On the deck of the Chakra Hover Battleship, cold wind howled through, making everyone's heads buzz.
Yoru leaned against the metal railing, spinning a screw he had picked out from who knew where across his fingertips. It clinked sharply as it spun.
Below the battleship, the Iwagakure genin were all fired up, lining up to practice precise chakra control.
The genin named Saburo casually raised his Chakra Gatling without forming a single hand seal.
A burst of muzzle flashes sprayed out, forcibly carving a crooked "Rock" character into a thick steel plate in the distance.
That level of accuracy made several Anbu who had recently defected from Leaf Village twitch their eyelids.
Back in Leaf Village, they had scraped their skin raw practicing a Great Fireball Technique, only to get scolded anyway.
And now, look at these people.
Any random genin could handle the thing in his hand like it was second nature.
Sasuke stood at the very edge of the deck, holding the Kusanagi Sword that still radiated a chill, his face dark and silent.
He looked down at his palms, covered in calluses from intense training, and felt stifled inside.
Life was impossible now.
He, Sasuke Uchiha, once a genius prodigy, actually felt a little... useless?
"Hey, Sasuke."
Naruto was squatting on the deck, holding a leftover skewer stick and vigorously scraping old black grime off the bottom of his shoe.
After scraping out a clump, he casually flicked it over the railing with perfect naturalness.
"Look at those guys down there. Why do I feel like they're training even harder than we are?"
Naruto grinned, revealing a mouthful of white teeth, with bits of vegetable still stuck between them.
"Yesterday, I saw that Goro training that Precision Targeting thing. He went three whole days without sleeping, and