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Back in Konoha, Shikako doesn't really expect that she'll see Team Minato again — unless Minato decides they need another round of sensory training or something — so it's a surprise that one day after turning in a D-rank, she and her apprentice literally run into them.
Or rather into Uchiha Obito, with the rest of his team trailing behind him, probably to hand in their own mission. Based on the colour of the mission scroll in Obito's hand, a B rank.
"Hey, it's Anko-chan! And, uh, Nara-sensei!" Obito cries, as if anyone else in the room had missed that information. "Did you just turn in a mission too? What are you doing now?"
"Yeah!" Anko agrees, meeting enthusiasm with enthusiasm. Apparently she's taking to the Konoha tradition of being fast friends after a single mission like a duck to water. "We're going training now! Sensei is teaching me some new jutsu!"
"Us too!" Obito says. "You should totally come training with us. It'd be great, right sensei?"
"We wouldn't want to intrude," Shikako declines, a little amused. If it had just been him, she might have agreed, or just the kids. "Namikaze-sama probably has something planned for you guys."
"The more the merrier," Minato says, smiling a little. "I think Obito is dying to show you how much his sensory skills have improved."
"In that case, how can I refuse?" Shikako says, gently ushering Anko out of the way so that Team Minato can actually turn their mission in. Anko strikes up an easy chatter with Rin as well, and maybe she is missing having teammates and friends her own age.
Kakashi makes absolutely no effort to be sociable but it is Kakashi, so Shikako doesn't really expect anything else.
"Well," Minato says when they get to the training field, clapping his hands. "Why don't we start off with some light sparring? Obito and Rin against Kakashi and Anko, huh?"
Shikako nods thoughtfully. "Anko could definitely use some combat experience sparring against other people," she agrees.
Anko bounces in place. "Yeah! Wait, does that mean you and Namikaze-sensei are going to fight too?"
Shikako chokes a little. "When did that enter the equation?" she protests, but Team Minato takes up the cry too, seeming pretty eager to set their terrifying sensei on someone. Brats, the lot of them.
Minato only laughs. "Alright, alright," he says, good natured. "Just a quick one, so watch carefully. Taijutsu only?"
Shikako nods, resigned. Well, she's sparred with Lee so it's not like she's unused to getting her ass kicked by allies in the name of training. "I accept," she says, moving away from the kids to the center of the training field and saluting with a half seal.
Minato makes the same seal and it's on. She throws a brace of kunai, hurling herself through a Body Flicker to close the distance, landing behind him and then immediately readjusting her momentum into a completely different attack — not an intentional feint so much as reacting to the fact that he was already ready for her.
Everyone talks about his speed but no one ever talks about the fact that his reflexes are insane.
From there she's on the backfoot for the rest of the fight. She doesn't have to disguise her abilities because her taijutsu is just a mishmash of everything she's ever seen that works, and — without bringing in her lightsaber or tanking hits with her shadow state or using seals as support jutsu — her taijutsu really is just jounin level. And she needs all of that to even think about keeping up with Minato Namikaze, no matter how easy he's going on her.
"Nice footwork," he congratulates as she narrowly avoids a slice to the shoulder, hopping backwards and putting at least some distance between them. Then he goddamn disappears —
— not Hiraishin, just a Body Flicker, and Shikako is already tracking the path of his chakra and flips her kunai into a backhand strike the split second that he materialises.
Minato Namikaze — the guy that made a career out of teleporting around the battlefield — deflects her blow and has her in an arm bar and pinned to the ground all in a single smooth counterattack.
"Yeah," Shikako says, slightly muffled. She keeps the muscles of her arm loose and they barely even hurt despite the contortion. "That was never going to work. I yield."
"Not a bad effort," Minato says, seeming genuine. He pulls her back to her feet in an easy movement. "A little lacking in power, though. You're going to need some kind of hard hitting finishing move if you want to get serious."
"Yeah, I know," Shikako says, because that really is the difference between a run of the mill, regular jounin and the combat monsters of the elite jounin ranks. And also explains why Kakashi is focused so hard on developing chidori at this age, despite already being a jounin at thirteen. "But overpowering an unsuitable jutsu is going to be a handicap more than a boon."
