Let's make an Ice House! <3 (solo)

The last time we left our hero, he was hiding away in a stop along an escape route, training while exiting the Claws of Grima stronghold.

The reader may be pleased to know that the location has not changed, and that his efforts were not in vain. Having learned a second needle oriented technique, however, Kohei was not satisfied. While he knew a water needle technique, and another involving hair, he knew none that could use air itself, and was not currently able to pull off ice versions. You know, ice. That element he never used but spent a lot of time training by skimming down rapids and over waterfalls. Time to make that effort not go to waste.

He had waited a couple of hours since his initial escape, during which he had spent some time thinking about the details and specifications of the ice needles, spears rather, that he was going to make.

They could be formed on solid surfaces, or from or on water. The size, most likely referring to the diameter and hopefully not the circumference, could range from a couple of inches out to two meters in width. Yeah. Who ever designed this jutsu obviously didn’t convert between systems of units, which apparently existed together in this ninja world. Pretty annoying, if he was frank. Anyway. The length could be up to five meters, which made it just a teensy bit bigger than the stuff he had been making, previously. As was evident from other techniques, the stronger one’s internal energy was, the larger the number of spears the user could make. In this case, he was probably looking at a round 7 ice spears. Just a hunch, definitely not metagaming or anything.

He wanted to get used to the idea of forming ice need- spears, rather. Just the spears, however miniature they might be, before attaching them to a surface.

Gathering his chakra, he slowly formed a water needle. It could have been easier, but he did just spend a lot of time running away from other bad guys, sooo….. yeah. The water needle had a decent consistency to its thickness, and made a small pointy hole in the floor when he pushed it that way, held in his hand. The next step was to freeze it. He had frozen natural water before, and formed water before, but not together, so this technically was something new. Later on he intended to form ice by freeing the moisture, but he was not that confident in his abilities yet.

The needle of water slowly glazed over as a thin veneer of ice began to coat its outer surface, the small lumps of frozen water shifting on the outside of the water as more and more of the water beneath joined it in a frozen crystallization of sorts. The needle slowly grew in size, the water expanding as it began to decrease in temperature.

When it was fully frozen, he checked it over, but the shape was decent, it seemed to be close enough to a perfect needle shape, and largely mirroring the shape the water needle had been in. That being said, the shape would have been more perfect, if it were not marred by the imperfection of Kohei’s finger prints. Yeah. At least he could think that he replicated the needle well, if giant thumb prints were visible on the sides. The ice was clear though, lacking impurities and air bubbles for the most part.

He began the exercise again, this time without touching the water needle directly, channeling his ice powers through the air, converging onto the helpless water needle. The water needle creaked, not in terror, but because ice began to form within it, those structures colliding and making audible noise. Kohei was too slow, that kind of sound would definitely alert those he was attacking, when the time came to use such techniques in battle. That wouldn’t do. He needed to freeze them almost instantly, or additively - by freezing parts onto each other, instead of freezing sections of a pre-existing structure.

He was making progress. Now to see if the ice was strong enough. Repetitive, he knew, but there weren’t many other ways to go about this that he knew of. Later on, if he got into the whole tornado thing as he intended, later, then he would be able to make a bit more… destruction…. As it was, however, that had not come to pass yet, and unfortunately, he did not have proper motivation for his training, nor a temporary diversion to keep his mind from wandering off, so this training would have to be slugged out the hard way, sadly. Yes, that thinking was filler to pass the time.

The next water needle he was working on began to take shape, this time, as he formed the water, he began to freeze it, trying to make the two separate processes into one but only making slow progress since this was kind of… hard to do. Especially if it was your first day doing this sort of thing. So, yeah, he kept on trucking because training solo is generally a slog and he tried to not think too much about what he was doing. Partially so it would feel less boring, and partially because then he could technically be making this ice needle, err, spear formation a more instinctual or visceral creation, one that he would not have to plan in advance. Definitely not because this was boring and he wished he was doing some thing else. As much as he wanted to be able to make noise, there was a significant chance of detection since he was still near the Claws of Grima base, and there was definitely not some prick nearby who wanted things to be overly quiet so he didn’t have to move spots instead of bringing his laptop to another, more secluded room. Because, you know, those things don’t exist in this little universe, so it definitely wasn’t that reason. Not at all.

