NOVEL WEB Chapter 4: Chapter 4
I wake up the next day feeling well rested. I grab my Pokéball and head to the kitchen to eat breakfast. After my morning routine I head off to school. This time for class I brought Fūinjutsu scrolls on jutsu storage and release. My next goal is to learn how to store and release jutsu to bring more move types and power to my puppets. Class continues as I study and learn. All these classes are boring just will of fire crap and all. No point in paying attention I need to get stronger. As I'm reading each word I am spelling them out with chakra threads every ten words one for each finger. It is great practice and helps me memorize it better.
Soon class ends and I meet up with Kiba and Akimaru.
"Hey you two ready for our sparing today?" I ask them both.
"Arf Arf!" barked Akimaru
"Yeah man me and Akimaru have been training hard. You better be prepared" said Kiba.
"Awesome! Alright let's head to a free training ground then" I say in excitement.
We run off to a training ground close by. Once we get there we both stand apart from each other, Akimaru hop's off of Kiba's head. I release Gible from his Pokéball and attaching 6 strings to him. We both do the seal of confrontation as our spar starts.
"Let's go Akimaru" says Kiba as him and Akimaru come running at me and Gible.
"Not so fast!" I say as I control Gible to run on all fours and swipe its tail at Akimaru, causing him to have to jump back and dodge. After slowing down Akimaru, I turn Gible quickly and activate his spring loaded legs Launching himself at Kiba in a speeding head butt. Kiba puts up his arms blocking Gible's head butt with a grunt while sliding back a few feet. I land Gible on the ground using the recoil force with the landing to re in-gauge the spring mechanism in its legs. Then I instantly turn Gible to launch at Akimaru this time with its mouth open to bite him and hopefully hold Akimaru in place. Akimaru jumps up over Gible's head and kicks the puppet down as Akimaru turns and bites Gible's back leg as I struggle to free Gible my six strings drop to five without me realizing that my one string attached to Gible's body connects itself to his head and mouth and tail. Instinctively my finger twitches and Gible's stubby tail smacks Akimaru's head just hard enough to get him to release. Though as soon as that happens I finally realize that Kiba is on me, throwing a punch at my face. I stumble back barely avoiding the punch. But his follow up kick hits me clean on the side launching me to the ground I go to stand up but struggle trying to regain my breath as Kiba comes up.
"Surrender I got you" said Kiba breathing heavy
"Alright alright" I grunt out in pain struggling for breath.
We both stand upright and give the Seal of reconciliation. Thus ending my first spar with Kiba and Akimaru.
"That was a good fight man you really had me and Akimaru on the ropes at the start. Tho controlling Gible seems to take a lot of your focus leaving you pretty vulnerable to attack" Kiba said.
"Yeah you are very right I know it gets easier to multitask once I'm better at puppet control. It becomes like second nature, but it's still a well known flaw of puppeteers that we are weaker in close combat." I said contemplating my weaknesses and how to counteract them.
"You should definitely learn some form of taijutsu for sure, at least so if someone gets to you at least you have the ability to defend and get your puppet back too you so you can put distance back between your self and the opponent" Kiba said.
"Yeah I'll have a talk with my mom about it and how she deals with the issue." I said.
We soon spar a few more times after some rest, at the end we both are breathing heavy laying next to each other on the grass.
"You may not be very good at taijutsu, like at all, but you sure as hell have a lot of stamina that's for sure." Kiba said.
"Ha, thanks I guess feels like more of an insult than a compliment" I say as I roll my eyes.
"You wanna go get something to eat? My treat." I say as I sit up my stomach rumbling.
"Heck yeah man, I'm starving!" Kiba says as he jumps up.
"Alright let's head to Yakiniku Q for some barbecue. I need to eat some good meat to replenish my energy!" I say patting my stomach with a sigh.
