A mildly dangerous training method (solo, nk)

Kukla Ustasi Nazar the Third, sat astride a massive boulder. His mildly skinny legs were crossed in front of him as he did something most others of his clan had never been foolish enough to do. That something was to sit within a hundred meters of the rim of what was currently a mostly dormant volcano. Of course there was no guarantee that the volcano would not suddenly become active again, but chances of that were quite slim, and the danger made this more exciting. Besides, knowing that he was near the mouth of the volcano said to have brought about the destruction of the world, did make him more on edge, not just for potential eruptions, or even flying rocks, sulphur gas emissions, and the like. No, there was a far more organic element as well he had to be careful of.

People.

It was unfortunate but historically the Nazar clan had always set up shop near Funkagakure, the volcano village, and it did not look like they were going to Change their minds soon.

Why might this be an issue, one might ask? Well, there were two parts to the problem. The first, more benign bit, was that the Nazar clan sought to enlighten the world, this not being something that was looked upon favorably. This was understandable though, some did not wish for competition in their quest for power and control. Not that that stopped any decent Nazar from trying, anyway, so long as they were not about to be assassinated as they occasionally were. Mostly though, people tended to think of the Nazar clan as peaceful monk folk, mostly harmless unless seriously provoked.

This brings us to the second bit of the problem. The locals. Yes, the Nazar clan persisted to keep their compound outside of Funkagakure, a place wracked with terror, filled with marauding cannibals, in constant strife. It was said that even Kirigakure, once f ames for their barbaric practices, and filled with bloodthirsty hunters, had taken a look at Funkagakure, and then metaphorically stepped back, as if to say "Woah, guys, that seems a little much right there...."

So if the Mizukage reportedly was a little apprehensive of the Nazar clan's neighbors, then that obviously meant that the denizens of Funkagakure would be the most rewarding recruits to join the path to enlightenment. That was the only logical reason for the Nazar clan to have stuck it out for so long. It's not like they were having an easy time of it when they waded into the anarchist biomass within the village walls. At least they were not actually living in the miserable place, though. Not everyone respected the Nazar clan, sadly, despite, or perhaps because of their mission.

That being said, many would not understand why on earth Kukla boy here was out of the frying pan that was Funkagakure, with the walls and toasty climate, discarding it to chill out in the fire, err, volcano?

But enough of the philosophical meanderings, it was time to get to the point of why he was here in the first place. To train. And, before anyone asks, no the regular training ground in the Nazar compound would not have suited his purposes better.

Mister Kukla wished to become a master of the fire element. It was here, among the volcanic vents, flying rocks, and fissures, all of which were prone to dramatic and unexpected appearances, that he felt the closest to both the earth AND the fire elements that were supposed to reside within himself. This made sense though, the Nazar had a tradition of creating their dead in the volcanos.

If he was a bit plucky though the rest of his kin would be spared the job of hauling his remains to the tip top of the volcano.

He sat on the rock, meditating. It was an attempt to clear his mind for only when his mind was a blank slate, an unmarked lump of metal. All, that he would be the most prone to outside influences. Influences like the kinetic and heat energy latent in the very rocks around him. His theory was that if he let himself be influenced enough, it would help him awaken the fire energy within himself. Assuming he was not blown up first, of course.

Slowly, his mind emptied, having been trained to do this in order to awaken the Arahant, the state of mind trained to all Nazar, that enabled them to get stronger, and enhance their awareness, without any, ya know, any actual physical changes. Of course, as previously stated though, this was not merely to enhance one's awareness, he was slowly deepening his connection to the fire within himself, and the fire that dwelt within the belly of the great stone beast beneath his body. The volcano.

Slowly, his breathing slowed, as his body became more in tune with the heat surrounding him, if not the actual flames that spurted from different volcanic vents every now and then. It was a slow process but slowly the heat coalesced, not literally, but in terms of senses. As the waves of heat boiled up around the rock, also not literally or our hero would have met an untimely and drastically early demise. Rather, the heat flowed up through the rocks, past Kukla, and slowly, he was able to become one with the heat, so to speak. It was taking time, but he could feel the heat as it emanated from its subterranean source, he could even begin to feel the outlines of the different currents as they flowed past - the heat was no longer a monolith, an amorphous threatening being. In fact, he could sens ethe entire flow of the heat, and the way it was beginning to build up along with the shifts in the dirt...

Uh oh.

He got to his feet, and bolted down the mountain side.

