Having made the decision to focus even more on his training, Dazen began to use any free time to train his ninjutsu and nature change, even going so far as to ignore his sleep to train more, that's until the day of the ninja academy's end-of-year exams.

As expected, Dazen had no problem getting top marks in the written test and he won the taijutsu and shuriken throwing competitions and Dazen even showed the transformation jutsu, which surprised everyone and guaranteed him first place in his class.

Dazen decided to show mastery of one of the basic jutsus so no one would doubt if next year he mastered all 3 jutsus and although showing mastery of one of the jutsus at the last minute could raise suspicion he could come up with an excuse as he wanted to surprise everyone with your jutsu to show your talent.

At the end of the exams Dazen was talking to his friends and saying goodbye to them, everyone was excited to finally be on vacation before going home Dazen decided to go towards the teachers' room to talk to Takashi.

Arriving at his teacher's room, Dazen knocked on the door and soon he heard Takashi's voice telling him he could come in.

Takashi looked at Dazen entering and asked, "Dazen what surprise is there a problem?"

Dazen quickly replied: "No, I came because I was considering starting to train kenjutsu during the holidays and I wanted to know if you could help me with training some techniques, I looked in the library, but there wasn't much about kenjutsu."

Takashi looked at Dazen in surprise: 'Is he considering training on vacation? Based on his grades and improvement during this year, he is obviously very hardworking, but for him to want to continue even during the vacation, this is unexpected, is it due to the rumors that are circulating in the village.'

During the last few weeks, rumors of small conflicts started to spread even more in the village and there wasn't much that the superiors could do about it since this type of event is very difficult to completely stifle, so people started to get more worried.

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He looked at Dazen and thought, 'Dazen's parents died during the war, maybe these rumors affected him and made him want to try even harder, still...'

Takashi asked, "Why do you want to learn Kenjutsu?" He understood Dazen wanting to train and get stronger, but he didn't know why he wanted to learn Kenjutsu specifically.

Dazen responded immediately: "Recently I tested my chakra nature out of curiosity and discovered that my affinity is lightning and while researching I realized that several of the best users of this type of affinity use kenjutsu so I thought it would be good for me to learn."

Takashi said: "I understand, yes, the affinity of lightning has destructive and sharp characteristics that are well used with kenjutsu, you thought correctly, but for now, don't train your chakra nature, you need to have good chakra control to be able to do this type of training, it would be better if you wait until you have completely mastered the 3 basic jutsus, as for kenjutsu, I know a little about it and can teach you during the vacation."

Takashi's proposal surprised Dazen, he just wanted Takashi to give him some books that would teach him the basics of kenjutsu and he would train alone, but with Takashi teaching him it would be much easier to learn the basics.

Dazen quickly agreed: "That would be perfect, but won't it interfere with your vacation, sensei?"

Takashi responded, smiling at his student's concern: "It won't be too difficult to take an hour a day to teach you the basics and I also train during the holidays, so it won't bother me at all. Well then you can meet me tomorrow at 2pm at training center 13 to start training, don't be late."

Without thinking much, Dazen replied: "I won't be late, thank you very much sensei." Then Dazen said goodbye to his teacher and started running towards his house.

On the way Dazen thought: 'This was much better than I expected, having a teacher to teach me will save me a lot of time and now that I'm on vacation I have a lot more time to train, I'll make the most of this vacation to get stronger.'

Dazen had a determined look on his face as he thought: 'The rumors of the conflicts are getting bigger and bigger and although I have no way of knowing what is true and what is an exaggeration generated by fear, everything indicates that the situation is not good, my guess is that if things follow the current path the war will start in 6 months at most, it's no wonder that Kakashi graduated so young was due to these events.'

Dazen arrived home and started to prepare something to eat and then he sat down at the table and started eating while thinking: 'Today I'm going to relax a little and sleep early so I'll be completely ready tomorrow, from now on my training will become even harder.'