The next day Roen was up bright and early as he cooked breakfast. Afterwards I went to train with Imoto, but he was gone. Suki told me he had grabbed all available missions and went on his way, which meant we were free to do whatever for the next few days. Dee heard this and decided to relax and read. Roen heard this news and to my surprise asked me to train with him. I decided why not.

Roen then asked, “Do you have any experience with hand to hand combat?”

I answered, “No. And I’m not too experienced with chakra either in case you were wondering.”

After a moment of thinking he replied, “Good. No chakra use. We can focus on basic hand to hand. I have little knowledge of non-lethal styles and I think it would be good practice for both of us.”

“I’ve never fought. Ever. So, I’m not sure how this is gonna work.”

“That is why I chose you over Dee. Your inexperience means you will fight similar to targets that warrant non-lethal methods.”

“So what should I do?”

“I will try to subdue you. You should attempt to punch me while also not being subdued.”

“Subdue me how?”

“Grabbling.”

“Uh…”

“Stay still. I will demonstrate slowly.”

Roen then walked up to me. He put an arm on my back and said, “A common tactic in grappling is a takedown. For instance, if I perform a leg trip like so,” Roen then slowly used one of his legs to lift one of mine off the ground and continued, “you will be taken down to the ground.”

Since he had his hand on my back, I didn’t fall all the way to the ground. He then pushed me back up and backed away. Okay, he will try to take me down and I just need to prevent that and try to punch him.

Getting the gist of it, I said, “Alright, I think I got it.”

Roen nodded and said, “When I say begin, come at me.”

I got ready by putting my arms up in a mock boxing stance. Roen crouched a bit and put his arms up loosely. After a moment he yelled, “Begin!”

Knowing that Roen was most likely faster and stronger, I cautiously approached him. We slowly walked towards the center of the clearing and once we were close I decided to throw a light right hand jab towards his nose. For a moment I was worried I might actually hit him full on, but he quickly grabbed my right arm and sweeped my right leg from behind. He then pushed my chest with his other hand which caused me to fall on my butt.

Once I hit the ground, Roen pushed me to my back and sat on my chest. He pinned my arm left with his knee and said, “You're subdued. When you feel that you cannot escape, simply say, ‘Yield’ and we will start again.”

For a moment he kept sitting there, until I realized that included now, so I said, “I yield.”

Roen then helped me up while saying, “Do not be afraid to hurt me. Throw your punches at full speed and strength. For practice we should simulate the battle environment as much as possible.”

Looking at the scars on Roen’s body, I am not sure I completely agree. But I understand the sentiment. My punch was slow with little power and I was a bit afraid of actually hitting him. Once we got back up and got ready, Roen had us start again.

This time once we were close enough I threw a right hand jab as quick as I could. Instead of grabbing my arm he dodged and proceeded to sweep me to the ground and pin me down. I yielded and while helping me up, he told me how to improve my jab. Simple things like taking a step forward as I punch and keeping my elbow pointed down before the punch so I don’t signal that I am about to punch. The next few rounds were similar with me throwing a punch and Roen taking me down then explaining how to improve.

Eventually I was able to change it up a bit. After throwing my jab, I crouched down and widened my stance preparing to stop Roen’s usual sweep. It sorta worked as he failed to lift my leg off the ground completely. Since I was so close, I was able to land a quick uppercut on his stomach. Roen barely grimaced as he hooked both his arms around my legs. He then lifted my right knee up and kinda pushed against my left knee. The imbalance combined with Roen’s strength had me fall to my side and soon Roen pinned me on the ground again. I yielded and Roen told me how to protect against that double leg takedown he did.

We continued practicing with most of the time being spent by Roen showing me how to throw a punch properly and how to protect against all the takedowns he was doing. I was only able to land a few punches and most of the time they were light glances that barely affected Roen. By the time it was noon, I was tired and hungry, so we had a break for lunch.

