Teju and Kurenai had been awake for two days now, but they were still on bedrest. The medical ninja said the neurotoxin concentration in their systems was unusually high, which meant a long recovery. Every time Sora visited, the two of them looked like they'd spent the night drinking. The poison was still messing with their heads.
He'd planned to stay and keep them company. The command staff certainly weren't going to assign him solo missions anytime soon.
But the atmosphere was wrong. Teju kept looking at Sora the way you look at a bare lightbulb hanging over a candlelit dinner.
Their squad tent was divided into two partitions by a hanging cloth. Teju wasn't the type to initiate conversation with Kurenai, not yet, but this was a golden opportunity, suffering together, bonding through shared hardship. He didn't want Sora anywhere near it.
The ingratitude. Sora had botched an entire mission to drag this kid out of a thicket, and now he was getting the cold shoulder for it.
Whether Teju's bedside vigil would impress Kurenai remained an open question. That it impressed Teju himself was beyond doubt. Young, clueless about romance, and utterly convinced he was pulling off something grand.
So Sora, exiled from his own squad tent to avoid being a third wheel, took to lying on whatever patch of open ground the camp had to offer.
Sometimes he watched the sky. Sometimes the dirt. Mostly he turned the same question over and over: how do I get stronger?
The fantasy version was tempting. Fall off a cliff, find a secret manual at the bottom, stumble into some reclusive master who'd pour decades of power into him and send him back as the strongest in the world.
Fun to imagine. Useless to pursue. Better to work with what he had and figure out the next real step forward.
The last battle had given him one genuine lead. He'd pressed Gale Palm's compressed air against the soles of his feet on instinct, and the burst of speed that followed had been absurd. Like winning a lottery he hadn't bought a ticket for.
The problem was execution. Pressing palms together to form the air mass, then redirecting it to his feet, was clumsy and slow. Too many steps. If he could streamline the process, Gale Palm: Revised might become something worth relying on.
He tried everything. Molding the technique through his feet directly, channeling wind nature chakra from the legs down. Nothing worked. Casting jutsu through your feet was a trick reserved for someone at the Legendary Sannin level, like Jiraiya. Sora wasn't even in the same postal code.
He lay on the grass, rolling Akimichi-sensei's sealing scroll between his fingers. Dead end after dead end.
Sealing.
Wait.
If he had one advantage over other ninja, it was Fuinjutsu. His previous life had been spent studying the Book of Changes, studying geomancy, drilling the principles of the Eight Trigrams until they were second nature. When he'd arrived in this world, his talent for sealing had been obvious from the start. Maybe the only cheat code his transmigration had given him.
What if I break Gale Palm into its component functions and seal them onto my feet?
And so a rumor began circulating through the frontline camp: some genin had lost his mind from combat stress and now spent every day sitting in the grass, picking at his feet.
Ignorant fools, the lot of them. They'd never know the joy of a good foot rub.
Whether the seal was working or not remained unclear, but his feet had never felt better.
From that point on, nobody in camp wanted to shake his hand. Water was rationed, hygiene options were limited. He couldn't help it.
The reputation damage didn't bother him. Once Teju recovered, Teju could handle all the squad's social obligations. A few more days and Sora would be free.
What did bother him was this: classmates from their Academy year dropped by to visit Teju and Kurenai, and someone mentioned Sora's strange new hobby. Now Teju, the ungrateful wretch, was dragging himself out of bed on legs that still wobbled, fetching meals for himself and Kurenai rather than let Sora do it.
I should have left him in that thicket.
Kurenai had always been popular. Those ruby-red eyes drew people in without effort. Teju could chat with anyone about anything. Half their graduating class cycled through the medical tent to check on them.
Rin and Shizune visited Kurenai whenever they had time. Shizune especially. Kato Shizune hadn't gone through the normal squad assignment process at all. She'd been taken directly under Tsunade's wing to study Medical Ninjutsu. The kind of connection that made everyone else grind their teeth with envy. Her uncle, Kato Dan, had been a powerhouse, a serious contender for Hokage, and Tsunade's lover. He'd died in the Second Great Ninja War.
Among the visitors to Teju's bedside, Sora only knew one squad well: Might Guy, Ebisu, and Shiranui Genma. Fellow nobodies. Civilian ninja, all three, with nobody's coattails to ride.
Might One-for-One, as Guy was still called, hadn't come into his own yet. On the battlefield, his pure Taijutsu focus left him short on versatility. Limited options meant limited adaptability when the situation shifted.
Ebisu would eventually attach himself to the Sarutobi clan as a household tutor. His strength was in fundamentals, the boring basics no one else wanted to grind. Another civilian with no backing and no shortcuts.
Genma specialized in projectile weapons. Later, his civilian background would catch the Fourth Hokage's eye, earning him a spot on the Hokage Guard Platoon. Sora wondered if he'd ever get that chance himself. Minato had been making a deliberate effort to recruit unaffiliated ninja.
Sora painted the seal onto his foot soles in oil pigment. Three concentric rings. The outer ring: flowing, linear runes that replicated Gale Palm's air-gathering process. The middle ring: a Four Symbols Seal for containment. The inner ring: the character for "Wind."
When chakra flowed into the sole, the outer runes would generate and convert a large volume of compressed air.
The Four Symbols array in the middle ring trapped that air against the foot. A storage seal, in principle, only storing air instead of objects.
The final stage was release. Air burst from the central gap, and the volume could be regulated by adjusting chakra input. The "Wind" character in the center was decorative, nothing more. A shame nobody would ever examine the bottom of his foot, because the brushwork was genuinely excellent.
He pumped a heavy dose of chakra into both soles. The seal runes activated. A blast of air erupted beneath him and launched him straight into the air, feet over head, spinning upside down above the camp.
The camp consensus was unanimous: the foot-picking lunatic had finally cracked. Now he was walking on his hands and kicking with his feet.
Ignorant fools. They'd never understand the wonders of being upside down.
Days of practice. Falls, bruises, overcorrections, more falls. Gradually, control came. Sora learned to channel the foot-seal bursts into rapid displacement, and the effect on his vertical leap was extraordinary.
His own personal Body Flicker Technique.
Gale Palm: Revised got a full overhaul. Beyond the foot seals, Sora painted oil-pigment seals on both elbows and both wrists. With proper chakra modulation, every punch and sword swing carried the force of compressed air behind it. The tradeoff was brutal chakra consumption, but the power was real.
He copied the full Gale Palm: Revised 2.0 specifications into a sealing scroll and stashed it away. A family technique, for a family he didn't have yet. Whether he'd ever settle down in this strange world was anyone's guess, but he hoped that when he got home from the front, there might be a little brother or sister waiting.
The combat logic was clean: foot seals for mobility, covering sprints and escapes; elbow and wrist seals for striking power, delivering the killing blow.
Next time he stepped onto a battlefield, it wouldn't be the disaster the last one was.
About a week later, Teju and Kurenai had improved enough to train. The three of them eased back into light drills together.
Kurenai's father visited once. Whatever he taught her, it left her hunched over a stack of scrolls afterward, brow furrowed and chewing her lip.
Teju still had nothing beyond traps and Taijutsu. No plan for where to develop next. He didn't even know his own chakra nature, hadn't learned a single elemental technique. Sora watched and worried, but there was nothing he could do about it.
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50 p.s for extra chapter