The next day, as promised, Ensui started to teach Hitomi. She woke up incredibly sore and couldn't quite hide it, which made him give her a sorry look. However, he told her she was going to have to bear with it. Still, he didn't intend on starting her on the physical part of training until the afternoon – Kurenai had explained how she did things with her daughter and Ensui had thought it was a good plan – he made her a hot water bottle with what they had in the room and showed her how to apply it to the worst aches in her body.
He set up a travel shōgi board on the table he had pushed against the bed and started teaching her about strategy while illustrating it with the game. They ended up playing a normal game where she got her ass properly kicked, but she acquired new moves Shikamaru probably didn't know about. She couldn't wait to give him a run for his money.
Then, he showed her the basics she'd need to know for battle chemistry. Hitomi already knew some of that thanks to her prior life, but she couldn't really show him that without explaining how she knew. She settled for making him believe she just understood very quickly – and, in all fairness, it was already the case for the things she didn't know about, so it didn't shock him.
"If everything goes as planned," Ensui promised, "I'll let you try to blow up something on your own. It's the most basic skill of battle chemistry and very efficient if your goal is to take control of the battlefield, be it during a one-on-one fight, in team configuration or during open battle. This knowledge wins war, Hitomi. It's usually only taught in the Nara, Yamanaka and Akimichi clans, since we're so closely tied. And even amongst us, not a lot of people master it, they want to focus more on common ninja arts, but since you're an amazing little apprentice, I'll make sure you don't go down that road. Got it?"
"Got it!" she beamed.
The teaching lasted all morning, making Ensui stupidly happy. He had a hard time hiding it, even. He just wanted to go hug his clan leader, to thank him for giving him such a gem. The kid seemed tailored to receive all the knowledge he had to give her, and the pleasure to learn was as clear as day in her big red eyes, along with insatiable curiosity and eagerness to prove herself. She reminded him of the child he had been, once.
He would continue to teach while she attended the Academy and even later during her career. He'd sharpen her like he would his best blade, physically and mentally. She'd become the beautiful, terrifying kunoichi he could see in her. She'd look like her mother, perhaps with the more delicate features that all Nara had. The day she'd surpass him, he'd be so impossibly proud. He was already proud to see her devour all the technical chemical notions that were usually so hard on students. She was his first apprentice but he wasn't entirely clueless as to how to teach her, since drunk Jōnin bitched about their own apprentices from time to time.
After a light meal, man and child paid then went outside, the room carefully locked just in case. Hitomi was still sore and limped slightly, but she knew it would have been far worse if Ensui hadn't given her the hot water bottle. She hadn't thought about that before, while training with her mother, but this was a trick she was definitely going to use again.
"We're gonna stay a few days here," Ensui said that evening, "so your body can adjust to be in the best conditions possible. When you can walk without problems in the morning, we'll hit the road again. We'll walk in the morning while going over theory stuff, then we'll stop to get lunch and stay in whatever area we're in for physical training. You'll be working on reading and writing before you go to bed."
"Where are we going?" she asked as she stretched. He had made her work hard that day, but she didn't feel as exhausted as last night. Could her body be getting stronger already?
"Probably Suna. I want to show you chemicals drawn from stones you can only find there."
She noticed he used the short version of the Village's name, as he would for Konoha, but she didn't say anything about it. She was too busy wrapping her head around all the things he was teaching her. She didn't know that man well, and yet she'd felt honoured, yesterday, upon seeing the gleam of pride in his eyes. It was invigorating. She hadn't thought about the eventuality of getting noticed by a powerful shinobi; she'd thought she'd get in a typical Genin team then advance on her own. How absurdly lucky she was, to have Ensui focusing on her.
As soon as they got to the clearing, serious business began. He made her run for twenty minutes so her muscles could warm up and take what he had planned for her. He had decided that the girl, first and foremost, needed to learn how to fight. He was feared, a shinobi no one in their right mind would fight without a good reason, but he knew anything could happen. Hitomi needed to be able to defend herself.
Katas, fighting moves used as a base to learn how to fight, were usually taught in the Academy from the third year up, Hitomi knew that. She had sometimes watched her mother do them to warm up and they looked easy then. As she tried the first move under Ensui's watchful eyes, she tripped and fell face first in the grass. She stood back up with a groan and started again from the beginning, as he had ordered her to do if she made a mistake.
It took her an hour to master the opening stance, and her limbs didn't move as gracefully as Ensui's had, far from it. Her hands and feet, mostly, were still clumsy, and her balance was highly challenged as she shifted her weight from one leg to the other. It was increasingly frustrating, but she comforted herself by focusing on the fact that she didn't feel tired at all. Her body had never been this strong, this healthy. She knew she would succeed eventually. And knowing that felt wonderful.
The katas couldn't be used in a real fight. They were too predictable, too common. But they were the working foundation for every shinobi: they used their favourite katas, modified and adapted to become suitable for battle. Ensui explained all that to her in a soft voice as he corrected her starting stance, his hands careful not to press too hard on hers. He probably knew that a prolonged touch would be painful for her sensitive meridians.
