AN: I mentioned in last chapter how I would describe the story as a whole and I'd like to reiterate that by saying that everything he attains comes with a price, whether that is paid for immediately or possibly even before or after the damage is dealt really just comes down to what you assume was the price for what.

Chapter Title: It was something Like cracks in a blade
Arc 3 part 7

Her fist flew past my head.

It was slowly becoming a common occurrence for her to do so in our Taijutsu spars. It's been three days since our first one that she had us do on the river, so I think we must've been here for nearly two weeks already? It feels like time has flown by without much warning. Moments after her punch though I was kicked in the gut and sent flying into the river and bounced off its bottom getting launched out and slamming into a tree, it winded me fairly badly as I gasped for air for a good minute before my breathing returned to normal. Ume landed close by walking up to me as I recovered.

"Huh, I don't think I've gotten used to booting you with those weights yet… want to let me try again?" she joked offering me a hand as I began to stand.

I took the offered hand. "I'd really rather you not, seeing as every time you've kicked me like that it feels like my spine is being displaced." groaning from the pain I rubbed my stomach for a moment before attempting to stretch at which point I started to feel that 'displaced spine' part of this that I was complaining about. "Ugh, why do you always kick me in the back or stomach?"

"You know I could always start kicking you in the head again if you want?" Ume's grin scared me as the memories of the earlier years of my training when she'd nearly kicked my head off my shoulders and I was in hospital for two weeks, gods I think I'm starting to realize why my mother has had problems with my training at times and also why Ume often chose to hide behind me from my mother when she would come back home with me after training.

"I'll stick to this for now." I finally said after a few minutes of silence.

"Hey Takezou?" my Aunts voice stopped me in my tracks as I had begun walking away from her back to the camp.

"Uh yeah?" I turned toward her seeing an expression that didn't suit her at all, it was that of somber dwelling.

"You know, that path you're headed towards may not seem all that bad for you at the moment, but just remember following the path of least resistance isn't always the best option despite how things may seem." There was something to what she said that made my mind uneasy. "It may seem difficult at first but everything is difficult at first. So with this remember that doing things you don't find comfortable may bear as many fruits if not more then those present on the bank of the stream." Her eyes caught mine and I felt as if they were piercing right through my soul and past me.

"Right." was all I could manage to get out of my mouth before I watched her turn and walk off.

While I was left on my own I reminded myself to stop the flow of chakra in my body that wasn't needed for me to live, back on what would've been our second day I had decided to reduce my use of chakra whenever I wasn't training so that I could train myself without it, on top of that I haven't used a single jutsu not even the substitution. It was nice to feel free of some of the weight chakra left on your body through how interwoven it is into shinobi life, where I now felt almost lighter not having it in my system constantly.

[Scene Break]

Her words had stuck with me quite a bit, a day had passed, we'd trained again and she'd given me pointers, but I was still caught up on what had been said. I had always been someone who had enjoyed taking the path of least resistance and just generally keeping myself to Wu Wei or some Taoist stuff where I could and so it was so confusing for someone to call me out on an aspect of myself that I had vague memories of people praising me for, not that I really understood said praise. Her words though, there was something heavier there.

She used to always love throwing philosophies at me while I was over, literally sometimes in the form of books, and I'd indulge myself in them, if not for her sake but my own and whenever she did nothing really ever caught me the way she had done saying what she did. Maybe it was long ago I had given up on that sort of thing so her calling out my path like that stuck something underneath all the junk in my head that has been clogging my mind up.

Ume… Ume has been something akin to a support in this life, the more I look at it and realise what she's been doing for years, she was always the place I could go to and be myself around without restrictions, I loved her for it too. Mum asks me from time to time what draws me to love sword fighting and hanging around my aunt so much, and I always answered 'Because I can let go' or that 'it was an outlet', Mum understood, but what I think got to her about it was the fact that I was otherwise really passive and detested conflict of any kind, choosing to abstain from anything violent where possible outside of the Kenjutsu. It was right enough reason though wasn't it to ask your son whether or not he was okay, that was something I treasured about my relationships, even though it's such a simple thing it made me happy to hear Kaede or Nobuyuki ask that sort of thing, especially because it could be so easy to ignore someone's mental health by just letting it be. The Shinobi lifestyle probably has a large bearing on them being so upfront with me about it, well that and I've not exactly been the most normal child to have had, it might have been different had Katsuya not died at birth.

