Elemental Basic Fundamentals, revised (solo)

Kohei was making a sand castle.

Yup.

A missing ninja wanted for murder, was working on a sand castle, his forehead furrowed in concentration. You read that right. It made a funny picture, even if the murder in question was actually a framing.

Now the question remains

Sand? Really?

Indeed.

The deal here is that Kohei was bored of the normal methods for training. Wind element meant cutting, cutting, and more cutting. Boring. At least fire users got to burn something and make interesting colors. Probably bad for the health, but they likely got more converts than the wind element.

Ugh.

So he he had decided to challenge himself. He would make a detailed sand castle without tools, just his hands and chakra. Well, one could argue that chakra constructs were tools as well, but he was not in the mood to discuss semantics.

He surveyed the landscape in front of him. Choosing a decent looking dune free of weeds and other plants, he got to work.

He gathered the wind chakra in one hand, his left specifically. Standing next to the pile of dirt, he plunged the chakra formed into a small blade, into the sand. He began pulling it along the dune, keeping his arm as straight as possible.

The transformed energy blade began slicing through the sand like a tinfoil sword through frozen butter. In other words, it bent out of shape and became useless rather rapidly.

Crap.

Evidently, he did not produce enough chakra, or had not controlled it properly, or some thing, because this was already deviating from the instructions he had read. That or his wind energy had the constitution of a wet noodle. Yuck. That had to change.

He withdrew his arm, casting a disappointed glance at the line in the sand, that started out deep and rapidly disappeared all of six centimeters away. Funny shapes. Frowning, he began pushing out wind chakra from his palms, attempting to sharpen it into a more usable tool. The wind chakra remained stable up until around two centimeters from his hand, the energy largely being blunt, lacking an edge altogether. If anything, he had a good smoothing block.

Well, that was absolutely bloody brilliant, eh? He would take on the world with glorified mitts. Seriously, what the hell was this? Oh, of course. He would defeat his opponents by smoothing over their clothing and hair until they surrendered to his unrelenting barrage of helpfulness.

That was sarcasm, emerging from the depths of his mind whenever he was kind of… mad. Not too pleasant to hang around, if you were born into this kind of “humor”. It’s the way he thought far too often, it might be lowering his life span.

Eh, enough with the murky moping, it was time to see if this smooth gust of wind would be useful for anything.

Mostly because he was feeling a tad snarky, as implied earlier, Kohei first used his personal clump of air to clean off all the edges of this dune. Not that there were many. The trade winds did a decent enough job on this front already.

As it turned out, a fairly blunt and flat surface was good for pushing sand away, and flattening the outsides of a cube into existence. The wind chakra condensed into a small shovel, the sand rapidly drying and falling away since it’s hard to stick to, well, air. Slowly, because he was not able to make a larger pad of chakra, the cube of sand took shape, a meter and a half tall or long approximately, on all sides. If Kohei’s imprecise chakra control had caused some noticeable variances in the dimensions through shifts in the length of his make shift ruler, he didn't want to know, and did not want any advice on the matter thank you very much. At best, this would have otherwise meant that he was feeling large parts of the cube. He had trouble leaving it incomplete looking. A scatter brained perfectionist. Wonderful.

The cube being largely shaped proportionally he began considering how and why he wanted the castle to take shape. As he plotted and designed, he used the wind chakra to form different shapes protruding from his palm, pressing the chakra into the sand to form shapes representing the supports, bricks, and other such integral building components of a castle.


Slowly, the outside shapes of his sand castle began to take place. But what was this? Several small clumps of went sand where his nice design had been previously! What happened? Cue dramatic gasp.

Well, upon reflection of prior events, he decided that he probably splashed a little water at one point, or the wind had carried a few stray droplets from the sea. Neither was acceptable, this terrible climb of dark wet sand had to be dealt with immediately!

