During morning class that day, Takuya finally drew the second half of the half-seal.
The moment the chalk lines joined on the blackboard, the classroom fell strangely quiet. Even Kiyo did not speak right away. He stared at the complete hand seal as though a pastry someone had been hiding for days had finally been served.
After a while, he asked softly, "Can we learn the whole thing now?"
Takuya set down the chalk. "You can learn the full movement, but not the technique."
Kiyo let out half a sigh of relief, then swallowed it back. "So it's been served, but we're not allowed to eat it?"
Morita Yu said, "Your metaphors have been hungry lately."
"Because training makes me hungry."
Che looked at the complete seal on the blackboard. Beneath the desk, his fingers slowly came together, then relaxed. The missing second half really was close to what he had guessed: press down with the heel of the palm, draw in at the side of the wrist, and shift Fire Release chakra from dispersed heat into fine-line control. It was not the complete seal for the Great Fireball, but it resembled Fire Release's earliest thread, teaching one how to compress heat from a mass into a controllable direction.
He had guessed most of it right.
The discovery did not make him happy for long. Being right was tempting; it made people bolder about guessing next time. Che lowered his head, opened his workbook, and wrote three words in the corner: Don't get cocky.
After writing them, he felt they sounded too much like a teacher's scolding, so he added a tiny crying face beside them.
Kiyo leaned over and saw it. "What did you draw?"
"My learning status."
"It looks miserable."
"Realism."
Training with the complete seal did not