He was there after followed by a sputtering volcanic vent that opened its Rocky jaws behind him, emitting a breath of sulphur particles, which were not particularly healthy to inhale, ingest, and which should not be used to fully comprise ones swimming pool. Mostly because the gas stuff was kinda unhealthy though most assuredly this world was insane enough that one might be able to find some ninja buddy capable of tanking the entire volcanic eruption. Cool. This meant Youka obviously, the Raikage of a village said to rival Funkagakure now in terms of sheer mean-ness.

Fortunately, even his own pathetic pace was enough to out pace a slow poke of an ancient, most assuredly geriatric vent, which emptied it self out in a few seconds, about five and a half or so, leaving the entire scene as peaceful as it had been previously, which is to say, not much at all.

Still, this kind of cheap thrill was better than covering for another Nazar yet again, when it came to baby sitting, he was not entirely sure why some people could not be bothered to instill their values in the next generation, if they could not be bothered to help farm, or preach. Well, that just meant he got more exercise in patience and diligence, pretty much never a bad thing. In fact, his self control would help.him become better at the Arahant, though he was still in the preparatory stages.

He walked back to the rock he had previously been sitting on, and carefully tested it. Confident it was reasonably stable, he climbed back up, a small puddle of sweat rapidly forming from trails.all over his body, due to the.pervasive heat in the region. When it was finally time to leave, it would be easier than for most of the Volcano village denizens, as the Nazar compound was outside the main village, and the leader of Funkagakure, whoever that was, clearly did not care much about the clan's coming of age journey, or some one would have done something by now about it.

But, enough musing for now, or he would never be able to get some training done. And that would be bad.

He got comfortable on his ghetto recliner, and let him.self.fall away, metaphorically speaking, into the flames and heat that surrounded him. As he began to deepen his connection to the flames, he could feel the beginnings of a spark stirring within him self as well. A corresponding flame that would soon engulf him if he was not careful. He jerked wide awake from his stupor, he was getting dangerously dehydrated. He could feel a connection with the flame inside of him though, one that was not about to disappear.

********

Some time and a few good drinks later, our hero returns, being a hero for the purposes of getting plot armour and such, the most impressive feats he had accomplished being to have won the inter-clan staring contest by virtue of a frightening frown, and the second being to have extracted an open bottle of catnip.from a.cluster of initially sleeping cats. The latter put him out of commission for a while though, as the scratches on his hands made it difficult to focus when he tried to do work. Not that he did not try to carry on despite the bandages hampering his movements. To do otherwise would just have been lazy.

He plopped his skinny bottom.on the ground, near the edge of the volcano. As he felt the connection to the fire within him self now, he felt little need to try and feel out the volcano heat as well. The extra warning in the event of an accident or freak quirk of nature, undoubtably played some role in his decision making as well, though what crucial fraction it represented would be hard for anyone else to say for certain.

He concentrated. His next goal was to produce heat in good quantity - control would be a desperate issue. His body sat perfectly still though his insides boiled over with fire. Eventually though his body could contain no more, and he was forced to relieve him self of the pressure, releasing a small, disappointingly small amount of heat that simmered in the moderately moist air. This was far from satisfactory.

He tried again, stockpiling the fire nature chakra. This time though, he tried to stretch his fire nature chakra capacity until it felt like it was a balloon about to explode. At this point he just waited and held it, letting out a contented sigh, the fire element chakra slowly spewing from his mouth like a water fall. It was merely moderately warm, though, and nowhere near the searing hot that it was supposed to be. It was an improvement though. So, there was nothing to do but go at it.

Countless boring hours pass as the erstwhile monk slowly depleted himself of his stamina and chakra, the fires at first had begun to strengthen as he strengthened his chakra network, but eventually a certain culprit, the lack of energy, forced him to retire again, from his fire training. At least he had made some progress.

He retired from the scene again.

Later, he could be found on the edge of the mountain, surrounded by twigs. The training method was a lot simpler now, in some ways, and more annoying in others. But, he was making progress and so with this he must stick if only to lengthen the amount of so called “time” that he was spending training.

