“Hmph!
Who’s afraid of who?
Sasuke-kun belongs to S Class!” Ino shot back, refusing to give ground.
She drew her right leg back, her sandal clacking against the ground as she set her footing, then bent her knees to drop her center of gravity and crossed her fists in front of her, taking a fighting stance of her own.
Senhime and Yumiko were not about to look weak either.
Both stepped back and squared up to attack.
Sakura watched Ino about to get into a fight, and worry flickered in her eyes, but she did not try to stop it.
Sasuke was a fish bone lodged crosswise in both their throats, and it galled her.
Still, Sakura Haruno had gotten into S Class on her own.
Not on the strength of any family behind her, but on a mind sharper and more careful than most children her age.
There were three of them on the other side.
Ino was stronger than A Class students, but only one on one.
Even with Sakura added in, they would come out on the losing end.
And when it came to Sasuke and to S Class’s honor, she would absolutely stand on the same side as Ino-pig.
She raised a hand and touched the bruise on her forehead lightly, and then, in the split second before it started, Sakura shouted, “Wait!”
“What is it, Sakura?
What’s the matter with you, yelling stop out of nowhere?” Ino had been a hair from striking, and the shout right beside her made her jump.
Senhime, Yumiko and Reiko flinched too, and the looks they fixed on Sakura turned ugly.
Senhime raised her sleeve to cover her mouth out of habit and said, “What is it, Billboard Brow?
You want to join in too?
Except, would someone like you dare?”
“So you’re planning to go three on one?
How pathetic.” Sakura’s fists clenched tight, her eyes fierce.
“If this is a duel between ninja, then it’s one on one.
What do you call what you’re doing?”
Senhime, Yumiko and Reiko burst out laughing, finding what Sakura had said richly ironic.
Yumiko wiped away a tear with a fingertip, laughing too hard, then straightened up, glanced at Ino with contempt, and said, “Fine.
Then let me take on Ino Yamanaka alone, in an absolute duel between ninja.
What’s so impressive about someone who only got into S Class through her clan?”
Sakura answered Yumiko’s grand declaration at once.
“Good.
Don’t back out of it!”
Ino heard all of it.
She looked at Sakura’s profile and felt a warmth in her chest, but she still put out an arm and pushed Sakura behind her, muttering, “Sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong…”
Since it was a one on one match, Senhime, Reiko and Sakura all stepped back a few paces, leaving the open ground to Ino and Yumiko, and a battle between two “women” over “Sasuke-kun” and “the honor of their classes” officially began.
“Ah!”
“Ha!”
Back and forth they went, Ino and Reiko trading blows in a “ferocious” exchange.
Yuuga, of course, yawned from boredom.
Standing at the corner, Yuuga had no intention whatsoever of going out to break it up.
When it came down to it, the reason Ino and Sakura were at odds with Reiko, Yumiko and Senhime of A Class was Sasuke, that blockhead.
This was a bunch of little girls coming to blows over a good-looking boy, pure childish nonsense, and the key point was that the good-looking boy playing the “male lead,” the blockhead Sasuke, did not care in the slightest about this pack of troublesome little girls.
The blockhead existed for revenge.
So the battle between Ino and Yumiko looked, to Yuuga, like playing house.
Two girls who could not even project chakra outside their bodies were limited in how much damage they could do.
As long as he kept an eye on things from here, nothing should go wrong.
And in a one on one, Ino was not outmatched by anyone from the other classes.
She might be the young lady of the Yamanaka clan and might seem a little spoiled most of the time, but she trained for real and worked at growing stronger.
Reiko, Yumiko and Senhime were a good deal behind her by comparison.
Between A Class and S Class there were gaps that could not be crossed.
Yuuga rubbed his chin and thought it over.
The Academy was divided into six grades, and each grade was divided into S Class, A Class, B Class and C Class, with twenty-four students to a class, a fixed quota.
S Class was the top of each grade.
Teaching staff, and everything else, were the best available.
Take the class the Konoha 12 were in: their homeroom teacher was Iruka.
Iruka ranked among the very best of the chunin, and he was an outstanding young teacher at the Academy.
The other classes had it far worse.
C Class had even had a genin as homeroom teacher at one point.
And there was one more thing that separated S Class from A, B and C entirely.
In the Academy’s training process, graduation into genin was without question the most important stage.
At that stage, the children in a class were divided into groups of three, formed into small squads and assigned an instructor.
S Class students, regardless of aptitude, were assigned a jonin as instructor, and some of them elite ninja.
For example, the future instructor of Naruto, Sasuke and Sakura would be Kakashi.
The instructor of Tenten, Rock Lee and Neji would be Might Guy.
The ordinary classes were only given chunin as instructors.
If there happened to be a promising seedling in an ordinary class, a jonin might come to instruct, but those jonin were generally not willing to take the job.
After all, a student from an ordinary class was a loss of face for a jonin.
The tilt of resources and the school’s attention made S Class the pinnacle of the Academy, and everyone in the Village wanted their own child to get into S Class.
But getting in was not easy.
The first path: descendants of Konoha’s great clans.
The Hyuga clan, the Yamanaka clan, the Akimichi clan and others like them were the backbone that defended the Village and had made outstanding contributions to it, so as long as a clan had not declined, the doors of S Class stayed open to its children forever.
Ino and Sasuke had both entered S Class because of the clans behind them, though they were also fully capable of getting in on their own.
The second path: exceptional ability.
When S Class could not fill twenty-five places, it would recruit promising children from among the ordinary villagers’ children, and such children made up more than half of the twenty-four.
Rock Lee and Sakura Haruno, for instance.
As for the third path, Yuuga thought of a mother and son: Kushina Uzumaki and Naruto Uzumaki.
That kind of admission was specially approved by the Hokage of the day, and nobody was going to go against the will of a Kage.