---Training Ground 44 - The Forest of Death---
The Forest of Death had always been a graveyard pretending to be woodland. Ancient trees, thick as fortress towers, clawed at the sky with gnarled limbs. Vines hanged like nooses. The ground was soft with centuries of rot and blood-soaked loam. Even on quiet days, the place exhaled menace... a low, constant chakra hum from every scar left by past shinobi.
Today it was silent in a different way. It was anticipatory…
Haku stood in the largest clearing he could find, the one ringed by the tallest trunks. His teal kimono hanged loose, sleeves rolled, Kusanagi sheathed at his left hip. Frost already traced delicate patterns beneath his sandals, spreading outward like spilled mercury before sublimating back into nothing. His breathing was even, eyes half-lidded, calm as still water.
Across from him... just forty meters away… Alaric leaned against a tree trunk, arms folded, his crimson coat unbuttoned and fluttering in the late-afternoon breeze. His platinum hair caught the fractured sunlight. He looked bored.
…But he wasn't.
Haku could feel the difference now, after two years. Alaric's presence wasn't loud. It didn't roar or press. It simply… existed. Like gravity. Like the certainty that the sun would rise tomorrow. You didn't notice it until you tried to move against it.
Alaric pushed off the tree. He cracked his neck once. "Eight hours," he said, voice casual. "That's how long the forest gets to survive us. After that, we stop when one of us decides the lesson is over."
Haku inclined his head slightly. "Understood, Sensei."
Alaric's lips curved... just a fraction. "Then show me. Everything. No restraint. No mercy. Try to kill me like your life depends on it... because if you hold back, I'll make sure you regret it."
The words landed like a thrown kunai. Haku's fingers brushed the hilt.
The draw was silent. Steel sang free in one fluid motion.
And then he moved.
Zero Friction ignited.
Ice didn't form beneath Haku's feet so much as it anticipated them... thin, glassy sheets manifesting a hair's breadth before each step, vanishing the instant he left them. Friction ceased to exist. Momentum became absolute.
He exploded forward.
The air cracked like breaking glass. Forty meters vanished in a single heartbeat. Kusanagi, now trailing a faint wind-chakra shimmer, sliced horizontally at neck level… it was clean, surgical, and unavoidable.
Alaric tilted his head one inch. The blade passed so close the displaced air tugged at his coat. A single platinum strand drifted downward, severed.
Haku didn't hesitate. Mid-stride he reversed... Zero Friction snapping him backward like a rubber band stretched to breaking. Ice senbon materialized between every finger of both hands, launched in overlapping spirals... five hundred needles in under two seconds.
Alaric raised his left hand, palm outward. A pulse of wind chakra rippled outward. It was not a wall, but a precise deflection field. Trajectories bent by millimeters. Senbon tore sideways into tree trunks instead, detonating bark in wet explosions, showering the clearing with splinters.
Haku was already moving again… sliding low, one-handed seals flashing. "Ice Release: Ice Rain."
The canopy overhead froze in an instant. Then shattered.
Thousands... no, tens of thousands... of needle-thin ice shards poured down like inverted hail. The sound was apocalyptic: a high-pitched shriek of wind and fracturing crystal. Visibility dropped to zero. The ground became a pincushion.
Alaric moved through it.
Not fast. Not even particularly quick by his standards. But perfectly. Each step found the microscopic gaps between falling death. His coat tore in six places… shallow cuts opening along forearms, ribs, thigh. A single shard carved a red line across his left cheekbone. Blood welled.
Haku saw it. His heart rate didn't spike. It steadied.
'I can touch him.'
Mirrors erupted.
Not the full Demonic Mirroring Ice Crystals dome... not yet. Partial arcs rose instead… curved reflective walls seven feet tall, angled to create overlapping reflections. Haku's image fractured into dozens, then hundreds. Each one moved independently, each one held a Kusanagi.
Alaric's eyes shifted. The Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan spun lazily once.
He saw the real Haku instantly... third mirror from the left, moving low.
Still, Alaric didn't counterattack. He waited.
