Chapter 7: Fireworks Show
Following my second, more successful meeting with Kushina, things settled down into something of a pattern of improvement. With Tou-san's intense last-minute preparation, I successfully passed my Basic Instructor's level in Whirlpool fist, which allowed me to officially instruct up to (but not including) Basic Instructor level to anyone I chose.
This was about equivalent to, say, a 1st Dan (1st degree Black belt) on Earth. There was still more to learn, and much more to refine, but it showed basic expertise in the style and the trustworthiness to teach it to others. It was a pretty big deal; as Uzushio and the Uzumaki were official a military village and martial clan respectively, achieving certain levels of proficiency in any combat art came with an automatic rank in the reserves. In this case, it gave rank equivalent to a leading genin who would be 2nd in command of a 4-man genin cell, behind the traditional chunin or genin-corporal. Given my age and lack of other qualifications, I would officially be on “extended leave”.
Still, if I were to be going a traditional ninja route in a place like Konoha, and became, say, an elite-track genin under a jonin leader, it meant I would automatically be the superior of my team-mates (unless they had some similar qualification). The whole thing may be a bit silly from an outside perspective, but as a mark of respect and honor, it was a big deal.
I'd never have made it so fast without my prior understanding of martial arts; I mostly had to learn the Whirling-Fist kata and combinations and philosophy, then drill muscle memory rather than learn to move and strike in the first place. Even then, it took years of training several hours a day, much of it under a Expert Instructor and combat veteran, and in later months with my muscle-memory enhanced by my mental reinforcement.
The test itself was on the kata and techniques, as well as interpretations of how the kata were applied. There was also a physical capability test, and one of my chakra reinforcement and speed. Lastly, there was a spar against an Advanced Instructor; I didn't win, but did extremely well, especially given the size disparity.
Tou-san, pleased with my success, added knife-combat to our practices at my request, and showed how the kata and combinations were modified to account for both parties being at least somewhat armed. He told me that once I was proficient with these and had passed my Advanced Instructor's test that he would start me on swordsmanship.
Tou-san also decided that I was good enough at my manipulation and canteen-jutsu to start in on my next water technique, the water-clone. Water clones were pretty interesting, since they were about the same density as the jutsu-user, and had similar speed. Thus they made for a much more realistic distraction, since they sank into the ground a similar amount, sounded the same, and had little difference in movement compared with the original.
Compare this to other clones: Illusion clones didn't interact with the environment; a glance at the feet would show them for what they were, and they made no sound. Earth based clones tended to be very heavy, and sink into the ground. More esoteric clones tend to fall under one of these two categories too, either above or below the real user’s attributes. As a further, water clones would “bleed” for a bit if struck, unless so much damage was dealt that they disperse completely. Still, this could provide a split second of distraction that's needed, especially if the enemy relaxed thinking they had won.
The problem with water clones was that they were weak. While they were quick and fluid, they could not exert nearly the same maximum force on an object, and could explode if they hit something hard enough due to the shock wave. Water clones, like many other elemental clones, were also stupid. Unlike the shadow-clone of anime fame (kage-bushin), which came with an automatic duplicated intelligence, clones came with a set of commands. The greater your affinity, and the more chakra you put into them, the tougher the clones would be against shock, the longer they would last, and both more and more complex commands could be programmed. Higher affinity also helped with detail, making the clone look like the user.
Learning the clone jutsu wasn't hard. Learning how to program them, and making them a bit more lifelike in appearance, was a real challenge though. Right when I first started, most of my clones looked a bit creepy, somewhere in the “uncanny valley” along with mannequins and other humanoid objects. With time and training they improved, but while I could see the use in them, Water Clones were hardly the trump that I was looking for, and so I merely got them to an acceptable level. Eventually, I would develop or learn the shadow-clone technique for all my cloning needs. Instead, I spent a fair bit of time and focus on improving the replacement technique.
While a skilled sensor could sense it at a fair distance, and just about any jonin was skilled enough to sense the replacement if they were nearby, it was still a great way to avoid large scale attacks that were highly damaging or difficult to dodge. It was a relatively low chakra technique, and was a major precursor of the shunshin, or body flicker technique. That was definitely a technique worth mastering, especially if I could use a modified version to make me generally faster instead of just increasing burst-linear movement. I hoped that if I could get the replacement technique down to a single half-seal, or no seal at all, that Tou-san would teach me the flicker.
Eventually I reached my goal, and impressed with my dedication to the replacement technique, and satisfied with my adequate replacement technique, Tou-san showed me both the shunshin and the Mist Generation technique, similar to what Zabuza used in the fanfics I read all those years ago back on Earth. That said, Tou-san didn't train me in silent killing or anything, though I was learning some stealth stepping techniques in Whirlpool fist at the time.
