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After taking over the case, he unexpectedly found some time on his hands as Amami worked on the agents and other prisoners. After what happened at Inahara, they needed additional information before proceeding with any new leads. Until then, they had to complete paperwork and process what they had from before.
In the meantime, Takuma decided to focus some of his time and attention on training. He could only use a shadow clone for four hours daily, which he would send to work for the first half of the day while he extended his morning training session until lunch.
Relying on Masaaki's advice, he had two options to push his chakra augmentation to its iteration. The first route was to follow "containment", which followed the basic principle of applying pressure. Reducing the area over which the chakra impacted the target would increase its destructive power. The second option was to focus on chakra "compression"—as the name suggested, it involved compacting more chakra into a smaller physical area, resulting in a power boost.
During the chase at Inahara, his clone used chakra augmentation against the agent, but missed and instead shattered the entire roof and more of the building. He suspected he had caused enough structural damage that breaking down the existing structure to build anew was the only way to move forward. It was far more powerful than his usual chakra augmentation and was only possible because the clone used "compression".
It was a kamikaze attack where the backlash from overloading the augmentation crossed the clone's damage threshold. If Takuma himself had attempted it, he would've lost his arm and shoulder for good.
He needed to overcome the backlash problem by perfecting compression to make it a viable part of his arsenal. However, he was aware that, in his case, without a pre-established framework to progress his self-made augmentation, it would take time to perfect it via careful trial-and-error, especially when messing up potentially meant blowing up his arm.
But it was too powerful a weapon to let it sit in development. He wanted to make it combat viable as soon as possible. Fortunately, he had a potential way to accomplish it.
Earth Release: Earth Spear
Takuma's second B-rank ninjutsu boosted his defensive and offensive capabilities by channeling Earth-natured chakra through his body, causing it to become as hard as diamond. It would shore up his endurance enough to handle the backlash from the in-development augmentation.
It was a patchwork solution, but he needed to train Earth Spear either way, so taking this approach had only upsides.
For training, he found himself next to a pond in the village.
The pond's clear surface reflected the beautiful image of the sky dotted with cotton-like clouds. He sat on a camping folding chair with a bucket of waterlogged, muddy soil between his feet, enjoying the refreshing breeze that cooled his skin.
B-rank ninjutsu and beyond required advanced chakra training before one could actually train the ninjutsu itself. For Earth Spear, the focus was on nature transformation as the jutsu utilised "hardening", a property of earth-natured chakra. Every chakra nature had multiple properties associated with it. Weight, seismic vibrations, and malleability were among the properties of earth-natured chakra. He had to understand the property utilised by the jutsu and become proficient in it before he could use it in the ninjutsu.
If his memory served him well, Naruto's Rasenshuriken used the "sharp" property of Wind-natured chakra, which had other properties such as vacuum, wind pressure, and velocity among others.
Takuma scooped some wet mud from the mound and cupped it between his hands. The feeling of mud getting stuck underneath his fingernails was annoying, but he ignored it, guessing that he would get used to it sooner or later. He recalled what he learned about Earth Spear from its jutsu scroll. Every time he bought a new ninjutsu, his appreciation for the academic text in the scrolls increased. The scroll contained clear instructions for training Earth nature transformation specific to the ninjutsu.
He focused on his hands—his palms and the inside of his fingers—and slowly pushed earth-natured chakra into the wad of mud encased in his hand from all directions.
The aim was to convert the wet mud into a rock with a pebble-like structural integrity.
His chakra seeped into the wad and attached itself to the soil particles before pulling them together. The mud slowly compacted over a few seconds, making squelching sounds as water was pushed out.
He opened his hands. Instead of a hard pebble, the sopping wad had turned into a semi-dry cake. He picked it up, and it immediately crumbled when he stared at it too long.
Takuma sighed as he threw the mud cake away.
