Okay, I have to ask this: How many of you think I spend too long detailing Sora's thoughts?
I had a review saying that it went on a bit and now I'm curious.
Chapter 6
"Hey dad, how does graduation work?"
Sora watched as her father froze up slightly and turned his head to look down at the sink. "Right...I forgot this is your last year." He turned to face her after a few more moments, making her slightly worried by how...forbidding he looked. "Sora, what I am about to tell you...I promise that it is no joke, no attempt to freak you out. I am completely and utterly being truthful to you, I swear this to you." He took a breath and seemed to steady himself for a moment. "You know how Kiri is regarded as the Village of the Bloody Mist?"
She shook her head, not actually knowing that. "Well, all the other villages regard Kiri as such. It isn't just how brutal our shinobi tend to be, but that is part of it, and relates to what I am about to tell you. At the end of this year, you will have a graduation exam. But unlike in other villages where you might be tested on your knowledge and your abilities in a calm environment, in Kiri things are a little...different."
Blinking, Sora waited silently as her father seemingly struggled to find the right words to say. "There's...no easy way to put this. At the end of this year, you and all of the others in your year will be put into a hall and told in no uncertain terms to kill each other." Sora's eyes widened, but her father wasn't done. "To pass the exam, you have to have at least one kill to your name, but they prefer more. If that kill is deemed cowardly or opportunistic, you will fail and be killed, you have to claim a kill that cannot be called into question. In other words, you have to pick a fight with someone and kill them yourself."
"So...hang on, I need to wrap my head around this." Her father nodded, giving her a moment to process what she was just told. "Okay...okay, so..." She drifted off, trying to figure out who the flying fuck came up with that idea. "So, every year, at an absolute bare minimum amount, 50% of the graduating class is killed off?" Her father considered it a moment then nodded, a tired look overcoming his features. "And our village does this every year, it kills at least 50% of our prospective shinobi, willingly cutting our available increase in manpower by half for...what exactly? Because if it's teaching us how to kill, couldn't they use prisoners or something, instead of having us kill off other potential allies?"
"I'd suppose it's not just that, but also to test your bond to the village. The ones you will be killing you have grown up around. Can you do it, kill someone you've been a student alongside for years, or will you refuse an order from the village and die for it?" Sora tipped her head in consideration. That did actually sound quite pragmatic in her head. Of course, she had no connection whatsoever to any of the students so it wasn't exactly going to be a challenge for her to stab one or two of them, probably up to three to make absolutely sure there could be no doubt that she was willing to obey orders.
If she wanted to be a Hunter-nin, she had to appear to have rock-solid loyalty after all. "So, what about teams? I heard that when being considered for Chunin promotion, people are always put into three-man teams?" Her father sighed and turned away from the sink, drying his hands off. "Because the Academy hasn't actually said anything about what actually happens after graduation."
"Putting it simply, you don't get a team. What happens is that all the survivors, those seen as strongest, are then dumped into the Genin Corps for a while and allowed to do odd jobs around the village, upon which Chunin and Jonin can recruit them to use on missions." Sora stared at her father a moment before burying her head in her hands. "It's not...quite as bad as it sounds. The Chunin and Jonin aren't idiots, they won't make a team that can't work together. If they do, it's their necks on the line, not the Genin. Very often a Chunin or Jonin will claim a group that works well together and keep them together, or will select two Genin or even just one as an apprentice and not take others. That's usually how the Seven Swordsmen operate, taking one apprentice to train."
Admittedly, right at that moment, all Sora really wanted was to hurt someone...badly.
The next few months passed by swiftly, and were filled with rather feverish activity.
Rather than spend any of her time goofing off and doing anything leisurely, Sora worked brutally, leaning heavily on her healing to keep herself from burning out. She unlocked and started to lightly grind her stealth proficiency, having never actually unlocked it despite having a perk tailored for it. But rather than focus on something that potentially could get her kills called into question, she instead trained with her Naginata, her hand-to-hand and her Kunai usage.
And so, every single day, even on weekends, she was either sparring with those who were vastly superior to her, being beaten down frequently and painfully every single time without fail but gaining valuable proficiency experience by the boatload, or she was at the docks testing her first proper experiment, rats. She had gone around and captured a whole bunch of rats, gave them a pile of pet food and left them to their own devices. Every so often she came back to dump another bag of food off and check on their numbers, letting them roam around freely.
