The team met their sensei on top of some random roof in Konoha. Sarah sat down in between Naruto and Sasuke so that the duo wouldn't do something stupid. It was their first day as a Genin team and things were already going to shit, although that seems to be the story of her life.

     Sarah looked up at the man with a bored expression on her face. This guy is an asshole, ten times worser than Sasuke Uchiha. She would sock this man in the face if she could, although getting arrested and spending time in prison just doesn't seem appealing to her. Maybe during training she could...yes, that would be the plan.

     "First, let's have you guys introduce yourselves."

     Sarah's head shot up. What exactly was this man planning?

     "Why don't you introduce yourself first," Naruto said as he crossed his arms.

     "Me? I'm Kakashi Hatake. I don't feel like telling you guys about my likes and dislikes. I never really thought about my future dreams. As for my hobbies, I have many...." Kakashi said as he looked over at the trio, "Now it's your turn."

     "My name is Naruto Uzumaki! I like ramen and hanging out with Sarah-chan. My dislikes is the three minute timer after pouring hot water into the instant ramen. My hobby is eating ramen and trying out different flavors and comparing them to each other. I also like to prank people. My future dream is to become the Hokage and get the entire village to acknowledge my existence," Naruto responded in a determined tone.

     Sarah rolled her eyes as Kakashi motioned for her to go next, "My name is Sarah, no last name. I like to hang out with Naruto and read books on medical ninjutsu and sealing. My dislikes are ignorant assholes who think they're all that just because they were born lucky."

     She would give Sasuke a death glare from the corner of her eye.

     "My hobbies is er....none of your damn business and my dream is to become strong enough to protect those I love."

     She wasn't about to admit what exactly she did during her free time. Her teammates and Sensei would look at her weirdly if they knew about it...

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     Sarah was around eleven when she decided to steal a book from the library. Shinobi Conditioning...

     Shinobi Conditioning takes many shapes and forms. The most important conditioning is on killing.

     The first kill is extremely important and usually deemed the rite of passage for many shinobi families. Dated back in the Warring States, the average age for first kills was four to six.

     If one can not handle killing, they do not belong to the ranks. Kill or get killed. Many Academy freshers drop out due to their psychological break and PTSD after their first. Some even retire early beforehand because of stress and the fear barrier.

     People argue that their first kill was always unprepared and least expected while the next five kills were unprecedentedly easy. The breakdown between the first and second kill was almost instantaneous if the shinobi was fully conscious, as covered in elementary Academy conditionings. See: early-life conditioning, pg.29

     Self-conditioning was valued in the fields, especially when training was unavailable. Some popular methods include comparative imagery, command-force autopilot/blackout and ethical manipulation.

     In comparative imagery, one where not many could achieve, uses the shinobi's ability to visualise and metaphorize their actions, (i.e. beheading someone could be compared to cutting off a butter cube while baking; certain kata movements could be interpreted as acting in a film or performance. This method helps ease the mind and draw it to more satisfying imaging in the mind, distracting itself from the task at hand.

     In command-force autopilot/blackout, the shinobi psychologically disengage and let their muscle memory act on its own accord. This is most applied by suicide mission personnel and experienced jounin, either as a natural defense mechanism or with chakra interference to the brain

     In ethical manipulation, it is the most valued method and can be seen as idealistic. This is the personal reminder of what someone was fighting for, fighting to protect. This makes the brain focus one a short command like 'kill' or 'survive' and excuse itself of any consequences that would be caused in order to achieve it.

Note:

- Most Hidden Villages force its genin to make the first kill before their first mission. Reports showed Konohagakure had banned this practice decades ago and moved on to replace it with animal killing instead. Sixth year Academy students would kill from rat, rabbit to deer. These however, does not fully desensitize killing.

- Nuke-nin and nefarious shinobi could kill for pleasure. It can be a choice developed in shinobi-hood or a born instinct coupled with early-childhood drive for bloodthirst. Most of those in S-rank, or, Red Coded and above had admit to their enjoyment in taking a life at one point or another in an anonymous study. They described it as an inevitable step to accomplish their titles.

     The book inspired her to begin conditioning herself to the idea of killing someone. If she were to hesitate even for one second, people including herself would die. That wasn't something Sarah wanted to happen in the near future...

     Sarah was eleven when she caught her first rat near her apartment. She killed it with a sharp stone and watched the life drain out of the rats eyes. The carcass of the rat smelled like dead things with decaying substances covering its matted fur. She felt quite sorry for it. But it didn't plead, it didn't have the power to, and she finished it quick.

     The next time it took her several hours to get her hand on one. It was plenty of fun, killing them. Naruto would sometimes looked at her strange, as if she had suddenly changed one day from the person he grew to love and care for. She found company in hunting and heard it's a good adult hobby. Now she have a purpose, an activity to do instead of sitting in the corner and practicing her seals.