Haku struck from behind... Wind-infused Kusanagi screaming for the spine.
Alaric caught the blade between the index and middle finger of his right hand.
PING…
The impact rang like a struck bell. The ground beneath them cratered three feet deep in a perfect circle.
Haku's eyes widened... only for a fraction of a second. He released the grip, letting Zero Friction hurl him backward again before Alaric could close his fingers and crush the bone.
Alaric examined the thin line of blood across his palm. "…Very sharp," he murmured. 'Should I get another Kusanagi… give it to Kassandra maybe? Or Hunter? Hmm…'
'Decisions, decision…'
The first hour ended. The clearing was ruined… trees pocked with senbon holes, canopy shredded, ground glittering with frost and blood.
Neither fighter was breathing hard.
This time, Haku changed tactics. The first phase was not getting him anywhere, just shallow cuts on Alaric. It was already night time, he had to do something.
'I should up this with control and attrition... let's see...'
He stopped chasing hits. He began owning the battlefield.
Ice spread outward in pulsing waves... first ankle-deep, then knee-deep, then waist-high in places. Roots froze and burst. Tree trunks crystallized from the base upward, turning into glittering obelisks that reflected light in blinding patterns. Water-style techniques surged beneath the ice layer, freezing mid-flow into pressurized traps... step on the wrong spot and the ground detonated like a mine.
Alaric was forced to move constantly.
Alaric still refused to go on the full offensive. He would not summon Susanoo, would not freeze time, would not flood the field with country-killing scale. But he could no longer stand still.
His right hand rose in a single, casual Tiger seal.
"Wind Release: Great Breakthrough."
The exhale that followed wasn't loud, but precise.
A wall of compressed air detonated forward from his position, invisible until it hit the mirrors. The gale carved clean corridors through Haku's reflective labyrinth… shattering curved ice walls like glass under a hammer.
Shards exploded outward in glittering sprays, refracted moonlight turning the air into a storm of razor confetti. Mirrors toppled in sequence, their reflections winking out one by one, forcing Haku's multiplied images to collapse back into a single, real body.
Haku didn't blink. He slid sideways on Zero Friction, feet never truly touching the ground, and answered with one-handed seals of his own.
"Ice Release: Ice Hammer."
Chakra surged upward. From the frozen earth rose a titanic construct… a hammer whose head alone was the size of a small house, crystalline blue-white, handle thick as an ancient oak and thirty feet long. Haku gripped the ethereal haft with both hands… Kusanagi sheathed for the moment… and brought it down in a single, earth-shattering arc.
The hammer struck the ground between them.
BOOOOOOOM.
The impact was apocalyptic.
A shockwave rolled outward, cratering the earth in a perfect thirty-meter radius. Frozen soil erupted in jagged spears. The remaining mirrors closest to the strike zone detonated into powder. Alaric was already airborne… leaping backward, coat flapping wildly… but the pressure wave clipped him mid-air, slamming him against a tree trunk hard enough to splinter bark and drive the breath from his lungs for a half-second.
He landed in a crouch, boots sliding across fresh ice. 'I know that's enough to get sensei…'
Haku was already pressing.
From his left sleeve burst a roiling sphere of water chakra… shaped into the gaping maw of a shark, its body now veined with jagged ice spikes that grew and regrew as it moved. "Water Style: Shark Bomb — Ice Infusion."
The shark roared… a sound like cracking glaciers… and curved through the air in a predatory arc, homing on Alaric's position with unnatural intelligence. Frost trailed in its wake, freezing the ground it passed over into slick black ice.
Alaric rolled skipped… once, twice… then planted his feet and thrust both palms forward.
No seal this time. Just raw redirection.
A pulse of wind chakra erupted from his hands, catching the shark mid-charge and twisting its trajectory. The beast veered violently, smashing into a cluster of frozen trees instead. The collision was deafening… ice and water detonated outward in a white geyser, frozen shrapnel peppering the clearing like shotgun pellets. Several shards sliced shallow lines across Alaric's exposed forearms… blood welling instantly.