Amusingly enough, after a little while she actually unlocked a proficiency for animal husbandry, which increased growth rates as well as reducing food consumption and increasing baseline friendliness of claimed animals, all by 1% per level. So presumably at level 100, 'claimed' animals wouldn't require food, they would grow at double the speed and would be perfectly friendly to her.
Claiming animals was also fairly simple. When they ate the food she put out while she was there to actively witness it, the rats came under her claim, and she had a list of all claimed animals that marked their location on her map. When rat pups were born by rats that were claimed, they all immediately became claimed by her. This helped her track the exponential growth of the rats and ensure she didn't draw attention with the sudden increase in population. Most of the rats lived in the building she dumped food off in anyway, since it was shelter and food supplied as a two-in-one package.
After a month or so, she noted the much higher quantity of rats that were present, presumably bolstered from other regular rats finding the location and the free and bountiful food. There were also a lot of pups around, and that meant she could do the next test. Picking one at random, she picked it up and removed it from the building, then took a Kunai and killed it before ditching the body in the ocean to sink, immediately checking her notifications and smirking.
The rat pup had given her a base amount of 10 experience, bumped up to 11.2 by her Intelligence. Sure, a rather tiny amount, but with the number of rats available, and with a few months to go before graduation, she had time to essentially farm the rats. She then killed an adult rat, and her plans very quickly shifted when she only received a base 20 experience for the kill. Initially she intended to allow them to grow to adults and then cull them, but that was an expense she didn't need to maintain. Already she was spending all of her mediocre 'pocket money' from her father on food for the rats.
So what she did instead was to maintain a certain rough population of rats and kill any extras. By doing this frequent culling of rats, as well as occasionally knocking other students out in sparring, she actually managed to reach levels 5, 6 and 7. This was helped by the fact that she put all of her points into Intelligence to increase her experience gain, meaning each pup she killed gave her 12.7 experience, then 13.2, 13.7 and 14.2. 14.2 experience per kill was definitely not bad at all, not for how little effort it was to encourage the rats to multiply.
Occasionally she did have to kill predators that found their way inside, snakes and weasels that hunted the rats and gave her notifications that claimed animals had been killed, but that wasn't a big deal. One of the weasels she killed actually even gave her a fine pelt, which could be useful further down the line when her crafting proficiency was higher up.
That was another proficiency she was grinding, and she was making money to do it. Sora had, after some hunting around and demonstrating her appeal, managed to convince a blacksmith to let her refine the kunai he was selling for a nominal fee. For a pitiful ten ryo per Kunai, which she worked out was like 50 pence per weapon, she would refine them and make them better than before, then give them back. He didn't ask how she was doing it, so for all he knew she had a special sharpening technique, and she, in turn, didn't get in the way of him selling the unquestionably superior weapons for whatever price he wanted.
She simply showed up, took a bag of Kunai away, refined them all using her crafting menu, then took the bag back the next day. The guy would take a few out at random and test their cutting strength and durability against a normal Kunai he had personally made, and as long as they were sharper and more durable, he would pay her. Sure, he could have simply taken that bag of weapons back from her and not paid her, but he wasn't that stupid. She had an ability that he couldn't replicate, so if he cheated her out of a single bag of Kunai, she would be able to go to one of his competitors and offer the same deal, thereby costing him in the long run. Maybe the thought just never occurred to him, it was one or the other.
Doing this, she was able to farm her crafting proficiency, which had a knock-on effect in that every level of crafting proficiency increased the damage her refined Kunai did. So a baseline Kunai did 10 damage, and at first, her refined Kunai did 15 damage. But once she actually levelled up her crafting proficiency, it increased the number a little. She was at level 4, and the refined Kunai were now doing 16 damage, being increased by 0.6 points of damage and rounded up. So at level 100 proficiency presumably a basic Kunai refined with literal rocks would actually have 30 damage.
Of course, at that kind of level she'd definitely have already unlocked vastly superior weapons, but they'd likely cost her dearly in terms of materials, whereas for those Kunai, all she had to do was buy completely normal Kunai and scavenge for small rocks to make into whetstones to craft the refined Kunai. Though, with the diminishing returns of her crafting proficiency gains, she'd probably need to pick something else to focus on. At level 5 she was going to be unlocking a bunch of seemingly generic crafting recipes which included a Kunai+2, so presumably that was a Kunai refined twice, but might need a better version of a whetstone to craft.
