Chapter 6: Meeting the Firecracker

After our eventful meeting, Haruto-sensei explained what exactly it was that he'd be teaching me. It turned out, as I'd somewhat discovered, that the “Chains” didn't normally take the shape of “chains” at all, but were normally basically whips or tentacles. The “chain” shape was actually a chakra-conservation technique; since the holes didn't include chakra, it allowed us to make the chains longer.

This fell into the first category of chains-training: manipulation. This was also used to make the chains pointed, sharper, barbed, or smooth depending on how the target should be restrained or destroyed. Manipulation further covered how quickly the chains moved, and what motions they used to strike.

Beyond manipulation, there were a few other training categories too. The second category of chains training was manifestation. This included how dense the chains were, their overall length, and overall cross-sectional volume, all of which were typically constant for all chains in use at a time. Advanced users were eventually able to manifest two or more different types of chain.

Manifestation further covered the chakra balance in the chains. Higher amounts of Yang made the chains stronger, tougher, while higher amounts of Yin made them more fluid and easier to manipulate. Since I had comparatively high levels of Yin, especially for an Uzumaki, I was expected to have an unusually high level of control. Manifestation also included how quickly the chains were generated, and how much chain was generated. A large number allowed greater effect, but over a smaller volume for the same chakra expenditure compared to a single longer chain.

The third category of training was channeling. This was how the “Sealing” chains work, as well as chains that used elemental chakra flow. Channeling was important too if they were being used to do something like restrain Bijuu, and high levels of channeling expertise could allow users to make their chains resistant to enemy elemental chakra flow techniques. The most basic level of channeling was to only allow the user's chakra to exist within the chains; this prevented the enemy from using a shock jutsu or similar. At a higher level, the chains could also be used to drain an enemy, allowing the free flow of chakra that is either the users, or uncontrolled and elementally neutral.

Lastly, there was combat training. Or, how to combine manipulation, manifestation and channeling together to block enemy techniques, and slice, tear, crush or capture as desired.

Haruto-sensei was primarily a wind user, and would be training me in how to use what he called the razor wires, his signature technique. Haruto's technique used super-dense, very fine chains only as thick as some thin wire. He then used an advanced level of wind chakra flow to make the wires even sharper, and high levels of manipulation to control the rigidity on the fly to strike fluidly and viciously but with a strong cutting edge.

Haruto demonstrated his technique by cutting a line through the foliage of an oak tree; dozens of branches, some as thick around as my arm, were cut in a moment. He showed off the piercing version of his style too, driving a handful of wires through about a meter of rock before they separated and spun, cutting a whirlpool symbol into it. I was, as you may imagine, extremely impressed. If I could learn this, I would be much stronger. Haruto had my full attention, and found me an apt pupil.

My training schedule was modified to account for those lessons. He would come twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I would visit on Saturdays to take classes with both him and Kushina. Apparently training the chains was dangerous, and so we would not be training the chains actively together until we had both achieved greater levels of control. Other days, I was expected to spend an average of one and a half hours practicing with the chains.

This meant that daily, I did the following (note that Uzushio typically ran a day based off of dawn, but for convenience I'll assume that that is at about six in the morning):

6 am: Wake up. 30 minutes of meditation, then starting the chakra building exercises and meditations while going through a set of stretches for the day ahead.

7 am: Eat breakfast with the parents.

7:30 am: Start morning with physical focused training, including katas and conditioning and physical chakra techniques. Frequently train with Tou-san.

10:00 am: Finish physical training, eat a snack and start elemental and chakra control training.

11:00 am: Finish elemental and chakra control training. Wash up.

11:30 am: Find Kaa-san, train seals.

1:00 pm: Lunch.

1:30 pm: Continue learning from Kaa-san. Sometimes work on history or theoretical knowledge beyond seals.

5:00 pm: Train chains until it gets too dark to continue, either alone or with Haruto-sensei.

6:30 pm: Eat a snack. Personal training indoors, especially chakra control and growth exercises and meditations. Practice mental reinforcement.