As it so happened, the water needle formed swiftly, it being converted into ice layers rather abruptly after. A thin cracking and shattering sound was clearly audible as the different layers were forced to shift in position and angle to accommodate the others forming beneath and around them. When it was finished, the ice needle/ mini ice spear dropped to the floor, making a minor dent in said floor. He picked it up. It was obviously going to be cold to the touch. It was also pointy. He could feel the edge with his finger, and had to be careful to not cut him self too easily. This time the glorified man made icicle felt more sturdy, though, which was definitely a good sign. This time it would break his skin slightly when he tried to snap the long and rounded vertice over his knee. Better. Now he knew these could actually hurt people beyond giving them slight bruises.

Enough about all that though.

He decided to take a brief break from training, not that much actual time had passed for this character, much of it being thoughts and griping of course.

Checking to make sure nobody was coming after him up the passageway he had scurried away from the Claws of Grima base through, he was pleasantly surprised to see nobody there, and unpleasantly surprised to hear approaching sounds. Evidently, that secretary he had knocked out cold had woken up, he needed to get moving, any additional reading or training would have to be on the fly for the next while. He stealthily checked behind him down the passageway, not observing anyone, and then outside the building he was hiding in. Nobody.

He ended up making a quick get away from the hideout, and back to his own spot, purely by luck, and not because the narrator ran out of ideas and thought this was going to otherwise be way too complicated to manage or some thing. Yeh. So he needed to grow ice spears. As it so happened, there was a table in his hideout that needed some legs. He decided to make some from ice as a training exercise. Hopefully the weather did not heat up too much in the near future, the weather guys had predicted a mild climate for the next week, with a bit of rain, and not really any sun. Anyways. He needed to modify the table top slightly, as he was intending to form points on the ice spear still. Finding a softer part of the flooring, he used a kunai to cut out a cone shape, with a small cylinder in the exact center, reaching out a little in each direction. A bit of an odd shape he had produced, but it should suffice for his purposes. Checking, double checking, and then triple checking the dimensions of the table, in particular, the pattern and gaps between the holes for the table legs, Kohei began cutting out more holes in the floor, another three to be precise, that could match all of the former hold he had created, while corresponding directly to the holes in the table top for the table legs. This took a while, since he was not used to working with knives, well, not kunai on dirt, anyway. Meat and cleavers was a different story, due to his time in the slaughterhouse as a teenager, but that was hardly applicable here, and besides, it wasn’t a job you just bragged about to your friends, especially if you were trying to not seem single. Being creepy and a missing ninja to boot, showing up to a date covered in blood, and holding a still-dripping knife would just not do, they might cower in terror, and those who thought you were cool anyway, or perhaps because of it, were probably best left to their own devices. Creeps gotta watch out for each other.

The table would present a harder challenge, in terms of cutting out the small cylinder. It was all very fine to push around dirt with the flat of a blade, but you don’t do that to wood. He could cut out most of the outline of the cylinder of extra removal he wanted to take away from each hole, but he was not able to make the final cuts parallel to the surface of the table top, perpendicular to the walls of the cylinder shape he was trying to form. Crap. He was not sure how to go about this. He knew of one method for obtaining such cuts, but this involved slicing through an adjacent side of the table, down to where his cylinder was being cut. He couldn’t think of anything else to do though, so that is what he did. It took quite a while though, since the kunai weren’t really flat blades, he ended up forming a series of small ice spears, using them to poke holes in a series that became a line, eventually extending all the way down into the cylinder he had cut earlier. So presumably, this was a form of ice spear training, to allow him to do other ice spear training. Well, Certain Kill Ice Spears, anyway.

After he had cut the holes on both the table top and the floor in which to place his soon to be formed Certain Kill Ice Spears, which he had been on and off training during this entire weird time, he was ready to move to the next extra wordy stage. He decided that he would work on making multiple ice spears at once. Even with his water needles, he tended to form them a few at a time. As the ice spears were more complex, requiring two actions instead of one, he needed to use more mental effort for each, regardless of the size. However, he needed to be able to make spears consistently and quickly, so he was going to skip a grade and go from one ice spear at a time, and usually an undersized one at that, to some decent sized ones that he would use to support a table, four at once, of the same approximate dimensions. A bit of an exercise in chakra control.

