After Kurenai dealt with Gato, the rest of the mission was just like Ren liked them. Boring. With nothing happening. Full of relaxing free time where he got paid for standing around and failing to look menacing.

He even managed to rescue several million ryo from Gato so there really was nothing he could complain about his time in the Land of Waves.

Two weeks quickly passed and the bridge was finished, the people of the Land of Waves rejoiced, Tazuna almost died of alcohol poisoning, Itsuki, the lucky dog, had a happy moe-moe time with Tsunami who nursed him to health from his chakra exhaustion, and Kurenai was silently grieving, intent to ignore both Itsuki and Ren unless absolutely necessary.

Really, Ren started to think he was lacking some kind of protagonist aura. Chicks didn’t dig him simply for existing and getting stronger was actually hard.

Wasn’t that just unfair?

They even managed to find a bandit camp on their way back to Konoha, and Kurenai decided to use it to vent.

After hearing the despairing screams of the bandits and seeing the pain Kurenai casually dished out on them out of sheer spite, Ren was a bit happy that he didn’t have said natural charm of a protagonist.

Getting close to a woman who enjoyed mentally torturing her victims did not sound like such a good idea. Yeah? He wished Sarutobi Asuma good luck.

Maybe dying to Hidan was the man’s good fortune?

‘Now, if only I didn’t need to waste time writing a report on the mission.’ Ren inwardly smiled as he glanced at the paperwork on the Hokage’s table.

Heh. Who was he kidding? He wasn’t going to do that. Smart people had shadow clones for their paperwork.

Fortunately, it only took thirty minutes before they were dismissed.

…

“Yo, girlie.” Ren, leaning on a tree on training ground forty-one, raised his hand in greeting as Hinata entered the clearing, “Missed me?” He cheekily asked as she came closer.

What he didn’t expect was for the girl to spread her arms and engulf him in a hug, pressing her head to his chest.

Raising an eyebrow at that, Ren mentally sighed in unexpected fondness and patted the girl’s head.

“Oof.” He playfully spoke with a chuckle.

It was almost pitiful how starved the girl was for positive attention when he started teaching her. It was even more sad that he didn’t even try to make her attached.

Of course, the girl didn’t seem to have romantic feelings for him. There wasn’t enough fainting for that involved in their interaction. Or at least, that’s what Ren hoped was the case. He was kinda scared to ask too.

He was very much happy being comfortably friend-zoned. He had no intention of getting involved with a fourteen-year-old kid, thank you very much.

After a few seconds, Hinata moved away with a faint blush and a small, embarrassed smile. So, Ren took it as his privilege to break the awkward atmosphere that was forming around them in the most dastardly way he could think of.

“Did you do your assignment well while I was away?” He asked with the tone of somebody who knew she suffered and enjoyed that fact immensely. He truly had to give it his all to resist eye-smiling at her to make her more annoyed.

Hearing him, Hinata froze and her eyebrow twitched as she gave him the cutest glare of them all.

Her anger was truly the food for his soul.

“You are a bastard. Four hours. Every day. At least. One day I had to spend eight hours just running around the pond. After the academy. Even Father gave me a weird look when I came home.” She quietly ranted. Her voice was still a whisper but…

“Not even one stutter. I am truly proud.” Ren said with a smug smirk as he wiped out an imaginary tear from under his eye. The girl’s fingers twitched as if she wanted to strike him with Jyuken but she held herself back.

For the two weeks he taught her, he stopped her every time she spoke with a stutter and had her repeat the sentence until she said it without stuttering. It brought her a lot of frustration. But it was helping.

Alas, when Ren left for a mission, he still wasn’t satisfied with her progress so he gave her an assignment.

Her assignment while he was away was to simply run laps around the pond. She had to run twenty laps every day by default. And then, he also ordered her to try answering questions in the academy whenever she knew the answer.

He counted that as doing his job as her tutor. Considering he was hired to help her get better at the academy subjects. Not to properly train her.

The catch was… every time she stuttered while answering the teacher, she was told to add one additional lap around the pond.

‘But still, eight hours?’ Ren wondered how much she stuttered that particular day to have to run eight hours.

He had to resist the grin that was trying to show on his face.

Heh. It was for her own greater good.

And it was going to get only worse from here out.

“Ah,” Ren dramatically sighed, putting his right hand clad in a fingerless glove on his heart, “The sight of my hard work paying off is truly touching.”

As playful as he acted, his eyes observed Hinata like a hawk.

Her fingers twitched again. A bit more violently. His hard work? It was she who had to run the laps. He wasn’t even there! She had to take a deep breath to calm herself down.

Ren was a bit disappointed at that. This was the next thing he would have to correct. The girl still held herself back. If she did that only when facing her sister, then it would be whatever for Ren. He couldn’t care less. The problem was she held back against everyone.

It’s why he tried to make her angry and provoke a reaction from her. Well, it was a shot in the dark anyway. It seemed he would need to put together some creative training for her to show her the joys of brutally beating other people.

“I did the laps as ordered.” Hinata unhappily mumbled, but her eyes showed a bit of excitement as she expectantly asked, “Will I get the reward now?”

Oh, yeah, he promised her a reward, didn’t he? Ren’s lips twitched but inwardly, he sported a full-blown evil grin.

“Did you get faster?” He truly tried to ask it calmly, but it was hard to suppress the evil grin forming on his lips and speak with composure at the same time.

“Yes?” Hinata quietly answered, slightly tilting her head at the weird behavior of her tutor.

“Good. Speed is the most important thing for a ninja.” Ren sagely nodded, conceding the battle against the evil grin as he let it form on his face as he cheerfully said, “Your reward is more laps around the pond.”

What? He needed to see how fast she had gotten. How was he supposed to gauge that without seeing her run?

Hinata looked as if he killed her puppy and it tugged on Ren’s heartstring. He inwardly promised that he would teach her something new as the true reward for her efforts. But for now, he was going to enjoy making her day miserable. All in the name of training.

“What are you waiting for?” Ren mirthfully asked. “Off you trot!”

“I liked you better when you were away.” She muttered under her nose, shocking Ren with her rebuttal. He didn’t think she had it in her. So, he answered her with happy laughter as he shooed her with his hand, causing her to reluctantly start running around the pond.

The funny thing about Hinata’s assignment was that he had no way to police her. He told her he placed a small invisible seal on her to monitor if she did the assigned work.

But that was bullshit.

How was he supposed to create a seal that could monitor how many times she stuttered in school and then check if she properly ran the laps she was supposed to?

… Okay. Properly thinking about it, maybe it wouldn’t have been that hard to create such a seal. But he was busy. He was lazy. He really couldn’t be bothered to do it. He had more important seals to work on.

Hinata was really cute in that naive way. It probably never really occurred to her that he had no way to enforce his rules. If she cheated and didn’t do the laps, Ren had no way of knowing it.

Seeing how much faster she had gotten, she obviously did her assigned training diligently.

It was almost a pity he would have to beat that cute naivety out of her eventually. Figuratively speaking, of course.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep