Tradition's Beginning

The three Uzumaki siblings stood before their mother in a line, one joyously exuberant and raring to get started, another relaxed and showing no signs of nerves. And then stood between his two sisters, Naruto just stood ready, his eyes completely fixed on his mother.

Kushina Uzumaki was beautiful. She was in her 40s now, and yet there was absolutely not a sign of that at all. She looked as beautiful today as she had the day she had married their father. And she stood before them all with a look of pride on her face, smiling at all of her children with love. "You know this is the day I prepared all of you for. After today, you will all be Uzumaki. Not just in blood, but officially. You will be sworn into the Clan as a full member, and granted all the rights that entails including access to our personal sealing techniques and library, votes at the clan council, access to the clan treasury, and maybe most important of all, the right to claim artefacts from the family vault for your own personal use. After today I will be able to train you in our Chakra Chains and any of our other inherent bloodline abilities you may have inherited."

The smile on her face twisted a little, forming a knowing smirk as her eyes tracked across all three of them. "And you will be granted the right to marry other Uzumaki, as you will have been deemed worthy of that honour." Natusmi blushed. Naruko kicked the ground, making a decent job of pretending not to care. He might even have believed her if she hadn't long ago made it clear she refused to sleep without him by her side. Naruto just smirked right back at his mother.

"Oh come here my babies!" Of course she couldn't help herself. In one quick move faster than any of them could react to, she had pulled all three of them into a hug, squeezing the life out of all of them with the strength that of a mama bear that had spent its entire life within Konoha's Forest of ****. "I couldn't be more proud. You're all going to do great I just know it. Just remember your weaknesses. Naruko, watch your footwork. Natsumi, you need to make sure to keep your attention split. Don't hyperfocus and forget your surroundings, but don't get distracted and miss something important. And Naruto..." She looked into his eyes then and gave him a stern glare. "Don't get distracted by yours sisters. There will be plenty of time for that once you've succeeded. If you flunk this because you were too busy watching your sister's asses swaying, I won't be the only one you need to answer to, but I will definitely be coming for my pound of flesh young man!"

"Yes mom." All three of them parroted back before being released. With that Kushina stepped back and towards a seemingly inconspicuous rock engraved with the Uzumaki seal, just like pretty much everything here within the ruins of Uzu. This had been their clan's home for centuries before the fall, and everything was made to theme. Pulling free a Kunai from her belt, Kushina quickly slashed it across her finger and spilt a few drops of blood onto the rock. There was a quick flash of light, and the entire thing seemed to fold in on itself, revealing that underneath it had been a hole.

It went straight down, a long drop into darkness with all light seeming to stop barely a metre down. Kushina stepped away from the hole and gestured towards it. "Good luck my babies."

"Mom. Come on. We're your kids! We don't need luck." And with those simple words Naruko hopped right in. Naruto followed right after, and he could hear Natsumi jumping in after him.

The Stone reappeared, sealing them in. And Kushina was left to wait for her Children to emerge. Left alone in the ruins and ashes of Uzu. Any other mother might have been worried she may never have seen her children again, but not her. She'd taught them well. They would come back to her.

--

Naruto found that his sister had been right about the Trials. They were kinda easy. There was some complex seal stuff going on that made every trap reset itself for each person which helped prevent it from being pathetically trivial, but most of this stuff seemed to be testing the very basics of Ninja skills.

A few rooms filled with wide varieties of traps they had to spot and then either disarm or avoid as they progressed through the lengthy series of tunnels and rooms. Then a huge chasm that had tested if you were able to use your Chakra to stick to the walls to be able to cross it. Basically it was just the treewalking exercise, but with some weak wind jutsu firing out of seals every now and then, so that if your skill was shaky you'd be blown off of the wall and to a gruesome ****. Obviously no trouble for the three prodigy children of Kushina Uzumaki.

Variations of the same continued. Testing your accuracy with throwing weapons against moving targets. A second suite filled with traps that required you also traverse across it with a pot filled with water as a weird sort of pseudo-escort mission. An equivalent room to the chasm one now testing skill with Waterwalking instead.

Overall, it felt like this whole system of Trials was sort of like the Uzumaki's equivalent of the Chunin exams. Every skill required to pass was at about the level of something you would expect from a low level Chunin, and so the three of them were able to speed through it pretty easy. Chunin was the most common type of ninja, and that meant that the skill of a Chunin was the broadest of all the Ninja classifications. A low level Chunin was really basic, while a high level Chunin could be an almost untouchable terror for an entire team of Genin to face. Top Tier Chunin was where the Anbu typically recruited from. Jounin usually had some level of name recognition to them that made them less suited to the blackops missions of the Anbu, so standard practice was for the Anbu to take Top Tier Chunin, remove them from a village's standard roster, and give them a crash course from hell to get them up that last little amount to Special Jounin level, then start sending them on missions. Once they had served their term they could retire to a life of quiet anonmity amongst the ranks of the village's countless other Chunin, or graduate to becoming official Jounin and serve the village as a household name, known far and wide to be amongst the best that their village could offer.