Dee seemed to have left the camp, so lunch was just me and Roen. After a hefty lunch, Roen wanted to get right back to training. This time after he would take me to the ground, Roen would try to get me in holds or chokes. The practice turned into a weird sort of wrestling match. It was a learning experience for me. I learned how to put someone to sleep, which actually involved pressing arteries on the neck and not suffocation. There were also a slew of positions and methods I learned about when fighting on the ground.

After a while we called it a day and had dinner. Dee was back and had come back with a large amount of firewood and some foraged food. Dee seemed excited about our training and wanted to join in which I thought would be interesting.

The next day Roen would alternate between sparring with me or with Dee. Her spars against him were a lot different than mine. When me and Roen sparred, it was a weird combination of wrestling, grappling, and boxing. Dee on the other hand never grappled or fought on the ground. Despite Roen’s attempts, Dee managed to stay on her feet and out of reach, which considering the weight difference between them was a good idea.

Dee was quick and she favoured kicks over anything else. This was in part why Roen found it hard to subdue her. At first he tried grabbing her ankles or legs when she kicked, but she had a strange counter to that. In a feat of flexibility and grace, when her leg was caught Dee would perform a sort of spinning back kick aimed at Roen. And since he had only one hand to defend it was hard to properly defend against which usually meant he dropped her leg and backed away.

I was honestly surprised that at the end of the day Roen seemed fine. He was only slightly tired despite fighting two different people back to back over and over. And surpassing my expectations he was able to do it again the next day and train with his swords afterwards.

-

Soon enough Imoto was back and I went to our morning run with Roen and Dee joining us. After seeing us, he got out of his rocking chair and immediately started stretching. We joined him and the run afterwards was short and slow. It was pretty much just a ten minute jog.

Once we got back, Imoto led us towards a large clearing, towards the center of which was a large pile of long, thin wood chips. Imoto walked next to the pile, turned towards us, and said, “I’ma show you the three best ways to use chakra. chakra is energy and energy has many forms. To be honest there are probably ways of using chakra I’ve never heard of, but I’m just showin’ the three most common, simple, and practical uses.”

Imoto picked up a wood chip, “Bonding. Putting chakra into an object can increase the strength and durability of the material.” He broke the chip in half and then threw it on the ground. Then he said, “Wood chips are not very strong, but when I apply my chakra with the intent to strengthen the material, it won’t break so easy.” He tried to bend the chip, but it remained ramrod straight.

Imoto then flipped it over and held it towards my face saying, “Now it’s called bonding for a reason. See the grain of the wood? Gone. When you use bonding on something, it becomes like metal. All the tiny parts join together and get packed in tight so it becomes smooth and strong. But like metal it can get brittle if you do it wrong.”

Imoto then threw the wood chip back onto the pile. He took a deep breath, bent down, and then shoved his hands into the grass and dirt with his palms face forward. For just a second there was a low cracking sound, then Imoto lifted a 2 by 2 meter wall of dirt from the ground and into a vertical position. We now faced a wall of grass with 10 centimeters of dirt behind it. For a second Imoto was hidden from view then he walked out from behind the wall. And interestingly enough the wall remained standing as he walked in front of the wall and said, “Most people call this the Zel-toyu. That’s just an old fashioned way to earth technique, but don’t let that fool you. You can use bonding on anything except gases and fire. You can make walls of water or wood if you know what you’re doing. This right here” Imoto punched the grass wall, which did not move, then said, “is what we’re doing for the next few days.”

I had a lot of questions. But first I chose to inspect this Zel-toyu a bit. On the other side from the grass, the dirt looked smooth with some cracks here and there. It looked like the dirt had been compacted and dried under the sun for decades. On the ground behind the wall was the 10 cm pit from which the wall came from. Looking closely I saw that the wall actually extended into the pit allowing it to stand with support from the ground.

After taking a look for a while, I turned to Dee and Roen for their reactions. Roen was glaring at it in his usual intense manner. Dee seemed to be in contemplation trying to figure out how to replicate it. As I realized that I was out of my depth, Imoto slapped me on the shoulder and said, “Later Kell. Today you work with wood chips.”

