Latest Update:COMPLETE
Summary: Minato screws up when he signs a contract dictating that Naruto would be the protagonist of a videogame being developed by TOBI inc. This has unknown consequences at the time, but 13 years later it manifests in a way that leaves Naruto trapped in a world full of videogame UI, Syntax, and shit ton of confusion. Will Naruto be able to survive, or will it be GAME OVER?
Link: https://m.fanfiction.net/s/10252240/1/When-Signing-a-Contract-Always-Read-the-Fine-Print
Word Count:273k
Chapters:42
Chapter 1: a start
It was a book.
The book that started it all.
Naruto was resting in bed at the house of Tsunami. He had just helped to liberate the country of wave and was exhausted not only physically, but also emotionally from the efforts to do so. Apparently Sasuke was okay, just exhausted and recovering from the false state of death that had been put on him. Sakura was watching over him and trying her best to nurse him back to health. And Kakashi was resting up as well, no doubt reading his porn.
Naruto had a problem.
He was bored.
Very bored.
With nothing to alleviate the boredom.
Naruto got up and checked his ninja bag for anything that might be of worth. Maybe he could practice kunai balancing or something else that was just so utterly mind numbing that it would waste his time in large amounts and still allow him to do something useful. Anything was better than staring at the ceiling with nothing to do
Naruto saw something that caught his eye in his ninja bag. Reaching in and grabbing it, Naruto pulled out a book. He didn't carry books around with him, so finding the book immediately put him on guard.
It couldn't have been more than a hundred pages long, making it the size of a small novel. The book didn't have a cover, a title, a blurb, or anything else that might denote whatever is was for.
'Is this Kakashi's porn?' Naruto thought to himself. The porn that he carried around with him usually had at least a cover page.
Realizing that it couldn't hurt to check what the book was, Naruto cracked it open to the front page. It read thusly:
Welcome to Naruto: the game.
By opening this book, you are accepting the terms and conditions of the contract stating that we have free reign over your personal and subjective reality to make it into the way that the contract dictates.
This change will be happening in 3…2…1…
Then Naruto's world turned black.
00000000
Naruto blearily opened his eyes to the world. It was dark. He was lying on the ground in no small amount of discomfort and he had a splitting headache. He looked around for any detail that would seem out of the ordinary that might give credence to why he was on the ground. Naruto spotted the book that he had grabbed out of his ninja pouch.
Picking it up, he found out that the front cover now read Naruto: the gaming handbook. 'What the hell is this thing?' Naruto thought to himself.
On one hand, Naruto could open it up and find out. On the other hand, something worse than him blacking out could happen.
His curiosity won the debate. Cracking it open once more, new words came out on the front page.
Welcome to Naruto: the gaming handbook.
Would you like a tour?
[Yes] [No]
"Erm… yes?" Naruto tried saying to it.
New words popped up under the confirmations
Welcome to Naruto: the gaming handbook.
Would you like a tour?
[Yes] [No]
*tap an option*
Naruto pushed his finger down on [Yes] and new words popped up on the page.
Welcome to Naruto: the gaming handbook.
*All hints given by the tour guide (me) will be given in between asterisks*
*Please turn the page onto the base stats section.*
Naruto complied and was visually assaulted by walls of text and statistics. 'Ugh. Reading.'
*This is the 'base stats' section of the book. On it contains all of the things that make you, you.*
Naruto Uzumaki: EXP: 55/4000 level-ups available.
*This shows your experience point score. You gain experience points only by fighting other strong individuals in open combat. This could be classified as fighting to the death, or simply sparring. Level-ups can only be achieved when you reach the current level cap of your experience level. Level-ups include points to affect your base stats as well as points to affect your attribute stats (which will be explained later)*
Chakra: 50
*This is the total amount of chakra available to you*
Chakra Control: 5
*This affects the expenditure of chakra for various tasks.*
Wisdom: 40
*Wisdom is all about how one uses the intelligence that one has for battle applications.*
Intelligence: 2
*Total level of factual knowledge*
Charisma: 50
*This stat represents how much people like you and are willing to listen to what you have to say. Usually only has an impact on strangers who don't have any pre-made thoughts and assumptions about your character*
Flexibility: 10
*The nimbleness and agility of a person*
Speed: 12
*How fast one moves, thinks, or reacts*
Strength: 10
*How much weight one is capable of being under*
Endurance: 40
*How long you can operate in battle scenarios*
*You are incapable of changing base stats by any other method than putting points into the areas given by level ups. This has its ups and downs, as you are incapable of working out for a strength stat increase, but your muscles will also never atrophy.*
*All of these stats are subjective to the average shinobi. i.e. 0's across the board are average for people who have just started the academy. Genin average in the 20's. Chunin average in the 40's. Jonin average in the 60's. ANBU are all over the place, but for simplicity, let's just say that they average in the 80's. Kage level shinobi average in the 100's*
*Please turn the page to the attributes section*
'This has to be some kind of joke.' Naruto thought to himself. Nevertheless, he did what the tour guide told him to do.