He could generate a mean gust of wind from his hands, at least for a few seconds, it seemed. Long enough to blow away the wet sand. Short enough to not use up much of his time. Plenty long to obliterate all the designs on the face of his beloved cubular shaped lump of sand that he had been carefully cultivating. He swore loudly and bitterly. The previously lightly populated beach front around him, suddenly was reduced to a single angry man, starting with unhappy parents who were evidently naive about their children’s vocabulary, then couples, then the other loners. As it turned out, vehement cursing could almost change the color of the air.

Yeah.

He surveyed the damage, a little surprised by the sudden outburst of energy. Evidently he had not expected this. Certainly not the partial erasure and erosion of his carefully sculpted curves and delicate lines that he redrew three to five times apiece. Definitely not the gaping bites taken out of his carefully constructed corners and vertices.

He would need to reconstruct the cube to make it worthy of craftsmanship.

If he was a manga or anime character, he would have dissolved into a sobbing puddle of tears, his eyes a quivering nest of circles shedding a veritable river of salt three water droplets. As it was, he was supposed to be a normal person, if a pretend one, and normal people weren't supposed to undergo such transformations. Mostly because it looked rather undignified, aside from being scientifically impossible. The Hozuki were obviously freaks of nature, perhaps an accident involving radiation….

Well, he couldn't just stand around now, could he?

But he wanted to curl into a fetal ball every time he glanced at the ruined cube of sand. That settled it.

He kicked the sand cube to bits, scattering the sand into the air as a thick cloud with his wind chakra. Unbeknownst to him, the actual wind picked up the sand he scattered into the air, fooling many into believing they were in a sand storm for a few entertaining seconds. Unfortunately, as our focus is on Kohei’s misadventures whilst attempting to improve his proficiency with the wind element, we must read our eyes away from the otherwise fine spectacle he had created.

So, since he could not stomach messing with sand more for the moment, he walked out to the edge of the water on the beach, whatever it was called.

He knelt by the water. His next idea, was to reduce or eliminate the ripples in the oncoming water.

Because Kohei did not study physics, he did not realize that this was a thankless task, even for training, but that didn't mean he wouldn't try for reasons he had no business knowing.

His knees wet, his bathing suit holding something besides des himself, air, and sand, Kohei held his hands almost parallel to the water, his hands a few centimeters above the surface. His wrists were out in front of his torso, the fingers raised slightly towards the sky. Carefully, he held his body still, then released a spurt of wind energy towards the water.

This wasn't too hard, if he wasn't trying to make reverse waves. As each natural wave rolled onto the shore, he blasted his area with wind energy in the opposite directon, flattening out and sometimes eliminating the appearance of a wave altogether for the time being. For a while he kept this up, though every once in a while he needed to pause for a breather. Apparently, converting your energy into waves of wind could be rather tiring.

After a good fifteen minutes of this, he began trying to create waves in the opposite direction from their origin. In other words, away from him. This was ultimately a matter of timing, rather than actual power, unfortunately. It took a brief shift in timing to counter this, Kohei creating higher crest waves when he blasted wind timed to create waves pushing directly against those oncoming, instead of  inbetween.

This variation was definitely a lot harder to produce results with, though. The water wanted to go the opposite way, and even when Kohei amped up his wind chakra output, was significantly stronger and deeper. As a result, the underlying wave continued, while the upper surface fought bitterly with Kohei's somewhat subtle influencing. He was making progress though. He was becoming able to output more energy at a time, even if less total due to exhaustion. This might have been because he was becoming more used to creating wind energy in a tangible form. He was making progress!

Almost enough for him to forget about the sand castle idea.

This time, he decided to make it more abstract. He piled up lumps of wet sand in a disorganized fashion.  Some were stacked high, others formed a twisted honey comb of pathways. Holding a hand next to a protruding lump of darkly textured sand, he began gently blowing out wind chakra, this time the goal being to control the output to sculpt the sand without toppling it all. From the looks of the libraries he had perused, most did training the normal way, so this was going to be rough, at least aesthetically.