He had to push as much water out of the mud as possible—while he wasn't successful at it yet—he didn't think it was a problem, and he could see himself perfecting it soon with practice. The real challenge was turning the mud into a solid pebble. When done naturally, it took over a thousand years for soil to turn into a rock or pebble through constant application of heat and pressure. He was trying to imitate that process in seconds. The chakra that stuck to the particles was attempting to replace the intermolecular force and enhance its hardness.
Fortunately, he had prior experience that made him somewhat familiar with the process.
Water Release: Eight Tentacles followed the familiar principle where the water-nature chakra held together the mass of water in the shape of tentacles. He wasn't controlling the tentacles; instead, he was controlling the water-nature chakra that, in turn, controlled the water. Similarly, Water Release: Spirit Water Wave used water-nature chakra to retain the bullet's shape as it travelled through the air at high velocity.
His sole defensive ninjutsu, C-rank, Earth Release: Earthen Dome, used the same "hardening" principle, albeit on a lesser scale.
And because of that prior experience, lesser or different as it may be—and because he wasn't trying to train nature transformation for a S-rank ninjutsu like the Rasenshuriken—if he consistently trained for three to four weeks, he would reach a point where he could use what he learned to perform Earth Spear with a relatively higher success rate successfully.
As for what came after that?
Even though his turnaround with the Shadow Clone Jutsu was quick, he had only gained minimal skill with the jutsu. Each time he created a clone, he wasted a lot of chakra, which wasn't a big problem for Takuma because of his reserves. It would've taken much more time to increase his skill if he were anyone else, but because he used a shadow clone daily, he progressed his skill at an accelerated rate. Of course, progress through repetition would eventually plateau, and he would need to train his Yin and Yang nature transformations further.
He couldn't train Earth Spear all day because the jutsu required a constant flow of chakra to sustain. The chakra consumption also rose when actively defending against damage. Tanking a ninjutsu would spike consumption. He also couldn't estimate how much chakra it would take because that information was entirely dependent on the user's chakra reserves and skill level.
He would start out greatly inefficient—which was worse for constant consumption jutsu like Earth Spear over a one-time input jutsu like clones—before improving efficiency as his skill got better. Not to mention, the jutsu would become increasingly desirable as his chakra reserves increased because, unlike Shadow Clone Jutsu—where costs scaled up with his progress—the cost for Earth Spear wouldn't increase.
However, time itself was a constraint because he had more things to train.
"So much to do, so little time," Takuma muttered to himself as he again scooped up a wad of mud to continue his nature transformation training.
He experimented with how to apply chakra. He tried slowly pushing chakra into the mud, doing it quickly, using non-linear applications, and testing any variations that might give him insight. He faced failure after failure, but didn't let it get to him because it was all part of the process.
As a certain sports franchise's motto said—
He trusted the process.
Eventually, Takuma had to go to work, so he created a clone and set to continue where he left off for the next four hours as per Inenpachi's orders.
He heaved a sigh as he watched the clone disappear from his field of vision. He spent at least an hour every day feeling depressed because every time he created a clone or received a clone's experience, it reminded him of the dangerous time bomb in his mind, and that only ever soured his mood.
Takuma looked down to see that he had run out of the wet mud and picked up his dirty shovel and bucket to get more.
As he shovelled mud into his bucket, he heard footsteps approaching him.
Throughout the day, people had been coming up to him to ask what he was doing. He was training near a public pond because it was easier to source wet mud than to make it in the pristine ANBU facilities.
He didn't mind the people because they broke the monotony and repetitiveness of the training. Though he was sure it would get old really quickly if he had to repeat the same response to every visitor, it was fine for now.
The consistent and stable footsteps told him that the visitor was most probably a shinobi, which meant the conversation was going to be longer because he didn't need to go into the intricacies of chakra manipulation with them, but shinobi—mostly genin—liked to talk about the topic and how they were also thinking about doing advanced chakra training even though they only knew C-rank jutsu.
He turned around and was momentarily surprised because he recognised the visitor.
"Good afternoon, Takuma. What a pleasure seeing you here," said Okubo Momoe.
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