Chisen stood beside a folding table at the edge of the training ground.
Spread across the table were nautical charts, waveform diagrams, a stopwatch, an open notebook, and a bottle of water.
Instead of a white lab coat, he wore a dark gray training outfit today. A black athletic knee brace was strapped over the right leg of his trousers-a thin steel plate inside it supported his knee joint when he stood for too long.
He had switched to a lighter aluminum-alloy cane with a rubber tip, which made a more muted sound than usual against the hard-packed earth.
"For this first joint training session, precision isn't the goal." Chisen's voice was quiet, but the training ground was still, and the mixed woodland filtered out the sounds from outside. His words reached all three of them clearly. "The goal is for each of you to find your own rhythm at a frequency of 7.3 hertz.
"Guy will use his breathing to control the rhythm of his punches, Neji will use chakra pulses to control the frequency of his Vacuum Palm, and Tenten will use the rotation speed of her shuriken to control when the vibrations are triggered.
"Your individual rhythms will differ, but the frequency has to be consistent.
"It's like three musicians playing the same note on the same beat with different instruments-the instruments and sounds differ, but the vibration frequency has to match."
"How do we tell whether the frequencies match?" Tenten asked.
She held two kunai already fitted with God Tree fragments. The fragments had been ground into tiny diamond shapes and secured to the ends of the kunai handles with fine steel wire.
The number of wire coils had been precisely calculated: exactly twelve, equally spaced, to keep centrifugal force from flinging the fragments off when