The wind chakra he controlled, directing most of it into the hole, letting the structure of the sand sort out the rest, watching to see what would be eroded away. Yes, he thought this was actually kind of fun, believe it or not.

As it turned out though, some of the walls of the little structure were thin, and collapsed, after only losing a few clumps of sand, in this weird twist on Jenga. Ack! He began trying to push other grains of sand into place to prop up the rapidly disintegrating structure, to little avail. After a few long seconds, the entire structure was in ruins, and he had to start over. Well, he could make it easier to replicate, he supposed. The wet sand was formed into a slalom of sorts, a series of pillars in a line away from him, each rather thin, about a centimeter or two across, depending on the point you examined. He began releasing his wind chakra again, generating another whiff of wind, this time he needed a better control over it. He directed the wind carefully around each of the pillars, alternating the side with which he passed each pillar, trying to adjust the gusts of wind with little nudges, sometimes secondary blasts at a shallow angle, from his other hand. For the most part, the wind didn’t touch the pillars, though it came close on multiple occasions. Not good enough. He wanted to remove a layer of sand from each pillar, exactly one grain thick. Not the brightest idea since he could barely control the wind he was trying to produce, but never let it be said that he didn’t try. He attempted the deed several more times, with varying success, on some tries managing to get past the pillars quickly, and other times going slowly. On a few occasions, he was able to take off the desired amount of sand, for the most part, but not consistently. Often, he instead left gaping holes in said sand pillars.

Ugh.

He’d try again later.

(ttl wc: 2022)

To say Kohei was unhappy with his current situation was an understatement.

Now a missing ninja for no reason beyond doing his job, he did not even have a home to return to. Of course, as that home was Tengakure, that meant he had been wandering for a long time, aimlessly. He still was not sure exactly why it was destroyed. It was just... rubble and some bodies, but not as many as he had expected. It was almost as if the population of Tengakure largely uprooted itself and went elsewhere, both without informing him, and while missing a few bodies.

No more.

The aimless part, anyway.

No more.

The aimlessness, that is.

The wandering would certainly continue, but he was going to find a purpose to his life. He would get strong enough to do what he wanted, so he would not have to bow down to anyone. Unfortunately, his missing ninja status meant that his best conversation buddies tended towards the drunks in lonely bars, in small villages. It was that, or trying to make friends using an alter ego, a practice he rather disliked due to its unreliability, rather than the underlying dishonesty. He felt a lot less compunction, making there be few inhibitors, or nothing at all, keeping him from becoming a pathological liar.

After all, the truth had gotten him so far, hadn't it. Yes, that was sarcasm.

Well, he was not going to amount to a lot if he could not use his clan element, long dormant though it had remained. Being one of the water affinity, he needed to improve his connection with the wind element, so he could begin his ice training. After all, an essential part of the Yuki Creed, was to give everyone the cold shoulder.... He he he....

Alright, enough of the bad jokes told by a nameless narrator to a nonexistent audience. It was time for some action!

He finally took a look around him at his surroundings.

Sky. Trees. Running water. A camp site - his own, in fact. Not much in the way of wildlife here, virtually anything that could move that he could catch, had been eaten.

Ah, he knew how he could train. But first....

He held one palm up towards the sky, at eye level. Examining it closely, he began exerting wind chakra from his tenketsu. Unlike some ninjas he had seen, getting to the wind element itself was not very hard, but using it powerfully enough was just as much a problem for him as anyone else. Quality was the issue. While a common prescribed training method would have been to start exuding wind chakra, using it to start pushing forcefully, slowly sharpening it into little wind blades that could be used to slice first organic matter, and later separate heavy liquids, like water. Basically, you messed with your hands and tried to turn them into deadly blow dryers. Not very interesting in terms of the potential applications.