He led me to the wood chip pile then told me, “For now, just practice moving your chakra into the wood chip. Despite the initial difficulty, I’m sorry to tell ya that there ain’t no trick. It’s about will power and mental brute force. You gotta have your chakra take over the wood. You’ll be able to sense your chakra in the wood when you succeed. Once you do immediately tell me.”

With that brief instruction Imoto moved onto showing Dee and Roen how to make the earth wall. At first I just played with my chakra to get myself ready. I focused different amounts to different parts of my body. A little to only my hands. A lot at once to my legs. Then I tried to move through my hands into the wood and my chakra just kind of stopped at my fingertips. It felt like my chakra had a knee jerk reaction as soon as it tried to leave my body. It felt like the natural shock that caused you to pull back after dipping your toes in freezing water. I attempted a few more times and each time the reaction felt stronger. It was a struggle.

Nearly thirty minutes later, I was taking a break due to ramping frustration. Sitting on the grass I watched Imoto’s signature style of training. Dee had raised an earth wall. While it had the proper smooth look that meant the bonding use was good, it was extremely thin, probably only a centimeter or less. Imoto walked over then asked, “You think that’s gonna stop a bullet?” he then pushed it over so Dee was caked in brittle dirt and said, “At the rate you're going we’re gonna run out of dirt.”

Roen was next on the chopping block. His wall was actually bigger than the one Imoto showed us and a lot thicker too. The wall had to be 3 meters wide and tall and maybe 30 centimeters thick. Roen was standing behind it with his usual serious expression and his arms crossed, but he was definitely trying to show off. Imoto strided over smoking his pipe. He touched the grass side of the wall opposite of Roen and said, “It’s big. It’s thick.” Imoto then punched straight through the wall with one hand, yanked Roen by his arm, and yelled, “It’s soft!” Roen landed on the ground as his wall crumpled due to the giant hole in its center.

Imoto then turned to me. Seeing that I was taking a break, Imoto walked over, took a deep puff from his pipe and blew a giant cloud directly into my face. He told me to get back to work and walked off. I listened and got back to it.

An hour passed and at that point I could feel my concentration straining. At this point Dee and Roen had succeeded in constructing the earth wall. Now they were working on how fast they made it and lifted it up from the ground. I was a bit discouraged as I compared our progress.

With a bit of frustration, I willed my chakra to go into and dominate the wood. When my chakra rebounded and returned to me, I just kept trying. A minute of this cycle and eventually as I became more and more determined my chakra pushed through into the wood like floodgates broken open. I could my chakra flowing through the wood. And I got a strange feedback from the wood chip. There was a sense for it that allowed me to ‘feel’ what the wood felt. I sensed the pressure from my fingers, the sunlight beating down on the chip, and even the integrity of the wood itself.

I called Imoto over and told him that I got my chakra into the wood. Imoto then explained, “Took long enough. Listen up, since this is for all techniques. If you will your chakra with a certain intent, your chakra will try and do it. The more detailed and specific the intent, the more likely the technique is successful and efficient. For bonding, imagine all the small parts that make up wood like mini ants. You ever seen ants make a bridge?” I nodded and Imoto continued, “Imagine the small parts of the wood joining legs like ants and pulling each other. The goal is to make the wood strong and rigid, so make that your intent and for the specifics of how, imagine the ants. Since your chakra can feel the wood, you’ll know when it’s working.”

After that Imoto walked off into the woods leaving all three of us alone. Dee and Roen decided to use his absence as a break. They both sat down next to me and the wood pile. We sat in silence for a while. I was practicing bonding on the wood and they were catching their breath. I would try to use bonding on some wood, I could feel it was working then I would bend it and the wood would for some reason break. But with each peace I could feel progress as the wood was harder to break or bend each time. It was peaceful despite the failures.

As I grabbed another piece of wood, due to breaking a previous one Dee asked, “Do you want some help?”

“Yeah. It works, but just not enough. You know?”

“Intent is way more important than the specifics. I can see that the wood has lost the grain pattern for each piece you’ve thrown, which means that you have a good grasp on the specifics of the technique. But most importantly you have to strongly impart the idea of strength and rigidness. Intent. Intent. Intent.”