He stood, just because it was unrealistic for him to be sitting in a combat situation. He began to concentrate his chakra. He mused all the while how it was weird how this energy of his was even usable to begin with, let alone turning it into something unrelated, like earth or fire or something. It was abundantly obvious that some thing fishy was going on behind the scenes, who ever set the rules for this universe was clearly not thinking things through too well. No matter. For Kohei, all that mattered was that he could use it to sort of figure out how he was going to perform his next task.

Enough mulling over the metaphysical.

He stepped forward, closer to the rectangular formation of holes in the ground. His chakra was organized and gathered enough or some thing. His hands at his sides, he slowly began to raise them, his chakra reaching out into the ground, his mind willing the ice to come forth. Slowly, sprouting from the bottoms of the holes he had carved in the ground, white glimmers of a shiny substance began to rise up. He began trying to sculpt the emerging ice, leaving the bottom as a point. Slowly, the upside down cones, largely mirroring each other, began to grow upwards, having a decent external circumference. He carefully monitored their progress, making sure to keep raising them at the same speed, fixing their imperfections as they were formed ever so slowly. The ice would expand outwards, their diameters widening, to a decent width of about five centimeters across. It could have been in inches for all he cared, but Kohei was not one of those idiots who put different standards of dimensions into the same jutsu description, and some times even the same sentence. The ice fully at its destined width, each pillar was carefully raised, the mental strain making Kohei more than a little stressed, sweat beginning to drip down his forehead, and occasionally into his eyes. The strongest effort he had put forth so far, this was much harder than the breathing technique he had learned previously, which was technically the same rank. Probably, the issue with the Wind Rejuvenation technique was that it tended to be rather excruciatingly boring, and outclassed by most things that could be learned as an S rank technique. So yeah.

Slowly, the visible parts of the ice pillars expanded upwards. They were looking fairly even so far, so he was not going to worry about their form too much, just their height. The upper edge of the cylindrical segment of these ice spears - which was currently the top - was rapidly approaching the desired height for the bottom of a table top. He was making good progress. When the visible ice was tall enough, he began forming cones on the top, sharpening them into spears. The angles of the cones would match those carved into the table top, at least approximately. The whole reason he had put so much effort into cutting the extra cylinders into the table top and the floor both, was because he fully intended to make his Certain Kill Ice Spears that he was using as practice tools, into sharpened spears. As a result, he needed to have the cones cut into the floor and the table, so that the conic parts would definitely fit, spreading out the weight of the table top and anything above it around the side(s) of the conic areas , but had to include that extra little cylinder just so that the points of the spear would not be touching anything, so there was little risk of the table top suddenly impaling itself on some thing sharp and letting the spear cut farther upwards.

Eventually, the final little pointy bits of the spears were formed, and Kohei stopped using the jutsu thing. Whoof. Who would have thought that wood working and general chakra control could be so tough! He rested for a few brief moments, before picking up the table top he had made the holes in, lined up the holes in it with the corresponding ice spears, then gently rested the entire thing on the ice spears. Pressing hard with the table brought no visible result, and briefly checking inside all the holes showed no damage. Apparently, this would work decently well, though he would need to keep forming more table legs. Well, he could use the exercise, so it was not all bad.

That being done with, he was kind of bored, and needed to find more uses for these Certain Kill Ice Spears. He should have spelled out the name more often, since it took up a decent amount of time, and he had spent enough time training this technique now that he could probably have slacked off the rest of the day, having spent over half his current necessary time training the technique, and still be ok to have considered himself a user of the technique by sun down. How ever, milling around aimlessly for slightly less than half a day was going to be boring as heck. He might as well make up a weird idea and try to implement it, to pass the time.

He wandered outside to a deserted area that nobody ever went to. In all his time there, not one camp fire, not even one foot print. So, he would build a safe house. He was not a senju, but he could at least make… an ice house. Get your mind out of the gutter, you alcoholics! He meant a literal ice house. Like an ice castle, with no alcohol, and made from a lot of ice. He had some thing similar in concept to a log house but instead of logs, he would form and stack up spears from the jutsu he was training. From what he remembered, the logs in log houses were usually notched though, and he was not sure he was supposed to be able to do that. It would take a fair amount of planning. He needed an alternative.

