Later on, when Yuta was sitting at his desk at home and thinking about his coming time-loop training session he heard someone knock on the door.

Yuta opened the door and saw Koichi outside.

“Sensei? Please come in” Yuta said surprised, as Koichi never visited him before.

As Yuta opened the door wider and let Koichi to come in, on his way in Koichi spotted Yuta’s right arm and froze for a second, then said, “Hm, transformation technique, isn’t it? This is an interesting application of it…” Koichi comes in and observes the room, it is clean and simple, and there almost no personal stuff there, only some scrolls on the side of the desk.

“Yea, I had an idea for it when I was cooking and it was inconvenient to do everything with only one arm, it’s a shame though that it doesn’t allow me to perform a hand seals this way.”

“Your room is so empty…” Koichi noticed.

“Yea, it’s not a lot of space here, so I store all my belongings in the sealing scrolls.”

“I have come to you to speak about the team-two” Koichi looked at Yuta after observing the room, “If I’m not mistaken you intend to continue your shinobi career despite the injury, right?”

“Of course I am” Yuta said surprised, “I admit that if someone like Hikari, who depends on the close combat would lost an arm, that would be a major problem, but I’m fine, I just have to learn how to perform a one-handed hand seals and I will be back at my full strength, isn’t that right?”

“That is good to hear” Koichi said relieved, “I knew that you would say that. Well, my true reason was to ask you how much time you will need to return to the team-two and resume your shinobi duties?”

“I think two months will be enough to re-train myself and get used to my new condition” Yuta said as he already thought about it, that will be a reasonable amount of time to ask in these circumstances.

“Good” Koichi nods, “Team-two will continue operate without taking a replacement, and we will be waiting for your return. If you need something, you always can find me on mornings at our training grounds when we not on a mission.”

“Understood, sensei”

After briefly checking on Yuta, Koichi left.

Soon after that someone else came knocking on the door, Yuta opened the door and saw Itachi and Hikari came to check on him.

“It’s you guys, come on in” Yuta said letting them in.

“Hey, how are you doing?” Hikari asked when they came in the room.

“I’m fine” Yuta replied to his gloomy-looking teammates, “Don’t worry about me, it’s not that big of a deal to be honest.”

While Itachi sighed, Hikari exclaimed annoyed, “What do you mean by not a big deal!? It’s your arm that is missing, you only had two of those and now one of them gone forever damned!”

“You are just exaggerating things” Yuta said with a smile, waving his right hand dismissively.

“You are…” Hikari interjected loudly, then froze looking at Yuta’s arm, “Wait a minute, how do you…”

“It should be a transformation jutsu” Itachi said calmly, “It seems that you are fine, Yuta, will you be still on our team?” Itachi looked at Yuta expectantly.

“Yea, I will return to the team-two after two months or so” Yuta said, while Hikari looked embarrassed by the fact that Itachi saw right through the transformation jutsu while she didn’t.

“That is good to hear” Itachi said.

After that Yuta had some small talk with them and they left.

For the rest of the day Yuta relaxed at home and analyzed his battle with Tatsuko, he was able to find many mistakes in his actions during the fight, if he were more careful, he wouldn’t lose an arm back then.

Yuta looked at his right arm made of chakra as he remembered his idea to develop a transformation into a bird to be able to fly. Strong shinobi can run faster than birds can fly, and there are a lot of jutsu that can be used to hit Yuta from the ground while he is transformed into the bird and flying, but even with all this it’s still a good jutsu idea.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

If Yuta would have enough time to fly higher into the sky to go out of range of the shinobi long-range jutsus, he can escape from any pursuit this way.

‘Well, bird transformation has to wait, the first priority is to restore the ability to create shadow clones of course.’

On the next day Yuta stayed at home and started to practice the shadow clone jutsu, trying to perform it with only one hand, every attempt is failing so far, and every time it costs a lot of chakra for Yuta.

‘I have used this jutsu hundreds of times and know how chakra should be molded, but now when I use one hand to form a hand seal, it guiding the chakra molding process only for the half of it, the other half of the chakra molding work I have to perform manually myself, and even a half of it is very complicated. It’s no wonder I was unable to do this jutsu without a hand seals before, even with one-handed seal it’s hard to do.’

With that days started to pass by, Yuta trying his best to master the shadow clone jutsu with one-handed seal, when he formed a horizontal cross-part with his left hand, but even the slightest mistake in the chakra molding process resulted in the jutsu failure.

