Doton. Earth release. Dirt and rocks. And metals. That last part was the most important one to Kaida. Without doton, her koton would never improve, and she desperately needed to improve. Being realistic about it, her family probably wouldn't come after the stolen scrolls. It was the sword strapped to her back that put her in danger. She wondered if she ought to entrust it to someone more capable than herself, but her thoughts just went back to what the Horikita did with weapons like this.

Ugh. Konoha was no home for her. Sure, it was a nice visit here, but she was ready to go home. Ha. Home. She cast her eyes downward and had a moment of silence.

Kaida was fourteen again. Not long ago, while training at home, she had gotten confused in the middle of a routine. She'd tried to use a katon technique and a doton technique at the same time. What happened was... different. A sheath of metal surged out of her arm and blocked an attack that could have injured her for days, even with medical ninjutsu assistance.

Nanashi, that name that she called the nameless man who had taken her from the Horikita family home, had disappeared then. For three weeks. When he came back, he had new injuries and new information. He had gone on her behalf. Learned about her clan and their bloodline abilities. The Horikita had never told her about it, since the trait had long since gone dormant... and only belonged to the Kongo clan, which meant that somewhere along the line, there was a mixing of bloodlines in her heritage. Those were not supposed to happen.

Anyhow, Nanashi instructed her in the nature of Kekkai Genkai and hers. It was what he called a throwback. Something in her exact genetics had allowed this dormant trait to come forth, and something koton, or steel release, was the result. They trained that ability together for the next two years.

What they discovered is that her koton relied jointly on her katon and doton. Without the right balance of those two natures, koton could not be created. Which meant that in the present, Kaida stood in a cavern in the Dense Forest outside Konohagakure. She had hung a canvas sheet over the passage that led outside and brought an electric lantern with her to set up for light.

The cavern wasn't exactly large, but Kaida couldn't have rightly called it a cave, either. There was enough room for her to work and see in. Today's training called for chakra control and the identification of a nature. She sat on the ground, in the lotus position, and gently pushed her chakra into the earth around her, reinforcing the structure of the walls themselves.

Remembering the last time she'd been out in the forest, she'd brought some rations and jerky to eat this time. And so, with both food and relative safety off her checklist, she moved on to the training at hand. She tapped her hand on the ground, and an earthen pillar rose up from the ground in front of her. The kunoichi shifted her focus, and at first, nothing happened. Then, the ground caught up with her instructions. The outer half of the pillar slid away into the ground, rumbling as it moved. Next, she raised the inner half of the outer ring halfway to the height of the inner circle. For several minutes, this process continued, slowly becoming more complex and more precise, until Kaida was sweating and panting with exertion.

She left the pillar of rings in a jumbled state, took a few hours to eat and sleep, and started the process over again. Slowly but surely, her control over the finer movements of the earth improved, and she graduated herself to sorting the earthen column into different orders of its constituent particle sizes. Rocks, pebbles, sand, dirt. Dirt, sand, pebbles, rocks. She stacked them in a variety of different arrangements for hours on end, utilizing a minimal amount of chakra to effect a precision amount of change. Or at least, that was her aim. Her practical skills weren't quite up to her theorycrafting just yet. At the rate she was going, she felt she could have hopes to have this down in a matter of weeks.

Poor forward planning had foiled her again, however, but she was learning. Ultimately, she had to take down the canvas sheet that was keeping the daylight out. Her electric lantern had finally bit the dust. Her use of it considered, it had probably lasted quite a while.

Days went by. Every day, her training regimen was the same. Wake up, eat a breakfast of woodland creature and berries or fruit, tire herself out on precision chakra tasks, sleep for a while, and then return to work for the other half of the day. On a particular day or two, she overexerted herself and met with the natural consequences, but in her cave, she felt reasonably safe.

Until, of course, she wasn't.

It was her sixth day out in the cavern when she awoke to unfamiliar sounds. Her eyes opened just as they poured into her earthen hollow: wolves. Massive and black, easily three feet tall at the shoulders, with beady yellow eyes and matted, bloody fur. These wolves were a specialty of the Dense Forest: a land of perpetual summer and rich natural chakra that made the flora and fauna within it burst with life, producing many variants on "normal" animals of significant size and aggressive temperate. An entire pack of them was ushering itself into Kaida's suddenly no-longer-safe space. The largest wolf spotted her and growled, causing hackles to raise and a low, rumbling chorus to resonate off the cavern's earthen walls.

Kaida glanced between her jumbled earthen practice pillar and the pack's alpha. A sheen of sweat glistened on her forehead-- she had been training herself for the last hour when the wolves arrived. Her chakra reserves were low, but not dangerously so. She stood slowly, making no sudden movements. As she reached a nearly standing position, the animals lunged in one great wave.

Waves of heat poured out from Kaida as she generated the doton ores within her body and pushed evenly-heated katon through them. A sheath of liquid steel slid out of her skin and covered her body just as the alpha's jaw closed around her midsection. Its teeth clamped onto steel, she heard a terrible crack, and the alpha wolf withdrew from her with a high-pitched howl of pain. Three more wolves made the same attempt before she managed to run onto the wall and ceiling of the cavern, and made her way out of what was now a death trap.

These wolves were aggressive, territorial and persistent. Kaida ran as fast as her legs would carry her, over root and under bough, and then straight up the largest tree she could find. More than forty feet up in the air now, she chanced a glance down toward the ground. Thirteen massive wolves prowled around the bottom of her tree. She leaped from this tree to the next, and on to several more, but the wolves followed her every time. Eventually, she had to accept these opponents.

She sat in a tree with particularly high lower boughs, keeping herself far enough up that even the most ambitious wolf couldn't leap to catch her. Now it was an endurance game. She harnessed herself to the tree such that she wouldn't fall out, even in her most agitated sleep, and turned her recent training to more practical ends. Hours went by slowly, wolves prowled nigh endlessly, but eventually one or two of them had to sleep. And they would have, but every time a wolf settled itself down to slumber, Kaida shot chakra through the tree and into the ground, upsetting the earth beneath her and creating shelves where there would otherwise be beds.

She slept. They slept. She woke screaming. They howled at the moon. She disturbed their sleep in return, and at long last, the pangs of hunger and thoughts of better prospects got the better of her would-be hunters. At dawn on the third day, the wolves moved on. She waited another hour before coming down from the tree, legs eager to stretch out and limber up for real movement again.

Kaida decided she'd had enough with training in Konohagakure's Dense Forest. At long last, it was time to go home.

1,439 WC (Have Prodigy: 10% WC training discount)