Mito stumbled through the front door of the cottage and through the hallway, aching with exhaustion and oblivious to Fuma calling her from the kitchen. She tossed herself onto the bed and wrapped a blanket most of the way around her, and willed herself to sleep. She heard Fuma burst through the door, undoubtedly ready to provide her with a litany of insults for accidentally ignoring her, but they did not come.
"How was the field trip?" she called from the doorway.
"Fine," Mito mumbled, already feeling herself falling asleep. "Later?"
"Absolutely not." Fuma marched to the bed and placed herself right where Mito was unable to ignore her. For a second, she considered rolling over; she only decided against it when she remembered who she was dealing with. "You're Nen-exhausted. How?"
Mito tried her best to recall what Lorro had told her in the mine, but she could remember only snippets, particular words: awakening, exhaustion, constant emission. "I—he said I awakened it when I was trying to escape. I guess I used a bunch."
"Escape from what?" Fuma demanded.
"The… singing snake, I think? It was a magical beast."
For a moment, Fuma's sunken eyes widened and her lips pressed into a thin line, but then she glared at Mito. "Just be glad you awakened it," she said. "You shouldn't have been careless in the first place."
"Lorro told me that too." Mito swallowed down on a lump building in her throat. "I know—that I should've been better. I did so many stupid things." Mito wanted to bury her face beneath her pillows. She knew she was now crying, and she didn't want Fuma to see it.
But she did not let Mito look away. And then, she said, "Well, yes, you did. You know what you did wrong?"
Mito nodded shakily. "I… should have checked the tea. And I shouldn't have fallen asleep somewhere that I didn't know." She thought she made more mistakes than that, little ones that she did not yet have the skill to notice, but those two she did notice and they weighed on her.
"At least you've got a few brain cells rattling around up there," she said, and knocked on Mito's forehead as if testing whether it would make a hollow echo. "Now, I've heard the Kiriko's version of events. But I haven't heard yours. Leave nothing out."
Mito did; she told her every last detail that she could remember, from waking up in the mine to leaving the Hunter Association, but telling the story laid bare the places where her memory had failed her, where there should have been something but when she looked, she remembered nothing. Evidently, Fuma noticed as well, frowning at the leaps in her story. However, when Mito reached the end of her explanation, Fuma said, "That's good enough. If you remember anything else, tell it to me first."
"Yeah, I will." Mito felt a sudden desire for contact, for reassurance, and she reached out hesitantly for Fuma's hand. She expected her to squirm away, or maybe to tell her never to do that again, but Fuma allowed it, giving Mito's hand a gentle squeeze. Her skin was wonderfully soft, like fabric stretched and wrinkled in the wash, and Mito thought of how pitiful and small she must look if Fuma was not teasing her for once. Oddly enough, that did the trick to stop the tears.
But now, seeing Fuma subdued and nurturing, a new fear seized Mito: that she had failed the most important test. She had failed, and now she was being sheltered, treated like an ordinary civilian. Some part of Mito now desperately wanted to please Fuma, to show her that she had what it took, so she summoned all the cheer she could and twisted her face into the carefree smile she'd perfected over the years.
"That's what I like to see," Fuma said, and patted her cheek.
Mito's training began many hours before dawn, when the moon was only halfway back to the horizon. On the first training day, Fuma tossed her an impossibly heavy backpack full of steel weapons that clanged brightly against one another with each step and led her to the clearing in the forest that they visited before. That day, she laid out Mito's training plan in a tone that brooked no arguments.
"To start, you haven't got the slightest idea how to fight," Fuma told her. "All the Nen power in the world won't help you if you can't use it well, so we'll work on that first."
For her first assignment, she taught Mito the proper way to fall, throwing out an arm to break your fall and spinning in the air like a gymnast to protect the vulnerable areas. Fuma insisted it was a vital skill, but the way she huffed in amusement when Mito would do it wrong suggested less altruistic motives. After three days, once Fuma's annoyance with Mito's complaints of skinned knees and sore elbows finally outweighed her amusement, she finally taught her to fight.
"Nen users practice Shingen-ryu, a style of kung-fu heavily involving Nen mastery," Fuma told her before her fourth training session. Mito lowered herself into what she imagined to be a proper kung-fu stance, and was met with a sharp slap to her knee from Fuma's cane. "Get back up! And listen for directions; I won't have you blowing off a hand later on because you decided to be an overachiever and thought you were too good for directions. Now, as I was saying, I won't be teaching you Shingen-ryu."
"Why not?" Mito demanded.
"Because I think it's a massive waste of time, why else? It's all about 'mastery of the will, self-actualization, the power within', all that appealing, spiritual crap that won't do you a shred of good in a real fight."
