Steeling oneself p, nk)

Welp, Kukla had managed to become a fledgling fire user, having managed to learn exactly zero jutsu and one element he could do nothing useful with. No matter, he was a puppetry specialist without a puppet for that matter. For what ever odd reason, he was able to apparently train the steel element a lot easier than the fire element even though fire was a basic sort of thing, heat and all that, and steel was a friggin ADVANCED ELEMENT yo. So, it made little sense in this context but there were indeed many weird rules that he did not even know about in this world, let along comprehend.

So, here he was, wasting time in an empty black smiths shop, after hours. The main reason for this, is that he was supposed to donate the metal he produced, if any, for further study, and for bumping up the black smith's profit margins of course. He began by first trying to generate the fire element in just one hand, being the newer of the two elements he knew he figured that he should start with the harder one of the two and slowly progress so that things would smoothen out later a lot quicker and he would be more encouraged, but he had to pass the first hurdle. So far so good, his left hand felt warm. Ok, more than a little warm. More like really really REALLY hot. Which was good. That meant he had lots of heat energy. He could feel him self getting closer to that sweet sweet and totally unneeded steel element already!

In the right hand, he slowly began to concentrate the earth energy within him, that was proven to be latent as the mental capacity to marginally understand this whole process. The right hand began to darken a little, becoming a bit more noticably heavy but not so much that it would keep him from doing any thing significant.

Still, he continued on wards, his right hand starting to resemble an earthen lump more than a biological part of an organism. It was at this point that he glanced at his left hand and grumbled. It was about the time he noticed the right hand starting to resemble an earthen pretzel that he realized with the aid of a brief glance, that his left hand had lost control of its fire chakra and the heat intensity had all dissipated. Awww.

No real harm done though, he just had to firstly learn how to have two chakra.nature's going at once, and then how to combine them. He hoped it had nothing to do with math for he hated those kinds of questions significantly. We'll, don't mind the grumbling it will subside shortly. Sure enough, after a couple of long pauses each a couple of seconds long and taken back to back, he resumed his training, the consecutive pauses barely noticeable to bystanders not stalking him, or even paying attention closely.

He began to try again, but this time he took the alternate tack of trying to do both elements at once. It worked ok for a while at least. That is to say, he barely got any of either element to show up properly on either hand. How ever, at least it was something as opposed to nothing. He knew as well as the next person, that is, not at all, that his training often took far longer than it really should. Sadly being unaware of this issue meant he was literally powerless to change any thing about it. All he could do was to keep training onwards.

Slowly, as his training faltered onwards he was able to increase the amount of chakra in each hand, one earth element, and one of the fire chakra nature persuasion each, until he could for certain concentrate enough in the combined total of both hands to fuel half of a Z rank jutsu, if such a thing actually existed. So sad, but technically usable, if nobody could do any thing else.one might suppose.

At least he was improving though, because some people would consider the prospect off learning the second basic element arduous and impossible. Fortunately he was not one of them. He only thought it would be a hard task, and painful potentially, to execute.

As he had spent quite enough time musing over difficulties he did not put enough effort into surmounting, he began training again for the heck of it. He once again, monotonously and boringly, began to concentrate the fire chakra and earth chakra into his hands, such that he would be able to use them both simultaneously to do nothing. He got close, he almost had usable amounts of chakra in each hand. He just had to try again. And again. Yet again. Take a guess what happened next.

Ha! Bet you were fooled weren't ya! Nothing happened… until a wild raccoon tried to bite him. The raccoon got clobbered over its poor little head and was laid out flat on the side of the road in a single swip. Then it was back to training, this time without any interference from raccoons, not even the ninja variety. So, slowly he was able to grow the amount of fire and earth chakra he had held simultaneously until it was better than before, which really just meant he did the same process as before but tried to stretch his mental limits a little further, in which he kind of succeeded. So technically he was training still, even if he was thinking about it instead a lot, it can be supposed.