With that training Yuta depletes his chakra quite quicky, and while he waits for his chakra to restore, he works on his fuinjutsu, studying the theory and trying to improve his existing seal designs.

After two weeks of unsuccessful tries, Yuta managed to create a shadow clone for the first time since he lost his arm, he stared at the shadow clone for a few seconds in surprise, that he finally managed to create it, even his shadow clone looked surprised.

“Sigh, finally!” Yuta exclaimed tiredly.

“Don’t celebrate early, it might have been just a coincidence.” Yuta’s clone interjected.

Yuta looked at his clone annoyed and dispelled him, and receiving his memory he become even more annoyed as the clone was just worried about his progress with the jutsu…

Yuta sighed calming down, and thought, ‘I need to relax a little, staying at home for two whole weeks training is making me easily irritable…’

With that thought Yuta went to the barbeque restaurant to have something to eat and spend the rest of the day resting.

On the next day, Yuta continues to mastering the shadow clone jutsu. After some unsuccessful attempts he managed to create another shadow clone.

Itachi and Hikari visited Yuta a few times checking on him, they spent some time talking about nothing or going to some restaurants.

Kochi visited him once more and told Yuta that they analyzed the poison, which was used on his right arm back then, and it turns out indeed a unique poison and general antidote was indeed inefficient against it. Koichi also gave Yuta money for the mission and the reward for Tatsuko’s body, as she was in the bingo book and after examining her body, village handled bounty claiming for her head, and Yuta received a two thirds of that sum of money which was 266k ryo as Tatsuko was listed in the bingo book with the prize of 400k ryo.

After one more week he managed to create a shadow clone every time. Now that he doesn’t waste a lot of chakra on fail attempts, the process of gaining mastery over the jutsu went better, and by the end of the month Yuta creating the shadow clones as easily as before with both hands.

With that out of the way Yuta decided to develop the bird transformation technique next. He went to the training ground 44, also known as the forest of death, there is a lot of wild creatures there, and Yuta wanted to find and observe a suitable bird to transform in to. As he is not allowed to leave the village and wander around in the nature, the forest of death is the best place for this.

Yuta moved through the tree branches high above ground, being cautious as there are a lot of wild creatures here that can attack him. Yuta created two shadow clones that scattered in different directions with the same purpose.

After a day of wandering through the forest of death, Yuta observed a lot of birds and picked a best option for his bird transformation – a black eagle.

‘Well, it’s not a lot of suitable options, I need a big bird that can fly fast, the most suitable option that I spotted in this forest so far is an eagle. It’s the biggest bird around here, and seems it’s fly speed is good enough.’

On the next day Yuta returned to the forest of death and after a few hours of hunting he managed to hunt down an eagle, hitting it with a kunai from the distance.

Then Yuta thoroughly examined its body, getting familiar with its structure.

After that Yuta starts trying to transform into an eagle. First attempts showed that while he was able to transform his body into a bird, his senses, especially vision became different than he used to. The field of vision is different, Yuta’s vision becomes clearer, and he is able to see much further away, but at the same time the image had less color in it, and overall, the sight made Yuta dizzy.

When he tried to move in the bird form, he instantly stumbled and fell, helplessly flipping his wings. After a few more attempts Yuta thought, ‘As I thought, getting used to the bird form needs time.’

Yuta continued trying to get used to the bird form. After a few days he gets used to the senses and movements on the ground. After one more week Yuta managed to glide from the high trees with little maneuvers in the air, and by the end of the second month after he returned to the village, he managed to fly on his own in the eagle form.

After learning how to fly Yuta immediately started to gain more altitude and fly higher and higher in to the sky, flying in a random direction, crossing the village border and fuinjutsu barrier that immediately send a signal to the barrier team, informing the village that chakra signature that belongs to Yuta left the village.

But Yuta doesn’t care at all about those things as he enjoys his first proper flight. After enjoying himself for a few hours flying in random direction, Yuta’s chakra was almost depleted.

‘Well, that was fun! But it seems that my current chakra reserves are not enough to fly long distances, this complicated transformation drains a lot of it to maintain. I feel like there is still a room for improving it and make it less chakra-intense though.’

Yuta thought while enjoying the view of the sunset in the distance, and the view of the clouds that are below him.