Chapitre 36: CH_2.5 (036): Hands, Not Feet

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———

If Takuma could say it, he would say it up close to Yoshio's face. For all his bulging muscles and overwhelming masculine energy, the chunin instructor was softer than Maruboshi. Takuma definitely feared Yoshio's metal baton, verbal harassment, and the punishments for mistakes, but he would take all of that in a heartbeat as opposed to the penalties that Maruboshi imposed upon failure. Even the much more difficult tree-walking practice didn't seem as daunting and dreadful as Maruboshi's version of leaf concentration practice with multiple objects of heavier and heavier weights with grinding penalties to the boot.

Takuma looked at his peers on either side as they started with a run up on the ground and used that momentum and speed to try rushing up the wall. He didn't know who started it, but soon everyone was using the same running approach. Only two people hadn't adopted the strategy— Takuma himself and Taro.

Takuma had his past trauma of wanting to fail the least, even if it meant he tried less than others— the trauma of losing money still haunted him. As for Taro, he simply stood at the back, observing everyone. Takuma gave Taro a fleeting glance before focusing on the wall in front of him.

While the tree-walking practice and leaf concentration practice operated on the same concept of 'sticking' using chakra, one key difference between the two exercises set them apart. The difference was the difference in mass(or force caused by mass) in action.

Yesterday, when Yoshio announced the tree-walking practice and the mission point reward, he had distributed the scroll on the tree-walking practice. Unlike a jutsu scroll, this scroll didn't have any hand seals and directions, as the exercise didn't need any. Instead, the tree-walking scroll was a theoretical research piece on how leaf concentration and tree-walking practice worked. And after having embarrassed himself in front of Maruboshi upon skipping the text walls in the Henge no Jutsu(Transformation Jutsu) scroll, Takuma had spent time reading the scroll in an effort to learn the technique quickly and bag the mission points.

Takuma placed his hand, palm flat, on the wall and channeled chakra through his chakra pathway system and out of the hand's tenketsu(chakra points). He pushed his hand down slightly, and instead of sticking, the hand slid down. Even the slightest tug was enough to dislodge his hand when he used the amount of chakra he used to stick a stack of coins.

'Mass's going to be key here,' Takuma thought as he pressed one finger on the wall and applied a constant downward pull, dragging his finger down— until it suddenly stopped as Takuma felt a force adhering his finger to the wall.

The theory scroll was complex. Takuma disliked that it was clearly written by an academician for other academics in the classic research paper language that had trumped him back at college when he needed to do secondary research for assignments and projects. He wasn't that. He hadn't researched chakra; his knowledge was that of a layman. Every sentence and paragraph had taken him thrice over to understand. But he had gained something out of it.

While twenty or so people ran toward the wall, Takuma stood near the wall with his hand raised straight above. He jumped as high as he could and tried to slap his hand on the wall at the top of his leap and keep them on the wall as he inevitably slid down. When compared to others, he looked downright stupid.

Nenro was doing the exercise beside him and asked, "Takuma, what are you doing?"

Takuma shushed harshly and said, "Go away, don't bother me," without looking at his teammate.

Takuma jumped again and slapped his hand at the peak of his vertical reach. He slid down again—but a tiny bit slower than before. He jumped again, and this time his hand was blown away from the wall as he crashed his back on the floor.

"Are you alright?!" Nenro came to him again.

"Yeah, yeah! I'm alright, thanks!" Takuma got up.

"Do you want me to help?" asked Nenro. Where Nenro practiced, there was a white chalk palm print on the wall fifteen feet above the ground.

Takuma shook his head at his teammate. "Maybe, tomorrow. But not today, my friend, not today," he smiled before facing the wall again.

Due to the nature of chakra 'sticking' where only the correct amount allowed perfect adhesion, anything less would form a weak bond, and anything more would blow the person or object away— Takuma couldn't stand on the ground and adhere his hands to the wall and start scaling the wall like Spiderman. Even if he stuck his hand on a spot and then tried to dangle from it, the weight change would erase the adhesion, and he would fall. If he tried to compensate chakra for the weight before dangling, his hand would be blown away as, at that moment, the chakra was much more than required for just the hand to stick.