8:00 pm: Dinner. Tou-san was often still on shift (2-10 pm most days).

8:45 pm: Bed. Meditate on my own chakra, and on keeping the link between mind and spirit. Focus on planning sneaky or cunning or creative ways to get more powerful, or weapons concepts I could introduce and how to achieve those concepts on a large enough scale to matter.

10:00 pm: Fall asleep.

This schedule kept up until the weekend. I continued to focus on my mental reinforcement, and began making progress in identifying what part of the brain interacts with what type of thought, and how much reinforcement effected it. I could significantly, if not hugely, speed up my reaction time in general. I could also enhance my hearing to an extent. It was more of a “enhance the processing of the audible sounds you hear” than actually enhancing my hearing though; the latter would be extremely dangerous with loud noises. Instead, this made everything a lot sharper and clearer.

While useful, it was far from the holy grails that I was searching for: eidetic memory, increased logical processing speed, improved intuition, enhanced muscle memory adaptation and enhanced chakra memory adaptation. With those I would be able to grow several times faster in physical combat, practical and theoretical sealing knowledge, and chakra manipulation.

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Less important, though still an eventual goal, was a combat mode consisting of mental and physical reinforcement paired with the release of a combat-cocktail of adrenaline and other drugs that I hoped would be similar to opening the first gates, if less permanently risky to my chakra coils. I had no other way beyond shadow-clones that I could think of in the scarce years I had to prepare, and so had to succeed. I endured headaches, phantom pains, even a small seizure all for my goal.

Perhaps influenced by my irritation at my continued slow progress and the pain it had caused, I was not as “on the ball” as I should have been meeting Kushina. While her importance to the canon plot had likely changed due to me and butterflies, she was still the Clan-head's niece, and had enough promise to manifest the chains even at such a young age. If she showed any promise in sealing, and I suspected she would, she would be a fairly strong candidate for next clan head despite her gender.

On the other hand, when I was introduced to her, she acted the absolute brat. Alternatively whiny, petulant, demanding, argumentative and loud, when she wasn't being more than one at once, she basically acted the way I should have expected. Here she was, five years old, told how special and clever she was to have unlocked the chains at such a young age, how it showed her excellent breeding. Somewhat more sheltered by her parents than I, due to a combination of parental preference and the demands of my genius, and spoiled due to her station, this was a predictable reaction to me, an interloper.

So there I was, suddenly taking her Haruto-jisan's attention, having become more special by unlocking the chains at an even younger age. Not only that, but I had already passed the Apprentice Sealer qualifications, and, unbeknown to me, was being hailed as the hard-working prodigy of the Uzumaki for the speed at which I learned and observations of my training. I was mature and cool and collected even though I was younger than she. In short, I challenged Kushina's childish world-view and her self image.

And so I should have anticipated that she would somewhat explode at me after I told her to “Calm down, Firecracker,” when she was being overly loud and aggressive. Suffice to say, the day's training was delayed while a long-suffering Haruto dealt with her emotions after excusing me for the day.

In my defense, she was driving me a bit nuts. I wanted to grab her and shake her, tell her that she had a duty to her family, our clan, our village and nation. That her very existence may have doomed us; so closely related to Mito-sama, with the sealing chains, able to breed and likely to develop an attachment to Konoha, especially if Uzushio were destroyed.

I had no trust for the leaf; for Uzushio, with all our seals to fall, and our ally to be absent? And, if I remembered correctly, there may even have been Root ANBU taking part in the assault. For this brat, this brat that so happily accepted the platitudes of Konoha and allowed herself, allowed Uzushio, everything I valued there, my family, to be sacrificed, burned, destroyed for paltry benefit to those two-faced bastards, those scum in human skins? And for this child, the potential cause of so much misery and suffering, to be such a brat?

Well, it may not have been mature, but I had few fucks to give and threw myself back into training.

