When Sute asked Ao to train her, she expected him to help her with her accuracy and then just stalk off to wherever he went during his downtime.
She did not expect him to take over nearly every facet of her training.
"Suiton: Water Fang Bullet!" she yelled, her hands pressed together in the tiger seal as she faced the lake. A twisting pillar of water began to rise, spinning slowly and carefully, but its form began to waver and it collapsed back into the lake with a giant splash. She groaned in frustration as she let the resultant wave wash over her, staring at it sourly through drenched bangs. "Dammit, again?"
"Your grasp on your chakra is wavering," Ao interjected gruffly. He sat on a boulder on the edge of the training field, his crutches leaning against the stone and his worse leg slightly propped up with a smaller rock. "You keep molding it fine in the initial stages, but once you start to apply it to the water, your control slips."
"Gee, thanks," she quipped dryly. "That is so useful. Still kinda surprised they cleared you to use your Byakugan."
"I was banned from physical activity, not chakra usage. Now try again."
"Yeah, yeah," she grumbled, turning back and closing her eyes as she began molding her chakra again.
Over a month had passed since that fateful mission where Juzo defected, and nearly every day of the past three weeks had been spent under Ao's supervision. Accuracy had just been the tip of the iceberg. Ao had critiqued everything from her taijutsu forms to her chakra output in her ninjutsu. At one point he even forced her to work on genjutsu, despite her abysmal aptitude for it due to her large reserves. When asked about his thoroughness, he pointed out that with a full month off duty and a ban on physical activity while his leg recovered, he had literally nothing better to do.
Naturally, she had made great leaps and bounds in some areas, and frustratingly stalled in others. Namely, ninjutsu.
"Dammit!" she growled as the water spire fell again. This time it had barely reached half the height of the previous one before falling apart. She could almost feel the derision from Ao as she glared sourly at the lake.
"You're getting sloppier," he observed flatly.
"I know!" she snapped, whirling to glare at him instead. He remained unfazed by her reaction, if anything he looked intimidating due to the veins from the Byakugan bulging around his eye. Sute flinched and averted her gaze with a scowl, her teeth grinding in mild apprehension. She understood now more than ever why people hated fighting the Hyuuga clan. Knowing the Byakugan was watching her, able to detect the moment her chakra would subconsciously try to shift to mokuton—
Needless to say, it set her heavily on edge.
"Is now a bad time?" The pair turned to see Utakata standing on the edge of the training ground, watching them with a rather unimpressed look.
"Uta, what are you doing here?" Sute asked, shoulders slumping as she frowned at him. Normally she had no problems with her friend randomly popping in, but today she was in a particularly bad mood for obvious reasons.
"A messenger told me to come here."
"A messenger?"
"I sent one," Ao interjected, and the teens turned to look at him. "There's only so much I can get from watching you practice ninjutsu on your own. I need to see you actively using it in a combat situation with a similarly-skilled peer."
"And I'm the only one willing to spar with her," Utakata finished flatly, grimacing. "Fine, let's just get it over with."
Sute didn't respond, just squinted at Ao sourly. "This feels like a trap," she muttered sullenly. He didn't bother responding, just folded his arms. Veins bulged around his concealed right eye, signaling the Byakugan under it to be active. The thought sent a shudder down her spine, her teeth gritting once more.
"Well?" he pressed. "I'm waiting."
In the end, the sparring match proved to be her worst one yet. She stuck to the more familiar Water Bullet and other ninjutsu she'd used in the past, even throwing in that earth one Kisame had taught her, but overall she found herself struggling to keep up with Utakata. Her most creative contribution had been a net made of chakra threads, and even those had been largely ineffective since he'd managed to create a new type of bubble that basically dissolved them on contact. He'd also made a point to grip his pipe with a thin film of chakra on his fingers, making it impossible to just yank it away like their last sparring match.
Ultimately Sute ended up finally landing a direct hit only for Utakata to pop and reveal himself to be a bubble clone, at which point she got pinned from behind by the real Utakata.
"That... was bad," he summarized as he climbed off her and let her get up. Sute said nothing as she clambered to her feet, pointedly avoiding looking at Ao. The entire time they'd fought she felt hyper-aware of his gaze on her, and even without taking the Byakugan into account she swore she could feel his stern disapproval throughout the battle.
"Clearly, you won't be making any more progress with ninjutsu today," the Hunter-nin observed bluntly. "It's close to sundown so we'll stop here and pick back up tomorrow." He reached down to grab his crutches, pulling them up as he carefully hobbled onto his better foot. Sute didn't bother offering to help him, knowing he'd refuse out of stubborn pride, and just headed back to town in silence with Utakata trailing behind.
