Training hard

Corvin had only recently arrived back in the village. He had managed to nab a spot in the ongoing Chuunin exams after some competitors dropped out. His first round went rather unexpectedly when his opponent had some sort of seizure and ended the fight before it began. He would be moving on to the next round, but this meant that he would be fighting tougher opponents too. So, he had returned to his village to train before the next round of fights began. He knew in his heart he had it within him to achieve this rank, but he had to get stronger. While having someone to train with would be ideal, this was simply not in the cards at the moment. Rather than fold and toss his hand away, Corvin decided to make the best out of what cards he did have.

Arriving at the training grounds, he held nothing back. He made sure to train every aspect of his body as well as hi jutsu. The very first thing he did was to send his iron sand into the ground to begin grinding out more sand. The only thing better than iron sand is more iron sand after all. He spent the morning running through the village. As he passed by various people, he waved and found that many of them were cheering him on. Apparently, news of the exams and my participation in it had spread. He ran up and down the village at a sprint, intent on pushing himself as hard as possible. He would not stop until his feet had trodden upon every road, side road, and alleyway within the village. His legs burned in complaint, but he ignored the pain and pushed through. He would not allow a little pain to get in his way now. He imagined that he would be experiencing quite a bit more pain in the upcoming rounds of the exams. He had watched a match where a guy had his legs cut off. His legs! Not just cut. Cut off. As in separated from the rest of his body. The memory sent shudders down Corvin's spine. He had watched another match where a guy moved so fast he could not even see his movements. How could he possibly stand up to these guys? He shook the doubt and fear from his mind and pressed on. 

His run finally brought him back to the training grounds. The hot Sunagakure sun had brought sweat pouring from him, and he was winded beyond belief. He was forced to sit and rest for several minutes just to get his lungs to stop the feeling that they were going to explode. He finally felt as though he could move again, and that was all the rest he would allow himself. He stood up and began simple exercises. He went onto the rooftop of the training grounds and got onto his hands. He would not allow himself to go back to his feet until he had jumped onto every rooftop in the village on his hands. He started at a rapid pace, but this caused him to fall several times. Each time he fell, he found himself intensely frustrated and started all over. Finally, he cleared his mind and took the exercise at an appropriate pace. The rooftops were often extremely hot under the desert sun, but he would not allow the pain to bother him, even when heat blisters began to form on his hands. He leaped onto every individual rooftop in the village. Many of these required him to either climb precarious heights, all while not using his legs, or drop down unsafe distances. When he reached the training grounds again, his wrists hurt remarkably, not to mention the heat blisters that had formed over his hands. Heat was something this village knew all about and there was a simple salve he had back home to deal with this sort of thing. Until then, he simply wrapped his hands in cloth, ignored the pain in his wrists, and continued on training.

His body ached everywhere, but he was not nearly done. He needed to train more in the use of his techniques requiring finite chakra use. His first task would be to train his mind to be able to concentrate on many things at once. He knew just the way to do this. Going into the training grounds puppet training area, he grabbed ten training puppets. He had never tried controlling this many at once, but after all the training he had done with his chakra threads and with the amount of chakra he was able to pump out, he just knew that he would be capable of doing it. However, being able to control them and being able to control them well were very different things. It was at this point Corvin began to wonder about the limitations of puppetry. Just what kind of puppets could he come up with, and was ten really the limit? He quickly pushed these thoughts aside for later and focused on his ten training puppets.

