Flying Swords (Open)

The errands for the day completed, Savarin found himself standing behind a crowd of younger children eagerly watching the stage.  A wandering minstrel of a shinobi was putting on a puppet performance of “The Foundling King.”  Savarin knew the tale by heart, and he was at least self-aware enough to know why it was one of his favorites.  The genin watched the elaborate, human sized puppet representing the orphan Hitori make his way through his rough childhood, having only his wits to protect him.  He laughed with the other children as a teenage Hitori won the heart of the disguised princess Issha in a scene full of lighthearted jokes.  It was easy to ignore the threads of chakra and forget that the intricate clockwork mechanisms were puppets and not human actors.  The crowd grew substantially during the play, including a large collection of adults, more likely to watch the elaborate puppetry than the play for kids. They laughed at parts that didn’t make sense to Savarin, though.  Nonetheless, the large crowd still gasped as a spray of red ribbons burst from Hitori’s shoulder when stabbed by the evil princling, and they held their breath as he clung to life.  They cheered when he struck the fatal blow in a duel with the same princling for the right of marriage, the red ribbons symbolizing victory for the hero tgsu tune.  And the square erupted in applause as the curtain fell on King Hitori and Queen Issha, looking into a cradle.

The puppets came out and took their bows to cheering and whoops from the children, along with polite applause from the adults.  The puppets parted and a shinobi clad all in black came into the middle, and took a bow with the puppet cast.  The children still cheered, but it was clear this is who the adults were giving their applause to.  Savarin watched as most of the crowd dispersed, several adults went up to talk to the shinobi, who appeared to have no issues conversing with them, even as his fingers still twitched with chakra threads, allowing the puppets to play and dance with the children.  It was an impressive display, to be sure; and Savarin wondered what the minstrel shinobi was trying to accomplish.  He hadn’t paid for this show, nor had anyone else that he’d seen; perhaps the play was secondary, and the true purpose was a demonstration of skill for some reason.  Mayhaps the puppeteer was more mercenary than minstrel.

Either way, puppetry was an interesting art; and he had learned a bit about it’s efficacy in the academy.  On the way back to his camp on the outskirts, Savarin stopped by a shop that sold some simple shinobi puppets.  They were customizable, with whatever weapons the user might want.  They were also incredibly expensive, at least for someone like him.  Even a simple puppet was more ryo than Savarin had ever had at one time.  His shinobi headband offered him a bit of protection from what he was sure would have been a disapproving look from the shopkeeper at his relatively shabby clothes; but Savarin still knew this shop was not the place for him.

First, was basic weapon drills.  He drew his mismatched blades, a straight sword the shopkeeper had called a jian, and a wakizashi.  Savarin had gotten both of these at a significant discount.  The jian had sat on the shelf for months, and the shopkeep had given it to him at a fraction of the price after Savarin spent a few weeks helping around the shop.  The wakizashi was part of a matched pair with a katana; the katana had apparently broken in a fight, and the original owner sold it off when he commissioned a new pair of blades.  No matter the reason, these were the blades that he had been able to afford, so these are what he trained with.

Controlled slashes cleaved wooden arms on a few of the dummies as he practiced his forms.  The blades became extensions of his limbs as the sound of the geysers rumbled in the distance.  He worked up a light sweat, a sword in each hand as he moved gracefully through the target dummies.  After about a half hour of this, he reshathed the mismatched blades in their mismatched scabbards on his waist and drew a pair of kunai.  He had set up a larger log for this, though it was still far thinner than the targets in the academy.  That still served him just fine.  He hurled kunai and shuriken at the target as he sprinted around, a satisfying thunk indicating he had hit his target each time.  He pulled his ranged weapons out then did it again.  And again.  For another half hour he did throwing drills, until by the end of it the various faces of the log were practically wood pulp. Even though the shuriken and kunai were supplied to him by the village, Savarin was not a wasteful person, and collected and packed up the weaponry before taking a water break.

He attached the translucent elastic to a few shuriken and practiced weaving the thrown weapons through the target dummies to a specific one in the back.  Using one was not a problem, even two he had no issues controlling with fairly high accuracy.  Three was starting to get difficult, but doable.  Four was where it became very difficult, so that was where he spent the next hour of daylight.  Using the manipulated shuriken technique to try and direct four shuriken through the dummies to strike the final one from multiple directions.  It was difficult, it felt more like he was fighting the stretchy elastic of the strings, rather than the target, when there were that many shuriken attached.  By the end of it, he had managed to get three of the shuriken to lodge themselves in the final dummy, but the fourth missed it by a few inches.  

On the bright side, he had avoided any unintended dummy casualties, which was more than he could say for the previous attempts with four shuriken.  He’d need to keep practicing that before he attempted four shuriken with any friendlies around.  Either way, he had devoted enough time this evening to that effort, and he pulled out his pair of wire strings.  Putting a steady stream of chakra, Savarin once again moved through the target dummies; slashing with the pair of wires as they whipped about according to his chakra.  These were easier to control, responding only to his will rather than the stretchy elastic of the shuriken.  It required a constant supply of chakra, but it was not particularly draining on him. His mind wandered about fifteen minutes into using the Wire String Manipulation Technique, when he was starting to feel the effects of the constant chakra drain, and he thought back to the puppet show.

With about an hour to sundown, Savarin allowed chakra to continue flowing into the wires as he wrapped them around the hilts of his mismatched blades.  He drew them both and laughed softly to himself, how had he not thought of this before?  Using the wire strings, he began slashing the blades at the target dummies, and it was easy.  Not easier than using them by hand, exactly; there was still the constant drain on his chakra and his body from controlling the wires, but he didn’t feel the mismatched balance he had trained to ignore from the two completely different blades.  While it extended his reach, it didn’t extend it substantially, the wires themselves were generally used as the weapon, not to hold other weapons.  Nonetheless, this was still novel and potentially useful.  Savarin walked slowly forwards through the substantially beat up target dummies, hands and arms outstretched as his chakra-controlled wires moved the weapons in the forms he had done earlier.