He continued to push wind chakra out through his hands. Maybe he could add a chakra control aspect to this as well, as opposed to just the unsubtle practice of blasting chakra as far as was possible. Plucking a leaf, he set it on the palm of his hand, that side of his hand still facing upwards. The orientation of the leaf did not matter, for this idea, it just had to be roughly centered over where he could remember the tenketsu location in his palm - never would have thought anatomy class could be so helpful, huh?

Purely because he worries about stuff like this that doesn't matter, Kohei adjusted the leaf so that the tip was pointing north. It could be considered OCD except that it was not very common he was organized or fussy about matters like this. Being on the job doesn't count. Actually, now that the leaf was organized to his specifications, he realized he could use it as an indicator of his chakra control. Just how would become obvious in a moment.

Finally ready, he started applying wind chakra through his tenketsu again. Slowly, the leaf began to levitate. Well, not exactly. The wind chakra was flowing out of Kohei's tenketsu in his palm, flowing under and around the leaf, slowly pushing it into the air. He noticed the leaf was beginning to turn. Apparently he was not launching all his wind chakra straight up. So he began shifting his chakra output, angling some of the chakra that was causing the angle into the opposite direction, allowing the leaf to stop rotating. Actually, that is not quite correct. He straightened back out the leaf first, before letting it continue up in its original orientation.

The leaf slowly ascended into the air, coming to a half about one foot above his outstretched hand. Whoooh.

He concentrated, rather intensely. If looks could burn, well, he wasn't THAT ugly. The leaf would definitely have been aflame though. A vein began to bulge in his forehead, as he began to force extra amounts of chakra through the one tenketsu. It was a path of diminishing returns, however, as the leaf did not rise quickly, if anything it slowed in its ascension. In fact, after another few seconds, the leaf stopped rising altogether, threatened to lose any progress gained, and boy, did Kohei's hand hurt. If he had to guess, he was overexerting the chakra nodes in his (right) palm. Ordinarily, it would have been the left palm, but he had smacked that on an object earlier, and he was not very tough at all, sadly.

He ended up concentrating the wind chakra more effectively, by gathering and consolidating energy from all over his body and mixing it together, and slowing it out and around him. While not technically what was the norm, the point was to control his chakra and change it into the nature transformation, so apparently, any extra work would still be handy. Which was good because he was getting sleepy and might have trouble continuing on this saga, anyway.

The extra energy output from the rest of his body proved rather helpful, and soon he was pushing the leaf much higher - almost out of sight in fact. It was taking him a little while though, but not long enough, how could he prove his mastery over wind, or get strong enough, otherwise?

The leaf was spinning almost uncontrollably. It hovered above his hand about twenty feet in the air above his hand, rather difficult to make out since he was not wearing corrective lenses, and had not grabbed a particularly large leaf at the beginning.

This seemed to be workable now.

Now for the second stage.

He released the leaf form the grasp of his chakra, after letting it slowly drop back into his hand, by gently reducing the wind chakra that he was streaming upwards. After the leaf landed gently in his hands, following a several minute long descent, he tossed it away! Because he wouldn't be needing it anymore, right?

He began wandering around, looking for a stream. Anything really, he just wanted to wash his hands of the matter.

The matter of the dirt, that is.

Handling that leaf and scrabbling in the dirt had caused him to get his hands dirty. He needed to clean them off. And since he was working with wind chakra now, he had effectively something akin to a blow dryer, on command. Pretty nifty, especially if you consider that most water jutsus involved pulling moisture from the atmosphere. He had a hand washing station on the go!

Though, he wanted to practice blasting away larger amounts of water. So a stream would do the trick.

As it turned out, there was a trickle of water conveniently placed to be audible, the source being a stream, no a river, no, a stream, no... agh! It was a body of flowing water of vastly varying widths, depending on one's current location and perspective. Ok, it was time to stop classifying this mysterious beast, and get right down to it!

Kohei frowned at the water.

As nothing jumped out of the water in fright, it was safe to assume he could train here without disturbance.