Holding one of the twigs in his hands, he began channeling fire nature chakra into it, in an attempt to light the twig on fire. If he could produce heat with the fire natured chakra, and he could set chakra paper on fire presumably, then it stood to reason that he should be able to train up his fire element through endless, well, mostly endless repetition of a similar but more difficult exercise. It was not like trying to evaporate a kettle of water, or even a bath tub, but it was on the right track. So, the first twig slowly heated up. This was almost as bad as waiting for the heater in his rather Spartan room, to emit the waves of heat that would help his body, but this was more excruciating. The twig did not want to heat up. How ever persistence paid off slowly and he was able to raise the temperature of the first twig, slowly it got warmer and warmer until voila! The twig burst into a little gout of flames and just as quickly evaporated into thin air, or so it seemed, as he was not able to even find the ashes after wards. Welp, cool beans. At least he had a good sized pile of them over there!

The young monk guy picked up another measly twig, and set about trying to make this one too, burst into flames and disappear in a dramatic flurry of self combustion. This was going better but his training was lacking flare.

How about if he went at it all at once? The young, bald, and marginally attractive young male monk went at it, collecting all the twigs he could find, slowly building up what was the equivalent of a decent sized pile of normal logs nearby. Of course, because this was done with a large armada of tiny little twigs and sticks, and not with large boughs you could get by breaking trees in two, this was a long ardous process most certainly worthy of an increase in his health, strength, stamina, or even speed, depending on the way in which you looked at such things like this. Any ways, the pile was eventually collected together, after a severely exhausting but not necessarily dangerous tussle with a rock lizard. Given that Kukla was a human and by definition had to be a couple dozen times as large as the rock lizard, he won, but the rock lizard was unusually strong and as such, this fight did not go entirely as one might expect, especially as Kukla Ustasi Nazar the Third literally had an uphill battle, and had to push the rock lizard off of the little branch it was trying to make a nest using, without hurting it, which was tough as you might imagine, but tougher than that if you know what I mean.

Any way, so eventually he got the pile of twigs together, and began the long ardous process of trying to ignite the whole pile at once, cause that was what cool fire users were able to do, right? It should not take that long, but then again, he was no uchiha, and he was not pre disposed towards this kind of element, and had to train it up, well, not as pre disposed as the Uchiha were, that clan of slightly uppity clan elitists whom only considered their kin to be adults when they could do a C rank fire ball jutsu. Seemed kind of harsh, he was glad the clan he belonged to, the organization of monks, did not need such necessesities. Instead, they only had trouble spelling and required one to go on a long journey, after unlocking two basic elements, and the clan one, steel release. Yes, actually, he had just as much work to do as the Uchiha, if anything more, actually, if you stopped to think about it, because the Uchiha only had to learn another C rank jutsu, and while the times have changed, before at least, it was always considered much more difficult to grow one’s capabilities to gain an advanced element, or even a second element, as opposed to merely learning another low ranking technique. Man, the power creep these days though. Now it seemed that it was considered standard for anyone to train much at all, and you had to have an advanced element, and multiple specialties to be viable. Sad days now. Any who, enough of the moping, it was completely out of character for him and this nonsense should be put to a stop at once.

He shook his head, smacked his bald pate upon some rocks briefly, along with  a couple of twigs, and then he tried flaring the fire chakra within him, in an attempt to produce some noticeable amount of heat. Well, on the bright side the fire that erupted came out quickly, on the other hand, it proved how little control he had over the fire chakra, since he was himself covered in it. Ouch! Youch!

Our wanna be hero retires once more, so that he can put out the flames, by rolling down hill and into a large mud puddle.

Dirty and such, he almost returns to the compound but figures that he will get messy again anyway with his training methods so to heck with that. He might pop in for a brief change though if he goes to the tavern, one of the only places with a reliably clean source of fluids with which to hydrate the body – alcohol. Better than nothing but certainly worse than clean water. Too bad in the defunct city of Funkagakure, that was largely the best source of hydration, especially on missionary visits, the NAzar clan had water but a lot of it went towards irrigation and the like, humans being more adaptable when it came to finding alternate sources of liquids.

So, just because it would be a funny way to train, he went to a section of the woods that was less sparse than the surrounding areas, and began lighting makeshift torches. At first the torches lit up fast. Then they lit up faster. Then, just to throw a wrench in things, they stopped lighting up as fast. Why? Who knows, but Kukla spent a significantly unimportant amount of time investigating the cause of all this weirdness and concluded that he needed a snack, none of which were handy. So, to make a long story short, hehunted down a boar. He cut it to pieces using his martial chops, well, kinda any way. Then after cutting the boar to pieces he skinned it, and roasted the bits of boar over a fire on twigs he had cut him self, with flames he had emitted him self. So, the boar was good and fresh, but because this was not crazy enough yet, he had to be attacked by a hungry lion of course, all the way from the savanna just for the express purpose of annoying him and making his day longer. To add to the annoyances, a medium sized tiger about the size fo the lion who was retconned to be large for a lion, and about equivalent size to the tiger who is normally larger. These guys both ganged up on Kukla, driving him away from his delicious and fatty meal, before turning on each other. Before long, Kukla had his choice of a lion corpse, a boar corpse, and a slightly smaller than average tiger corpse. His day rambled on from there, being chased by bees, and the like.

