Additional Training [Iron Country]

Age : 32 Posts : 1178

Day Fifteen

The first day of training started out rather different than he had imagined at first, though that was not really a bad thing. Standing in a room that had been described as the inner ring of the temple, he could see why the place was called that. Sitting in the basement of the large temple building, the ceremonial training ground was kept to those who were being trained directly under the Shogun, the men that stood directly under the Shogun and obviously the Shogun himself. Holding his Boken in his dominant hand, the Shogun stood in front of him while holding small leather satchels filled with sand. The satchels all had several small pieces of paper tied onto it with a leather strap, causing them to whistle slightly when in motion. The goal for today was for Hiruzen to use his Boken to deflect the satchel projectiles fired at him without using his Sharingan to aid him. With the Shogun were two of his more trusted students that also had a small basket full of satchels with them. Giving him until the count of ten, Hiruzen used the time he had to mentally prepare himself for the impending attacks. When it started, Hiruzen intended to use his Boken to strike the projectiles, though without his Sharingan, it was a lot harder to figure out how to angle his strikes in order to properly intercept them. Over time however, things did get a lot better. Though he did not always hit the satchel, he at least managed to evade the ones that had gotten to close to him. To him, this was still worth while as one could never truly defend against everything. Once several tens of minutes had passed, he had grown enough to at least know how to strike in order to deflect the sacks.

Now that he was doing well enough in deflecting the satchels without his Sharingan and just relying on his eyes and ears, it was time for the training to be pushed to the next level. This time, a blindfold was used in order to take away his vision completely, leaving nothing but his sense of smell and his hearing to help him. It obviously made the routine a whole lot harder to complete as Hiruzen had never really been doing anything without relying on his sight or his ability to sense chakra signatures around his being. While he was a Sennin, things like these showed him just how much there was truly left to learn, proving that no one was ever truly done learning and improving. At first, he was hit several times by the leather satchels, leaving rather painful bruises as well as a strong incentive not to get hit again. There was no point in denying that it did not hurt like hell when he got hit, so after he was hit by the third satchel in a row, Hiruzen took a deep breath and started focusing entirely on his hearing. Holding his Boken tightly in his right hand, he heard the rustling of the papers coming up from behind him. Ducking at the last moment, he could literally feel the satchel passing over him. Hearing the satchel get further and further away from him, Hiruzen stood up straight again. When he heard that the whistling from the same direction seemed to be getting closer again, he angled his body to the side to let yet another satchel pass him by. Trying to do the same thing he had done at first, the Uchiha tried to count the amount of time between the moment he first heard the whistling sound and when he would have to move away to dodge.

For a whole minute, Hiruzen was counting the time on the satchels so he would be able to properly deflect them. Once he became confident enough in his hearing and reflexes, the Uchiha started knocking one satchel out of the air after the other. When the pace behind the thrown satchels increased, so did Hiruzen temporarily shift from offensive strikes to evasive maneuvers until he was sure of the pattern behind them, after which he would just shift back to striking with his wooden sword. Once an hour of training had passed, the Shogun dismissed his students and had them take the satchels with them. Believing that he had seen enough, it was finally time for some actual Kenjutsu training, the thing he had been looking forward to when he came to the temple.

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Age : 32 Posts : 1178

Day Thirty-five

Several days had gone by since Hiruzen had started training directly under the Shogun. Due to him not being accepted by some of the people in the temple and even getting attacked while training, there had really not been any other option for the man. After all, he had promised the Uchiha that he would see to it that he received his training, so if he were to let Hiruzen get killed, it would reflect negatively on the entire temple. While he knew this very well, Hiruzen liked to believe that the man had chosen to train him personally because he felt bad for the way that he had been treated up to this point. While under the man's supervision, he had learned some basic Iaido techniques, came to terms with some of the things in his life that he could not change and learned a thing or two about fighting without the use of his Sharingan. To elaborate some more on the latter, the training he had received had been centered around using his hearing and even about sensing subtle changes in his direct environment, in turn allowing him to increase the way in which he could respond to incoming threats and make them far less harmful. When he had first begun that training that particular area of sensory enhancement, it had been done by throwing satchels filled with sand at him that left painful bruises on him if he did not manage to properly avoid them. The goal was for him to rely on something other than his Sharingan to tell him what was going on around him while using a Boken, a wooden sword, to cut the satchels out of the air once he had located them.

While it had been a rather slow start, the first day had brought him a bit closer to fully master his six senses. As an Uchiha, Hiruzen had learned to rely on what he could see from a very young age. This aspect only grew once he had awakened his Sharingan and gradually had it evolve to see more with every new stage it entered. As a result, it had made the shinobi rely less on his other senses. While this did not mean that his other senses were weak, it was obvious that his ears did not have the same level of sensory as his eyes had once his Kekkei Genkai was activated. Almost three weeks had gone by since his training had started, and at this point, Hiruzen felt that his ears and even his nose had been trained along with his mind to make up for his heightened senses. Every day that passed had the first thirty minutes of training begin with the same satchel tossing exercise, followed by an hour in which he was to work on his basic techniques and stance, after which he would get another hour in which he would learn a new technique while ending the day with another thirty minutes of sparring with the Shogun. In a way, knowing exactly what kind of day he would be having allowed him to plan his daily chores around his training while also helping him figure out just how much time he would be having to work on gathering information from the library and finishing his personalized map of the Sanrou Mountain area. Right now, he had gotten to the point where he would need to do some actual reconnaissance to see whether or not his triangulation methods had been paying off at all.

