Getting sand and working hard

Arriving at the training grounds, Corvin could not help but feel like this place was starting to feel every bit as much like home as his house did. He had been spending a sad amount of time here, but his drive to be better would not allow him to slack off. He looked around at all the various people training and took a nice deep breath. The air in the Sand Village was its typical hot and dry on this day, but it was something that all the residents there were more than used to. By now, Corvin enjoyed the heat. Taking his place in an empty corner, he broke up his iron gourd in order to allow the sand to go into the ground to grind out more sand. The more he had, the more he would be able to do with it. He figured that there was no reason he should not use the time training today to get more sand, it simply meant he would not be able to practice his sand techniques. 

The first thing he did was to stretch. He had once made the mistake of not stretching properly back in his academy days, and the pain it caused was enough to ensure he never made the same mistake again. There was a time when he felt a little silly stretching out in front of everyone, but now he realized that it just showed that he knew what he was doing. Once he was nice and stretched he went ahead and practiced his dodging. As a puppet user, his major weakness was going to be close combat until he could afford to build more puppets to offset that disadvantage. This meant that until that time, dodging was going to be one of his more useful skills. He leaped around the training grounds, trying his best to make his leaps accurate so that he landed exactly where he intended, and quick so that he left the ground again almost the very moment he touched down again. He did this for as long as it took to get his blood pumping. Once he felt nice and warmed up, he unraveled his puppet from his back and connected his chakra threads to it. He had his puppet extend its blades and started making it have a mock battle with one of the training dummies. In the meantime, he practiced being able to leap around while still maintaining his focus on his chakra threads and accurately moving his puppet. After a short while, he pumped a little of his Magnet Release chakra into the strings. This was one of Corvin's trademark skills, using his Magnetic abilities to influence the metal parts within his puppets and amplifying their strength and speed. He found that it took a bit more concentration, but not enough to seriously hinder him from continuing his leaps. 

When he finally felt like he had practiced this skill enough, he began working on a little trick he had thought up the night before when he saw the shadow of his mother washing dishes. While he was fully capable of moving around while using his puppet, he knew that he would only do so if the need arose. This meant that a jutsu like his clone technique would actually come in handy. By making two replicas of himself while he manipulated his invisible chakra strings, he realized that it might prove extremely difficult to do anything more than take a guess as to which was the real him. If someone was fast enough to get past his puppet, then attacking the wrong Corvin could give him the opportunity he would need to re-engage with his puppet. Once he was able to afford more puppets, this type of tactic would become more and more useful since it would be easier to re-engage. Unless the person was able to sense or see chakra reliably, then they had at best a one in three shot to hit the real him. If he saw that someone was going for the wrong one, he could still make every effort to protect it as though it were the real thing, thus potentially buying more time. So Corvin created a couple clones and practiced protecting them the same way he would protect himself. He practiced looking panicked in case his opponent got through so that they would think they had gotten the right one up until swinging through the clone. Every second he was able to buy was a second that he could use to gain control of the situation. Though it was exhausting work, he felt like this was a well worthwhile use of his time. 

Next, Corvin went over to one of the dummies that is able to move around and swing these stiff arms at you. While the movements were pretty predicable, when set for higher speeds it still posed a challenge. Corvin used this dummy to practice blocking. Should his enemy get past all of his defenses, he would have to rely on not just dodging but also blocking. As he trained on, he continued raising the speed on the dummy. He kept going until he got to a point where he felt like he could not continuously block the dummy. This is where he kept the speed of the dummy. He stayed working at this until he finally decided he was too tired to get the hang of it. He had gotten quite a few bruises. Each time the dummy would hit him he found himself getting flustered and would subsequently get hit two or three more times. He went and took a rest in his corner where his iron sand was still grinding away. He found that the vibration it gave off was strangely relaxing for him. He opened up his water pouch and drank greedily from it. The sun was high in the sky by this point and the dessert heat was blistering. That is why he, just like many in the sand village, wore clothing that covered most of his skin. While it seems like it would make you more hot, it was worth the feeling to protect your skin from being cooked in the sun. 

