"Okay, so I just… throw as hard as I can?" I asked, gripping a smooth pebble in my hand.

"Yeah! Wait no… first square your hips and… um… your stance; it's not good! Fix it!" Sasuke said.

"What's wrong with it? How do I fix it?" I asked, not understanding what he meant.

"Just make it better!" he shouted from behind me.

I was pretty close to chucking it at him at this point, we've been doing this for a couple of minutes and he always stops me right before I'm about to throw it. I had a feeling that if I tried to hit him instead, I wouldn't miss him even if my hips were triangular.

We stood outside the front porch of the house, there was a lone tree that Sasuke had painted red concentric circles on, imitating a target. The porch was fenced in but it had a couple of rocks strewn about near the edge of the fence and I was holding the best ones I had found, it wasn't exactly bougie but we made do.

I did my best to imitate the stance that Sasuke had when he threw the shurikens, but I couldn't grip the rocks the same way he held the ninja tools so I made do with what I could. I ignored Sasuke's shouting from behind me and threw the pebble with all my might!

*THUNK!*

It slapped the tree, breaking off a little bark before bouncing to the side. It had missed the target Sasuke put up but I was happy with the throw's strength.

"Hm, not bad I guess!" Sasuke said jogging up to me from behind, "There's some work to do but you're pretty strong Aoki! That pebble could've gone a lot further if it hadn't hit the tree!" he patted me on the back and smiled.

Even though we started on the wrong foot, I was warming up to the kid.

"But you're still far behind me!" he said smugly, readying his stance as he grabbed a shuriken.

I take it back.

I watched as Sasuke threw 5 shurikens in succession, each one landing near the centre of the target, the final one landing a fraction of a centimetre from dead centre. As annoying as the baldie was, he was far more skilled than me.

I learned from talking with him that he relentlessly practices day in and day out to improve his ninja skills, even with Tomo's ban on ninja tools he practised with rocks to improve his aim and worked on his body to better his taijutsu. I didn't know kids like him were even capable of such discipline! I sure as hell wasn't at his age!

Sasuke had me throwing rocks instead of shuriken or kunai as he said they were too dangerous, I agreed with him but it sucked to have a kid less than half your mental age baby you around.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"Let's do something else Sasuke!" I said as the boy bent down to pick up some more pebbles.

"Huh? Aoki, we only started this a couple of minutes ago! If you want to be a ninja then you need to be able to work harder than tha-"

"No no, I mean let's put this off for now! This sorta thing is something I can do when you're at school or I'm by myself, if we wanna make our training more efficient we should work on things that can only be worked on by two people! Doesn't that make more sense?" I asked the boy.

Sasuke frowned and knitted his eyebrows as he thought long and hard about this, for someone with such a reflective head, he wasn't very bright when it came to things like this.

"Hm, maybe you're right! Good idea Aoki!" he grinned.

I was worried that he would stubbornly stick with his plans but it seemed that the boy knew when to be pragmatic, I liked that about him. Sasuke asked to give him a moment while he planned what we did next, I was about to suggest a push-up competition when his eyes brightened and he all but shouted his next idea. Was that an evil twinkle in his eye? I must have imagined it…

"Okay okay! So I have an idea for what we do next…" Sasuke said, for some reason his tone made me feel slightly alarmed. "It's a game we play in the academy called 'Hunter!' " the boy said with an evil smile "When it's two people playing there are two roles…"

Sasuke walked closer to me, with slow but heavy footsteps, I instinctively took a step back noticing his strange demeanour.

"First we have the hunter…" he pointed his thumb at himself, quickening his pace, I did the same and walked backwards even faster.

"And you… you are…"

He didn't need to say anything anymore, I understood the rules of the game. I turned around and kicked my feet backwards, sending myself flying forward as fast as I could, from behind Sasuke shouted, ending his last sentence with a scream.

"THE PREY!!"

"Hahah!" I laughed as I bolted forward, running out of the front yard and into the compound where people watched us with a smirk. I felt their eyes on me but I didn't care, I was doing very important ninja training.

I ran and ran, I didn't look back but I noticed that the sound of Sasuke's footsteps was getting quiet. Craning my head back I saw that I was outpacing him, maybe I'm petty but I felt like giving Sasuke a little bit of motivation to catch up to me.

"AhHH I'm being chased by a living egg!" I shouted, alerting a few elderly people who were watching the show with interested expressions.

'That did the trick' I thought.

Sasuke had somehow channelled into the bald guy well of power and imitated Saitama as he pushed himself beyond his limits to chase me. Although I was no longer looking at him, I could hear the heavy pants he was making and the loud thumps of his feet.

'He's exhausting himself…'

I was sprinting with all my might at the start to put some distance between us, but now I was running at a healthy pace that I felt I could keep up for a long time. The same couldn't be said for Sasuke.

He was catching up to me quite fast, but from the sounds he was making, I knew he was giving it his all. I didn't quicken my pace even though I could, this child was giving it his all to beat me and I couldn't take that from him, not if I wanted to keep my pride as the grown-up. I kept the pace, it didn't take long for a sweaty hand to slap me in the back.

"Hun-... hehuh… Hunte… hunted! Yahr hunted!" the boy spat out, almost keeling over in exhaustion.

'Was it really that tiring? We only ran for a few minutes' I thought. Theories about my body and its superiority over a child who trains as hard as Sasuke started sprouting in my mind, but I suppressed them for a later date, now was not the time to mull it over.

"You caught me pretty quick! That was fun Sasuke, let's go again?" I asked. This was the very first time in either of my lives I had played tag, was this what I had missed out on? It was amazing!

"Ye-yeah… gimme a sec…" the boy panted, holding his arms over his head as he rested.

"Take your time take your time…"