It then hit him, literally. Water. Falling from the sky. Of course! Ice would freeze water in sufficient ratios and temperatures.

Soon he was back at the site with a couple of buckets of water. Rather, they were frozen buckets made of really cold water which had lost more than enough heat to freeze solid, the water they contained being very cold as well, but that was rather unimportant for the sake of this training.

Carefully, he began to mass produce massive ice spears, using the Certain Kill Ice Spears tech. He did wonder who the pompous jerk was who named it though. Even if you were very clever, a kill was never certain, the spear jutsu really did not deserve its name at all. Each spear was the maximum size for the technique, which was to some degree defined by the level of chakra control one had. This resulted in a series of large ice spears forming, from point to point about 5 meters long, and about 2 meters thick in the center of the body. In his current state, he could create about 7 at a time, though when he was using his Wind Rejuvenation technique, the number rose to 12. He did have to wait a while between each set of ice spears, simply because the laws of this universe said so. Exhaustion also played a factor in the delays, just so he could not be accused of metagaming.

After a while, he had a fairly large number of ice spears made, all of them at the largest size possible. Carefully, he began laying them down in a square, four at a time. The first four, anyway. After that, he poured some water on a ice spear, before placing a second ice spear on top of it, holding it to the other one until it was some what stable, the water eventually freezing between the two and holding them in place. He repeated this for each of the other sides, there being a small gap between two of the sets of spears, intentionally, so that he would be able to walk in and out, instead of living in a pit. Of course, freezing extra water around the connecting surfaces also helped a lot. But the initial water was just there to keep it going at first. He repeated this basic process at each other spear lying on the ground, resulting in a two spear width- high pen. After that, he began moving more spears to act as pillars of a sort. One went into each of the actual corners, where horizontal spears were stacked and touching each other. This was fused to them with water, allowing them to have a bit more stability. Two others went to each of the sides of what would become a door way. These were likewise attached with some frozen water. The pillars stood up high though, he needed to build up some taller walls.

He ended up repeating the earlier process, stacking up another layer of 4 spears horizontally, ending up at about six meters tall on the sides. With that done, he had to climb back down the sides using the Surface Walking technique, and start constructing a roof. This part was actually fairly hard to do, actually, since he had to freeze some spears in place, hanging out at an angle, then fuse others to them, and back onto the frame. It was really heavy work since he often had to support a spear with one hand while freezing with the other. Pretty difficult work actually. It took a lot longer to undertake than to actually describe, sadly, as it is easier for the narrator to speed past all this and make it into a hazy blur of pain and exhaustion, that ultimately ended in a success of some sort. The overall structure of a basic hut was there, though there were a lot of crooked edges. It hit him after he was done, that he had completely forgotten that he could make shadow clones.

Oops.

Yeah, he was a little annoyed about that, but at least he had gotten a lot of exercise, and been able to use up all his chakra for ice related spear stuff. Whoof.

He wanted a popsicle to suck on, but they rarely had the flavor he wanted. So he ended up forming an ice spear, blunting the edges carefully, and licking on that instead. Looked kind of gross, actually, come to think of it. For the hell of it, he decided to make a fence made out of ice spears. Slowly, he formed entire rows of ice spears, maybe not for a certain kill, maybe only impalements. However, the spears were still plenty sharp, and pointed out away from his ice hut, organized into a sort of wobbly circle. If he had to guess, the spears made approximately a sixty degree angle with the ground. Really, it was kind of an inconvenient and non continuous wall, but he called it a fence.

Now that he was done, he wondered how long it would take for this all to mel-

Oh.

The ice disappeared. At first he thought the frozen water had just disappeared altogether, but that was not the case at all. Rather, there was a cloud of water vapor that rapidly settled on the ground. Cool. So apparently, he could make holes in things, and the ice would just poof away in a cloud of smo- water vapor. Handy for murder weapons, don’t ya think? You could hold one of those and stab people repeatedly, without leaving any finger prints. Nudge nudge, wink wink.

(exit)

(ttl wc: 4002)
(claiming +20 stats and http://naruto-role-play-rpg.forumotion.com/t25092-certain-kill-ice-spears)

Approved yo