Roen interrupted saying, “The surface of the wood chips has been stronger than the center. Perhaps focus more on bonding the material all the way through. You may be imagining it as a flat wood chip, but even the thinnest objects still have some depth.”

I thanked both of them and asked a question that’s been building for a while, “How long have you guys been trained? Not in general but with chakra specifically?”

Dee answered first, “I started when I was about ten, so nearly three years now.”

Roen replied next, “Five years since the age of nine. But my initial training focused solely on house techniques.”

Wow that is young. I do not know much about the inner workings of houses, but I guess they believe in effective head starts. Moving back to the wood chips, I tried to take into what both of them said. Intent is more important and I need to make sure that I imagine the change throughout the woodchip. The second was easier to think about. Moving on from Imoto’s ant analogy, I imagined the simplest way to connect small parts throughout the wood. The first that came to mind was a sort of repeating cube pattern. Each part would connect to six other parts in each direction: up, down, left, right, forwards, and backwards.

I then focused on imparting intent. Moving my chakra into the wood was an act of will and determination, so I simply focused more on willing my intentions. With a sort of mental mantra, I repeated that my chakra will strengthen the wood within my hands. It will make the wood stronger, tougher, more rigid, and more resistant to impact. Soon enough on my third piece of wood, there was a sort of new feeling I got from my chakra within the wood chip. It was slight, but the wood seemed denser. Moving it between my hands I felt how the weight distribution had changed slightly. And most importantly the wood did not bend or break when I applied some pressure.

Eventually Imoto walked back into the clearing. He carried two buckets full of water. He set both buckets down on the ground in front of us then plunged each hand into a bucket. He did that a few times pulling stones and pebbles from the bottom of the buckets and placing them in a pile on the ground.

Imoto then flicked the water from his hands onto us as he said, “This here is more training in bonding use. Now water is a bit trickier than dirt or wood, but has a whole lot more uses. The most obvious being water walking. The Ouro territory is known for its thousands of lakes and ponds dotted everywhere, so knowing this technique is more useful than you’d think. Now the bonding principals the same, you just gotta do it with water. The main difference between earth and water is that water is already connected, instead you got to focus on making the water rigid enough to support your weight. And you got to be quick with it, water will shift under you weight, so you gotta constantly be working to remain standing.”

To demonstrate Imoto took off his socks and moccasins then jumped. He placed his left foot on the surface of the water in the bucket and did the same for the other bucket and foot. He jumped up and down, hopped on one leg, quickly jogged in place, and then he managed to stay still while standing for nearly half a minute before he started sinking. Every movement caused ripples in the water, but it seemed that wherever Imoto’s feet landed the water would remain completely still for a moment. It was very weird to see.

Imoto then did something to somehow dry his feet instantly allowing him to put his moccasins back on. It was some toyu as the water did not drip, but peeled off in this unnatural way. Imoto then walked towards me and asked, “Did it yet?”

I nodded and showed him. Imoto stared at me for a second then said, “You can work on the earth wall, but try to make it small. Just a little meter sized square. And try to make each attempt count. You don’t got the chakra pool those other two have. And remember that the important difference between dirt and wood is that dirt’s loose, and needs to be connected and compacted.”

I got to work on testing a small hand sized earth wall to get a feel for the technique. Imoto brought up a good point. Dee and Roen have been doing this for far longer and probably have way more chakra. I should practice on a small scale first and work my way up.

More proof of this idea came when Roen said, “Gatyri Imoto, I have trained extensively with water toyu. I believe it more beneficial to work on another technique.”

A weird grin spread on Imoto’s face as he said, “I know about your house, boy. And got a little special for you. They don’t use muskets a lot in the jungle, but up here there's a good chance any random farmer or merchant has one. So today I’ll teach you all about guns and how to not get shot.”

Roen nodded and then Imoto threw a pebble at his head. Grabbing pebbles in his right hand and throwing them with his left, Imoto yelled, “Dodge!”

I have to admit Roen was quick on the uptake. He dodged the first few pebbles with grace, but Imoto kept throwing them faster and faster. And he was really putting his whole arm into those throws. I could hear the pebbles whistle through the air. Despite the growing amount of pebbles hitting their target, Roen persevered.