She also encountered her first irritating activation of her stealth perk. She had entered a store to purchase some things and it took her a good thirty seconds before the guy who stood behind the counter actually noticed her standing in front of him ready to purchase her items. It wasn't a big deal, but it was definitely a bit irritating. Maybe she could use it to her advantage, but knowing her luck he would have spontaneously noticed her if she tried to leave the store.
Outside of all of that and her other generic grinding, she was constantly keeping her eye out for whatever unknown party had observed her fight back at the docks. She had brought up her relations screen and seen that there was actually a group of unknowns of varying relations. Some were extremely low and she presumed that they were the Hyuuga over in Konoha, since if she ever met them they would loathe her, but there were also those that were positive that she assumed were Hunter-nin or maybe some other hidden party that were interested in her progress.
She wasn't surprised to see that her relationship with her father was maxed out, a fact that brought a smile to her face. Having an actual father figure she could at least approve of was amazing, even if she didn't really look up to and aspire to be like him. He was admittedly not like her, he was altruistic and fiercely protective of her and those he was close to, whereas she had to admit to herself that she was pretty damn selfish and had no plans to follow in his footsteps. But she still, even with the cognitive dissonance of having two different fathers, saw him as her real father, rather than the waste-of-space sperm donor of her past life.
She also had decent relations with her teachers, mainly her Bukijutsu teacher. Apparently being beaten down repeatedly actually gave her relations. If she was in his shoes she probably would have neutral thoughts at best of a small brat who constantly got floored, but maybe he was just better able to appreciate that she was trying her fucking hardest to fight him. Plus, the fact that she wasn't like all the other kids who were practising Bukijutsu, since she wanted to use a polearm instead of a sword, making it clear that she didn't aspire to try and become one of the Seven Swordsmen of the Mist. Of course, that was only because her perk didn't relate to swords.
If she could have chosen it with knowledge of those special weapons, she probably would have, even at the cost of relations. Each one had a unique and powerful gimmick, though she only knew about two of them, Nuibari and Shibuki. Shibuki was supposedly a blast-sword, it could create on-demand explosions somehow which sounded freaking awesome, and Nuibari was able to create threads that could pierce enemies and literally sew them together. Both were highly lethal and highly powerful, but with her perk selected referring to polearms, none of the seven swords would be useful, as they were clearly, well, swords! But, in any case, with everything going on, Sora was definitely becoming a very enticing prospect for the Hunter-nin to snap up.
All she had to do was provide a good showing of her abilities during her graduation exam.
Resting her arms on the shaft of her weapon which itself was resting across her shoulders, Sora walked to school admittedly a little nervously.
It wasn't that she thought she wasn't ready, she felt way stronger than before. She'd managed to eke out an extra two levels in the remaining time and put those ten points into Agility, increasing her top speed by a full meter per second. Without even meaning to she was moving faster in pretty much everything, which did slightly offset a few routines she had, but the adjustment simply meant she had more time for whatever she was doing.
She'd unlocked level 5 crafting, and one of the results was the weapon now slung over her shoulders, a Naginata+2. It took an 'iron ingot' and a whetstone to craft, which meant she had to spend some of her money to buy said ingot since she couldn't make them herself yet. But in return she got a very nice weapon. A base damage of 40, but with 5 levels in crafting that was bumped up by 5% to 42 damage. Not a massive increase, except her damage increases worked off of weapon damage.
So, with her strength, Bukijutsu and Sōjutsu levels taken into account, which respectively were increases of 11%, 8% and a full 17% for her Sōjutsu, they increased her damage by 4.62, 3.36 and 7.14. Added all together, and her stats were giving her a 36% increase in damage, a full 15 point increase. So rather than 42 damage, each attack did 57. That meant that if she landed four attacks on herself, she'd die.
But that wasn't quite what was always required. By going through the menus available to her, after finding the damn things and cursing herself out for being needlessly antagonistic to the thing she presumed was meant to help her, she found that 'npcs' had different rules. If she landed a critical hit, like cutting their head open or stabbing their heart out of something, The Game would essentially just say she won and drop their health to zero. But she didn't play by the same rules. If she got a serious injury in a 'critical' area, like the head/heart, The Game would take their normal damage, multiply it by two, and then just apply that damage like normal. So if a guy with 10 strength, and no proficiencies stabbed her in the head with a Kunai, it would do 22 damage to her, even if he literally stabbed through her eye and into her brain.