Chakra 'sticking' was different from glue in such a way. Something Takuma had learned from the scroll.

He could dynamically regulate chakra as mass(or force) changed— which was needed to actually tree-walk as with every step, a force was applied on the surface, requiring a change in chakra quantity to maintain the adhesion— but his proficiency was still away from that level.

So, he jumped, and after numerous tries of slowly sliding down or being blown away... Slap! Takuma slapped his hand on the wall while simultaneously releasing chakra through tenketsu.

And with one hand stuck on the wall... he dangled.

Takuma looked down and he could see his feet off the ground. "Holy shit, I did it," he muttered to himself. He looked around, and he could see the other genin staring at him. He waved to Masaaki, who waved back with his jaw slightly open.

They had yet to be able to stick a point on the wall. All of them were trying to run up the wall, taking the next step as soon as possible before the loose adhesion on the foot collapsed due to excessive force so they could plant the other foot on a higher point. That wasn't true tree-walking.

Takuma remembered. Yoshio had walked up the wall and then had stopped halfway through and remained there, even removing one foot to showboat. Staying on the spot on a vertical surface— that was true tree-walking.

Looking up at the height of the wall, Takuma could see a lot of distance for him to cover. He raised his free hand and tried to place it on a higher spot, but in doing so, he put force on his adhered hand so he could push his body upwards a little— force increased, and the applied chakra was suddenly not enough to maintain the adhesion. Takuma's hand came off the wall, and he slid down rapidly.

Slap! He hurriedly slapped his other hand on the wall and applied the same amount of chakra he had done for the correct adhesion, and it worked; his fall stopped, and he dangled with his other hand supporting his weight. Only, instead of gaining height as he had attempted, he lost several feet of it.

"Shit," he cursed. Takuma sighed. He was now in the same position as the others. They could run up but not stick. He could stick but not climb up.

But he wasn't worried because he had read the scroll. He needed to increase the chakra output dynamically as the force against the wall increased.

'Do it slowly,' he thought— it was like letting up the clutch, you did it smoothly. He strained his arm as he pulled himself up and placed the other arm higher up on the wall, and in one fell swoop, he outputted the chakra on the higher hand while letting the lower one go.

"Okay!" Takuma yelled out loud, hyped for the one step he had taken.

He immediately tried to climb higher and ended up messing up the chakra output and ended up slipping a couple feet before catching himself. This time, he cursed himself out loud.

Climbing using chakra was different from traditional climbing, as Takuma wasn't using his legs to secure leverage. He used his hands as absolute holds and then pulled himself up with them without using his legs to push himself up. From the ground, it looked like he was dragging himself up the straight wall. Doing it this way was tiring— his shoulders, elbows, and wrists felt exhausted and weak. If he wanted the chakra to act like sticky gloves, he would need a lot of practice in regulating his chakra according to the force shifts— for now, he had to do it this way.

When he looked down, he saw that he was several meters high. He had already scaled three out of four stories height. Takuma looked up, and even though the slow deliberate climb had his body hurting, he raised his other hand.

He was going to make it to the top.

———

Yoshio, on the other side of the wall, sat on an outdoor chair with a report in his hand. Even though he was training genin brats, he still had to do damn paperwork.

'They need to pay me more for this shit,' he grumbled as he filled what felt like the hundredth dotted line.

He hadn't gone checked how his group was doing on the other side of the wall. They weren't academy students anymore, and it wasn't his responsibility to baby them. They needed to work hard if they wanted to succeed. He would go observe them secretly just before the end of the session (which was whenever he wanted it to end) to see who all was slacking and punish them like the pathetic weasels they were. He didn't mind if they hadn't made substantial progress. As long as they put in the work, they would eventually get it— which was the important thing. Of course, if someone showed substantial progress that satisfied him, they could slack off. Results did matter, after all.

"Wooh!"

He heard a voice and craned his neck up to see a figure standing on top of the wall with his hands raised up. He narrowed his eyes to identify who it was and his eyes widened when he saw it was Takuma.