Too on the nose? Neither of them look in Kakashi's direction, so Shikako can't tell how it lands.
"That was so cool," Anko says, looking like she has actual stars in her eyes, despite the fact that Shikako lost. "Sensei, Minato-sensei, you're so fast."
"He's kinda known for that," Shikako says, batting at her genin's head in fond admonishment. "Now, you had your entertainment. You're supposed to be sparring. Get."
The four kids take to the field and — well, it's kind of a mess, actually. It's clear that Obito, Rin and Kakashi are used to sparring each other and Anko is just left flailing around trying to find a place, for fighting in general and in their dynamic. But it's also clear that Kakashi isn't covering his blindspot properly, is rushing ahead and into danger. Fighting two chunin isn't dangerous enough to punish him for it, but it's clear where the habit that lost him his eye started forming.
The most interesting moment of the fight, though, is barely noticeable. Obito — eyes whirling sharingan red — thrusts his hand out in a direct mimicry of Anko's movement, chakra blazing down his arm and… nothing happens. Of course nothing happens; he doesn't possess the seal on his palms that Anko has, that actually generates the barrier. He fails to block Kakashi's attack and gets punted clear across the training field.
Probably a lesson that most sharingan users should learn, about testing the things they copy before they try to apply them in combat.
"What did we learn?" Shikako asks, like she always does when Anko is training. She's learnt she needs to try and get Anko some experience working with other people — a little difficult when it's usually just the two of them, but teamwork is such a critical Konoha skill that it can't be disregarded.
"Obito-senpai can't copy my barrier," Anko says, with the giggle of someone who knows a secret that no one else does.
Obito rubs the back of his head, sheepish, like he'd kind of hoped that no one had seen that.
"You shouldn't have tried to do that Obito," Rin scolds."It's rude to copy someone's jutsu."
Shikako hums a noise of slight disagreement. "Anyone can do that," Shikako says. "Any technique you use in front of other people can be copied. The sharingan just does it faster and easier."
"Really?" Anko says, apparently sensing an incoming lesson. She bounces eagerly. "Can you copy techniques, sensei?"
"So could you," Shikako says. She sits down and pulls out a notebook and pen that she balances against her knee. "Okay, look. Were you paying attention during the fight? Obito used a fire technique twice. What did it do?"
Anko frowns and sits down next to her. "It was a fireball."
Team Minato comes close, probably out of curiosity. Even Kakashi, who's trying to look like he's not listening.
Shikako writes 'FIREBALL' at the top of the page. "Okay. How big was it? How far did it travel? How fast did it go? How hot was it?"
Anko stretches her arms out, apparently measuring. "Like a meter wide. It went about three meters when he blew it. And, like, really hot."
Shikako writes that down, in neat little bullet points. "Good analysis," she praises. "And it was a fire jutsu, so we can probably assume it used fire nature chakra, just as a given. Do you remember what handseals he used?"
Obito looks like he might answer that question himself but that's not really the point, so Shikako waves him quiet.
"Snake," Anko says. She's smart and has a good memory and Shikako knows she would have been paying attention. "Then Ram. Monkey. Then Horse… no, then Boar, then Horse then Tiger at the end."
"Good. Now, wait— did they teach what each hand seal stands for at the Academy?" Shikako scribbles the hand seal diagrams onto the page then pauses when she starts to annotate them.
"No," Anko says, honestly. "We just practiced 'em. Do they stand for things?"
"Yes. And that's kind of important but—" Shikako huffs. "Okay. They can all mean a bunch of different things, depending on what they're combined with but for this jutsu we'll just say Tiger is a handseal for Fire Jutsu. Horse, in this instance is going to be for control, helping direct the flame. Boar is for power, to make it big and strong. Monkey is for finesse, so to help you shape it into a ball. Ram, ah. That one's a little complicated. Ram is to help form the chakra for a physical technique, instead of a genjutsu. And Snake is for stability. That's why, if you see an expert use this jutsu, they might just use Boar-Horse-Tiger, or just Tiger."
Obito blinks down at his hands, running slowly through the six handseals. "I didn't know that," he says.