He began to slowly merge the fire and earth nature chakras together, one in each hand slowly extending towards the center such that it looked like he was holding a stick balanced on his palms, if sticks were shaped like two cones stuck together, pointy ends touching with the flat sides directly opposite of each other using the pointy ends as a reference points, with the two halves being different colors. It should also be noted, that this complex sort of shape had two round spherical shapes, or rather, hemispherical shapes, that were merged onto the ends of the cones, so that they were effectively one large shape. It also kind of looked like two ice cream cone shapes, stuck together by the bottom of the cones, with at least one scoop of ice cream guaranteed to fall to the floor and make a sticky mess. Good thing none of this was ice cream of there would be some messy boots touching the ground below Kukla Ustasi Nazar's feet. And a lot of unhappy expressions as the formerly named ninja had to go and clean the boots off.

Anywho, Kukla was working on merging the chakras together, the chakras mixing to form a round ball shape in the middle that was a mix of brown and red, aka muddy brownish red, a truly vile color that did not have any aspirations what so ever towards belonging on a painting from any decent artist. Which was good, as any decent artist would have recoiled at the thought of using that color. Kukla slowly formed a large ball of chakra that could not be used in jutsu since he had not learned a useful skill for it yet. However, the ball was kind of heavy, and as he continued trying to mix the steel chakra together, he was able to condense the chakra into a smaller and heavier form, more solid and akin to steel, though he was able to manipulate it in small ways that were clearly not intended for combat.

He decided that the rest of his training would consist entirely of trying to manipulate the steel chakra that he was now able to magically create with no real impetus at all, to form weird little shapes that were unusable in combat, as stated by the ninja equivalent of the Geneva Convention. Of course, this was going to strengthen his body as well, he wanted value for his money, err, words, err, training. Just how this might be able to strengthen his body, or make him move faster, he was not entirely sure. At least, you could kinda theorize that the stress and constant danger would make him tougher, so his body could become more resistant to health it can be supposed. In addition, his stamina could be increased as well from this training, as he was using up a fair amount of chakra trying to control his stuff more accurately, along with running around and fighting in minor quantities of course. Of course, the most likely candidate for promotion among his different bodily functions, was his chakra levels, simply because that was almost always the most useful thing to work on increasing, especially in the beginning, for any fledgeling ninja who was going to work on chakra based specialty stuff, and even the odd form of puppetry, though why puppetry was more effective with higher chakra was quite beyond this erroneous hero of a little known folk tale that would soon be forgotten to the mists of time. Most likely anyway, unless sKukla was more successful than he had never dreamed of being.

Anyways.

Kukla began trying to manipulate the steel chakra again, having paused at the end of the previous sentence to say the word out loud, before catching him self at the very last second. Instead of making the lumpy rock shapes this young ninja monk has been retconned into having been making during his previous musings about what parts of his body was most likely to improve, he instead began to form layered sets of triangles. If anyone knows what that means please enlighten him, as he was not entirely clear him self, though the shapes looked a lot like stacked tetrahedrons, whatever those were. At first the triangles were not very large, not complicated, but as time passed, he began to interweave them, by free manipulating the steel chakra in totally unusable ways for combat. The steel chakra was able to slowly change shape, and on a whim he tried infusing it into one of the many fingers he had, that numbered more than nine and no number equal to or greater than eleven.

He was getting pretty good at manipulating this, but could he go further? Could he, Kukla Ustasi Nazar, manage to go and separate the steel chakra from his body? He could already make lumpy rock shapes and triangles so this was a logical step to have gone right past, abruptly stopped, and then speedily reversed towards. He began concentrating the steel element chakra in one hand, and held it over the ground, while chilling on a totally dormant volcano. Slowly, he worked up the levels of steel chakra for his training until it was almost visible and the energy that was steel related was nearly visible. Then he tried to separate the energy from his hand. It did not work. Seems like the steel element had, well, bonded too tightly to him. The next few minutes were spent trying to eliminate the connecting energy, but that did not work. Neither did stretching the chakra, which as annoying Kukla more than a little. If he could only keep steel chakra near him the entire time, it would hamper the usefulness of the element entirely. That being said, this was hardly an impossible task, and while he found that at first he had to literally try and throw the steel chakra to make it leave his body alone, this slowly was reduced in necessity as he practiced, until he was able to just drip the steel chakra from his hand like it was slag, though admittedly without all the excessive heat that would normally come with it. This process that was briefly described took more than a few hours, however, and as a result he was supposedly getting in a lot of training during this time, when he was not doing pushups o some other merely physical activity.

(ttl wc: 2011)

would like to claim Steel Release as being trained, and +10 stats)

(bumping now that it is finished)