Chapter 3: Childhood Preparations, pt. 1

Time passed, and I as I turned 3 I grew mentally, physically, and in my budding ninja skills. I should point out, Uzushio didn't really have many “ninja”. We had clan-guard who were primarily responsible for home and territorial defense (think ninja mixed with samurai), seal-masters and sealers who were responsible for all sealing work and frequently paid missions to perform sealing for others, retinue-guard who protected sealers on missions and were probably the closest to other village's ninja, and the Shadows who were somewhat similar to Konoha's ANBU.

Still, I called them “ninja” skills, since to the rest of the world, that is what those skills were. Though samurai, monks, and even some peasant families were chakra active, the ninja were the flashiest. Samurai tended to focus on refining a few less flashy techniques for killing; beyond that, their talents were typically only seen on the battlefield, or by other samurai or their own servants when practicing. The general population had little chance to see samurai using techniques because of that. Similarly, monks generally disdained flashy use of chakra as a religious matter, and the most impressive monks were typically semi-isolated in their monasteries.

Ninja, on the other hand, could be and often were hired for even relatively low-level tasks such as repairing flood-damaged fields, dealing with chakra-enhanced beasts and bandits, escorts, and the like. Unlike samurai and monks who avoided showy displays in front of the peasants and merchants, ninja loved to show off. It was a great advertisement, after all. And so, over time, chakra-skills became more colloquially known as “ninja” skills.

Tou-san moved me onto both general physical training as well as proper martial arts training in the Whirling Fist, Uzushio's general military combat style. The style was a pretty interesting one, and fit my own previous experiences well. It emphasized out-fighting (fighting at relatively longer range) for both striking and grappling or Aikido style techniques; this made perfect sense considering most enemies, especially enemy ninja, had hidden weapons or crippling-strike close combat techniques. A Muay-Thai style clench could lead to a half dozen stabs to the gut; such an outcome was not exactly the best way of surviving a fight, let alone winning it.

Whirling Fist strikes focused on soft targets for knuckle strikes, especially at the lower levels. Seal-masters needed good manual dexterity, Uzumaki tended to live for a long time, and knuckle conditioning tends to make people highly arthritic by their forties. That combination meant knuckle conditioning, and thus hard knuckle striking, was contraindicated. Instead, harder targets were struck with hammer strikes, and there was a lot of conditioning for the arms to use a hard-blocking style.

Kicks tended to be low and practical, with a lot of training on how to change target from a kick already in motion, presumably to help prevent enemy knife-wielders from managing to slice the leg up. The grappling was more similar to Aikido and longer-distance jujitsu techniques. The style further frequently used circular motions and force-redirection to present a good target or opening for comrades when fighting in formation. It tended not to result in long grapples, but more positioning a joint to be struck, or moving the body to open up a target by unbalancing the enemy.

Overall, I’d describe the style as somewhat conservative, defensively prioritizing minimizing the practitioner’s openings and danger rather than focusing on offensively breaking the opponent. Attacks tended to be fairly opportunistic, counter-attacking and exploiting openings brought out by the defensive maneuvers.

We had not yet moved on to weapons, though the physical training for the sword had become somewhat more intense. Tou-san was so impressed by my progress that he was actually a little worried; I heard him talking to Kaa-san that I was learning things amazingly quickly, and my pain resistance was intense, so much so that he had to be careful not to push hard, like he might with a normal kid. Knowing I had high pain resistance came from blocking training.

There are several different types of blocking in martial arts, but most can be boiled down to five philosophies. And this wasn’t just on Earth, or Chakyu – this is a more universally applicable analysis. Any good combat style will use all of them, given the right circumstances, but will emphasize some, and personal preference plays a part in how effective these methods are as well as which sub-styles a practitioner focuses on. These are:

1) Tank, or being so physically tough you can take the hit and move through it. There is actually a lot of timing involved with such an approach; if you move into a hit at the right time, you can easily rob it of 60-80% of the total impact, and damage the balance of your opponent. Typically, you are then at an in-fighting distance, and by striking first, can begin a real beat-down. Once inside the enemy’s engagement range, a tank tends to stick, keeping distances totally minimal, hitting hard and grappling viciously while preventing the enemy from building distance and recovering. This style is much riskier when weapons are involved.