Her sour mood persisted when she got home and promptly cloistered herself in one of the house's many studies with the Great Book of Seals, as she had taken to calling the giant book she'd lugged around since childhood. Fuinjutsu had become a lifelong obsession in this life, and fortunately for her the book came equipped with plenty of resources for a budding fuinjutsu master. It had seemed like an adequate distraction from her bad mood, but instead it ended up making it worse because of what she chose to focus on this time.
"This is so gross," she hissed to herself with a grimace as she carefully prodded the severed tongue with a small metal rod. Of all the body parts collected in the book, she would never get used to the tongues. Over the years she'd periodically summon the various limbs stored in the book in order to examine the seals tattooed onto them. Severed hands and legs could be a bit weird to touch, but she'd handled them enough in both lives it barely phased her anymore.
Tongues, though—she had actually only ever seen three outside a human body.
And now she had four.
Had it not been for her past life, she probably would have been nauseous having to handle them. As it stood, she just compromised by touching them as little as possible while studying the seals, using the metal rod to nudge its position for a clearer look.
At first glance, the seal made no sense. Three stacked solid black bars, followed by two broken bars split down the middle. It had none of the complicated writing which usually accompanied seals, making it seem more like a tattoo than anything. Only someone well-versed in the complexities of fuinjutsu would identify it as a collapsed seal.
Fact was, fuinjutsu tended to be complex and required a lot of writing to function; the most complicated ones could fill entire rooms, though those were exceedingly rare. Even the simplest ones included a good bit of writing though, so anyone looking at a seal would be able to identify it as a seal on sight even if they couldn't understand its intended purpose. Collapsing a seal circumvented this by making it appear compact, restricting it to a single character or symbol to hide its true nature.
Even so, collapsed seals were rarely used since they involved a lot of preparation to create. It involved designing another array specifically designed to collapse them, which could take hours to draw out at a minimum. According to Harusame, other methods also existed, but most had been lost over the years and only a tiny handful knew any now. Not many people specialized in fuinjutsu anymore, and the art tended to be too meticulous to use mid-battle, so the ability to collapse one at will—while convenient—seemed largely unnecessary.
All that said, breaking down a collapsed seal could be infinitely complicated. There were no set procedures on how to reverse the process in order to study the actual seal under it, and Sute decided trying to figure it out would just waste time. Instead, she focused her attentions to studying the symbol. The trick with collapsed seals was that they couldn't use just any symbols or kanji; it had to be related to its function in some way in order for the creator to focus on it properly.
As she pored over one of the many books pulled from the storage book, she barely registered the sound of the door opening behind her. "You seem quite focused today," the visitor commented and she instantly snapped to attention, spinning around with a dark scowl.
"Shishou! It's been ages!" she snapped at Harusame. At this point Sute had not seen him since the day after her discharge, and before that it'd been more than a month, so she felt rather justified in her irritation with his extended absence. The man looked rather amused at her annoyed expression, just smiling softly at her.
"I apologize for being away so long, Sute-chan. I've been working on finalizing some details of my project."
"You still owe us an explanation on that," she said flatly.
"Sometime later," he deflected. "Since I'm here now though, why don't you tell me what you've been working on lately? You seem to be making progress with the collapsed seals." If he wanted to distract her from her irritation at his prolonged absence, he'd succeeded.
"Well, I think I finally found something," Sute allowed, turning back to the book. "I think it's based on a hexagram."
Hexagrams, according to the Taoist philosophy book she'd found, featured six stacked lines, with the lines either whole and called "yang," or else split in the center and called "yin." Given chakra had its own classifications related to yin and yang, it seemed like an easy connection. Even better, they also utilized combinations of the eight trigrams, which was based on sets of three lines. Trigrams had clearly been established as something chakra-related in canon thanks to the Hyuuga clan, so altogether it made sense.
"Is that so?" The older fuinjutsu master arched an eyebrow at her claim, peering over her shoulder at the tongue. "An interesting theory. However, that only has five lines, not six."
"I thought so too, but you can still kinda get two trigrams out of it," Sute said. She grabbed a notebook and flipped it to an open page, drawing three full lines. "The top three lines can be one trigram, chi'en. Then, if you start from the third line and draw the two below it..." She drew one full line with two broken lines beneath it, continuing, "Then you can get this one, ken. Apparently when people read these things, they start with the bottom trigram, so it's the most important one here anyway."
After delving into the Taoist philosophy book, Sute noticed ken had a lot of connotations regarding staying still and not moving. Chi'en had some more complicated notions involving creativity and strength, but it also tended to be referred to as the "strongest" trigram since it had no breaks. So, by combining that particular meaning with the stillness part...