Of course, that wasn't the only reason, or even the primary one, as Fuma would confide later. Shingen-ryu was a striking art, and too specialized for Fuma, who had developed over the decades a ruthless eye for utility first and only. Mito soon gathered from repeated thrashings in spars that Fuma's preferred style was a cobbled-together mess of esoteric disciplines, with thrown knives and tear grenades and any cheap trick that would let her avoid head-on combat. For Mito's part, she received an extensive education on Fuma's style of fighting unfairly, and even kept a list of the more impressive ploys. However, Mito soon found that she lacked the special strain of deviousness that Fuma applied to battle, the kind that could stack advantages on one another until you had no choice left but to surrender. (Once, when Mito was still convinced of her own cleverness, or at least her ability to create a facade of cleverness, she attempted to make her own flash grenades. However, it was only when they had set a group of trees ablaze that she realized she had gotten the concentration of magnesium wrong.)
It was all just as well, because Mito found that in spite of Fuma's attempts to steer her from stupidity, she still preferred simpler strategies. And when Fuma took her to the Hunter Association's weapon supply stores, and she encountered a beautifully made bow, made of a shining, rich brown wood, languishing in a corner of the warehouse, she found her weapon of choice. And in two days time, Fuma had constructed a full-sized archery course, with three circular slabs of wood painted into targets, and several straw dolls tied to a clothesline that Fuma would move and pull for extra challenge. Secretly, Mito considered this by far the easiest of her studies, but she appreciated the break, so she made sure to put a quiver in her arms when she drew the bowstring to her chest and to shoot just off the center of the targets. She thought that Fuma probably noticed anyway, but she never said anything.
After three months of training, Fuma finally seemed satisfied with Mito's skill in combat—"Well, you might not die immediately," she told Mito—and they finally began to train with Nen.
Mito had continued to work with her Nen before they had officially begun training it, but she made little progress in that time. When she grew bored, she had tried the exercise that Lorro taught her, keeping her Nen wrapped around her body, holding it against her even as it evaporated into the atmosphere. On the third time she tried the exercise, she thought to watch the clock as she did it and it soon became a nightly habit, holding a shroud of Nen over her body for as long as she could stand it. It reminded her of a slow exhale: at first gentle, a relief even, but soon it began to drag at her strength until she felt she was pushing out air she did not have within her. But each time, she found more within her, and she lasted just a little longer. Sometimes, she did other things with her Nen to find its limits: she willed it from place to place within her, she threw it out of her body recklessly, she held it close and tight in the center of her sternum so that nothing escaped. As she did this, she came to see this habit of hers as a necessary form of training and from there, she progressed to the inevitable realization that it wouldn't be enough.
So when Fuma announced that they would begin to use Nen, Mito was overjoyed. Or perhaps relieved that she could finally feel caught up. Fuma brought her to the usual training ground, but then kept walking at least three miles past it, finally stopping in a part of the forest stripped bare of trees, where ash was deposited in a thin layer upon the soil.
"You remember how to channel your Nen?" Fuma asked. In response, Mito called it up from within her. "Good. Better than you should be. Do you remember what I said about overachieving?"
Mito gulped. She'd been found out; she had been this whole time. "Sorry," she offered.
"Of course you are; if you weren't, I'd find you another teacher." Even as she made the threat, Mito spotted a knowing twinkle in her eye, lending it a sense of irony. "But since you didn't maim yourself trying your Nen, I'll allow it. Now, do you even know the names of what you've been practicing?"
It was funny that she hadn't thought of that before. All this time practicing, and she hadn't questioned whether the things she did had names, had been done before. Of course, Mito had subconsciously named her nightly exercises, and only retrospectively did she realize she had done so. There was Nen covering, and Nen hiding, and Nen covering-but-bigger.
"Should've thought of that, hmm?" Fuma taunted. "What you're doing now—releasing aura evenly throughout your body—is called Ten. Remember it, because it's the basis of everything else we'll be doing. It's the most important of the four major principles of Nen, but we won't spend long on them because you've done three of them already."
Mito was surprised. Had she really done them already? She had not thought of her exercises as anything official; they had just been practice at best. But then Fuma pulled her Nen over her body in the same way Mito did (Ten), then she exploded it into a dome of humming, static energy half a mile wide (Ren), and just as quickly sucked it back into her body so that Mito could not sense a drop of Nen from her (Zetsu).
"Practice those on your own time until you can do them exactly like me." Fuma walked up to her, purposefully slow as to send Mito's heart hammering a little faster. She did that when she had thought up a particularly nasty bit of training, and wanted to see Mito squirm with knowing it. "In the meantime, let's do something more interesting." She raised her cane and as quick and sure as a tiger, delivered two rapid, precise strikes to Mito's legs to make her sit. "It's time we found your Hatsu."
A/N: Yay, I'm so excited for the next chapter! I think it should be a lot of fun, and I'll get some much-needed practice on fight scenes. Also, let me know whether you enjoy the way I'm writing the training "montages", or if you would prefer them expanded into a full set of scenes. I do plan to have training scenes in the future if that's your thing, but I frankly didn't find the Nen basics interesting enough to devote an entire arc to.
And yes, in case you're wondering, Mito is extremely talented with Nen, about on par with Gon or Killua. She did manage to work out three of the basic techniques on her own (although I think they're simple enough and intuitive enough that anybody could do it given enough time). She, however, is not a Nen genius. Seriously, look at some of the Nen geniuses like Tserriednich; they get absolutely insane.