“Write faster,” Kushina ordered.

“I’m trying my best, I can’t magically surpass my limits,” Hiro whined as his hand was beginning to cramp from his grip on the brush.

One month had passed since Kushina’s agreement to teach Hiro the art of seals. However, he had yet to be taught a single seal. The red-haired jinchuriki thought it would be appropriate to hammer him with the basics to create a good foundation. She was probably correct in doing so, but Hiro was anxious to begin creating seals. All he had been doing so far was writing writing exercises for different symbols and kanji.

“Hiro sweety, I know that you feel that you’re ready to start some big boy stuff, but if you want to do cool stuff like I can then you need to practice this, just as I did at your age,” Kushina instructed the boy.

“Could you not talk to me like that? We’ve been over this before.” Hiro was treated like an adult by nearly everyone he encountered day by day. The academy was most likely trained to treat the kids not much different than adults, considering that they would be soldiers at a very young age, also Hiro didn’t have much contact with any adults, or children for that matter, outside of the academy, therefore he wasn’t very acclimated to being treated like a child.

Kushina was the only person who reminded him that he was still a child. But in reality, he was mentally an adult, and it was very weird for a married woman to talk to him in this way. Especially because the woman was married to a man who he had a great deal of respect for. Speaking of Minato, he hadn’t seen him at all, except for a few pop-ins to the house here and there. The man was simply too busy to bother with the boy, and he was Kushina’s responsibility, not Minato’s.

“You have got to be the most ungrateful little brat that I’ve ever taught! I am speaking nicely to you, ya know it?!” Kushina had enough of the boy’s standoffish behavior.

“You’re speaking to me like a child.”

“You are a child.”

“Yeah, but you don't have to rub it in.”

“What does that even mean!?” Kushina was fired up again.

‘This is going exactly according to plan. If I play my cards right then I may be learning a seal today.’ Hiro deviously grinned but quickly replaced it with a face of skepticism.

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“I don’t know, but it feels like you're just wasting my time, do you have any intention to teach me some fuinjutsu, or will I develop carpel tunnel before I’m twenty from all of this writing? I think you are trying to set me at the pace that you learned as a kid, but surely I am more talented.” Hiro beamed.

Kushina started to feel attacked, “Oh? Do you think so? At your stage in training, I could already make simple storage seals, what about you huh?”

“Well I’m sure that I could, but my teacher hasn’t even introduced it.” Hiro struck back.

‘Please woman, take the bait.’ Hiro screamed internally.

“Okay then it seems, some homework is in order.” Kushina held up a spare wooden coaster from the table.

“If you can seal away this coaster in a simple storage seal, then return it at will, I will slowly integrate different seals into our lessons, but we will not forsake the basics completely. You have til Friday. You are dismissed.” Kushina said as the tossed the coaster to the boy.

“Deal! Thank you miss Kushina!” Hiro was ecstatic.

“What did I tell you? Don’t call me miss, I'm only twenty-three!” Kushina yelled as she chased Hiro out the front door.

Once Hiro was sure he had escaped Kushina’s wrath, he began brainstorming. Making a storage seal? It sounded easy, but now that he thought of it, he barely knew where to start.

‘Kushina is smarter than she appears. She wouldn’t have given me the assignment, had she not thought that I could do it. Or… maybe that’s exactly why she gave me the assignment’

Hiro closed the door to his apartment behind him and began changing into some athletic shorts and a white T-shirt. He quickly dropped to the floor and began doing pushups. Once he couldn’t do a single rep he transitioned to squats. He had been doing these types of exercises every day to improve his physical strength, but he still felt mediocre.

He wondered how advanced he would have to become to fashion himself some of the seal-inscribed weights that Rock Lee sported during his famous fight with Gaara. What kind of seals were they? Did they make the material more dense, thus weighing more, or did the seals affect gravity? He had no idea, but he was going to recreate it one day somehow.

Hiro’s afternoons had recently become much shorter after his new schedule with Kushina. This left him time only to complete his daily training before going to sleep. If he was going to figure out a way to make a small storage seal, then he would have to sacrifice his time in class to troubleshoot his experiment. Nothing would seem amiss, as it would look like Hiro was taking notes to an outsider.

Hiro was happy with this plan as the academy had become nothing but a formality to him. He found it hard to elevate his studies at the academy to the same level as his studies with Kushina, or his physical training. The first-year curriculum was simply not advanced enough for him. They had not even touched the three academy jutsu, they hadn’t even discussed the rope escape jutsu yet.

Hiro wiped the sweat off of his forehead that was running into his eyes as he sprinted around his apartment building. He had calculated that thirty laps around the building made roughly ten kilometers. The south end of the building opened up to an intersection of three streets, while the east and west ends were single streets. The north end was a narrow alley as the buildings bordered a restaurant that Hiro had never bothered to eat at. He prepared food on his own to save money.

Hiro was sprinting as he was making his final stride around the building, ‘Strength will not be handed to me like in those silly fanfictions. If I want to become stronger then I will have to work. Being weak isn’t an option for me. I will never look back at this life when I am eighty and wish that I wasted a little more time, or relaxed a little bit. No! I will maximize my potential!’