'If this jutsu had twice more power and compression, it would've tore my arm. That's sick.' He ignored it. Instead, he raised his left hand… single Ox seal… and the ground answered.
"Wood Release: Flowering Tree."
Thin wooden barriers erupted in a semicircle around him… not the towering forest of Hashirama's legend, but a tight, defensive lattice of interlocking branches, each one reinforced with earth chakra for density. The wood rose just in time… Haku had already chained into another assault.
Two more ice-infused Shark Bombs launched simultaneously… one curving high, one low… while Haku himself burst forward on Zero Friction, Kusanagi drawn and trailing wind-chakra edges that shimmered like heat haze.
Alaric met the dual sharks head-on.
He leaped upward, twisting mid-air, and drove a knee into the first bomb's snout. Chakra flared… disrupting the technique's cohesion. The shark burst apart in a freezing spray that coated his legs in frost. The second one he met with an open palm strike… chakra-infused, precise… redirecting its momentum sideways so it careened into the wooden lattice instead.
The barriers groaned under the impact. Wood cracked. Ice shattered. But the lattice held… barely… long enough for Alaric to drop back to the ground.
However, Haku was already there.
Zero Friction snapped him inside the collapsing wooden perimeter. Kusanagi flashed in a diagonal cut aimed at Alaric's throat… wind chakra screaming along the edge.
Alaric leaned back… just far enough. The blade passed an inch from skin, close enough to draw a thin red line across his collarbone.
He answered with a spinning backfist… casual, almost lazy… that clipped Haku's temple and sent him skidding across the ice.
Both men paused… for less than a heartbeat.
Blood dripped from Alaric's collarbone onto the frost, freezing into crimson beads before it could hit the ground. Haku's temple was already swelling, a thin trickle running into his eye.
The forest groaned around them… trees leaning drunkenly, mirrors reduced to glittering dust, craters steaming.
And still, neither had truly gone all out.
They simply circled once more… breathing steady, eyes locked… before the next exchange began.
Then… Taijutsu became the heartbeat of the fight.
Haku was a ghost... appearing for a fraction of a second, striking with blade or fist or knee, vanishing before retaliation could land. Zero Friction chains let him change direction mid-air, mid-strike, mid-retreat. Every swing of the Kusanagi trailed wind-chakra edges that could part flesh and bone at the molecular level.
Despite that, Alaric answered bare-handed.
A straight punch shattered an ice wall Haku had appeared behind. A spinning back kick collapsed three mirrors at once, the shockwave sending Haku tumbling. Open-palm thrusts disrupted Haku's breathing rhythm. Elbows cracked ribs. Knees grazed kidneys.
Haku bled. Alaric bled more. However, none of them minded, especially the blonde... he didn't care if he bled. This was the first time he allowed someone to do this to him. Haku was lucky since he was his student.
Against normal humans back in the Assassin's Creed world, Alaric would've been disappointed in himself if someone would be able to even scratch his clothes when fighting. However, his student was strong... not Madara or Hashirama type of way... but still very strong nonetheless. And Alaric wasn't going all out today; he was here to test how strong his student had become after just two years of being alone.
By hour three, Alaric's coat was in ribbons... left sleeve gone completely, right sleeve hanging by threads. Shallow cuts crisscrossed forearms, chest, thighs. Frostbite blackened several fingertips where he'd blocked ice techniques directly. A deep gash ran diagonally across his left pectoral... courtesy of a perfectly timed Mirror Step reflection that sent his own wind dragon back at him.
Haku wasn't untouched. His kimono hung in tatters at the waist. Blood matted his long black hair to his temple. Bruising bloomed across ribs and collarbone. One eye was swelling shut from an elbow he hadn't quite slipped.
Still they moved.
Hour four brought the first true lull... not exhaustion, but mutual recalibration. They stood thirty meters apart amid smoking ruins. Breath fogged the air despite the summer heat… Haku's ice chakra had dropped the ambient temperature twenty degrees.
Alaric wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. He smiled… small, genuine. "You've improved, Haku."
Haku didn't answer. He simply raised his sword again.
'I've improved, but it's not enough!'
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