The next week of training went well. I made a conceptual breakthrough in both sealing and my mental reinforcement, on the same day to boot. I started to get a good sense just as my day's seals training was coming to an end on how the seals might combine, something which was still on my mind when I later moved onto my mental reinforcement.

I realized that the best way to enhance my mind to achieve things like eidetic, or at least improved, visual memory was to improve the memory region, the visual signal, and the aid the transfer and permanence between the two. Basically, I was looking at parts of the brain as functional elements, and reinforcing those that were responsible for certain cognitive tasks. After that week of practice, I could take mental photographs and videos, and even link in my chakra sensing.

That wasn't the week's only progress. As mentioned, I also achieved level one seals intuition. When Kaa-san tested me, she was so proud she got teary, and almost cracked a rib she hugged me so hard (no, seriously, I had to reinforce it). As a more material bonus, I got my own dictionary with the first level of seals unlocked. Dictionaries only unlocked depending on intuitive understanding as a safety measure; the fact that I had one may have been a record.

As a note, despite the intuition, the dictionary was still pretty crucial. Intuition only meant that the user had a very good idea on how to combine symbols that they already knew to get a specific result. In a computer programmer, it would be like knowing how to write code without bugs. Considering a sealing “bug” could kill the practitioner, that was pretty critical. But the dictionary was what had the full list of symbols and their information to use. It also let a user take a completed seal (done via intuition), and then back-track, checking that the practitioner hadn’t missed anything. The reason that the Uzumaki were such unbeatable sealers was the combination of the deep theoretical background available in the dictionaries, and the individual intuition as a result of the bloodline.

After Kaa-san told me how hard it is to achieve that kind of intuition, and so quickly too, the thought passed my mind that all this reinforcement mucking about, especially combined with how I'd been spending so much time practicing seals, might have resulted in pools of available spiritual chakra being re-purposed to modify my mind to be even more suited towards sealing.

That, or I was just that badass (or, more likely, it was a remnant artifact of having touched on some deeper truths while reincarnating). I was happy with any of those options.

Either way, after a test on Thursday I was suddenly Uzushio's newest sealing Initiate, the term for someone with intuition on first-level seals. Second-level and above, for reference, were titled “Adepts”, with Fourth-level being “Experts” and Sixth-Level “Masters”. Eighth level or above were Grandmasters; only a half dozen Uzumaki were recorded as becoming Grandmasters in so many centuries.

There was chatter that at that rate I might be the next Grandmaster sometime in my lifetime. Either way, I brought myself and my parents, especially my mother, a lot of honor. Tou-san got off shift early and we went out for a special celebratory dinner.

Of course, in his typical, endearing competition with Kaa-san as to who could train me better, he announced that he thought I was ready to test for my Basic Instructor's level in Whirling-Fist and then start in with weapons. I was so happy, both due to my parents' pride and my own progress that I was still wearing the smile two days later for my second “joint-training session”.

I'd reflected a bit, on why that first meeting with Kushina went so poorly, and was a bit disappointed in myself. She may have been a bit of a bratty kid, but I understood her circumstances. It was also totally unfair for me to blame her for what I estimated to be Konoha's actions in an alternate time-line. I endeavored to make our second meeting better than the first, and immediately bowed and asked her forgiveness. From the surprise on her face, it was like I had done a full dogeza (formal Japanese kneeling prostration).

She was so taken aback, blushing and stammering that I couldn't help but chuckle, which of course irritated her again. Somewhat panicked, I said the only thing I could think of.

“Sorry, Firecracker-princess, but your blushing is just a bit cute!” Of course, I used the ambiguous kind of language that meant it could be “cute like how a kitten is cute”, but also “attractive”; this sent her into another paroxysm of blushing and stammering that I couldn't say that and she wasn't ready to be married like in the stories and she didn't know me and I hadn't saved her from an evil dragon. Haruto, off to the side, could barely contain himself.

And that is the tale of my first and second meetings with Kushina, the Firecracker, or, as she'd later be come to be known, the Fireworks.