Today, Hiruzen had been given the day off so that the Shogun could take care of something about the Temple of Raijin. So far, the current head of the temple, Guroda, had already been in the Iron Temple for about a week and was going to be heading out again tomorrow. He had come to the place to see whether or not he would be able to assist in Hiruzen's training and to work out a plan with the Shogun involved a large festival to honor the gods and ask for their blessings until the next festival that would be held on the same date in the next year. Since the festival was none of his business and he had no intention of further aggravating the local samurai with his presence in the open training grounds. No, for now, it seemed like it would be the best idea to just scout the area he had been mapping so far as a means of preparing everything for the time when he would finally be ready to enter the temple. For that, he had to find it first. Wearing a thick attire, he had ventured out into the white world that was the Iron country. Several hours had gone by since he had left the Iron Temple, only to stumble upon the ruins of what had once been a temple of some sort. Believing that this might well have been the place that he had been searching for, he started looking around the place while letting his hand rest on the hilt of the Boken he had taken with him from the temple. The fact that he had been looking for this place for several years did not make it any easier on him to see the it in such a run down state. The parts that he could see had all been broken down to rubble and got covered in snow entirely.

Forming a string of hand seals, Hiruzen started spinning in the center of the ruin, sending a wave of flame into every direction. Maintaining his jutsu for a while, the snow rapidly melted away under the intensity of Hiruzen's fire style. After a couple of seconds, most of the snow had disappeared, showing that there was more to the ruins than could at first be seen. Among others, he found a trap door that seemed to lead deeper into the ruins of the building. Obviously, this was enough for the Uchiha to believe that he was onto something important. Before looking around to see whether the place was safe enough for him to just head down into the darkness, he used the brittle staircase that took him further into the ruins. The first thing he noticed was a large hole at the far end of the room, which was really the only place that let any light into the otherwise barely visible room. When he attempted to scout the place for anything he might be able to use, he heard the sound of claws gently tapping against the old tiles and soft growling of a fairly large predator. Turning around to face the part of the room from which the sounds originated, he saw several large wolves as well as a bunch of younger pups. From the look of things, they had been living in these ruins for years, it was safe to say that he was now treading on their territory, something that was generally frowned upon by the animal world. Judging by their snow white fur, they were what the locals referred to as Frostwolves, wolves that had adapted to their surroundings perfectly and had been used as animal companions by the Samurai Temples for years. That said, these did not seem like the ones that had been tamed or remotely felt like being around human beings.

With his hand still resting on his blade, he tried to slowly back out, though he was not given the chance to just walk out. Actually, he was not allowed to move at all when he was this close to their pups. As an unfamiliar face, the wolves did not seem to care much for his presence. When three of the larger wolves started moving in, Hiruzen took out his Boken and activated his Sharingan. Though the wolves had at some point been trained to scare off outsiders, they were still wild animals that could easily kill a man when given the chance. Unwilling to let his story end with the sentence "Was devoured by wolves in the Iron Country", Hiruzen figured that he would have to defend himself against them if they chose to attack. While his Sharingan was in fact active, it did not do a whole lot to make up for the lack of light. Knowing full well that this was going to be the first time in which he had to actually rely on his other senses in a combat situation, he could just as easily have used a fire jutsu to incinerate every single wolf in front of him, though he did not want to have the death of the creatures and their young pups on his conscience when he had been the one that entered their territory in the first place. When the first of the wolves attacked, Hiruzen could tell by the sound coming from the tiles that the other two were flanking him. Drawing his Boken, he struck in a wide arc to slam the piece of hard wood against the snout of one of the two wolves behind him, making use of one of the Iaido techniques he had learned from the Shogun.

Feeling that his attack had done the job, it only served to momentarily set the beast back. Listening closely to the rapid steps made by the other wolf and the sudden absence of it after one particularly loud one, he dashed to the side just in time to keep the beast from leaping right on top of him. Again, he used his blade now that his Sharingan had registered it in the faint light of the cavern, slamming it right into it's neck and causing it to collapse on the floor. Hoping that hitting one of them and knocking another one out might keep the beasts from attacking, the last wolf had fallen back into the shadows, thus making his Sharingan useless yet again. Using this moment to dash towards the stairs, the wolf that had received a blow to the nose came towards him, forcing Hiruzen to abandon his idea to escape when the beast crashed into the already brittle staircase and took out the easiest way out of the den. Though he was not the best Taijutsu based fighter around, Hiruzen managed to get a solid kick against the wolf while setting off and sending himself on his way towards the hole in the wall that still let in the light of the outside world. For a moment, the Uchiha heard absolutely nothing as he went into the light. That was when he suddenly heard the sound of movement again. Luckily for him, it was already too late for them to stop him, for now that he had his vision back, his hearing was just overkill. Nearing the hole in the wall, the sound of steps got closer and closer. Once Hiruzen was sure that the beast was almost upon him, he turned his body and looked the creature straight in the eye. Utilizing one of his more powerful Genjutsu, the creature became immobilized completely just before it could jump him, causing it to trip and fall flat on it's snout.

When the last of the three wolves collapsed onto the earthen tiles, Hiruzen jumped out through the hole in the wall. Dropping in a thick blanket of snow that was roughly two meters below the hole, he looked back at the hole to see if any of the animals might try to come after him. After a full minute, he established that this was not going to be the case. Letting a sigh of relief escape his lips, he was rather annoyed by the wolves occupying that specific location of the ruins. Still, it became clear to him that that particular room was not what he had been looking for, meaning that there had to be more to the place than what could be seen with the naked eye or even the Sharingan. When he looked up at the sky, the Uchiha could tell that he would not get to check out the rest of the ruins on this same day as it would be dark in a couple of hours. If he was not back at the temple before nightfall, chances were that he would have to spend the night out in the cold, and that was something he was not looking forward to at all. Deciding to leave the investigation for a later time, he returned to the temple before the other wolves might track him down and get themselves in trouble.

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