章 269: Chapter 125
Anyone who has ever been on a mountaineering expedition knows how dangerous it is to traverse steep slopes in bad weather, even with reliable safety equipment. Climbing up sheer rock faces without safety gear in continuous rain and on wet, slippery stones is even more dangerous! Even if you're a shinobi who can literally stick to any surface.
After a few crashes against unseen protrusions following jumps, I had to seal Kuramaru, who clearly wasn't suited for such acrobatics despite all his training and chakra. How do shinobi even move through mountains? Mostly by running and jumping, actually. You hop across ledges where possible, run up nearly vertical or inclined surfaces, and leap frog-style to the next one. If desired, a jounin can reach speeds of up to a hundred kilometers per hour, which an ordinary person could never achieve.
The same goes for long jumps. Thirty meters? No problem! You crouch on a stable surface, channel more chakra into your legs, and push off strongly. That's it. You fly through the air like you're fired from a cannon, even nearly horizontally. The only problem is landing without smashing your face into a targeted rock. I strongly suspect that such scenes closely resemble comic books and superhero cartoons—when someone is thrown into a wall, and instead of becoming a smear, they land on their feet and shoot back at the enemy from a horizontal position. It's exactly like that. I'm almost certain that the stone after such launches develops a pretty decent network of cracks.
However, there's one minor drawback to all this movement—shinobi can't fly… Well, not ALL shinobi can fly, and unfortunately, the ability to fly is not one of our squad's strengths. Given that after just fifteen meters upward among the boulders, strong gusts of wind start to pick up, and a long jump might end up nowhere near where you intended, it's very easy to crash onto sharp rocks below. Being able to fly would be extremely useful.
I'm okay—I can extend an arm and release a chain with a pointed end from my Tenketsu if I notice I'm deviating, which digs into the rock and supports even my weight. However, I had to catch my teammates several times using the same method (of course, wrapping them up rather than hooking them) to prevent them from missing the intended spot. And the worst part is, there's nothing you can do—if you go down, you'll end up taking three to four times longer to get back up, and you can't jump from peak to peak because they are too far apart.
Sure, thirty-meter cliffs aren't enormous, but that's at least a fourteen-story building, so jumping at such a great height is quite scary. Not to mention the mental and physical strain. After three hours of this, I started feeling fatigued and was soaked like a dog, not to mention my teammates who didn't have the same physical strength and endurance.
However, just when I thought Rotaro might fall on his next jump, a gap appeared ahead. Through the curtain of drizzling rain and the dim light of the encroaching evening, we saw a mountain slope and the blurred outlines of cultivated fields at the edge of our vision. Activating his dojutsu, Hizashi confirmed that we had reached the opposite side and were almost in the inhabited lands of Tsuchi no Kuni.
— Finally, I thought those damned rocks would never end! — Tsume grumbled, breathing heavily.
Rotaro said nothing but nodded in agreement. Our commander, though looking better than this pair, was also breathing heavily and had depleted his chakra by a quarter, despite his refined control.
— Since in an hour this weather will make visibility zero, we're stopping to rest and will move on tomorrow morning, — said the jounin, looking at the sky and starting to scan the surroundings with Byakugan. — Ryo-san, there's a decent fissure nearby, but it's too narrow for the three of us. Can you widen it and seal the entrance?
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