Sending a single chakra thread to each one, he made two rows of five having all of the puppets facing one another. He would have a team battle royal with these puppets in a five on five match up. This was, for Corvin, intensely difficult. Corvin was having to do so many things at the same time. He was having to manipulate his chakra across ten separate puppets for precise and rapid movements. He was having to simultaneously attack and defend with ten different individuals. He was having to strategize the teamwork between each five man team, and simultaneously come up with a counter strategy for his other five man team. The clashing of metal on metal got intense enough between his puppets that he began to draw a small crowd within the training grounds. As more of the puppets became damaged beyond functionality, he found his focus narrowing on each of the others that much more intently. The result was that each time one of the ten puppets fell, the fight only intensified. Eventually there was just a one on one battle. By this time, their weapons had clashed so many times as to be useless and the two were going at it with pure fists. He dodged and moved and punched and leaped with the puppets as best as he could until finally only one remained. He could not help but laugh out loud when he noticed the small crowd around him. Not only did they cheer when the last puppet remained, but it seems that some of them had begun to take bets over who would win. By popular demand, Corvin was asked to do his ten puppet performance again. After resting for a short while, he got ten more training puppets for a rematch of the five on five battle. 

For Corvin, the crowd was every bit as much training as the puppets. He had to get over his nerves of performing in front of an audience. His first experience at the exam arena left him with sweating hands he was so nervous. As the rounds progressed through the exams, he knew the crowds at the arena would only get larger. He did his best to block out the small crowd there in the training grounds and found that it was impossible. All of the focus it took to work with his puppets left none remaining to block out people around him. He decided to instead try and feed on it. Shinobi had to be adaptable after all. While he would normally be working in the shadows and not in front of hundreds of people, he had to learn to be able to adapt to new situations. So he began listening to the crowd. He did not focus on any single individual, instead he listened to the crowd as a whole and let their excitement wash over him and give him an adrenaline rush. The result was that he found it oddly helped his focus. The second round of fighting with his puppets was much more intense than the first, and the little crowd got the entertainment they had hoped for. 

Corvin sat down for a drink of water and watched his little audience disperse back to their various training. He had forgotten how rare puppet users were becoming and was happy that he was dabbling in the art and making it so that others were interested as well. Once he was able to afford truly spectacular puppets, he knew he would be able to put on a show far greater than this one. Again, Corvin could not help but wonder at the limitations of puppetry and the capabilities of the technique. Once again, he shoved the idea aside for later and continued his training. The next thing on his list was training with his iron sand. He finally pulled it out of the ground and found that in the time of training over the day he had ground out another three gallons of iron sand. This brought his total up to nine gallons. He had given it some though and figured that he could fill his gourd with the maximum fifteen gallons, and then with the two gallons it takes to create the gourd itself it would bring it up to a total seventeen gallons of sand at his disposal. It was enough to do the kind of things he wanted to do with it. 

Gathering his sand, he decided to try an idea that had come to him after watching one of the fighters at the chuunin exam create some kind of bird and started flying around the arena. He gathered a thin layer of sand, an almost negligible amount from his total, beneath his feet to create a small disk. He knew that he could easily control his sand if he was near it, so there was no reason he could not use the sand as transportation of sorts and always have it near to him. It took a little bit of practice to get the balance right, but soon enough he was able to use his iron sand to make himself seemingly float around. As he rose about a meter off the ground, he began spinning the rest of his sand around himself rapidly. Once the sand was up to speed, he turned it into a bunch of small, roughly inch long spinning blades. Before long, he was completely surrounded in a cloud of deadly spinning blades. This would be an excellent defense to those people who were too fast for him to see. It made it so that he could not engage personally, but he was a puppet master, engaging personally was something he never wanted to have to do. 

He got used to the feeling of floating around on his disk and decided he liked it. He practiced creating different things with his iron sand. He could form just about anything his mind could come up with, the problem was that these things were limited in their speed and strength. Those were aspects that he knew would simply have to come with time, and that training could only take him so far. Feeling exhausted, Corvin gathered up his sand into a gourd and collected the rest of his sand into it. He felt that he did as much as he could do in a single day, and knew that he simply had to keep this level of training up if he hoped to stand a chance in the upcoming arena battles. He was still worried about speed demons, but that was something he would have to deal with until he could get stronger. Corvin finally headed home and collapsed onto his bed without even eating, his body finally giving in to the rigors of the day. That night, Corvin dreamed of flying over the village and seeing everything from a new perspective. 

(Word count: 2001, Rewards: 3 gallons of iron sand, 10 stat points, current jp amount maxed for rank)

Approved.