*This is the attributes section of the book. On it contains all the things that you are capable of doing*
*There are 7 expandable sections to the attributes section. Tap to enhance each one and learn more about them*
Ninjutsu
Genjutsu
Taijutsu
Senjutsu
Kenjutsu
Jinchuuriki jutsu
Miscellaneous
Naruto tapped on ninjutsu first, which expanded into more sections.
Learning rate 50/200
*As you can see, there is a limit to how well you can perform in any given area. There are various bonuses attributed to increases in these stats and you can't train an attribute better once it hits maximum*
Elemental affinities [tap to expand]
[tap here to go back]
Naruto tapped on the affinities section.
Wind 0/200 x2
*You have a wind affinity, which means that you will learn how to use wind elemental manipulation and wind jutsus twice as fast, and it will cost half attribute points to increment*
Fire 0/200 x.5
*Because you have a wind affinity, you will learn fire based elemental manipulation and jutsu's .5 times as fast, and it will cost double attribute points to increment*
Earth 0/200
Water 0/200
Lightning 0/200
[tap here to go back]
Naruto went back to tap on the genjutsu option
Learning rate 0/200
Detection 0/200
*affects how well you can detect illusions*
Dispel 0/200
*affects how well you can dispel illusions*
[tap here to go back]
Naruto went to the taijutsu option
Learning rate 20/200
Pain tolerance 25/200
*affects much pain you can endure before blacking out*
Form 5/200
*affects your elegance in hand to hand combat*
[tap here to go back]
Naruto went to the Senjutsu option, which he had never heard of
Pre-requisite of Senjutsu training: talk to a person who is capable of Senjutsu and convince them to teach you.
[tap here to go back]
Naruto sweatdropped 'Well never mind then' he thought to himself, while going to the kenjutsu option
Learning rate 0/200
Form 0/200
Versatility 0/1000
*Versatility affects how well you fight with a variety of different weapons that you have no formal or teached experience in. From sais, to katanas, to chakrams, everything's game*
[tap here to go back]
Jinchuuriki jutsu made Naruto's eyebrows go up in surprise. 'There are jutsu's that I can use with Fuzzball's chakra? Cool.'
Control 2/1000
*Control affects how much of Kyuubi's chakra you can take at once and still remain emotionally stable*
Shape manipulation 0/1000
*affects how well you can manipulate and control the chakra to your whim, allowing you to access different levels and forms of your traditional bijuu cloak*
[tap here to go back]
When Naruto tapped the miscellaneous option, it expanded across pages and pages of the book. On a cursory glance, Naruto saw that they all were out of 50 points and were all somewhat useless to him. Cooking, cleaning, singing, giving massages, forging, trap laying, seduction, poison identification and synthesizing.
Okay so maybe they all weren't so useless, but there were so many of them that Naruto would have a tough time sorting out the useful things to learn and the useless things to learn.
*the affinity section is comprised of skills that can be increased out of training yourself, but can also be supplemented by the points that you receive from leveling up.*
The last part of the last page of the affinity section read *please turn the page to the merit section*
Naruto did so and was met with a couple of pages that were full of grayed out boxes that had different words written down on them. Dead bone pulse, strength of a thousand, animal attributes, tongue modification, fire master, lightning rod, ice release.
'Wait, ice release? That's the thing that Haku had.' Naruto tapped the grayed out box that had Haku's kekai genkai on it.
Merit: ice release
The legendary elemental kekai genkai of the Yuki clan.
Pre-requisites: meet and battle a member of the Yuki clan. Water elemental manipulation 100/200. Wind elemental manipulation 100/200.
Unlocks ice elemental manipulation and jutsus to learn.
[tap here to go back]
Naruto sighed 'This UI is so clunky'
At the merit screen, there was new text
*As I'm sure that you've found out, you can unlock different unique jutsus, body modification techniques, or kekai genkai; but you'll need to meet the pre-requisites first. These are unlocked by using 'merit points', of which, one is awarded for every two level ups*
*Please flip to the 'people' section*
The people section consisted of an index of people that he met sorted out in alphabetical order as well as all the information that he knew of them so far.
*Please flip to the achievement section*
'This is so fucking weird' Naruto thought to himself.
*The achievement section contains all the things that you've done that are worthy of mention. Most of them have some sort of reward associated with them.*
ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: PASSED THE ACADEMY +5 intelligence
ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: BECAME A GENIN (FOR REAL) +1 to all base stats.
ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: DEFEATED HAKU OF THE ICE +10 wind manipulation, +10 water manipulation
*this concludes the tour of Naruto: the game handbook. Please note that there will be other things within this world that will only make sense to you. But you have to find them for yourself. Have a good day. Or a good night in your case*
'...Okay. Time to review the information so far.' Naruto thought out to himself. 'I've found some weird ass book that knocked me out when I first opened it up, then I opened it up again and it tells me all this weird stuff about me being in a game or some shit… this is either a really cruel and inventive prank, or I'm tripping out'
Naruto flipped the book back to beginning to find that his stats had been changed.