How exactly she would experience that she had no idea, whether she'd black out or something was totally up in the air. And that thought led her onto wondering about what'd happen if her Byakugan was stabbed since it wasn't originally her eye, but it might as well have been since she'd had it for years even before she took over from the Sora that came before.
But she had no time for that pondering, as she came up to the Academy slightly earlier than intended. Quickly taking a bandage from its place wrapped on her arm she wrapped up the blade of her weapon as her Bukijutsu teacher had taught her to do, then headed inside and towards the classroom. Already she could see that all the other students that were already there were much more heavily armed, and she smirked upon seeing the veritable arsenal some of them were carrying, enough to supply an entire infantry squad for a year.
Mentally she denoted the more dangerous targets, the ones with scary techniques or, more notably, those who were simply better than her at fighting, a list that was now mercifully down to only two students, both of whom were proteges of two of the Seven Swordsmen. Being behind them in Bukijutsu was perfectly acceptable, and she made up for it by being able to at least hold her own, even if she couldn't pressure them in fights. If she absolutely had to fight one of them, her plan was essentially just to abuse her speed boost to catch them off-guard. An opponent suddenly changing speed mid-battle would definitely throw them off, and might give her a small opening to attack them directly.
Plus, they used swords while she had a polearm, meaning she had a range advantage. A disadvantage if they got in close of course, but if they were getting that close she was probably fucked anyway. No, being able to keep her enemies at pole-length would definitely be best. Anyone trying to get near was liable to get smacked hard by the shaft of the weapon anyway, and really, she intended to stay far away from the more dangerous students. Then, she stalled just before entering the classroom.
If the Hunter-nin were interested in her and she avoided the dangerous enemies...would they still be interested?
Quest Received!
Conundrum of a Wimpy Kunoichi
Objective: Defeat and kill a notable student during the Kirigakure Graduation Examination
Reward: 5000 experience, +500 relations with (Unknown Parties), Karatachi-san. -750 relations with family of deceased student
Bonus Objective: Defeat and kill two notable students
Bonus Reward: 10,000 experience, extra +300 relations with (Unknown Parties), Karatachi-san. -1000 relations with family of deceased student
Failure: Potential loss of admission to Hunter-nin corps, -300 relations with (Unknown Parties), Karatachi-san. Possible death.
Glancing at the quest she'd just got, Sora sighed and shook her head.
Those rewards were definitely very respectable. Being able to get a big increase in relations with both Karatachi-san and presumably members of the Hunter-nin in return for pissing off the families of students she'd have to kill anyway? And that experience payout was awesome. With 27 intelligence, that experience would be worth a full 27% more to her, meaning two level-ups just from one day of work.
But...what consisted an acceptably notable student? Did she have to go after a clan kid? Someone with a bloodline? It couldn't mean she had to go after the only two students she outright knew outmatched her in Bukijutsu did it? Because if that was the case she was kind of fucked. Trickery would be less effective as they had sparring lessons with legendary sword wielders who probably already threw more at them than Sora could hope to replicate.
Right now, she was dearly regretting not putting much time into learning Jutsus, not that she actually could anyway, you had to be a Genin to learn them, or have someone willing to teach you, and Sora's only option was her father, who had been way too busy to spend time going over hand seals with her. No, she'd emphasized personal growth and speed, so that was the hill she was going to have to die on.
Maybe if she stayed at her slower speed during the fight and suddenly sped up to catch them by surprise? No, their teachers had to be pulling their punches in terms of speed, so a sudden increase wouldn't be nearly as effective. Sora slipped into the classroom as she rolled ideas around in her head. Shurikenjutsu would be useless, they'd probably just hit them out of the damn air. Maybe she didn't need to go after them at all?
Inwardly groaning, Sora went over all the students she could think of that seemed in any way notable. There was the Yuki kid, she could pick a fight with him and then cut his head off. But he had his Ice Release which was quite frankly scary, he liked to use it as an AoE attack during his spars, and avoiding it was a nightmare. More than once she'd had to heal her own leg when it got frozen in his ice during a fight. Sure, she'd won some of those fights, but he'd also won some, so winning wasn't...wait.
