"Naruto learned this in a week… a hundred and sixty-eight hours in a week, times sixty is 10,080 minutes," Sakura recited. "Given ten-minute sessions of tree climbing, around a thousand Shadow Clones are sufficient to shorten a week's worth of training to only that much."
A few of the Narutos raised their hands.
"You," Sakura said, pointing to one of them.
"There aren't enough trees left," she said. "What should we do?"
Sakura frowned.
Although she knew how to make wood style ninjutsu work, Naruto's chakra wouldn't respond to a chakra nature he didn't possess. That being said, even the least talented peasant possessed at least a modicum of affinity for each of the five basic natures, so knowing how to mould earth chakra, she could force Naruto's body to produce some.
"Earth Style: Mud Wall!"
Knowing that the next step of the training was walking on water, Sakura kneaded the earth beneath her feet and hardened it into a massive cylinder, one large enough to allow a thousand people to walk up its side with plenty of arm room to spare, and thick enough that her Shadow Clones wouldn't crack its walls if they had an accident.
Sakura hopped onto the earthen cylinder's rim and clapped her hands.
"Hop to it, now!" she called. "Ten minutes begin now!"
Now this was the best kind of training… the kind where she didn't have to do anything at all.
"Water Style: Waterfall Basin Jutsu!"
While her Naruto-shaped Shadow Clones walked up and down the sides of the earthen cylinder, Sakura began drawing water from an aquifer and pumping it up into the cylinder, filling it as though it were a giant teacup. When the wall-climbing exercise ended, the water-walking exercise would already be ready!
And before she knew it, the ten minutes were already up.
Sakura dispelled her Shadow Clones by performing the clone seal and fell to her knees, groaning as the tedious memories of walking up and down the side of a large mound of earth tens of thousands of times came rushing into her skull.
"Sakura, what's wrong?" Kakashi said worriedly as he rushed to her side.
"Nothing bad…" Sakura groaned. "I'm just… really bored, ya know!?"
This was the downside of using Shadow Clones to accelerate training. The mental exhaustion that would normally drain away between training sessions would instead instantly stack up, severely sapping away even the most hardened shinobi's willpower. This sort of thing wasn't really a problem in combat, since boredom wouldn't occur during life-or-death situations, but training was different… all work and no play made Sakura a dull girl.
"I don't wanna train any more," Sakura pouted. "I just really wanna play, ya know!"
"It's getting late," Kakashi sighed. "We should turn in for the night, sleeping will help you consolidate what you've learned today."
He glanced left and right, frowning.
"And where did Naruto wander off to, anyway?"