First, he held his hands straight out in front of him, and began scraping at his hands with his wind chakra.

Ok, maybe that was the wrong approach, it was really starting to hurt, and he had only just gotten started. He stopped, and wet his hands in the stream, just briefly, enough to get the dirt wet, but not long enough for more than a little of the dirt to be washed away. This time, when he fired up the wind chakra machine again, he was aiming to just blast the dirt off in short spurts, because that is more relevant usually to making a wind jutsu, than a slow accumulation like he had been practicing earlier.

The first blast went off without a hitch, though it did not accomplish its intended purpose. RIP. That is to say, his blast of wind chakra activated without a hitch, but it had little effect. The dust barely moved, and if Kohei had not been watching closely, he would have thought that it did not even lose any moisture in the ensuing gust.

He tried again, this time increasing the dosage of the blast. This time, some of the dirt came off. Woop de doo. The blast felt only a little stronger, but he had put a lot more effort into it. Maybe he was not being efficient about it....

The realization came to him, and he slapped his forehead.

Of course!

What a fool he had been! Blasting wind chakra everywhere! As if he was trying to shred everyth-

He looked around him.

Oops.

Well, it would seem that his wind chakra was less than poorly aimed. In fact, he seemed to have a vendetta against the ground around him, and some of the falling leaves, previously whole. Yeah. A lot of slash marks on the ground, centered around him. Mhm. Time to rein himself in a bit.

He tried again, this time he tried to keep a better handle on his wind chakra. This time he focused on not letting any excess escape, only pushing it in the direction he wanted, in this case, around his body and more concentrated over his hands. Rather than directly scraping his skin, he tried to use the wind chakra more like a brush. Inefficient, certainly more than prior methods, But doable, and less painful.

Slowly, the dirt slightly smudged onto his hands began to clear off, the wetness leaving. Whooh.

He was making progress!

A third blast cleaned off both the moisture and the last layers of dirt, leaving his hands squeaky clean, and pained. All that wind chakra scraping his skin hurt, and probably removed a fair few layers of skin.

Trying to sooth his hands, he stuck them both into the water of the stream. Hopefully nobody downstream got a stomach ache from chakra infused in the water or something. He began swirling the water around him, feeling a bit bored. Using the wind chakra, of course. Water didn't work so well in chakra form, that way, it required a more controlled form than just summoning raw chakra. Wind being lighter though....

He realized he had drifted off. From the looks of the swirling water, it was a little too late. While he had not been paying attention, the wind chakra had started forming massive currents, resulting in "small" whirlpools, one around each hand.

The last anyone who happened to be within earshot would know is a "WAAAGH" was suddenly heard, fading into the distance, suddenly cut off and replaced with choking.

Yeah.

Our more astute readers, and some decidedly less so, will perhaps have ascertained that Kohei just dragged him self into the water, with self made whirlpools.

Yeah.

He just took clumsy to a whole 'nother level.

At first, he was submerged, and rather disoriented. Probably because he was upside down, having fallen into the water head first. After all, feet first entries are for scrubs, and people who merely walk into water, rather than falling in.

He tried to get a sense of his direction, but it was hard, he was getting wobbled around so much, and he was getting a few nasty bumps against rocks, to say the least. Actually, this could be pretty dangerous.

Still, chakra got him into this mess, and maybe it could get him out of it. At least he was not caught in his own whirlpools any more. That had really sucked.

He found him self bobbing down stream, the water currents proving to be decently strong, the river bank being rather slippery. He was unable to maintain a grip on the sides for long, let alone getting a good enough repetitively worded grip that would let him climb out. He would need another way out. Unfortunately, he did not know how long the river meandered for. Or he might have been willing to wait it out.

He skinned his hand on a passing rock as he zipped his way down stream. Looks like he was picking up speed, water did flow downhill. Usually. Jutsu aside.