While that was going on, Dee had rolled up her pants and was dipping her toes into the buckets. Seeing her focused made me get back to work. I found a nearby patch of grass that was unmarred from Dee and Roen’s earlier practice. My attempts at making the wall were going well. The hardest part was delineating the wall from the surrounding dirt. When I plunged my hands into the dirt and willed my chakra forward, I had to make sure that there was a size in mind or else my chakra would dissipate as it tried to fill the all the earth in the clearing.

After Imoto ran out of pebbles to throw at Roen, he told us, “Keep practicing. I got business to attend to, so I’ll see you all tomorrow.”

We kept going for a little while, but eventually decided to break for lunch and rest. Since only Roen seemed up for any more training, we all ended up playing cards that Dee had. I learned that evening that Dee was an amazing liar with an even better poker face and that Roen always slowed his breathing when he was lying. I assume he was trying to appear calm, but compared to his usual intense demeanor it was an obvious tell.

The next few days were spent the same way. Training in the morning and relaxing in the afternoon. By the end of the week we could all make earth walls to Imoto’s standard albeit mine were only around one meter wide and tall. Me and Dee even managed to jog on water successfully although I could not perform any of the other stuff Imoto displayed while Dee could manage to stay still for a couple seconds.

The next week passed in much the same way, but instead focused on the second technique that Imoto deemed important. It was a simple technique to create a short flash of light. Imoto said it was useful for long distance signaling, distracting enemies, and was supposedly the basis for all illusion techniques.

When Imoto introduced the flash technique, I learned that Dee specialized in illusion techniques. She showed a neat trick that made a spinning ball of light that transitioned between every color in the rainbow. I could make very short flashes of white light after nearly three days of practice. The technique was simple compared to bonding. I just needed to imagine what I wanted and will my chakra to make it. Since my chakra technically did not have to leave my body or enter a material, the amount of will required was low. Despite that fact, it took an entirely different kind of focus to effectively use the technique. I had to keep in the mind the shape, color, brightness, and most importantly the different viewing angles of the flash. Did I want it to be a glow in all directions? Or a sort of flat flash that only projected outwards? It was draining taking into account all the small details to keep the flash technique going, which is why I was only able to manage short bursts.

The final technique took only a single day for Imoto to deem all of us satisfactory. Kinetic techniques were simple and straightforward. Add chakra to an object that is moving and make it move faster. Like bonding you needed to saturate the object with your chakra, but increasing motion was way easier than making something stronger. There were limitations to the technique. I learned that all chakra is uh, multiplicative. Which Imoto explained as meaning that chakra can only increase an existing property. It was why bonding air or any gas was difficult since air was not really connected like liquids or solids. That also meant that I could not move things with my mind. If an object had no preexisting motion, then I could not add motion to it, instead I had to increase the already existing motion. In practice that meant I had to be in the process of throwing a pebble before I could properly use the technique.

During the weeks of training I learned a bit about what Roen and Dee were capable of doing. Roen was of course amazing with his swords, but he was also skilled in all sorts of hunting and tracking, and knew amazing chakra techniques that controlled water. He demonstrated some of his ability when he walked on the moving water of the stream next to our camp and made some water flow into a pot from nearly five meters away.

Dee in comparison was even better with illusions than her spinning light ball let on. She could create lifelike still copies of me and Roen. They were similar to realistic portraits of us, except they could be viewed from multiple angles. I was surprised how good she was considering the difficulties with depth perception that I expected, due to her eyepatch and all.

The only real change of pace from the training were the missions. But all the missions we had were simple missions regarding cattle. The prairies were recently acquired land after the wars and there were a great deal of land disputes, lost cattle due to the sheer size of the area, and generally minor issues. The area was large and most places didn’t have proper roads, much less local law enforcement to settle any issues. It was boring and mind numbing work hearing the same disputes between grown men arguing who took whose cow, but it usually led to safer areas and should help prevent any feud from escalating. The Yomen ranch war was fresh in people’s minds so it was best to prevent anything similar.