What-If: Ino had Gotten Gaming Powers Instead

Another week above $70, another side story.
This one was a tie among the $10 tiers so I flipped and came up Heads. If you want to be the tie breaker, you totally can, just join that sweet tier.

I'll admit What-Ifs are odd with just how many canon stuff needs to be approached inside-story at this point, but I'll also admit I fucking adore What-Ifs. They're so quirky I'm allowed to do whatever I want without potentially damaging the story or going in a weird way with precedent.

It's stressless, and I love that.
Enjoy.
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“Eh?” Her eyes scan the list in front of her almost as soon as it arrives. She’s no stranger to odd mental effects, but a quick Kai does nothing to remove the box from in front of her vision. It’s interesting, it has a lot of numbers and very few of them are nice. She’d like to think she’s better than the average graduate, but maybe she’s not. She did spend a lot more time having fun than she did training.

“Huh…” Looking everything over, Ino’s a little surprised. Isn’t this Sakura’s kinda thing? She understands what she’s looking at, she’s spent more than enough time watching Sakura interact with this kind of info on a screen that she recognizes instantly. Should she ask Sakura for advice?

No… that’d be weird, and Sakura’d probably be pretty jealous. It’s not like they’re talking as much as they should at the moment anyway, she should figure out a better way to start a conversation and then maybe work into it.

For now, she has to figure out what she’s doing with this, it’s clearly real as she hasn’t lost her mind and no one with strong enough Genjutsu to completely override her is going to mess with her like this. She believes the term is trolling?

If Itachi Uchiha has snuck back into the village, watched her and Sakura enough to grasp the significance, and then decided to play a prank like this on her, she should be happy the worst to come of it is a little wasted time from taking it seriously.

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“Oh wow.” Almost the first thing she did was start trying to get prompts from people, and using her mental skills she found [Scan] to be easy to obtain. Sasuke’s a prodigy, Sakura’s worthless, and Naruto’s possibly the reincarnate of the 4th Hokage… It makes sense, weirdly enough, she decides not to think too much about it.

She feels bad though, all that time she could have been helping Sakura and she’s about to enter the mission field as [less dangerous than a fly]. She could have done something about that, and she will, but for now she doesn’t have a good way to approach it. She looks to the left from where she’s spying on the trio from a bush, and finds her scan activates again.

[Hinata Hyuuga, You Will Die]

Well that’s a danger level, Hinata’s got the stuff! Also why is she watching Sakura’s team too? She’s not secretly pining after Sakura is she? That’s her thing!

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Her allowance looks a lot bigger when it’s deposited in a little box and displayed as a number on a floating screen. She doesn’t have an inventory, because that’d be cheating or something, but she can place her money in and out of it. No more carrying around cash! That’ll make her life a lot easier, and it’s just there for free without having to put any work into it.

She does have to figure out if there is an inventory system she can unlock, but that’s another day’s worry. For now she’s full throttle testing out all these cool mechanics.

She’d be lying if she said she was excited for her own sake. This is cool and all, but she’s an observer, all these numbers and other nonsense are Sakura’s bread and butter, she only learned what they even mean so she could watch along and give her advice when she got stuck. A guilt has settled in, but she can negate that by getting so much stuff to talk about that Sakura ends up excited for her instead of jealous!

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“Did it, wow that was easy, what the hell.” Standing over her creation, Ino can’t help but wipe her forehead and stare down at the scroll on the table.

[Mind-Walker Jutsu LVL Training Scroll

Gives the non-Yamanaka to learn the Mind-Walker Jutsu with significantly greater ease than they would normally have.]

Technically anyone can learn her clan’s techniques, so she’s not surprised it lets her make something to ease the process, but she’s only been at this for an hour and she’s never tried to make an instructional piece before.

Sakura’s such a good student, she can probably fix her issues fast by making her stuff like this, and then boosting her up in her clan techniques. Daddy will be mad if he catches on, but that hardly matters. She was always going to try and add Sakura to the clan one day, what’s the problem in teaching her now so she survives long enough for that?

“Time to go hand this over.” Her crafting tutorial was fast too, she just had to dye her hair, the crafting menu really made that simple, and she got the barber trait, which is pretty cool. Maybe she’ll learn a lot more skills like that and open a salon sometime.

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Sitting on Sakura’s bed with her, poring over the scroll she’d made just a couple of hours before - she had to let the ink dry - and explaining core theories, Ino can’t help but feel like she did the right thing.

Sakura doesn’t have to be strong, she’s with Sasuke. Her interest in him may be fake, but he really is a true powerhouse, and Naruto’s clearly got a lot going for him. All Sakura has to do is be able to ensure she can take out one or two enemies and play support, and her techniques will do exactly that. It’s kind of the entire theory behind the Ino-Shika-Cho, she can artificially create it like this. Naruto’s clones - she saw him make so many - will manufacture the area superiority and support that Shika provides, and Sasuke’s raw power and brute force will create the Cho part of the triangle.

It’ll take a lot of training, but all that means is she gets to spend more time with her head resting on Sakura’s shoulder, holding her close and pointing through the scroll.

A part of her was worried that Sakura’d ignore her for gaming or something, but the bright eyes her best friend gives her fills her heart with glee. “Thanks Ino, I was kind of worried.”

“Yeah?” Ino asks her, knowing damn well she’s worried too and that’s why she’s doing this.

“The test Kakashi gave us did not go well.” Sakura admits, “I mean we won but it was largely because I allowed myself to be worthless in just the right way to trap him. Kakashi doesn’t seem happy about it either, who knows how long before he does something crazy if I don’t get stronger.”

“Well, we can make you stronger.” Ino says, arm around her bestie’s waist, she’s so warm and nice. If she could just stay like this forever, ignoring the pangs in her heart and letting this be their normal. She could accept that. “We will make you stronger.”

She’ll hold off on telling Sakura about the strange system in her head. If it’ll let her do stuff like this, there’s no reason to complicate anything.