2) Dodge, or, don't get hit in the first place. A lot of the time, this means being an out-fighter, staying at the edge of where they can and can't hit you, dodging the strike, and countering. Done properly, you can inflict damage at no cost to yourself, and frequently combined with parry-blocks which put enemies minimally off-line. Highly effective if you are fast and have a light build, this was my own favored strategy, and it worked well when your enemy may have some instant-death-touch jutsu.

3) Hard Blocks are the idea that a block is also an attack. It relies on conditioning the bones that you use to block, and making the blocking motions both fast and heavy. It tends to mesh most easily with Tanking, but can be combined with dodging without too much difficulty. You could see it in Earth martial arts like Goju-Ryu. One such block, to block a punch, involved at a basic level trying to break through their wrist using your own wrist in a block. At an even higher level, you might move forward and block at a joint like the elbow, breaking that.

The conditioning though was brutal; I'd forgotten how learning it on earth, the first time when I was 13, my arms were a constant bruise for six months until the holidays. The first day, when doing the conditioning sucked; I (like anyone) developed bruises over the practice, but just kept going. A week later though, everything started off sensitive and just got so much worse. Bruises on bruises on bruises over totally raw nerves until eventually those nerves start to die off and the practitioner starts to lose pain sensitivity in those conditioned areas.

If you haven't guessed yet, Whirling Fist loved techniques like that, spinning around an attack, building momentum, and counterattack-blocking before the enemy could withdraw; suffice to say, Dad was super-impressed at my resilience and willingness to continue practice.

4) Soft Blocks are just what they sound like. Think Tai-chi or Aikido. These are good for redirection, but a sufficiently stronger enemy with enough skill and experience against your style tended to break through as they learned to anticipate the pattern of force application they needed to use to deflect much of the parrying force. Parry-blocks fall under this category too, but I have yet to come across a hand-to-hand combat style which didn’t include parry blocks, so they are not stylistically definitive. Although I liked the concept of soft blocks, and combined with chakra they could be effective, they were generally not used within Whirling-Fist unless part of a dodge.

5) Trapping Blocks are designed for grapplers, though are very effective for a striker when used against kicks. A trapping block tries to gain control of a limb after a strike, often leading into grappling. While Whirling-Fist had some grappling, it is not emphasized. Sando, an Earth Chinese military martial art, had some great kick-traps though, that were otherwise similar to the types of blocks in hard/tank styles such as some karate variants and Muay-Thai. I was including those blocks into my own style, mostly because it was really satisfying to catch a kick on the rebound and then literally toss my suddenly off-balance and helpless opponent.

So, like I said, Whirling-Fist was mostly a combination of striking with dodging and hard-blocks, and a bit of longer-distance redirection joint techniques. It involved brutal conditioning, though not of the precious hands (which could become single-touch death when at a sufficient sealing level). At my urging, and continued adherence to the training schedule, Tou-san had me doing the conditioning at the best rate for a kid my age and with my recovery rate.

The problem with this kind of conditioning was that if taken just a little too far, it could damage the body faster than I could recover, resulting in problems like spongy and fragile bones (a nasty issue that those who did a lot of running back on Earth could get in their shins). Kaa-san wasn't super happy, but gave in when she realized that it was at my own demand.

When they asked me why, I told them: “Kaa-san, Tou-san, this world is dangerous. I will be powerful, and have to fight, like both of you. The more I sweat and bleed now, the less likely I am to fail later. I will have no regrets.” They were pretty speechless at this, and then both hugged me really, and I do mean really, overly, obnoxiously, tight. Kaa-san was, I think, a little teary, and mumbling something I didn't catch. But still, family love for the win. Suffice to say, my training continued, and was speckled with all the tips and tricks to improve my efficiency, both in training and combat, that Tou-san could give.