By notable, did it mean what the Hunter-nin would consider notable. If Sora took him down, someone that had defeated her before, would they regard that as notable? Thinking of it like that, anyone she had previously fought in spars, so the entire class, could be put into three groups. There were those she always beat, those she had won some and lost some matches against, and some she had never beaten. The only two she hadn't beaten was the two sword-wielding kids, they simply were too advantaged.
So, excluding all the students she had never lost a match against, that left her a little more than half the class to pick from. Excluding those then that she hadn't lost against since she took over from the Sora of before, that cut the class down to about a quarter, most of whom were kids that were from a clan, or were wielding bloodlines like the Yuki kid.
With her speed boost, the ones she was confident in beating were the ones who didn't have a bloodline. But the bloodline kids were also the ones more likely to score her brownie points with the Hunter-nin observing the fight. So really it was hard to pick. On one hand she could go after safer targets and run the risk of them not being notable, wasting her time and making it harder to score two notable kills.
But on the other hand if she went after a bloodline kid and lost, she was fucking dead. That was even if the bloodline kids procked her 'notable' requirement. They seemed notable enough, but maybe it did genuinely mean she had to fight the kids that the swordsmen were training, there were exactly two of them after all. Sora sat down and leaned back in her seat as she went over absolutely everything a few more times, eventually settling on going for one of the normal kids first. If she killed them and it didn't prock her notable requirement, she'd kill one of the bloodline kids, and if that didn't work she'd have to just try and kill one of the two sword users, both of whom were present already.
She'd accept only killing one of them, she just wanted to get the quest completed. The possible death probably just meant if she actually lost a fight, she could always just kill one of the normal students, though they wouldn't be notable. Then she stopped for a moment. This was a perfect opportunity to see how much experience a kill would give her. If she went after one of the normal students first, one of the admittedly fodder ones, and killed them, she'd get to see how much experience a kill gave her. Presumably a lot since she had to actually kill someone, and kills weren't exactly common.
Utilizing one of the other useful tools she'd found, the ability to observe enemies, Sora scoped out good targets. When observing a target, it showed their level, their health, chakra amount and any status effects they were inflicted with. While she couldn't outright see stats, she could make very rough guesses based on health and chakra amounts again based on their level. So someone with as little health as her probably had the same rough amount of strength and vitality points.
Using this, she mentally noted out several regular students she could kill easily, then selected the easiest bloodline and clan kids to kill, before finally looking at the two sword-wielding students. Both were several levels above her, with more health and chakra to boot. That was a discrepancy she only just noticed actually. They both had over a thousand health and chakra, which even if they min-maxed should have been utterly impossible. At level 14 they would have a complete total of 130 points. They'd need 200 points for a thousand health or chakra, and that meant there had to be some kind of perk or level fuckery going on.
Maybe it was a double-up at level 10, or maybe because they were the proteges of legendary swordsmen they had a bonus, but whatever the case was, the fact they had a massive advantage in that way was a bit upsetting. Well, more than that of course, it was distinctly worrying, but Sora hadn't grinded until her head felt ready to burst just for two 'lucky' students to fuck her over. If she had to gouge their eyes out or cut their testicles off to win she'd do it.
Besides, she'd already avoided death once, she had no intention of trying to avoid it a second time.
Name: Sora Metami
Level: 9
Age: 12
Experience: 2252/9000
To Next Level: 3648
Title: Academy Student - 50% Experience Gain within Classroom
Health Points: 210 (100 Base HP + (Vitality x Strength)
Regeneration Rate: 7/minute (Health ÷ 30) (Severe or noticed injuries can be chosen to retain scars)
Chakra Points: 220 (100 Base CP + (Wisdom x Intelligence)
Regeneration Rate: 7.3*/minute (Chakra ÷ 30)
Strength: 11 (Each point increases melee damage by 1%, adds 1 slot to inventory)
Vitality: 10 (Each point raises poison resistance by 0.1%, reduces need for sleep by 0.1%)
Agility: 22 (Each point increases top speed by 0.1m/s, increases weapon proficiency gain by 1%)
Wisdom: 10 (Each point decreases chakra cost for techniques by 0.1%)
Intelligence: 27 (Each point increases experience gain by 1%)
Luck: 10 (Each point increases the chance of something lucky happening by 0.01%, decreases the chance of something unlucky happening by 0.01%)