We both get up pat the dirt off our clothes and start heading to Yakiniku Q. We get a table and sit at a booth we order 3 orders of barbecue beef and basically inhale our food. As we are getting ready to leave I pay the bill spending most of my allowance for this week on just this meal. We see Hinata, Hanabi, and Hiashi eating at a booth we are passing by. I decided to stop to say hi.
"Hello, Hinata it's good to see you. Hello, little miss Hyuga, Lord Hyuga" I say to them as I then bow to her father. "I'll see you tomorrow at school" I say as me and Kiba walk out of the restaurant.
I wonder what it is like to be able to see with the Byakugan. Soon I me and Kiba split paths as he heads home and I decide to head to the sealing scroll shop. Soon I find the shop and head inside.
"Good afternoon little boy what brings you to my store today?" Asks the store owner.
"Hello sir, I was wondering if you have any Jutsu sealing scrolls one for each element?"
I asked the owner.
"Sure kid but that won't come cheap that's 5 sealing scrolls, you got enough to buy all these? It's 100,000 ryo per scroll" He asked.
"Dang I only have enough saved up right now to buy one scroll. Ok sir I'll buy the earth jutsu sealing scroll for right now" I said handing him my entire savings For this scroll.
Maybe I can ask my parents later if they could get me the other ones later but first I'll start by studying this scroll. I don't want to keep burdening them with all these requests. I take my new scroll to study and head on home. I arrive home and find no one home. Oh mom must have gone out for groceries or something. Dad is of course out on mission again. The daily grind of a Jonin I assume. I walk to my room to find all the materials to start building Bastiodon.
I start going through the materials and sorting them. I decided I'll make the metal joints first as that would probably be the most chakra intensive being a harder material. I activated the carving jutsu and got to work making the neck joint and the leg joints. As well as segmented tail joints for the extendable tail. Soon finish up as I set those aside. Mm I still have time and a decent amount of chakra as well. I'll start with building the shield head. Soon I rough out the outer shape of the head and start carving out the four archway shapes on the top of the head. I carve them deep making room as I plan to add kunai launchers into them in the final phase of finishing my defense puppet. Next I carve the nose portion and carve out the eyes. Once done with that I work my way down building a moveable mouth with the underbite teeth.
Soon I hear mom come back home. I wrap up my work and head into the living room to find her but ending up hearing her in the kitchen.
"Hey mom! Can I ask you a few puppet related questions I have?" I ask.
"Sure what questions do you have?" mom said while preparing dinner.
"So today after school me and Kiba did some sparing practice so I can get some experience using my puppet in a fight as well as Kiba can train his skills too. Well I found out pretty quickly that if my puppet fails or if he got past it I was pretty screwed due to my focus on my puppet and my lack of taijutsu skills. Is there any way around that?" I asked.
"Mmm yeah this is a common weakness of a puppeteer. Well you have some options to combat that weakness for sure one is you can practice taijutsu and fix that weakness so you are able to defend yourself long enough to get your puppets back to fighting. Or you can come up with a strategy or device to get you out of the situation when it happens. With that option tho the more you use it the easier it is for your enemies to find ways around it so you will have to keep improving or changing it. I would recommend doing both." Mom explained.
"Hmm ok I can think on that later on the strategies. Can you teach me taijutsu then?" I ask mom.
"No I wouldn't be the best teacher for you as it's not my strong suit as well. Luckily for you your father is a strong taijutsu user so when he is back from his mission you can ask him to teach you. He is due for some leave soon as well." Mom said.
"Oh sweet thanks mom. I will definitely ask him when he gets back." I said.
After dinner with mom I head back to my room and pull out the earth jutsu sealing scroll to study its properties, how it functions and the seals required to make it.
After an hour or so of studying it I was starting to feel sleepy. So, I headed to bed I took out my Gible puppet to start the Chakra infusion like most nights. As soon as I am almost ready from chakra exhaustion I end it there. I lay down and fall asleep thinking about future plans for Gible and Bastiodon.