"Together they basically mean force something to stand still," she surmised. "So I think the seal is meant to paralyze the person if they do... something. Or maybe keep them silent, by forcing their tongue to go still?" She shrugged. She'd only delved into this particular book recently since her old life had taught her to avoid all things pseudoscience, so she hadn't studied the subject too much yet.
"I see," Harusame hummed. "I don't use them myself, but hexagrams and trigrams are actually fairly common in some forms of fuinjutsu. If I remember correctly, the two together form Tun, or Retreat. That matches up with your theory, and would make sense." Sute paused, slowly turning back to him.
"...Wait. If you already knew about trigrams and hexagrams, then how long have you suspected this?"
"Since the first time I saw them," her teacher replied primly. "I considered mentioning it, but decided telling you would have deprived you of an opportunity to learn for yourself."
To his credit, Harusame had no issues dodging the giant book. He also didn't hesitate to catch the tongue when she threw it, though he did grimace a bit. "I'll admit, this is a first for me. You shouldn't throw around tongues, especially when you have an incredibly limited number of samples."
"It would make a pretty effective battlefield tactic," Sute mused thoughtfully. "People would probably go into shock if I randomly throw limbs at them..."
"Let's discuss something else," Harusame suggested as he carefully put the fleshy pink object down on the desk. "How are your seals coming along? It's been a while since I looked at them. I know the test-run of your barrier went well and you mentioned you were planning to modify it last time."
"Yeah, I did," Sute confirmed, perking up. "The guy thought it was a doton jutsu and tried to use lightning to break it, so I thought I'd build off that. I got it to the point where the earth won't wash away with a high-power suiton jutsu, but I'll need someone with a raiton affinity to test it more."
"Ho? Impressive. Can you show me?"
"Well, maybe later. There's something else I wanted to show you..." She sealed the tongue back into the book and flipped through the pages, quickly summoning a short stack of books and notebooks. "I'm trying to work out some stuff dealing with memories. I want to improve my recall and ability to sort through them, so I can use the information I have to the best of my abilities." Harusame's friendly smile faded almost instantly, his face becoming much more serious and grim.
"Messing with the mind is a dangerous thing, Sute," he warned lowly. "If you make a mistake, it can potentially kill you."
"I'm aware. That's why I want your help." She grabbed the notebook on top of the stack and flipped through it, turning to show him a page full of complex diagrams and rough seal prototypes. "Whoever owned this thing before me had been studying this stuff for a while. This notebook has a bunch of schematics for theoretical seals that can do stuff like improve memory retrieval, block them, and also stop their formation entirely. I want someone more experienced to look over this and give me their input."
His eyebrows rose in surprise at that, but he took the notebook and began idly flipping through it. "These are detailed," he murmured, his eyes critical. "Just skimming it, I can see an evolution in the formula as it was refined. Clearly, there was a lot of effort placed into it."
"Yeah. Lucky me. I guess whoever owned this book before had the same thought process I did." Sute's voice took on a quieter note, more somber than she'd expected. She never thought much about the book's old owners, but it wasn't a stretch to assume it belonged to her parents in this life. Finding the notebook already full of notes and rough drafts of experimental seals had been surprising, but then, the book contained many other resources on seals. Apparently fuinjutsu ran in the family.
"I suppose so," Harusame agreed softly, bringing her out of her thoughts. "If you don't mind, I'll need some time to take a look at this."
"That's fine. If you're going to take a while, take this, too." Sute turned and grabbed another notebook from the desk to hand him. "I've made a couple designs of my own based on those notes, but I don't want to test them until I get a second pair of eyes to review them. Take however long you want, I'm probably gonna be stuck training with Ao for another few days anyway."
"Alright, I'll try to finish up by the time your training ends. Then we can spend a full day reviewing this together. Does that sound fair?" He smiled at her, and despite her earlier bad mood Sute felt herself smile back. She and Harusame had never developed a particularly close student-teacher relationship like he had with Utakata, but she still had a healthy respect and admiration for the man, and a yearning to learn from him.
"Yeah. That sounds great."
A deep breath, and a flick of the wrist.
Five senbon flew fast and true, slicing through the air before embedding in the five human-shaped targets. Not quite center with the bull's-eyes, but still close. Sute huffed as she looked at it, folding her arms. "Dammit," she grumbled with a scowl. Personally, she felt satisfied she was improving at all, but just because she did, didn't mean—
"You're still off," Ao interjected gruffly. He looked thoroughly unimpressed from his perch on the boulder, his gaze critical as ever. "You keep gripping it wrong. I'm not correcting it again."
"At least I'm making some progress," she grumbled to herself. She really had. Under his supervision she'd improved her accuracy by leaps and bounds, though it also helped she'd finally gotten over the mental block about tossing away projectile weapons thanks to her chakra threads. A twitch of her fingers and the threads receded, jerking the senbon out of the wooden post and back into her hands.