How ever, like all good things, this came to an end, and he was able to get back to his fire training, the rest of this fluff having done nothing but lengthen his day and delay any actual fire element training he was actually supposed to be doing like a boss as a missing ninja known as Kozai was known to say. So, eventually he got back to his fire training, spewing fire nature chakra all over the place so that he could work on getting his steel element and getting out of this damn place. Oops, he was not supposed to swear but you get the bloody point right? Guffaw Guffaw he had err has a weird sense of humor, not entirely suited for this world.

Any who, this word parsing jerk was going back to his fire training, and it looked like he was going to make it happen this time. He was able to produce prodigious amounts of fire chakra, for a fire ant, but don’t tell him it is a surprise yo. As his training was crazy interrupted often by annoying and insignificant events, and just as often accidentally reset, the training was taking longer than expected but not to an insurmountable degree, if only because this sucker had nothing better to do. As his training had not managed to surpass any of the limitations of technology placed upon his training in weird ways, it was obvious that he could continue onwards. It was not like he was plagued with electricity sucking brain melting devices capable of distracting everyone present and prevention noting any due attention to a most certainly unhappy teacher.

So, if only to break the monotony, he successfully set the pile of wood on fire. Yay. Finally. Took bloody well long enogh as it is.

So, technically he was done training the fire element but there was some thing missing, almost as if an other worldly force reqiluired that he spend more time training. Well, it was time for a drink the first time this day, and man was he parched.

As the volcano village was significantly closer and more interesting than the clan compound, he ended up going on a brief trip to the city of ruins and decay.

A monk walks into a bar.

Ouch.

A monk walks into a second bar.

It was closed though.

A monk, coincidentally named Kukla Ustasi Nazar the Third, walks into a third bar, filled with many interesting people, both emotionally and physically. He is more than slightly befuddled.

fortunately for him, so is every one else in the bar, if only because monks are rarely seen in the bar. Of course some one tried to rob the monk, incidentally the one we followed earlier in the story or narrative. Due to this annoying event called lag, the instant he entered the bar, an awkward pause ensued, in which absolutely nothing happened. After the lag, however, the bar enlivened up again significantly and the incident was forgotten as if the characters of the narrative were completely unaware of the incident. Period.  Nothing out of the ordinary, apparently.

Tel wc 3700

As the training topic was kinda long and resulting in more annoying lags, it shalt be continued henceforth.

Kukla was in the bar and suddenly people realised he was one of them ninja. Blindly assuming he was kind of tough because of the many scratches accumulated over the day, some even offered him drinks which he had assumed to be water. How ever, it was a liquor and a hard one at that. Kukla tried his best to be polite despite watering eyes, but his body would not let him swallow it. So, that meant that he ended up spitting it out.

Onto some very annoyed thugs that were dispatched in short order.

To try and sooth their feelings, he tried to order drinks for them all and was pressured into taking another swig himself.

It was a no go however, and he was about to spill it out of his mouth again, his body convulsing worse than before, when suddenly, his body accidentally touched off the fire element, purely by accident. It sounds dumb of course, but he ended up belching flaming alcohol. Whoops! He was sent packing by an irate bartender shortly afterward but he did earn the grudging respect of absolutely nobody, them all having seen a rogue uchiha make larger flame balls bought but a day earlier. How ever, it did give him a fun idea for a new jutsu, and it did help him understand ways to utilize the fire element so at least it was not a total waste.

Having spent quite long enough training, he decided to begin heading home to the compound. This did involve a fight with a nasty racoon, but did not involve any thing else out of the ordinary, so he got back relatively easily. Of course the first thing he did was take a good hot shower to remove all the remnants of past volcanic eruptions, from his body.

Wc 321, +3700 is 4021.

Claiming 4000 towards fire as a second basic element, along with 20 stats

Approved.

Thanks!