     On her fourth rat, she brought a proper knife, one from the kitchen, small but sharp. She tried to skin it the way the books on survival told her how to. She did not eat it. The skin flailed and flopped in her dirtied hand with mangled organs and blood. It took her thirty minutes to wash the blood from her body and face. She took notice of how hard it was to get rid of the solidified liquid on her hair strands. The times after that, Sarah brought a hair tie and a mask...

     Sarah loved the [Illustrations and Essays of the Anatomy: A Treatise] book. It was the thickest thing she has flipped through. An in-depth collage of dissected humans, notes compared to those of Tsunade-hime, Nidaime and unsourced specialists. Revolutionary nervous system breakthroughs, relationship between tenketsu and blood veins as well as the cardiovascular network. Things she had never thought the body contained.

     The flesh and bones and things that control them is an intricate design as much of a mystery as the realms of summons. The books estimated in twenty years the medical field could advance pivotally at a pace unimaginable if a second coming of the Slug Princess was born. The woman herself had fallen from grace, her last quantum leap invention was to do with bone regeneration using chakra. She was the greatest, the first woman, the first true medic who wrote the four clauses all villages abide. There were glory in that, Sarah thought, and dreamed of being someone good enough to sit on the throne the Senju woman sat.

     Sarah then began writing a notebook of ideas on biology.

     Genes, DNA, the atoms and cells and other units of the body. The book contained not what she had learnt, but rather what she thought would be possible given the explanations of those texts. Her theories were wild and doesn't hold back on any laws of science. She never dissected anything before, and that was becoming an issue. She can not look at pictures and figure out something so labyrinthine. An image frozen in time was not the key to the living.

     She would have to fix that, she thought. She couldn't rely on Nemuri anymore, the later being radio silent since the incident, so she was left to learn and do things by herself.

      Surgeons were so revered and rare in the medical field due to several reasons, two of them being lack of precision and inexperienced anxiety, inability to cope with high-stress situations. A surgeon never started out as a surgeon, instead as a practitioner and provider of healthcare, focusing on things that are more bearable and ethically rigid.

     Some people agreed surgeons are heartless and traded their humanity to be able to give live to the dead.

     "This is not entirely true" said Senju Tsunade in the Third Shinobi War, "It is the equal respect we give to the study of anatomy and the abstract life force...There is no successful surgeon who haven't been a murderer and harbinger of ends. To the left of a surgeon' morals is a psychopath and to the right, shinobi. They are separated by invisible borders. In the end, fear most the ones who mastered all three grounds."

     Surgeons make sacrifices, like any other career do. The most successful surgeons Konoha (the most medically advanced village) produced were forged in war where they must perform fast and effective sessions. This can only be achieved if they have a complete understanding of the anatomy and kill more than they have saved. They must devote everything to perfect their craft and rehearsed performances yield optimal results, similar to a musician.

     Dr. Kinamoto, under the Nidaime's reign, revealed, "You need to make mistakes to learn and it does not need to be human, but the amount of rabbits and cats I've dissected can fill The Valley of The End. I will never be able to make up for it. It is the reality of the profession."

     Another person, Dr. Tetsuki wrote in his controversial memoir, page fifty one, "An adequate surgeon use cattle or hunted animals to sharpen his skills. A good surgeon use dead humans as tester bodies. Corpses in hospital morgues wheeled in the dead of midnight to be excoriate and study. But the best surgeon use living specimens. That is where he no longer have the rights to decide where the line of sanity draws. He will not be call the best surgeon, he will be the devil reincarnated."

     It was the frogs behind the alleyway that gave her the adrenaline those non-fiction recollections of soldiers described. The exhilaration that jolted her arms and ran down her calves. The blood on the ground and specks of it on the green green grass.

     The creatures were ugly and brownish in colour. She squeezed them and watched in satisfaction as they pop and roll them until the liquids drain out like a sponge. It was a fun game of killing, but she needed to do more. Killing when unnecessary is evil, she remember Iruka-sensei's words. But in the books she read it said the more exposure with killing, the better, especially for non-clan children.

     Sarah caught her first rabbit behind the Hokage cliffs. She skinned it, although harder than the rats, it was absent of the smell of rotten trash. Death dyed her hands but she did not mind.

     She liked the notion of being a surgeon, more so the notion of uncovering things even the greatest did not understand, experimenting what many were scared of to then see it come to fruition. Sarah wondered about the tens and hundred methods no books said was ever tried out that she thought out. Why don't they cauterize wounds with a refined katon? Why can't suiton users force blood flow? Would a zap of controlled and low voltage raiton be able to revive the heart? Can mana become invasive and replace poison? Questions, questions no one had asked. Sarah wanted answers, she will find them herself.