The weakest of his group... of the current of the batch. The only one to fail two graduation attempts. Some failed one of them, but none failed two— none had done it in a while. Which was why it had been such a conversation among the instructor.

He was waiting to see a lazy brat unfit to be a shinobi walk into the basic training, and he was ready to whip the kid into a functional bottom-of-the-barrel genin, the type who eventually became career genin— but the person who walked on contradicted most he had seen on the report. Yes, he was barely skilled in the basic bukijutsu, but other than that, he was decently competent in taijutsu and could perform the academy three well (how much chakra he was wasting was another topic). He was disciplined and seemed to gel with his team. If Yoshio had to point something out, Takuma seemed a bit too rigid and needed to talk more.

He was no way the best genin he had got, but at the same time, he wasn't the worst he had seen. And he could appreciate those who put in the work.

'Didn't expect him to get to the top first,' Yoshio thought— he assumed it would be one of the clan kids.

But then he saw Takuma starting to climb down.

'What the hell's he doing?'

Takuma climbed down on his hands instead of his feet as he explicitly instructed. Yoshio could tell that Takuma was using chakra but on his hands and not his feet. And what was supposed to be the harder part of the challenge— as walking down the wall meant that gravity was now working in favor, which made sticking to the wall much harder while rapidly came down as opposed to when running up where you could lean your body forward while rushing; without proper technique, their hold would weaken, and they would plummet down— had turned into Takuma climbing down flat against the wall, looking foolish.

The climb down was excruciatingly slow, showing the boy's inexperience with the technique. Takuma eventually made his way to the bottom without messing up.

"Wooh!" celebrated the brat, his arms limp by his side.

"And what is this celebration for?" Yoshio asked as he got up with the baton in hand. "Genin Takuma, you do remember I said that the challenge would only be considered successful when you scaled and climbed down the wall without using your hands."

Takuma straightened up, assuming proper. He looked forward in the distance, not meeting Yoshio's eyes. "Sir, I remember, sir!" he said loudly.

"Then what was that you just did?"

"Sir, as you said, chakra is notoriously difficult to gather near the feet. However, it's the easiest to gather chakra in hands. I used my hands to familiarize myself with the process so that I'd be able to progress faster when I switch to feet, sir!" said Takuma.

Yoshio couldn't find words for a moment. The logic made sense. Because people used their hands so much in their daily lives, it was instinctively easier to gather chakra in their hands, as opposed to legs, which, while people regularly used a lot, were the furthest from the heart where chakra was produced.

He decided to throw a hypothetical at Takuma. "Do you not fear embarrassment that everyone will learn the technique when you are still floundering with your strange hand climbing, left behind alone?"

Takuma didn't look fazed at all. "Sir, I intend to win the mission points, sir!" he said.

Yoshio scoffed as any respectable instructor would do. "You need all of your team to complete the challenge before any other team. As it stands, you're the furthest behind everyone, which places your team behind everyone else."

But he could appreciate the effort and sentiment.

He decided to not punish the brat for making zero official progress.

———

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Chapitre 37: CH_2.6 (037)

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———

"What are you doing today?"

Takuma raised his head from his feet to his three migrant teammates, who were looking at them with curious(or dubious) looks.

"Training for the tree-walking practice?" said Takuma, his tone twisting in the end. It was the second day after Yoshio adjusted their training regiment to add one and a half hours of tree-walking(which they did on a wall).

"It has 'practice' in the name, you know," Ai made air quotes. "It's the training exercise to improve our chakra control and walk on any surface... People don't train for a training exercise; that doesn't make sense."

Takuma raised a finger as he said, "Actually, that's not true. People who can't do a pushup can be taught to do the pushup motion against the flat wall, then at a slight angle, then on the floor with bent knees, basically making incremental progressions to the actual pushups. It works with a lot of exercises. I'm doing the same here."

"That's not the same! What you mentioned is raising the difficulty..."

Nenro noticed Ai fold her arm and step forward, her expression turning sharper. He intervened by placing his arm between Takuma and Ai. "What Ai is trying to say is if training for tree-climbing will involve some actual climbing?" Nenro asked.

