Kaida was getting to know the Dense Forest around Konohagakure a little too well. It had its share of beasts and dangers, though, making it a place that potential interlopers were unlikely to go, and therefore a place where Kaida felt safe to practice and train herself according to the scrolls stolen from her family, though never in the same place twice.

Each time she made the trek out into the forest, Kaida brought with her a backpack with an assortment of tools, ropes, and large canvas sheets. Finding a number of especially large trees, she set herself to work, setting up a sort of camp where she could have privacy and time. First were the canvas sheets: they needed to be hung up between the trees so that her activities couldn't be easily viewed by passers-by. Second, her escape routes. Kaida cut down a single thick branch and separated it into sections about the size of her torso. In the boughs of the trees nearby, she set up these wooden sections such that she could always see at least two of them from no matter where she stood in the enclosure. Charging them with her chakra, she prepared these items to swap with her in the event that she was attacked.

Third, food and water. Every day, she hunted for a different kind of small animal: a rabbit, pheasant or fish. It was a trick she had learned from one of the wandering ninja that her mother hired to train her. Each type of animal required different types of skills to hunt and would keep her eyes and ears sharp. A very necessary thing for any ninja. Today, the catch was a rabbit. She cleaned, prepared and cooked it herself, giving her something meaty to eat between training bouts.

The fourth was the training targets. She built simple dummies and targets from wood, sticks and the rope she'd packed with her, and set them up opposite her kitchen. Each dummy was set upon a simple swivel made from inserting a long, sanded-smooth peg into a similarly sanded-smooth hole on the dummy's base. This way, when she struck the dummy, it would swing about and attack her in return, forcing her to defend herself in pairing with every attack she made. The targets were three round pieces of wood with rings carved onto them to indicate different levels of accuracy, and several more were heavy clay plates she'd hung up from branches and connected to a complex design of ropes that, once untied, would sequentially drop each plate from its suspended position and swing toward a position she'd marked on the ground with a circle. The object was to stand inside that circle and destroy each plate before it could strike her.

Fifth and final, the training itself. She started with producing her scroll of scrolls, selected a seal from it, and released that seal, revealing a second scroll. This one, however, was not the storage variety. It contained the secrets of ninja art and combat handed down over dozens of generations in the Kongo clan. Rather than leaving her training up to chance, as she had done in the past, however, she knew exactly what she'd be working on today.

Kaida retrieved the weapon from her backpack. It looked simple. A leather and steel gauntlet that fit over her right hand, with a sturdy, three-inch-long metal spike that jutted outward from over its knuckles. She slipped it on and secured the straps, then flexed her hand and arm to ensure that she was wearing it correctly. Despite being called a gauntlet, the only important things about it were wrist stability and its properties as a weapon. The leather was stiff but provided almost nothing in the way of defense.

She started with meditation, limbering up, and a little jog out to the nearby stream and then back to her enclosure. Appropriately prepared now, she set herself in front of the wooden targets. She referred to the Kongo scrolls occasionally, but already knew the gist of this training. It started with accuracy.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk thunk. Thunk. Thunk...

* * *

She'd been at it for four days. Five salmon, two pheasants, three rabbits and all the berries she could stand. And then some. Seriously. If she never saw another raspberry again... her attention snapped back to the target in front of her. She'd replaced all of them a few times by now. A plate of wood could only take so many shots from a young woman like Kaida before it just fell apart.

Thunk. Bulls-eye. Thunk. Bulls-eye. Thunk. Bulls-eye. She smiled. She was improving. Fifty more punches and she decided accuracy training was over for now. Her whole arm and shoulder ached. Ached might not even be the word for it. Every little movement from her right arm, even a finger twitching, and the whole thing burned and spasmed. She knew this sensation well. Muscle fatigue. She had crossed into its territory and never stopped.

She rested, giving her arm time to recover. Two more days passed by.

Kaida returned to the wooden targets, threw another fifty punches, and recorded her accuracy results. Not one of them struck outside the first accuracy ring. Most of them were bulls-eyes. Even after her arm had healed, her precision remained on-point. Pass.

Next was speed and reaction training, what she knew would be the longest part of her training. Not because she felt she was lacking, but because she'd have to stop and set up the plates again, in different positions, after every run.

Her first run... could have gone better. Reflexes? Speed? She lacked both. It seemed her arm had been taught power and accuracy, but these new things were foreign concepts to it. On the bright side, if she kept going like this, the plates would last her twice as long as she had planned for. Ugh.

Three more days ground slowly by. Three rabbits, four fish, and some apples and pears. Her rope-tying skills improved first, and she even found a couple of corners to cut from her design that shaved precious minutes off every reset. Eventually, she ran out of plates. And thanked the gods when she did.

Dummies. They'd been sitting out in the woods for a week, protected from the elements by a canvas laid over the top of them. She pulled that canvas off now, and moved the dummies into positions around herself and tied a rope around the wooden pegs near their bases so that when one moved, so would all the others. She started off with a blow at one on her right.

* * *

Day ten. Two pheasants. Another rabbit. Apples and berries. All three dummies had been destroyed, rebuilt once, and destroyed again. There was nothing left to salvage here, and even her gauntlet needed repairs. She broke down her camp, packed up her backpack, and looked at the pile of broken plates sitting at the base of the tree. Ultimately, she shrugged, packed them up into a canvas sheet, and hauled them all over to the stream, where she unceremoniously dumped every last plate into the water. To an outsider, it might have seemed like littering, but Kaida knew the dirt along this stream too well by now. Hell, she wouldn't be surprised if this were the same shoreline the clay for these plates had come from in the first place.

Well, that was it. A ten-day camp in the woods, and little evidence that she had ever been here. She crossed off this location on her map and headed back into Konohagakure.

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