Weighted training

Ryuto emerged from the vines without looking back.

Ki flowed out of his body like water, spreading out and covering several hundred meters around him.

Rustling grass, birdsong, insect calls, and even that unpleasant hum of clashing chakra farther away all flooded his mind.

"Like running a monitoring app in the background," he muttered. His feet moved, and he shot more than ten meters ahead.

The forest paths were rough, but he no longer needed to watch where he was going.

His ki sense scouted ahead, showing every pit and steep slope clearly. All he had to do was follow that feeling and run.

He ran for most of the day, until the sun climbed overhead.

Ryuto stopped beneath a large tree, caught his breath, and pulled the cloth bundle Yamano Tarō had given him from inside his clothes.

He took a couple of bites of the rock-hard rations, then pulled out the tattered hide map.

The map looked like gibberish, its lines crooked and twisted. Some places were even marked "Bears, supposedly" or "Miasma, keep away."

"This navigation might as well not exist." Ryuto clicked his tongue, but still studied it carefully.

His current position was probably somewhere near the crooked valley symbol in the map's bottom-left corner.

The Uzumaki Clan's settlement, meanwhile, was in the top-right corner, across a vast blank area. It was marked only with the tiny word "Uzumaki," without even a definite outline.

"I'll be walking till kingdom come." Ryuto put the map away and leaned against the tree.

He closed his eyes, and scenes began playing through his mind.

Not from this life, but from his last.

Dragon Ball, Son Goku-how had those Saiyans leveled up?

Gravity chambers, hundreds of times normal gravity. One session was like having a layer of skin peeled off.

Weighted clothes, worn every day. Take them off in a fight, and your speed went through the roof.

"Right, that's the idea." Ryuto opened his eyes and patted his arm. "Basic fitness is always the foundation. No matter how powerful your ki is, it's useless if your body can't keep up."

But there was a problem.

This was the war-torn Shinobi World, not Capsule Corporation.

Where was he supposed to find a gravity chamber? Where could he find high-tech weighted clothes with adjustable weight?

"If technology won't cut it, ninjutsu can fill the gap." Ryuto recalled the ninja he had glimpsed on the battlefield a few days earlier.

The Senju Clan's Wood Release, the Uchiha Clan's Fire Release, and the Hyuga Clan's Byakugan, with its full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision and no blind spots...

Sealing Jutsu. The term flashed through his mind.

The Uzumaki Clan seemed to be experts in Sealing Jutsu.

Techniques that could seal objects inside scrolls, seal tailed beasts, and create all kinds of barriers... Making training weights with adjustable weight should theoretically be possible, right?

"The Uzumaki Clan it is." Ryuto made up his mind.

He stood and continued onward.

But simply walking wasted too much time.

"Let's try the low-tech approach first."

Ryuto looked around and found a rock the size of his head.

He crouched and pressed his hand against it. Pale golden ki flowed from his palm, wrapping around the rock like glue, and then he tried sticking it to his back.

The ki did hold it in place, but the rock was so heavy that his shoulders sagged under it.

"Not bad." Ryuto took a few steps.

Then, with a clatter, the rock slipped out of the unstable wrapping of ki, fell to the ground, and broke in two.

"...Poor quality." Ryuto looked at the broken rock and shook his head.

He tried a few more times, wrapping rocks in ki and fastening them to his legs and arms.

Either the rocks broke midway through, or his ki drained too quickly to sustain it for long.

After an hour of practice, he was drenched in sweat, with next to nothing to show for it.

"Sure enough, professional work calls for professionals." Ryuto kicked the broken rocks aside and abandoned the idea of DIY.

He spread his ki sense out again, keeping watch over his surroundings as he traveled.

That vigilance revealed quite a few things.

Scorched earth, as though huge fireballs had plowed through it.

Large trees severed in two, their cuts clean, as though something sharp had sliced them apart.

There were also kunai and shuriken scattered in the grass, some still stained with blood that had not fully dried.

Farther away, the earth in a patch of forest had been churned up as though giant earthworms had burrowed through it-probably traces of Earth Release ninjutsu.

Ryuto stopped and looked at it all.

Back in the valley, hearing the sounds, it had felt far away.

Seeing it with his own eyes now felt completely different.

"This isn't fighting. It's demolition." He crouched and picked up a bloodstained kunai.

The kunai was ordinary, forged from iron, but it felt heavy in his hand.

Ryuto could imagine that whoever had held it might have only just come of age, or not even reached adulthood, before dying in some unknown charge.

He tossed the kunai back into the grass.

"Gotta hurry." He stood and continued onward.

He expanded his ki sense a little farther, sweeping ahead like radar.

Not to avoid ninja-there were no chakra signatures from living people nearby for the moment.

It was to remember these traces.

To remember just how absurd this war was.

When the sun sank toward the west, Ryuto stopped again.

He climbed onto a higher rock and looked ahead.

The blank area on the map was, in reality, an endless stretch of forests and hills.

The Uzumaki Clan was somewhere within that region.

"I'll have to pick up the pace tomorrow." Ryuto jumped down from the rock and found a clearing sheltered from the wind, preparing to spend the night.

"If only I could use the Flight Technique..." Ryuto did know the training method, but unfortunately, his current ki was not strong enough to keep him airborne, let alone move him around.

He sat on the ground and closed his eyes.

Instead of withdrawing his ki sense, he deliberately maintained it, expanding it little by little as though exercising a muscle.

Five hundred meters, five hundred and twenty, five hundred and fifty...

His head felt a little swollen, but he did not stop.

He knew this was just like training for distance running. Push through, and his limit would rise.

Night deepened.

Ryuto opened his eyes, took the last piece of dry rations from the cloth bundle, and slowly finished it.

He looked in the direction of the Uzumaki Clan.

"Step one, get equipment."

"Step two, train like hell."

"Step three..." He paused. "We'll see."

He had to live that long first.