Naruto Uzumaki: EXP: 55/4000 level-ups available.
Chakra: 51
Chakra Control: 6
Wisdom: 41
Intelligence: 8
Charisma: 51
Flexibility: 11
Speed: 13
Strength: 11
Endurance: 41
Naruto tapped on the level up option
You've leveled up (3 times). You are now level 4. +15 base stat modifiers +50 affinity stat modifiers +2 merit points.
There were now pluses and minuses beside the base stat points. Naruto shrugged. If he had already spent this much time investing in the book, he would play along for a while longer.
He dumped all 15 of the base modifiers into his chakra control, as he had always been told that he needed to work on that because of his large chakra size. There was a prompt for confirmation, which he pressed.
"Urk" there was a burning sensation in Naruto's gut. It felt as though his chakra system was resorting itself out in the most painful way possible. The pain was gone as soon as it came and left Naruto gasping for breath.
"What the fuck is this thing?" Naruto said in between gasps for breath as he held onto the strange book. 'Wait… if this thing is real…'
Naruto put his hands together in cross formation and whispered out "shadow clone." There was soon a perfect replica of Naruto right next to the original, but that wasn't the cool part. What was the cool part was how it felt to spawn the clone. It was easier, vastly so. Not that it wasn't easy to begin with, but it was just the way that the chakra flowed inside of Naruto's body to create the construct of chakra that had him gaping at the book.
'This thing is real' he thought out in wonder.
Naruto reopened up the book and went to affinity section. He had 50 points and a lot of options to choose from. The blonde knew that his taijutsu sucked, but he didn't want to dump all the points into it just like he did with chakra control. So he decided to distribute it evenly across the genjutsu skill traits and the taijutsu skill traits. Leaving him with:
Genjutsu:
Learning rate 9/200
Detection 9/200
Dispel 8/200
Taijutsu:
Learning rate 28/200
Pain tolerance 33/200
Form 13/200
He pressed confirm, but didn't feel like anything of merit happened. There was no sudden pain in his gut, but that could easily be chalked up to him changing his affinity stats as opposed to his base stats.
He also had some merit points to do things with. Grinning with glee, he opened up the merit section to see what had been unlocked for him.
Not much, as it would seem. There were three boxes that had lost their dull gray color in favor of a light beige color. They read: sharingan (stage 1), affability, and medical ninjutsu.
Naruto wanted to immediately shove a merit point and get the sharingan, but held off at the mention of stage 1. Looking deeper into it, Naruto discovered that the sharingan had 5 stages in total. Stage 1, stage 2, stage 3, mangenkyou, and eternal mangenkyou. All of these had incredible powers associated with them, but they also had steeper and steeper requirements with each iteration. The eternal mangenkyou required Naruto to kill someone with the normal mangenkyou sharingan eyes, have 80 in almost all the base stats, and invest 10 merit points towards it. Naruto wasn't sure whether or not the investment in the first stages would be worth the investment in the latter stages, so he checked out the other merit points that were available to him.
Affability:
You are a nice and honest guy, who has a quality that makes people gravitate towards you.
Unlocks: 'What people think of you' in the people section
Pre-requisites: have 50 charisma.
Cost: 1 merit point.
That was a really good thing to have. He could find out how people think about him and change their perspectives. He tentatively put a point towards that. Naruto rationalized it as the fact that he could always choose the sharingan at a later date.
Medical ninjutsu:
You have enough chakra control that you can start the enrollment into the medical nin field.
Unlocks: 'medical ninjutsu' in the ninjutsu section.
Pre-requisites: have 20 chakra control
Cost: 1 merit point.
Naruto flashed back to the bridge. Sasuke was dying of various puncture wounds and Naruto couldn't do anything to help him. He knew that Sasuke was okay and just in a catatonic state after the battle, but he didn't want to feel that helpless ever again, and thusly put a point in towards it.
All the spendable points were gone. So Naruto headed over to the people section to find out how his teammates feel about him
Kakashi:
What (Kakashi) thinks of me: annoying
Sakura:
What (Sakura) thinks of me: annoying
Sasuke:
What (Sasuke) thinks of me: annoying, slightly grudging respect
Naruto's heart sank a bit at how Sakura thought of him.
'Wait a minute… this doesn't help me at all!' Naruto shouted out mentally. '*mental sigh* I should have gone with the sharingan.'
From the window in Naruto's room, he could tell that it was still dark out. His eyelids felt heavy. He had been having a strange night.
'It's probably a good idea to get some sleep'
Naruto put the book on the nightstand and hit the bed with a thud.
Slept took him almost instantly
Link: https://m.fanfiction.net/s/10252240/1/When-Signing-a-Contract-Always-Read-the-Fine-Print