Tou-san did talk about how to combine the jutsu with my natural sensor skills, and how the use the technique to create cover. It’s hard to hit what you can’t see, and the Mist Generation jutsu was great at quickly covering large areas in impenetrable fog. As a sensor, I had a massive advantage within it too, so long as my enemy wasn’t a sensor. Another use of the technique was for when the user was heavily outnumbered – the dense fog made it difficult to coordinate with allies, and allowed the user to turn a many-vs-one fight into a series of one-on-one engagements; if they were lucky, the enemies might even get hit by friendly fire.
Tou-san also mentioned I should ask Haruto-sensei for some help with my sensor skills, as he was apparently fairly proficient himself. Tou-san and I focused a fair bit on that technique while he was training me so that I could achieve anything from a heavy fog with minimal chakra traces to imitate a real one, all the way to a spooky cloud that was so impregnated with my chakra that even sensors would not be able to locate me within it, and that those with eye-based bloodlines would find it impenetrable.
What people often mistook about ninja-based training was that it wasn’t really designed to turn people into death-dealing combat gods. That was more the samurai’s deal. Think about the classic genin skills: body replacement (kawarimi), illusion clone (bunshin), self-anchored illusion (henge). None of those were remotely offensive. They werere all designed so that a kid can escape and evade a large number of chakra-less or low-chakra city guardsmen, militia, or low-ranking soldiers. The Mist technique was similar; it wasn’t meant to make me more deadly, it was meant to increase my survivability. And at that, it excelled.
As for my training with Kaa-san, I was learning all the seal-elements that made up the second level of seals, and developing my intuition as to how they interacted with each other. She also had me making custom explosion seals, determining the size, heat/light/concussive force mixture, color, and timing of the explosion. It was a lot of fun (who doesn’t love fireworks?) but actually fairly complicated.
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While they may have seemed simple, especially since Naruto had everyone tossing explosion seals about like confetti, your average explosion tag was anything but. Each one consisted of several separate sealing circuits combined into one whole seal. There was a main storage, which the user filled to power the seal. There was the indicator, that interacts with the main storage to indicate the seal was full and that the user should not feed the seal chakra unless they planned on activating the seal. Then there was the primer storage, which slowly empties; this was what the user fed a small bit of chakra when they planned on using the seal.
It turned out, the seal actually filled the primer when the user first filled the main power, so the seal needed a counter to detect whether it has been filled once (don't activate) or twice (do activate after the primer is empty); the primer emptying provided the fuse, so too thick a line there and the seal will literally take the user’s hand off. Then there was a feed circuit that took the chakra from the main storage and converted it to some combination of energies with some kind of bounding to make the explosion more potent within that space. And this was just for the most basic of explosion tags.
As a fun project, Kaa-san had me set up a fireworks show, after which she promised we would start in on functional sealing scrolls to store objects. I took full advantage of the ability to experiment, and wheedled Kaa-san into teaching me a number of second and even third level boundary seals to shape the explosions.
Among the tags I made, three were particularly applicable to combat. The first I made was a high intensity directed flame attack that was hot enough to burn through a quarter inch of steel plate at thirty feet. I called it the Dragon's Breath seal. It honestly wasn’t anything unique; other sealers had designed similarly motivated seals of similar efficacy, and Uzushio’s shops tended to stock a good variety for qualified buyers (eg, members of our military forces).
The second tag I made was a type of semi-persistent flash-bang seal that would continue making explosions within a bounded space around the seal; these explosions were loud enough to be slightly painful, and could be bright enough to blind for up to an hour at close range. The point of the seal was to make it impossible to fight for anyone without some kind of chakra-based sensing system; as a potent sensor, this would help me, and many Uzumaki with similar skills. This, I gave the rather innocent name of a Sparkler Seal.
The third seal was by far the most complicated yet elegant. It created a bounded chakra field, then condensed the field into a three dimensional spiderweb pattern. This pattern was then itself used as a circuit, and flowed through the seal to convert the nature of the chakra to make it closer and closer to fire until it exploded. It was by far the most advanced seal I designed, as it was essentially a seal that made the surrounding air itself into a second, temporary seal.
The cool thing about the seal was that it was extremely cheap in chakra costs, since the majority of the chakra came from the local environment. Also, because the spider-web shape, it would be extremely effective at causing damage with a small actual volume of effect being used to damage large objects (ie humans) in the overall area of effect.
