A punishment

Sakura Haruno, soon to be newly minted Genin, swallowed as her new teacher finally arrived at their training ground hours after the time he'd told them. Today was the day her future was decided. She knew that Sasuke would succeed at this test – there was no test that he didn't excel at. But she had to ace it too, or else she'd be sent back to the Academy for another year and forever miss out on her chance to be on the same team as him. That was a fate worse than ****! She'd do anything – she'd face hell itself to stay on his team!

Their new sensei, Kakashi, droned off the last of his instructions before the survival test began. “-and finally, whichever one of you does the worst in this test will be tied to this post and watch the others eat lunch. Oh, and they'll be subjected to the Nidaime's Encouragement for the rest of the day as extra punishment as well. So try your best to avoid that.”

Sakura blinked.

'What?'

Sakura prided herself on having read everything on the Academy's curriculum from start to finish and she'd never heard of the second Hokage, the Nidaime, having an 'Encouragement'. What would the famously stern former Hokage have used to encourage people, anyway?

Before she could raise her hand and ask for clarification, the Jounin calmly spoke up again with a simple, “Begin!”

Sakura's instincts took over immediately and she dashed to some nearby bushes, doing her best to stamp down her confusion and self-doubt as she got into the right zone of mind to fight. She'd surely heard him wrong, or he'd been making things up in order to motivate them. Besides, it didn't matter. She was fighting for Sasuke's love, and to be on his team! She wasn't going to lose!

Sakura bit back a groan as she groggily returned to awareness. Remembering her ninja training, she kept her eyes shut, feigning unconsciousness as she mentally took stock of her situation. Her razor-sharp mind (when it wasn't love-sick) rapidly flitted through her memories as she tried to recall what happened.

It was a depressingly short sequence that ran through her mind. She remembered Naruto making a complete fool of himself from the start, but still putting on a decent show thanks to those strangely solid clones that he'd produced which would have been a real threat if he'd used them properly. After that, she'd retreated to find a better spot to lay an ambush on their teacher, and then...

Sakura gasped, her eyes shooting wide open as she remembered seeing a seriously hurt Sasuke stumbling towards her. At screaming her head off. And fainting in shock.

Her renewed panic almost immediately subsided when she saw Sasuke in front of her, pointedly not looking at her and clearly not injured in any way.

“Wh-what happened?” she gasped out, trying to clear her foggy mind.

“What do you think?” Sasuke replied with gritted teeth, staring off into the distance and refusing to look at her.

It only took her a moment to realize that the injuries she'd seen would have taken days to heal, and since they still appeared to be out in the training grounds that meant... 'Genjutsu! Inner, you're supposed to help act as my secondary defense and protect me against those!'

'Sorry, but seeing Sasuke supposedly hurt like that shocked me as much as it did you!' Sakura's Inner personality defensively replied in her mind.

Outer Sakura was about to mentally argue with her Inner when she realized that Sasuke wasn't the only one standing in front of her. Which meant that she was the one who was tied to a pole for punishment. Great.

“Sakura! Are you okay!?” Naruto shouted as he ran into her view. “I mean, of course you're okay! You're fine! Totally fine! A-grade! Never looked better!”

Sakura narrowed her eyes. Even for the never-shuts-up Naruto, that was bordering on babble. And just like Sasuke, he wasn't looking her in the eye. Sasuke was one thing – he had the cool wounded-soul kind of thing he did. Naruto, on the other hand, was a lot of things (most of them annoying) but he'd never hesitated to look her in the eyes when talking to her before. Why was he talking to somewhere around her belly-button? And why did his eyes keep shifting up and down between two different levels down there?

Why could she so easily feel the rough rope that had been used to tie her? It's like her clothes were doing nothing to protect her skin.

_ 'Uh... is it just me, or is that breeze really noticeable? Like, all over?' _Inner hesitantly asked.

With a sinking sense of rising dread, Sakura tilted her neck to look down at herself.

Her brain froze for a moment, refusing to process what she saw. Sakura's red qipao dress/shirt was nowhere to be seen, nor was the (not really necessary if she was being honest with herself) bra she'd worn beneath it. Instead, the first thing that came into view were her pink nipples, tipping off her small, barely-handfuls breasts. Her pale skin was bare to anyone who looked, except for her arms and waist, which were tied tightly together by thick braids of rope. The rope was thick enough to prevent her from seeing below her waist, but she could definitely feel the wooden pole resting against her bare back and ass.

She was naked. Beneath that rope her slit would be completely visible, with only the smallest tuft of sparse still-growing pink pubic hair atop of it and doing nothing to hide it. Her tits and pussy, her most private of places, bare naked to the world!

Naked!

Naked in front of Naruto! That pervy creep wasn't looking her in the eyes when he'd spoken to her because he was embarrassed by her performance, he was just busy looking at her tits and pussy!

_ 'Wait, wait! We're naked in front of Sasuke too!' _Inner wailed.

Inner was right! That was even worse! She was naked in front of her crush! He could see everything!

Sakura's mortified scream pierced the heavens. They also half-shattered Naruto's eardrums, since he was so close, but thankfully he had rapid regeneration on his side and would only show the effects by talking loudly for the next half-hour. Since he talked loudly all of the time, nobody would notice the difference.

“Mah, mah, you'll attract all sorts of concerned people if you keep that up,” Kakashi calmly noted as he flickered into view.

Sakura cut her scream off at once. With an appropriate target in front of her, her mortification crystalized into anger. “You... you pervert! What have you done to me!?”

“The Nidaime's Encouragement,” Kakashi responded. “He thought it was an excellent way of encouraging young ninja to do their best in training each day. His idea was simple enough: the worst performing student in a team gets stripped naked for the day. Don't want to be stripped? Then you get better. Simple." He shrugged. "And you were the worst today. Not that the others were much better.”

Sakura sputtered in shock and rage. “There's no way that Naruto handled a genjutsu better than me, he was terrible at it in class! And you didn't even try to fight me in taijutsu! Wait, what does it matter? Either way you shouldn't have taken my clothes! This is insane! You're insane! I'll report you to the Hokage!”

Kakashi shrugged, unconcerned with the threat. “I fought Naruto and Sasuke in taijutsu because that was where they scored best in their Academy scores. You scored best in genjutsu, so I attacked you there. They lasted much longer in their best skill than you did, and so here we are. But don't worry, none of you need to worry about facing this relic of the Nidaime's teachings again. After all, none of you deserve to even go back to the Academy and get a second chance to be ninja. Really, now that I think on it I probably should have stripped you all and tied all three of you to the poles for failing so miserably.”

Sakura felt the world tilt from under her. This couldn't be real. If it was, then it was the worst day of her life. Stripped naked and tied to a pole in front of her crush and her most annoying admirer, while being told that she'd just failed being a ninja forever. She couldn't even cover her body, with the rope tying her arms down to her wrists tightly against her waist.

For a while, all she heard was white noise as she fell into despair. Finally, her hearing cleared enough for Kakashi's final words.

“-I'll be back after lunch to give you one last chance. If you feed her, you all fail!” With that, he disappeared in a puff of smoke.

An awkward silence fell across the training ground as the two boys were left alone with their naked teammate.

Original Chapter by AkaB