     She pulled at a tendon, the borrowed book and her notes laid beside her on the ground. At each pull, the muscles moved and the rabbit's limbs retracted, then as she released, it eased out. The girl tugged on different tendons, then she caught another one, now knowing how to sharpen a kitchen knife with her mother's cooking lessons, and experimented on the blood vessels. The arteries were easy to locate, the blood squirting out in swift succession, but smaller vessels were accidentally cut by her more often than not. She poked at its eyes and with a pinky, pushed it out from the socket. The sound was equally nauseating as when she gutted it. The eyes were tiny and slippery, Sarah thought maybe cows eyes would give her a better look.

     It was fascinating. Sarah did not have an obsessive love for anatomy as she did with poison or psychology, but it had a special place in her heart.

     Some rabbits after that, she tried to douse them with the little mana she had (the first time she almost faint) and they became unconscious but remained breathing. Cutting them open and alive was hard, they always bleed out in less than ten minutes. Sarah worked faster. She was over her seventeenth rabbit when she finish opening and closing wounds with needles and stitches before it die, infected.

     On her twenty ninth rabbit, she got bored of it, thinking she might need to open a rabbit farm at that point. She usually feeds whatever remains of her dissections to the crow near Naka river. Two days later, she found a lost kunai in the area and brought it with her.

     She caught a neighbourhood stray cat one day, it was weakened and skinny. Its ribs poking from its empty belly. It could not run. She killed it at once. Sarah started to catch a homeless cat or dog a month. The white, brown, black rabbits were forgotten, devoured by black birds.

     She stole chicken feet and sheep's hearts at the market while buying groceries. It took her several tries to get only a few of what she needed, incase of raising suspicions. The chicken feet were unsurprisingly tedious, the tendons were studied with the rabbits, after all. The sheep heart, though, looked very similar to the rarely depicted drawings of the human heart in the chuunin medical textbooks. The first time she tried cutting it open, she failed and slashed the wrong opening. The chambers were bloodier than she would like, considering it was supposedly cleaned by the butcher. It was a mess and it took her three more months to acquire another heart, unprocessed, with lungs intact—even if it was not a stable or popular ingredient, the owner noticed things. This time she was much more careful and aware of the lines of her little kitchen knife. Some parts, like when separating the heart and lungs, she had to make use of the kunai. It was blunt, but reached deeper than her small blade. The tip was good to make pre-cut lines for the knife, too...

     Sarah snapped out her trance and looked over at Sasuke. It was his turn to introduce himself.

     Sasuke looked at them with a disinterested expression on his face, "My name is Sasuke Uchiha. I have a lot of dislikes but no likes in particular. I don't feel like summing up my ambition as a dream, but my goal is to restore my clan to its former glory and to kill a certain man."

     "Wow, what an edgelord," Sarah thought as she just looked at Sasuke, "Good to know I'm on a team with someone who wants to commit fratricide."

     Sarah knew about the Uchiha massacre long ago. It wasn't that hard to figure out what happened considering how much people within the village likes to talk about it while looking over at Sasuke with a pitiful expression on their faces. It was tragic to loose your whole family in one night, especially since it was at the hands of his brother Itachi. Sasuke had every valid reason to want the man dead, but to make that his sole reason for living is just incredibly dark in her opinion.

     "The three of you are certainly interesting. We will have a mission together tomorrow, so rest up," Kakashi said.

     "What kind of mission?" Naruto asked.

     Kakashi responded, "First, we'll do what we can with just four people: a survival exercise."

     Naruto raised his eyebrow, "Survival exercise?"

     "Didn't we do plenty of those at the academy?" Sarah asked him.

     Naruto nodded, "Yeah, we did. Why the hell are we doing more of these now that we are Genin?"

     "Oh but this isn't a normal exercise," Kakashi   said as he leaned back against the rail, "But if I were to explain it to you guys then you'd just be disappointed. Out of the twenty-seven graduates in your class only nine of them will be fully recognized as Genin. The remaining eighteen will be sent back to the academy. In other words: this exercise will be an extremely difficult test with a failure rate of 66% or higher."

     Sarah nodded. She now understood the gravity of the situation: if she or her teammates failed this exercise then they'll get sent back to the academy. It was a test used to weed out incompetent shinobis..

     "How interesting," Sarah thought to herself.

     "Make sure to come prepared tomorrow, we meet at five o'clock!" Kakashi said before seemingly teleporting away from the group.

     "It looks like I'm going to have to come extra prepared tomorrow," Sarah thought as she headed back towards her place, "Hm..now what exactly should I pack..."

- Genin Days (3): The Bell Test -

     The trio met up at the training ground early the next morning. Naruto seemed to be completely exhausted, not used to waking up early while Sasuke just looked at them with a serious expression on his face. Sarah had gotten plenty of rest last night, so she was good to go for the test.

A few hours had past since they had gotten there. Sarah had resorted to making traps around the area, not really focusing on what Naruto and Sasuke were doing. She was determined to pass this test, not now..not ever.

Failure was not an option to her. If she failed and got sent back to the academy then that means she wasn't ready to become a Genin. That meant that she would forever remain weak, useless Sarah.

Sarah walked back to where the others were at, standing beside Sasuke with a determined look on her face. Eventually their sensei showed up...admittedly a few hours later than said.

"You're late!" Naruto exclaimed as he pointed his finger at Kakashi.

"Sorry, a black cat crossed my path." the man casually responded before continuing, "Anyways..."

Kakashi walked over towards a nearby log and placed a timer down on it, "Times set for 12:00. Today's assignment is to take these bells from me by noon. And if you fail.."

Kakashi gestured over towards the three logs nearby, "Then you'll get tied up to those and get sent back to the academy."

"There's only two bells and three of us...so that means that only two of us can pass this test and one has to be sent back to the academy," Sarah thought for a second, "No, this has to be a fluke.."

But what was the real meaning behind this exercise?

"Unless..." Sarah looked over at both Naruto and Sasuke, "He's wanting us to work together as a team."

No, that wouldn't be possible. Sasuke and Naruto were too hardheaded to even want to work together, much less work with her as a team. They were too prideful to let that happen.

Sarah sighed. Maybe she'll just let the two of them get the pride beaten out of them by their Sensei before she even offers to work alongside them as a team. Yeah, that would be the most logical move.

So that's what Sarah did. She just watched from within the trees as Naruto tried to attack their sensei...with shadow clones, with traps, with sneak attacks. He only stopped when he got caught in a blatantly obvious trap.

Sarah hopped over towards the tree where Sasuke was residing. It seems she didn't have a choice but to force Sasuke and Naruto into working together.

"Look Sasuke, I know we don't exactly see eye-to eye but we're part of a team now," Sarah whispered as she watched Naruto try worming his way out of the trap.

Sasuke raised an eyebrow, "What are you trying to propose?"

"Maybe we could work together as a team and try to take down Kakashi-Sensei? With Naruto's help of course!" Sarah explained as she pulled out a kunai from her bag.

Sasuke nodded, "I see. But who exactly is going to go back to the academy once we get the bells?"

"I'll go," Sarah said, "I know how much being a ninja means to you two, so I'll sacrifice my position for you both to live out your dreams."

"Hn," Sasuke responded, "Very well then."

Sarah threw the kunai at the rope holding Naruto up in the tree, slicing it with peak precision. Kakashi glanced up and saw Sarah jumping out from her hiding spot, throwing some shurikens with a piece of paper attached to them at him. Kakashi jumped out of the way as the shurikens landed on the ground, ice spikes erupting from them.

Naruto used this as a distraction to free himself from his bindings, running towards Kakashi and using the multi-shadow clone jutsu to make two copies of himself. He then cornered Kakashi on three sides and jumped after him in an attempt to get the bell. Before Kakashi could escape Sasuke came charging up from above and attempted to land a kick on his back. Kakashi dodged as he took a few steps back.

"Eat shit sucker!" Sarah cried out as she slammed her fist into the ground, cracking it and trapping Kakashi's body in the ground.

Kakashi looked at her in shock, "Such inhuman strength.. I fear I might be dealing with a mini Tsunade on my hands.."

Naruto and Sasuke rushed over and took the two bells out of Kakashi's grasp. Sarah smirked, noting her senseis reaction in her head as she walked over and broke the dirt holding Kakashi in place with her fist.

"You all pass," Kakashi said as he dusted himself off.

The three of them just look at him completely dumbfounded. But...the test...?

"The purpose of this test was to get the three of you to work together as a team. Although your teamwork could use a bit of improvement, you all past the test," Kakashi explained before gesturing over to the three logs in the corner with bags of food on top of them, "Enjoy your lunch, oh and welcome to Team Seven."

In the end, the test was just a giant fluke to get the trio to work together as a team. Sarah smirked as she took a bite out of her bento; turns out she didn't need to go back to the academy after all. Naruto was busy blabbering about how cool Sarah and Sasuke were, making sure to emphasize the 'cool moments' he witnessed. Sasuke glanced over at Sarah with an intense expression on his face, as if she were suddenly a rival to him. Sarah couldn't care less; all that mattered now was celebrating the formation of Team Seven.

This turned out to be quite the interesting start to her career as a ninja.