He began applying wind chakra to the water, trying to reduce the rate of his progress. He was about as unsuccessful as the second attempt, which was with water energy. That being said, a bit of each combined, the water becoming colder, transforming into ice. Well, he didn't have a better idea….

The first chunk of ice he formed didn't work out too well, beyond letting him slide past a nasty looking chunk of stone. Ok, it did have some use after all.

He put his hands together, to try to make a more useful shape of ice with his combined wind and water chakra. Holding one hand just above, and one hand just below the surface of the water, he began forming a sheet of ice. Just in time to catch it on an outcrop of rock, because life isn't interesting or long enough to be worth telling, otherwise. The resulting impact knocked the wind out of him, somehow not being fatal, leaving him tumbling through the water, ice temporarily forgotten, perhaps understandably.

He got a decent mouthful of water of three, the first of which he swallowed. When he surfaced in a calmer part of the water, drifting in a more straight line, he coughed up a significant portion of what seemed to now be a slow river. Evidently he had passed some tributaries in his earlier tumbling.

He breathed a sigh of relief, and began forming some ice by freezing some nearby water into the shape of a paddle. He used it for the obvious purpose of bringing him towards the river bank. Without looking in the direction he was mostly headed, which was downstream. As it turns out, the river began to shrink in width, the water beginning to pick up speed. Up ahead he could see oncoming rocks, the water starting to froth around then into a normally magnificent white spray.

Beautiful, if one were warm and dry on land.

He clapped his hands together, mixing the water and wind chakra to form ice. If he was going to get through this safely, or at all, he needed to start making something to protect him from the rocks. The most obvious idea was to freeze the water, which was not completely doable due to its velocity, but he could create a barrier of slush….

As it turns out, frozen particles of water that have not formed into a cohesive formation, provide little protection, and barely slow the onslaught of water upon rocks. Kohei could attest quite strongly to that, his shin having received a thunderous smack. Ouch. He would be feeling that one for a good while, actually.
Another rock approached, up ahead. This time, he would make something a little sturdier. Instead trying to make a shield, he tried to divert the force. Yeh.

Why reinvent the wheel, when you can reinvent a surfboard out of a material you have never used before today, in vastly more dangerous conditions?

As it turns out, Kohei was a tolerable ice board surfer, once he learned to bend his knees, and after he attached his toes to the board by freezing water around them. Most of the rocks he was able to avoid, skimming along on top of the water. Until he found the rapids. That surfboard was not going to cut it, literally and figuratively.

So he began freezing the water around him, forming a large protective shell. Because the water tended to dissipate up above, he ended up forming a sort of tea cup shape, the sides highly rounded. The rapids approached, well, rapidly, and he was busy thickening the shell of frozen water, rapidly cooling new layers with his hands pressed together, ice chakra pouring from his hands.

Would it be enough?

Mostly, it turned out. He had to keep forming new ice with his chakra, as the tea cup shape smashed its way over the rocks, following the course of the water. It was holding up, apart from cracks that he was mostly keeping up with. Until the water began pouring through a small crack. He could see the ground beyond it, apparently the river curved….

He didn’t realize it was a waterfall until it was too late.

“WAAAAAGGHH”

The splash had to have been ten meters high, and his skin was probably red from the impact, but he was alive.

After his skin stopped hurting like crazy, he began swimming for land, but it was kind of far away.

Apparently, frozen water can also be a decent life buoy. Cold, but serviceable while he regained some stamina.

After about a half hour, he let go of the frozen water he had been resting on, enjoying the warmth of the surrounding water, before doing a tolerable front crawl towards the shore. All the while, he had never remembered to use the surface walking technique, not once. Apparently the ninja academy really does help its students.

(exit)

(ttl wc: 3036)

grand total: 5058
claiming:
+25 stats
Wind element (at 2x the cost - dropping mah first 4k towards it)
Ice element (which should be just 1k iirc, if not, 1k towards it)

Approved, try to avoid going over any more waterfalls though, it's not really good for your health lol