Right now though I was just walking through the forest looking for something that wasn't fish to eat, I think I had seen some rabbits earlier in the week. I found several small maybe palm sized stones that I sharpened with Chakra, they had become more like arrowheads or small spearheads, I had done this a few days ago and tried out their effectiveness, I managed to get the stones to pierce a tree pretty deep. The problem with that was that those stones had been much smaller so they got destroyed once it hit anything, so the idea with these palm sized ones was that they'd keep shape and likely just go right through whatever I threw them at.

I spent what felt like an hour or two using the very limited hunting skills I had to find something worthwhile, what I came across was a handful of boars feeding near a pond that was probably only just big enough to fish with a hand line or spear fish. My throwing skills had improved quite a bit since I started training with my dad and uncle as well as my aunt now, eyeing my target - it was a boar that had moved away from its sounder, or well I think a group boar is called a sounder… I'd look pretty stupid if its not.

As I stepped forward in the brush hidden from the sight of the wild pigs I was reminded that my weights were on at the worst possible time, the stone had been let loose going right towards the skull of the animal I had deigned for our meal, as it went in through one side causing a large splatter of blood as it came out the other side making more viscera spray across the ground and plants around it as the boar dropped dead. Now see the weights were a problem because they were even heavier without using chakra so I had stepped on a twig snapping it, while that and the death of their member seemed to be enough to scare off most of the sounder, that left two of them that were very angry and also nearly as tall as I was.

Both of the angry beasts squealed as they ran at me an a rage, their speed caught me off guard allowing for one of them to smash into my side throwing me to its friend of whose tusks decided to make acquaintances with my face as it dragged them up through it in one swift motion narrowly missing my right eye.

I didn't need to see my reflection to know that from just below my lip on the left side of my face up through it along my cheek and carved in around my nose up past my eye to the top of my forehead.

Blood gushed from my face forcing my left eye closed as I attempted to skirt around another rush from the boar, though they both came from my right gratefully, it allowed me to maneuver around one and twirling in the air a moment copying a move I had seen once and with all the force I could muster using the heaviness of the weights to push it further kicking the boars neck and skull down with enough force that aside from hearing it, I could feel everything in that area of the kick shatter as it turned to mush as I was covered in more blood, getting only a second to recover pushing off the now presumably dead boar to face the other that seemed to start shaking before squealing and running off toward where the others had gone earlier.

I fell to my knees instantly after it was out of sight and let out a loud paind "FUCK!" echoing into the forest, as the adrenaline drained from me and I noticed my face was covered in dirt as well as my blood not helping the large line that had been carved up my face.

'And I still have to bring that boar back to camp… ugh!'

[Scene Break]

"Ow ow ow! Stop!" I winced as my Aunt tried her best at patching me up, as it turned out my thigh had been punctured and my ankle was nearly broken from that kick because it was too much for my untrained body- or my body without chakra flowing through it.

"You know, if this was a normal situation I might have told you to man up or something similar, but this isn't like those other times, this is a time when you get to see me in Mother mode." Ume said ignoring my pleas for her to stop while she wrapped some bandages around where my leg got hit.

"I'm glad you'd go so far for me then." I said almost sarcastically, but I'm sure she knew I did mean it.

A small grin turned into a smile on her face. "Listen here you little sod, I love you like I love my own daughter, so let's just focus on you losing your only good asset." Ume poked at my face emphasizing what she thought my only good asset was. "Hmm… maybe I was wrong the more I look at it the more you look like someone who just got disfigured in a training accident."