I think that’s something important to recognize and emphasize. I wasn’t training to go on the US karate competition circuit, or to stay fit, or against the tiny risk that I might one day be mugged. No, I was training for the eventual surety that I would be serving in our military, fighting for my life against other super-human warriors. I knew it. Tou-san and Kaa-san knew it. And that knowledge, well, it was a pretty good motivator.

After that conversation, Tou-san also started me on external chakra control and internal chakra reinforcement. I could do bark-sticking (Uzumaki's had more chakra, so leaf-sticking was actually kind of hard), and when focusing could tree-walk. We were working on leaves and unconscious tree-walking, and after I could water-walk Tou-san said he'd start me on some water-jutsus and water-elemental manipulation (his affinity).

Tou-san also began the basics of chakra reinforcement. At it's most basic, you could flood an area with chakra, making it stronger. Although I was a chakra beast even for an Uzumaki due to my exercises, even a Jinchuriki would get tired using that to maximize power. At a slightly higher level, you could enhance specific tissues such as bones, making them tougher, or muscles to make them stronger or faster, and by using beams or columns of chakra rather than pools, enhance them in a certain direction further increasing efficiency. Intention was important with Chakra, and as I trained my chakra to react to my intention, I would be able to control whether the enhancement was more for speed, or power, or toughness.

It turned out that the rapid-chakra internal flow technique (something that I luckily practiced so much that it had become automatic) actually gave a bit of a bonus to everything, but meant that maximum exertion drained energy a bit faster since I was technically able to go at a higher level. My chakra volume, density and vitality were sufficient for it to be worth it though, as the only real way to use techniques like this in combat with other buffing techniques was to make it automatic.

Plus, it meant that if I fought at a level equivalent to what would be (without internal-flow) 100%, I only drained energy like I was fighting at 90% of the flow-less levels. In other words, it allowed me to go all out at a boosted level for a relatively minor cost, but also made me efforts in general more efficient. Apparently it also made it harder to put me under a genjutsu, as the genjutsu would have to match that high circulation speed or it would jar against my chakra system. For the purpose of making my non-circulatory chakra enhancement combat-effective, Tou-san had me practicing enhanced punches, blocks, kicks, and movements with the chakra reinforcement to make the reinforcement faster, more efficient, and most important an unthinking instinct when I need to use it.

That involved a lot of work.

There’s a saying that it takes ten thousand repetitions to make something instinctive. For example, ten thousand jab-cross combinations will make a jab-cross fast and automatic. To build up a full personal combat style back on Earth typically required something on the order of ten different kicks and about forty punches, blocks and counters, another twenty pieces of footwork, dodges and rolls, and a dozen throws, grapples, and escapes. Overall, with transitions, a practitioner typically required on the order of a million technique repetitions. And that was after they could do all of those hundred or so motions semi-perfectly and had picked out the techniques that worked for them.

I needed that same number of repetitions, but every one required different chakra enhancements. Different balances of which muscle was getting how much energy in which pattern. How that meshed with the movement, combined into an ass-kicking technique. It was involved, and even with hours of practice every day I knew it would be years before I was at a skill level that I was happy with. I loved it though, the complexity and difficulty of turning my body into a fine-tuned machine. But best of all was the beauty when everything came together.

Kaa-san too was starting to train me at an enhanced level. By the age of three, I could read about as well as a 12 year old, and could read basic seals (my handwriting wasn't quite good enough, according to Kaa-san, to write them yet). Part of this was that I already knew concepts, all I had to do was learn the word itself and the symbol (I truly loathed having a logographic rather than phonetic writing system). Part of this was my own genius, and the crazily flexible mind of a child.

And part of this was the unflagging efforts of Kaa-san. I knew about different inks, and brushes, and most of the technical aspects behind at least the most basic seals. And all of those inks, brushes and the like were crucial, as they effected the conductivity and charge of chakra in the seal. Kaa-san even started me on the small, fine-scale chakra control needed to be able to chakra-etch seals at a touch (and eventually even a distance with a variant of chakra-strings), doing so without using ink or brush at all.