"Unsurprising," Kakashi mutters. Given he had already started making chidori, he probably did have a solid grasp on what the different handseals did.
Anko frowns though. "Snake is definitely in all the Earth Jutsu you taught me, though," she says.
"That's right," Shikako agrees. "And in those jutsu it does the 'Earth' aspect. When we use Tiger in an earth jutsu, it's for power. It's complicated. But once you learn the meanings behind what handseals are used in what jutsu, you can break them down pretty easily." She gives a cough. "Moving on. Based on what you saw, how do you think the chakra moves during the jutsu?"
"... out the mouth?" Anko responds, as if that's too obvious.
"Yep," Shikako says, doodling a quick human shaped diagram on the paper. "Formed in the dantian, up the throat then expelled out the mouth, where it ignites and is propelled even further away as the fireball. So that covers the pre-fireball steps. What does fire need?"
Anko looks stumped. Shikako is about to reword her question because she's sure the problem is only that she asked it poorly when Rin pipes up, "oxygen, fuel and heat."
"Right, that's the fire triangle. If you remove one of those things, then the fire goes out. So if you want to put a campfire out you can smother it — remove the oxygen — or cool it down or take the firewood away. The jutsu doesn't have firewood, so the 'fuel' is just chakra."
"So it'll only burn as long as the chakra lasts," Anko says.
"You got it," Shikako says, writing it down. "And, same as that, what does fire output?"
"Heat and light," Rin says, apparently happy to join in now that her first attempt hadn't been rejected. "Smoke. Um. Charcoal."
"Right, right," Shikako says hastily. "So if you're going to be creating a giant fireball right next to your mouth, what do you have to worry about from those things?"
The kids throw a volley of responses at her from 'burning mouth and hands' (Obito, who says it with the wisdom of experience), 'breathing smoke in', 'flash blindness' and 'setting everything on fire'.
"Yep, and we'll add in 'chakra exhaustion' to the list," Shikako says, not making them guess that one. "Always a risk when you're learning a new jutsu. You don't know how much chakra you'll use up or how many times you might need to practice. And… there we go. You've all constructed a basic jutsu breakdown. If you know how to form fire nature chakra, you have a pretty good chance at copying a jutsu you've seen twice."
She tears the page out of her notebook and hands it to Obito, considering that it was his jutsu. And it's not like she can't get Anko to remake it later.
"That was an excellent analysis," Minato says, thoughtfully.
Shikako shrugs. "It's just common sense," she says. "They already knew all of it, they'd just have never thought to break it down like that." She dusts off her hands.
"Can we do another one?" Obito asks, excited.
Shikako glances at Minato but he doesn't look like he's particularly bothered by the derailing of their training plans.
"Sure," she says, amused. She hands Anko her notepad and then runs through the handseals for Earth Spike to pop a small stalactite out of the ground next to her. "Okay, go."
The kids crowd together, excitedly discussing jutsu mechanics like complete little nerds. Even Kakashi unbends enough to contribute the handsign meanings when they get that far.
"Okay," Shikako says, when they're pretty much done. Since this one doesn't run the risk of setting the forest on fire… "Now, who can actually do it?"
Kakashi — annoyingly — manages a pretty successful example on his second attempt. It's possible he knows other earth jutsu already, or it's equally possible he's just that good.
He looks towards her and his sensei, half smug and half challenging.
Shikako gives him a benevolent smile. "If everyone manages it, you can choose the next jutsu," she says.
His eye flicks towards Anko, fast enough that if Shikako didn't know him, she might have missed it. No, she has a pretty good idea what he wants — and it's not like she isn't willing to teach Kakashi her seal. He just has to work for it.
"Even this," Shikako says, flicking her hand out and forming a very small barrier in front of her hand. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Minato Namikaze suddenly paying much more attention.
"So it isn't a bloodlimit," Kakashi says, which only proves he has been trying to work it out. And likely not getting very far, if that's the conclusion he's come to. "Oi, Obito. You're forming your chakra wrong, idiot."
Shikako might feel bad about subjecting them to Kakashi's idea of teaching, but she survived it. It'll be good for them.