"Sure whatever, laugh at me more." I replied rolling my eyes then immediately wincing and trying not to make more noise forgetting in that moment that yes my face was still in pain and that it had only been fifteen minutes since it happened. Ume had found me about five minutes after I had yelled into the forest, she found me dragging the boar corpse back having set fire to the other.

Not long after this we traveled back to the dilapidated building where I was forced to rest and she began skinning the animal and taking the cuts from it she thought best and actually asking a few times whether I knew much about the different cuts of meat, which I did, I had done a lot of learning about the things a butcher needed to know in case it became handy for cooking on missions, while this hadn't been what I had in mind back then it works just as well.

The rest of the day bled in and out for me as I napped where I could until the food was ready, when I had been roused from my sleep for said food my face was stinging with pain and I had to keep my eye shut to keep it from getting worse.

When the next morning rolled through I had just decided to take a length of bandages and wrap it around my forehead and then over my left eye, kinda like how Kakashi has his Hitai-ate. Ume had let out a short laugh when she saw what I'd done to help keep me from causing myself anymore pain. Despite my lack of perception we still trained my taijutsu on the river, I mean really the whole point of it was to get me better at multitasking my skills e.g. not fall through the water because I lost my concentration when I got hit, or getting used to these weights some more seeing as they were still somewhat awkward for me.

It was nearing the end of the day again when I was cooking what was left of what we'd taken from the boar, while I was doing this my aunt had gone fishing about an hour ago and I was more or less assumed she'd have showed up about now, but I couldn't see any sign of her anywhere.

The area around my eye was less irritated now so I was able to take the bandages off for the moment, I traced my index finger along it wincing slightly before sighing as I remembered that I was going to have to explain it to my mother. Kaede wasn't going to let Ume train me for the next year… damn it. I'm going to need to talk mum out of killing Ume over this, it was my fault it happened after all.

While I was distracted in my thoughts I hadn't noticed Ume walk into the camp area.

"Hey kid?" her voice made me look up seeing her with a skeptical expression.

"Mm?"

"Is it me or is your hair a little more grey? Like maybe it's just the lighting or maybe I haven't really cared for it before until now, but it really does look like there's more." She explained stepping over and picking up a large part that was silvery-greyish, I had to agree with her it looked like there was more.

"Huh… yeah it kinda does, eh. I'll get over it, I mean maybe it's just my hair getting longer cause it kinda is past my shoulders and it's not like I have anything to tie it up with." I said almost more like I was just airing thoughts about it rather than considering it further, I mean mum's looked more like highlights in her hair rather than how mine had ended up where it was more like flakes of it and now it seemed thicker in those places.

"Uh, right." there was a pause. "Well I guess if you aren't going to worry then I won't then." Ume moved back and sat down where the cuts of boar meat were grilling.

"I mean, how bad could it be right? It doesn't really matter right now, also when are we going back to the village? I'd like to participate in my match." I was enjoying my time here but I also wanted to be in the village when everything went down so I could do something for my team.

"If you aren't worrying then I'll leave it, but just remember that you shouldn't try to rush to every milestone, it starts wearing you down before you know it. You might end up looking like someone ten or twenty years older because of it." her tone became a little more somber and it reminded me that she was also covered in minor scarring.

"Right."

"Here's an analogy you might understand better- we're all like blades in that if we don't take care of ourselves, mentally, physically and a few other ways we'll start getting chips, nicks and the blade will start getting dulled- maybe even rusted." I almost imagine her running her hands along a damaged blade pointing out said damages.

"So if you don't remember to look after all those things and make sure you're happy and doing what you really want then… you'll get cracks in your blade that no blacksmith will be able to repair- things like hatred or vengeance is the sort of thing that people who can't look sorrow in the eye run off to- like that stuff your friend is after, they are the sort of thing that you soak in blood constantly 'to get closer' as it rusts the blade making it worse until finally you go to sharpen it- and all those cracks of your fears and built up emotions cause it all to snap." Ume imitated a blade snapping in half by using a stick as its Crack echoed into the forest.

"Take care of yourself, Takezou."

AN: foreshadowing is a troublesome thing.