Seals had three important aspects. The first was territory: seals could be used to define a space wherein a certain effect would occur, or a point at which it started. This could be the blast zone for an explosive seal, maximum object size of a space-sealing one, or persistent effect zone for a ward. The next was condition identification. A lot of the time, this was as simple as “chakra has been pulsed into the seal” for an explosion seal's countdown, but could be more complex like “object generating chakra smaller than 10cm by 5cm by 5cm is within the defined territory” for an anti-vermin ward (a huge seller on ships and for warehouses, by the way).

The last aspect was the effect, which was normally some combination of converting, modifying and directing energy. The effect was one of the things about seals that was just so damned awesome, since it could be basically anything. Teleportation or very fast travel? Sure, though difficult and generally pretty expensive chakra-wise. Sealing? Trapping Bijuu was actually, relatively easy in a lot of ways given that they are just sentient chakra. The trick was keeping them trapped. Explosions? Healing chakra converters (totally necessary for Uzumaki medics with their large reserves)? Genjutsu jammers? All of these were possible. And all had dozens of different, already discovered seal formulations in the clan and village libraries.

The hard part about seals was that they don't really fit into a conventional wisdom. Part invocation of oriental divine and abstract entities, part analogue to chakra's version of electrical-engineering, part computer-program, part absurdly advanced and obscure physics (especially for dimensional effects) and part art, there was a reason few villages had more than one or two seal masters. You had to have some sort of natural talent for it, an intuition that allowed the sealer to go beyond what could be calculated or even inferred. Thankfully, the Uzumaki bloodline seemed to have some natural predilection for seals that in any other place would result in being protected as a national strategic interest. Even among my fellows though, I was (somewhat unsurprisingly) a genius.

I'm not sure if it was Kaa-san's exposing me to seals so early, or my own natural intelligence and knowledge boosting my biological tendencies, or the fact that I had passed beyond the veil of our limited understanding of reality, or my exposure to hundreds of different magical systems, many geometrical, in fiction I had read in the past, but I just got seals. And I did so faster than anyone Kaa-san had heard of.

There was a set of sealing dictionaries, some of the greatest protected secrets of Uzushio. Seriously, I think the security seals checked my soul, and I was sure that there were some checking the body and even mind for any spying devices, based on conceptual understandings of observation. If you think about it, that means the sealers used quantum mechanics just in the security seals. I also knew that the dictionaries checked sealing understanding, and wouldn’t allow access to levels that weren't already understood. Seal masters could get super squirrelly when they got paranoid, and the protection of these was the province of the most paranoid of the seal-masters, past and present.

These dictionaries were linked to the master dictionary, and were kind of like an advanced Wikipedia about the seals you had access to. It describes general usage of characters and sub-seals, some seals they were incorporated into, deep information (like celestial and elemental alignment, dimensional polarization, and chakra orientation) and known interactions with other sealing components.

Suffice to say, Kaa-san had access to her own, personal, version, with the standard protections. Her dictionary contained all level one and level two sealing elements, as well as level three and four sealing elements concerning detection and abjuration warding, Kaa-san's specialty. As a note, the dictionaries had nine levels. For perspective, Minato's Hiraishin, as a super-efficient distance-ignorant teleportation technique, might rank as a level six seal in its entirety. Most components would rank as level four or below.

Level eight was for things like summoning greater gods; in other words, with access to a level eight sealing dictionary, you could build a custom divine summoning seal. No one even talked about what level nine seals can accomplish, and I didn't want to know; it seemed like the kind of knowledge that might be capable of noticing you for knowing it. So, Kaa-san's level two/four dictionary was pretty damned respectable, especially given her age. She was expected to become at least a candidate to make sealing master in the future.

What was cooler though, was she'd officially made me her apprentice. I passed the basic exam (thankfully not public, really didn't need that attention), and was written into her book as her apprentice, giving me access to seals which she thought appropriate (sadly, still somewhat lacking – I wouldn’t be breaking reality anytime soon). Still, they were so much fun to play with. I was basically on the sealing equivalent of writing “hello world” programs, but learning very quickly. I mean, hell, I was three. By age eight, I expected to be able to write my own original strategically useful seals at that rate.