"Your chakra threads will be useful," Ao commented as she prepared to throw again. "If you can increase your flexibility with them, you should be able to control your weapons' trajectories and change them midair."
"Yeah, I've considered that." Thunk. Five direct hits, three in the inner ring and two right on the rim of the bull's-eye. "Manipulating them takes ridiculous amounts of chakra control though, and control does not come naturally to me. I'm better off improving my aim first and then working on it. For now I'm just satisfied being able to attach them to stuff and pull it back."
"Your reserves are quite large," Ao commented, and she carefully kept her face blank as she reeled the senbon back. She could sense the probing undercurrent to his tone, so subtle and hidden she likely would have missed it had she not been looking for it. "You mentioned in the cave you trained your control from early on, but even so it's impressive you can perform medical ninjutsu."
"I had my goals, and I knew what I had to do to achieve them."
"Still, why iryo-ninjutsu?" Ao pressed, sounding perfectly conversational by his standards. "That's not a common goal for a kid. Your reserves would be more suited for a ninjutsu specialist. And I know you didn't go into it because of a basic empathy," he added dryly.
Sute paused, flexing the senbon between her fingers. She knew he wanted something, that he had an ulterior motive for asking. But she couldn't figure out what he wanted because her attention focused on the question.
"I don't have a good answer for that," she admitted, and threw again.
"You're kidding," Ao said. "You have a reason for everything you do. Dedicating yourself to an entire branch of shinobi studies isn't done on a whim."
"It's not," she agreed with a shrug, reeling back the senbon once more. "I chose it because I already had a knowledge base suited for it, and it includes a bunch of sub-skills that fit my fighting style. Besides," she added wryly, her voice taking on a more rueful note, "I think we've established I won't be a ninjutsu specialist anytime soon."
Ao didn't respond right away, just seemed to study her thoughtfully. Then he huffed a small sigh and unfolded his arms. "That's enough projectile practice. I want to try teaching you a new ninjutsu." Her shoulders slumped as she let out a low groan, reluctantly turning to face him.
"Let me guess, practice makes prefect?" she quipped dryly. He didn't take the bait, instead grabbing his crutches to balance himself as he carefully hefted himself off the rock.
"I'm going to demonstrate the hand seals for you, and then I want you to try it." Sute sighed but nodded, watching intently as he knelt and began flashing through seals. He did it slowly, making sure she could see each one clearly. Boar, Ram, Snake, Horse, Dragon. When he reached the last one he turned his hands towards a nearby stone—
—And then a rippling arc of lightning sparked from his hands and surged at the rock, shattering it on contact.
Sute jumped in alarm at the result, snapping a wide-eyed look between the debris and the Mist jounin. "What the hell—is that raiton!?"
"Raiton: Electromagnetic Murder," Ao confirmed with a nod. "The seals are Boar, Ram, Snake, Horse, and Dragon. I'm giving you until the end of the day to get it down."
And I'm back! Thanks for your patience everyone, I finished my class so now I'm free for the rest of summer~ For the record, the class was about designing creatures. It was a lot of work but also a lot of fun, I learned a lot of interesting things and got a chance to start building the world for a story idea of mine. Bonus: I was able to write a story with a favorite OC of mine and explore her backstory a bit. It's the first time in a while I've written something that isn't fan fiction, and I'm pretty happy with it. I might post it to my Deviant Art sometime soon.
So today's chapter features I Ching hexagrams. I found out about them by looking up the Root seal on the Naruto wiki, and after researching it a bit I think it's DEFINITELY the basis for the seal's design. As stated in the chapter, hexagrams feature multiple elements that are also used in relation to chakra in Naruto, particularly the Eight Trigrams. Plus, the interpretation "Tun" fits the seal's purpose so well. I'm usually not one for stuff like this, but reading the interpretations of hexagrams is pretty interesting. I might end up using it some more in the future for fuinjutsu, who knows?
Other than that, not much to say. Except, does anyone watch Juuni Taisen? Because I might be seven chapters deep into a fan fic for it. (Editing this chapter was so weird because hand seals use the Chinese zodiac too.) I highly recommend watching it if you haven't, I thought it would just be a battle royale-style story that focuses on fighting, but it's actually a lot deeper than I expected. I'm already looking forward to the sequel.
One last thing: Magdaleria on Deviant Art did some AWESOME fan art of Sute from Chapter 15 when she had that mini-meltdown at Juzo accused her of playing hero. This is the first bit of fan art I've gotten for Bloody Oracle, and it's just amazing! Magdaleria deserves so many more watchers than she has. Please go check out her profile on DA, the piece is titled "Playing the Hero."
Anyways, see you all next week!