The use of natural chakra, and the time that the seal persisted, made it extremely suited to landmines which trapped, fed on leaked enemy chakra, and killed the enemy, but also denied the area for anywhere between a half minute and five minutes, with larger fields lasting longer. It addressed a big issue with automatic land-mine style seals, which was a field could be cleared quickly by suicide-clones; with this, the field would still be cleared, but it would take a lot longer. Considering landmines were, much like on Earth, only really useful when supported by troops, that was fine. I called it the Spider's Seal.
Kushina and Haruto-sensei were invited to the show, as were a number of extended family members, and we ate cherries and these delicious sweet bean rice buns. Kushina was very taken with the idea of being able to make fireworks, and apparently demanded that whoever it is that was teaching her sealing begin instructing her. I felt kind of guilty at that; I wasn’t sure I was responsible enough to play with explosives, but Kushina sure as shit wasn’t.
Hikaru jii-san, my mother's father and a full-on sealing master, was quite impressed, and told me that he would start tutoring me after Kaa-san thought I was ready. Overall, the evening was a great success. The next morning, Kaa-san started me in on sealing seals (which I still think need some sort of better name. Sadly, dimensional subspace scrolls was both somewhat in-accurate and lengthy to say), and I went back to more conventional training.
The training with Haruto-sensei was not progressing as quickly. Learning to control the chains was kind of like learning to play the piano, but with dozens of individual fingers, all of which were new and had no reflexive kinesthetic sense. And, just to make everything a bit tougher, the piano keys were made of eggshells and couldn't be broken.
I think the analogy may have escaped me a bit, but suffice to say, it was hard.
I learned how to control a pair of chains first, and how to manipulate their motion and begin to refine their shape. Apparently I was doing well and learning quickly, but it was basically learning a set of highly complicated chakra control exercises, some at a fairly long range, while also learning how to use a whip-like weapon. It didn't play to any of my pre-established strengths, and my chakra control, while excellent for someone of my age and chakra reserves, was not so instinctual that it could simply overpower these issues.
I decided that my chains would significantly benefit from some correctly applied mental reinforcement, and began to focus on reinforcing the chakra memory reflexes. While significantly more difficult than the visual eidetic memory, it was not impossible. I achieved it a bit more than a week later by enhancing the sensation of the chakra-sense and combining it with mostly emotional memory reinforcement. Interestingly emotional memory seemed more linked to chakra control than other types of memory.
There was still the issue that I was making a lot of mistakes; I didn’t want to burn the wrong things into my memory, and needed to overcome that issue too. With my physical training, I could simply do the motion perfectly but slowly, then over time speed up, going faster and faster, burning the memory in again and again. But with chakra memory, that wasn’t an option.
To overcome that issue, I experimented. I found that by enhancing the short term memory constantly, I would have a perfect, temporary buffer of all my chakra manipulations. When I stopped reinforcing, and in fact scrambled it a bit, the memory of mistakes would fade. Then, whenever I did something correctly, I could flash-reinforce the long term memory.
I had achieved perfect chakra memory. The technique was pretty new, and hard for me to achieve, so I could only use it in general, methodical training until it became more automatic, something which would come with practice.
The chakra memory technique wasn't perfect, since there would still be residual information from my chakra sensing and personal state, but it massively accelerated my growth in chakra manipulation, especially for my chains, chakra control exercises and elemental manipulation exercises. It also helped with removing handsigns from jutsu so I could cast faster as well as using techniques one-handed while wielding a sword in my other hand.
By the end of the month, I had completed the intermediate levels of water and wind manipulation (basic, intermediate, advanced, expert, master), and could control two chains up to twenty meters (60 feet). The chains were still a bit crude, and very far from Haruto-sensei's masterpieces, but they did now look vaguely like chains, and I could make the edges sharper and serrated. The chains could also move fast enough to catch the average chunin. My chakra reinforcement improved a bit faster too, and I started seeing better gains from my meditations and exercises, which became easier to perform in the background.
Haruto-sensei, pleased and somewhat astounded at my progress, taught me the Bubble technique. Like the Canteen technique in Water, the bubble technique was a relatively simple one. It created a bubble of pure air around the user's head, banishing dust and other particulate matter. As the user got better, he could remove harmful gasses too, and the bubble would get larger and persist for longer. The bubble technique was commonly used as a precursor to the Air-shield technique which was particularly effective against fast moving projectiles, and the more advanced vacuum-shield technique which could reduce the severity of incoming fire and lightning attacks.
Haruto-sensei also began to teach me the advanced level of wind-manipulation which consisted of the Wind-flow techniques to use a wind-sheathe to sharpen projectiles. While I had not mastered them, my progress was extremely rapid, and Haruto sensei extremely impressed.
Overall, I was doing reasonably well, but still had a long way to go to meet my objectives.