After he had caught his breath, he headed back to the speed dummy and continued at the same speed he was at before. He finally got the hang of it and was able to block each shot every time. He was considering raising the speed a little when he noticed a few academy kids up on a roof watching him and commenting on the speeds he was going at. While he knew that there were plenty of people in the village far faster than he, to an academy kid he supposed he did look pretty fast. He remembered all the times he sat on that very roof and watched some shinobi training at this very dummy. So instead of raising the speed he remained where he was at to show off for a little while. Unfortunately, this type of thing tired him out pretty quickly and it was not long before he was getting hit again. Each time the dummy would whack him he could hear the kids giggle at him. He stepped back and shut the stupid thing down and went sit to catch his breath once more.

After he felt like he was ready to start again, Corvin got up and decided to test his puppet. Having yet to find a sparring partner yet, or be assigned a team by the village, all he could do was use his puppet and face it off against one of the training grounds puppets that he would control as well. Of course, this meant it was difficult to do any kind of surprise attack on either end of things, but it was better than nothing. It gave him a chance to not only get used to the mechanisms of his puppet and get a feel for how it moved, but it also gave him a chance to get used to using those mechanisms while also controlling another puppet. He found that a good tactic was to use his puppet's ability to fire its fingers out with the connecting ropes and latch on to its enemy, which would slow his enemy down, trip it up, or at least keep in range. Then by retracting the fingers it brought the puppet flying toward the enemy. This, combined with the blades in its palms, made for a nice combo move. The enemy really could not get away from the puppet at this point, and the puppet was in a prime position to move in for the kill. If the blades on his puppet were also coated with the poison he had been developing, then this was truly a fatal combo. He found that it could be difficult shooting all the fingers at the target, and instead took to shooting them in a wide spread in the general direction of the enemy. It only took one catching on for the combo to work, after all. 

Next, he worked on using the puppet on the assumption that the blades it had were broken off or otherwise not usable for whatever reason. The finger ropes were still very useful since he could potentially drag the enemy into range for his iron sand attacks. It also had the added benefit of potentially tripping the enemy up, thus making it easier to land those sand attacks. Speed freaks were definitely going to be his worst nightmare until he developed more puppets to counter that and built his own speed up at the same time. Corvin then worked on the assumption that the ropes on his puppet had been cut in addition to the blades not being usable. This essentially meant that the puppet was reduced to hand to hand fighting. This was certainly not ideal for it, but it was something to fall back on if nothing else. It was from this training that he started to really see the need for more gadgets within his puppet, but having no ryo to work with made it a moot point.

He then practiced connecting his chakra threads back onto his puppet on the fly. While normal attacks and weapons had no effect on chakra threads, certain attacks could cut them. There were also any number of reasons he might need to purposely release his threads to use his hands for something else. He needed to be able to reliably reconnect his threads while on the fly. Simply walking up to them would rarely be an option after all. So he was back to leaping around, but this time he was shooting out chakra threads at the same time. He did not bother to suppress the threads to invisibility for this exercise since it was more about accuracy than secrecy. He initially found it difficult to hit his mark, but found that as long as his thread was on the puppet he was able to use his chakra to manipulate it. He practiced this for a while, then added a second puppet and tried reconnecting them both at the same time. This took quite a lot of practice, but eventually he was getting his mark every time. 

He finally decided that this was quite enough training for one day. He went over to his corner and started pulling his sand back from the ground. Once the initial two gallons of sand were out of the ground, he made his gourd out of it and began filling the gourd with the rest of the sand he had created while training that day. He had created a total of four more gallons of sand, bringing his total to six. This was plenty to make the various things he would need for a combat situation. Happy with his progress for the day, he headed home for a nice big meal and some well deserved rest and relaxation.

(Word count: 2002, Rewards: 4 gallons of iron sand, 10 stat points, at current max for jp)

Approved