"Huh? I climbed yesterday. Got to the top and down," Takuma had scuffed his hand badly by all the slipping and dragging his hands against the grainy concrete— nothing the shady guy couldn't fix, but still pretty painful after an hour and a half of dragging his hand against hard concrete.

"With legs, you dummy," said the usually cutesy girl of the group.

Nenro rubbed the top of Ai's head, squishing her neck down a bit. He said to Takuma, "You did something so different yesterday and somehow completed the challenge on your hands. It was startling. So when we saw you doing something else again, we got interested. Maybe it would help us complete the challenge quicker?"

"Teach us!" Masaaki's voice in the short distance rattled the other's ears.

Takuma shrugged. He had no qualms about telling them. They were his teammates, and if he wanted to win the mission points, he needed his team to be the first to complete the challenge.

"Okay, so listen, yesterday after training—"

"Wait, let me get Taro," Ai interrupted and ran off to get their last teammate. She returned with Taro in tow, who flailed his limbs frantically as he was dragged on the ground.

Masaaki threw his head back in laughter. Nenro sighed and shook his head. "You could've politely asked him to come with you," he said.

"I did."

"No, you didn't, you wild woman!" Taro raised his protest.

"I asked you once, but you started grumbling. I didn't want to waste time because I knew there would be no end to it. We only get ninety minutes of practice for this exercise. You left me no choice."

"No choice? No choiCE?! You—"

Takuma didn't need to listen more to decide he was siding with Ai. In the few weeks of working closely with Taro, and what he knew from the time before, Takuma knew there was no one more lazy than his ex-classmate. Taro was lazy incarnate. He didn't outright slack off and not complete the tasks assigned to him— only he tread the thin rope by merely doing the minimum amount to get by without pulling himself into trouble. And he was very good at it.

"Alright, both of you fight later," Takuma clapped his hand to get their attention to him. "I already told you about the sticky-hand climbing yesterday." The moment he returned from his successful climb, everyone crowded him about what he was doing. He had been polite and told the gist of his approach so as to not burn any bridges with the group because even though they were separated into teams, a lot of the time was spent together with the group. Afterward, he took his group aside to share some details.

No one had given the sticky-hand climbing approach a try, though, not even his teammates. He didn't blame them; he technically was with the least amount of progress.

"Today, I'm doing a simpler version of the tree-climbing practice," Takuma continued. "Like the pushup example," Ai furrowed her brows, "I'm doing what you guys are doing but on a less complicated surface, which is flat ground," he pointed down.

He had yet to climb the wall using the standard tree-walking style. Instead, after thinking about it for a day, he came up with another step to make progress more painless as possible.

"... By walking on the ground, you can take your time to apply the grip with chakra, eliminating the complexity that comes with a vertical surface," Taro, who was still on the ground, said while staring at Takuma's feet with his brows furrowed ever so slightly. "You don't have to worry about falling to the ground while you regulate the chakra between your soles as you take a step forward."

"Exactly!" Takuma pointed at Taro as that was precisely the crux of the simpler version. "I can do it slowly as gravity isn't hungry to pull me back down to the ground"— as the saying went, what goes up eventually comes down— "and I can take it as slow as I want while everyone else is trying to sprint up." He continued and pointed at his feet. "I'm trying to make every step stick to the ground without... this... happening!"

Takuma pushed the chakra to the sole of his front foot. The topsoil burst under his foot, and at the same time, he was thrown back onto the ground, unable to retain any semblance of balance.

He sat up with a groan. The feeling of being thrown back was annoying. "This exercise is perfect for getting a sense of how weight and force distributes between the two legs as you walk. If you can do it on the ground, you would have an infinitely easier time doing it on the steepest of walls."

"It makes sense," Taro nodded.

"Right?" Takuma smiled. "Start with both feet sticking to the ground, then release one foot and raise it up while adjusting chakra for the increased weight on the backfoot. Plant the forefoot on the ground, secure it with chakra, and only release the backfoot when you have affirmed the grip on the forefoot... and then repeat the process."