The Uzumaki siblings would probably place pretty middling amongst the Chunin. Dead average for Ninja overall. But given their age, that would place them far and away above every other Ninja of their generation by a wide margin. And they would only get stronger after they had passed the trial, and quickly too. Kushina had taught them almost exclusively the foundations of Ninja abilities, making them as good as they could be at all skills it was expected for every single ninja to have. But they hadn't once tackled more advanced techniques that would be more specific to them. Their potential bloodline abilities, Jinchuuriki powers, Sealing Techniques beyond just the very basics, and even their Elemental Abilities were all still unknown to them.

Though Kushina had never actually stopped from trying to learn them on their own, just she had been devoted to making sure they started with the strongest foundational base they possibly could. She always made sure to remind them that fancy abilities would kill your enemies faster, but having a faulty foundations would get you killed faster than that. It didn't matter if you could melt a country if you couldn't spot a trap and got a kunai through the heart.

What that all meant was that by the time they reached the first legitimately difficult trial, each one of them was **** to come up with an entirely different way to move past it.

It was about two thirds of the way through the Trial that it occured. Up until that point this trial had been a chore, though challenging to any Genin or lesser Chunin. But on top of that, it hadn't really seemed like a Trial meant to prove someone worthy of being an Uzumaki. There was nothing uniquely Uzumaki about any of the difficulties they had been **** to face beyond the sealing arrays that reset the trials for each one of them. The trap that changed all of that was simple but effective, and composed purely of two seals. One on the floor that carefully monitored the air pressure above it, meaning that there was absolutely no way past without activating it unless someone had somehow mastered a Time-Space Jutsu that allowed them to turn intangible. That was the trigger. The trap was a modified version of a storage seal, designed to launch a harrowing barrage of senbon tipped with a deadly neurotoxin that would be directed mid flight into their target, meaning simply dodging out of the way was also unfeasible.

This was a uniquely Uzumaki problem.

Naruko was the first to deal with it, and in keeping with her performance thus far, she found a simple solution that took very little effort on her part. Of the three siblings, Naruko was the only one who had currently developed the ability to draw on the power of the Kyuubi sealed inside of her on demand. The others could do so with an appropriate external trigger, but Naruko could summon up a single tails worth of Biju Chakra completely at will, and dismiss it just as easily. She had made barely any progress on summoning a second tail, but that didn't matter here. Cloaked in a thick cloud of corrosive Biju Chakra she walked through the trap, Senbon being deflected off of her chakra cloak without touching her, the very few that managed to penetrate were stripped of their deadly poisonous payload and so Naruko was left with only tiny wounds that were swiftly healed by the Fox's chakra.

Upon reaching the far end of the corridor, showing that the trap extended the full length of the hallway, she turned back to them with a cheeky grin on her face. "Come on then slowpokes. We've not got all day!" And without further ado she turned and dashed further in. Apparently getting to flex on them in such a manner had ignited a level of competitiveness.

Well Natsumi wasn't about to take that challenge laying down. She was the more seal oriented of the lot of them, and the most scholarly. She took a moment to inspect the seals on the walls and floor, trying to locate a weakness, but finding nothing she could exploit. So a different seal based solution was swiftly concocted. She pulled out a scroll and quickly engraved it with a few seals. There were two main ones. A seal to make it levitate and float around the room, and thereby change the air pressure enough to trigger the trap to fire on it, and a storage seal to collect the senbon fired. After double checking, she set it loose. It took about 5 minutes for the trap to finally run dry of ammunition, but soon enough the seals were empty and she could walk across the room without issue, collecting her scroll as she went. She turned to look back at him from the far side, not saying a word but a crimson blush gracing her cheeks for a moment, before she too vanished.

And then of course the room reset, leaving him to deal with a fully reloaded setup.

Naruto considered that. He wouldn't be able to just shrug this trap off like Naruko, and he didn't have the sealing knowledge to create his own clever solution on the fly like Natsumi. So he needed to do something else.

Step 1, throw a rock across the room, triggering the trap.

Step 2, catch one of the poisoned senbon fired so he could inspect it.

Definitely a neuro-toxin like he'd thought, but the specific type... Very carefully he examined the poison, sampling its scent, chakra signature and viscosity, leading him to one conclusion. It was derived from whirlpool lilies. They were a special type of lilies that grew on Uzu's coasts with very weak stems. A strong gust of wind would blow the flower clean off, usually to be carried into the many whirlpools surrounding the island, where they would swirl around within the maelstroms in a vibrant display of colour before finally being sucked beneath the waves in a spray of seeds, that would be carried by the ocean breeze back to dry land.

But given they only grew on Uzu, no one in the world would have any reason to carry their antidote or have trained themselves to have a resistance to those poisons. No one but an Uzumaki. Developing immunities to many common and uncommon poisons was a vital part of a ninja's training. They could mean life or ****. And an Uzumaki who hadn't trained their body against Whirlpool Lily poison couldn't really be called an Uzumaki. Now these neurotoxins were modified somewhat so he would haven't full immunity, but with a fresh dose of antitoxin and his resistance to the base poison, it would be enough to see him across the room safely.

It was effectively a mad dash. Dodging as many senbon as possible to minimise the dosage, plucking handfuls out of the air. It was a tough challenge and he got hit dozens of times. But by the time he reached the far end he was still standing.

He couldn't wait to find what else was in store.