"It's time now for me to help you work on your oversensitivity. There is no secret, unfortunately, no shortcut that could help you cope until you get it under control. You'll have to meditate and create a box, hideout, cage, whatever comes to mind the fastest for you, and put the information given by your meridians there." He sighed then continued. "After that, you'll need to find out how to manage the opening of that place so you can receive information, but only enough that you're aware of people around you without being overstimulated. No shinobi at my level or below can take me by surprise, but I'm not writhing in pain either. Got the difference?"
Hitomi nodded calmly. She understood the concept, better than he imagined. The exercise sounded very similar from what she had done with her Library, what she had had to do to automatise the sorting of new memories.
"Your mother said you were already meditating once a day. Show me the posture you use."
Immediately, Hitomi sat in seiza, the traditional sitting position used by all traditional families in Konoha. She knew that, in the Previous World, this posture was well-known too, but she had never used it then. Shikaku had helped her practice until she got it right. Hands on her thighs, back straight and shoulders relaxed, she closed her eyes and stood at the very edge between her Library and the physical world. It was hard not to go in, to stay between two planes, where she could still focus on Ensui.
"Good. Now imagine the thing you want to use to contain those perceptions. Take what comes first to mind, and get it attached to your mind. This sickness is an advantage, Hitomi. You'll treat it with the respect it deserves, no less."
She obeyed him. She saw a cage, a beautiful, delicate thing, made in one block of crystal. As soon as she went inside her Library, she made a column out of marble in the centre of the rotunda around which she had organised her sections. It formed a light well and illuminated the whole place. There, she stopped and thought about what to do next. On the pillar that she had raised to waist-height, she built the cage she had in mind. She carved it with flowers and animals she loved, made sure the crystal captured light and refracted it all around in pretty rainbow colours. It took her an hour to make her vision reality.
In the crystal cage, she tried to put her meridian's perceptions. It was incredibly complicated, because she didn't know if she was transferring feelings or memories of those feelings. The line between those two concepts was thin and she didn't know how to walk it, even after a few tries.
If this difficulty wasn't enough, Hitomi started feeling a form of fatigue she had never felt before. Her thoughts were weirdly sluggish sometimes, like being stuck in honey, and her breathing was becoming more and more laborious. Her limbs were shaking and covered in cold sweat. Despite this, she didn't stop trying, and she wanted to scream in frustration each time a book, a memory, appeared in the cage.
"Hitomi? Hitomi!"
She regained her senses in a start, her pupils extremely contracted in the centre of her red eyes. Ensui's hands on her shoulders were gripping the joints painfully, but she realised he had no other choice: she would have fallen without his strength, her legs so weak they couldn't even bear her weight. She shook in the mild evening air, coldness growing slowly inside her. Wherever she looked, it made her nauseous. "W-what's happening to me?" she whined.
"You spent too much chakra. I'm sorry, kid, I didn't know you could use it. Most children your age or even older can't access their reserves."
She answered with a wordless whine, her shaking getting worse after each passing second spent in that dreadful state. Ensui wrapped her in a blanket he had taken from his backpack, put all their stuff inside it instead then picked her up in his arms like she weighed nothing at all.
"You're in for a dreadful night, I'm afraid. During the hardest parts of it, remember that everything will be better in the morning. I swear it will be, kid."
She heard shame in his voice, and it frightened her. She tried to calm the chattering of her teeth by biting her lower lip, hard. She didn't want to worry him more than he already was, but she could see from his weather-beaten face that it was already the case.
Once they were back in their room, he tucked her in with as much care as he possibly could then heated water up with a wisp of chakra so he could make her a hot water bottle. His dark grey eyes didn't leave her for a moment. He was ready to act if she took a turn for the worse. He remembered the first time he had been in that situation: he had thought he was going to die but had survived, and learned his lesson. Unfortunately, despite his best efforts never to go through chakra withdrawal again, shinobi didn't have much choice in the matter. There was always a good enough reason.
The night was difficult, just like Ensui had assured Hitomi it would be. After an hour, she had started to feel her limbs burn, a terrible pressure that made her want to lose consciousness. She muffled her cries of pain in her pillow, biting so hard she tore it apart. Ensui petted her hair, whispering comforting words and meaningless promises.
Then the nausea and vomiting started, leaving her exhausted and haggard. Sometimes in the middle of the night, she got a fever that gave her chills and vertigo, making her lose her grip on reality. She was so dependent on her knowledge and awareness to feel safe that she spent a lot of those hours sobbing, terrified and deaf to Ensui's tender words.
The night was hard and long for both master and student. The sun rising in the sky found them both asleep, her between the half-undone sheets and him sitting on the ground, his back painfully bent so his head was on the mattress, the rest of his body on the ground. He snored weakly, his unkempt hair slightly moving each time he released a breath. One of his hands was reaching for Hitomi but not quite touching her, as if he had fallen asleep while trying to comfort her.
As he had promised, everything was better in the morning.