"Let's give this a try," said Ai. Nenro and Masaaki quickly agreed. All of them opted to do the 'ground-walking' without trying the hand climb like Takuma. Nenro even said that directly doing it with feet made more sense and involving hands seemed like an additional unnecessary step.

Takuma didn't agree, but he also didn't argue. Who was he to tell them how to do things? The hands exercise worked with him; who knows if it would work for everyone.

"Hey, where are you going?" Masaaki called when he noticed Taro walking away. Everyone looked to see Taro going back to his original spot.

"Back to the wall," Taro jutted his chin to the tall concrete structure.

"You're not doing Takuma's thing?"

"No, you guys go ahead; I'll stick to the normal method," Taro said.

"What the hell?" Masaaki frowned heavily, sounding upset and confused. "Didn't you say that Takuma made sense? Why're you not doing it then?"

Taro stopped and turned. He looked disinterested in the conversation with his lidded eyes and hands slipped into his pant pockets. "I did say it made sense, but never did I say it was correct...."

"Huh?"

"No one has tested Takuma's approach before. Hell, even he himself hasn't tested it before. He just came up with it after yesterday's session, who knows if it would work. The logic made sense, but a lot of things make sense on the surface, but not all of them actually work. I would rather try out an approach everyone knows works than try something whipped up by a rookie genin with less than a day's worth of thought."

Taro glanced at Takuma. "No offense, but given your past performance, we both know you aren't exactly reliable regarding this stuff."

"You! How can you say that?" Masaaki sounded upset but looked more confused. Even Nenro and Ai looked uncomfortable with the confrontation.

"Everyone, let's not fight," Nenro stepped forward, the mediator in any conflict in the team and group, "let's talk about it peacefully."

"He's right," Takuma suddenly said. The trio looked at him in surprise. "Everything Taro said is right. We don't know how well my progress on the ground would translate on the wall. Even if it does work, who can say it is worth it from a time standpoint. What if just grinding it out on the wall from start to finish is faster than my approach of gradually increasing difficulty."

It upset him. Taro's words about his reliability hit a place he didn't want to admit hurt. He might be on the same rank as every one of his peers in basic training, but his reputation remained the same. He was still Takuma, the genin who had failed two graduation attempts, the genin who despite being a graduate of the Konoha shinobi academy wasn't given a chance to test against a jonin, the same person who had lost all fights but one, the genin who had barely inched into genin rookie... he was still all of those things... none of them had disappeared.

Takuma clenched his fist until he was white knuckling and looked up at Taro. "Still, I will continue on with my approach," he said.

"You do you," Taro shrugged before walking away.

Takuma closed his eyes for a moment to calm his emotions down before opening them to look at his feet. He summoned the two energies in his body and melded them together to create chakra that flowed from his feet to the farthest part, the soles of his feet.

"Hey, Takuma..."

He looked up at Nenro and winced when the chakra that reached his feet didn't create a strong enough sticking grip and fizzled out.

"Yes," he sighed.

"... I think we're going through the normal route," Nenro said with pursed lips. His shining confident charm seemed to be dull in the moment as he matched eyes with Takuma.

Takuma nodded. Who was he to tell them how to do things.

Nenro walked away with Ai, who looked regretful as she followed her boyfriend. Masaaki looked conflicted as he looked between Takuma and Nenro and Ai; in the end, he walked after his academy friends with his head hung down as if he was guilty.

Takuma looked down at his feet and tried to mold chakra, but a hollowing feel stopped him. He knew what it was; he had felt it a lot in the past year. He was used to it. It shouldn't have bothered him. But who knew that after a few weeks in the company of a team with whom he spent most of his days, being all alone again would sting so much.

'Don't waste your time,' said a voice, 'remember you're trying to get stronger to survive— to thrive— you can't waste time worrying about others when you know how this world is and what's to come.'

He was right. Takuma had no time to waste. He had no special talents to rely upon or a clan to support him. He needed to do it on his own, and there was only one way to attain his goals— to work more than everyone else, and better than anyone else.

'—only you can guarantee your success—'

And thus, he molded his chakra.

———

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