Sword and Shield [Chapter 5: A Testing of Strength]
Pairing: Eventual Sasuke/Kurapika
Rating: 18+ overall; this chapter E for Everyone.
Warnings For This Chapter: None that I caught at this hour.
The next day, Kabuto gave Kurapika a clean bill of health, and he was allowed to go to the training field. Sasuke was already there, throwing shuriken at a target twenty metres away, at speeds that Kurapika couldn't even start follow with his eyes.
"Is everyone from your world that fast?" Kurapika asked once Sasuke ran out of shuriken and had to stop to collect them again.
Sasuke scoffed. "Of course not. Is everyone from your world as strong as you are?"
Kurapika shook his head. "No. . . but there are still plenty who are stronger."
Sasuke nearly dropped the shuriken he was picking up. "You. . . just mean overall strength, right? Not physical?"
Kurapika shook his head. "No. My eyes and the fact I've done weight training give me a bit of an edge, but it's still nothing compared to what can be accomplished by someone born under Reinforcement."
Sasuke grit his teeth at that. He still didn't understand the jargon Kurapika was using, but the meaning was clear enough: He had even further to catch up than he'd previously thought. He continued gathering up his shuriken in silence.
"Will anyone mind if some of these training posts get damaged?" Kurapika asked suddenly.
Sasuke looked up. "No, I break them all the time. Why?" He was absolutely certain that the posts were not sturdy enough to hold up to even a single kick from Kurapika.
Kurapika didn't answer. He was instead standing very still, facing a training post with his eyes closed. Sasuke surreptitiously activated his Sharingan to get a better look, and his suspicion that Kurapika was doing something with only his aura was confirmed. The very air suddenly began to hum, and - going by the surprised squawks from some genin training on the other end of the field - Kurapika's aura had just become visible to normal eyes. Then it suddenly flared out in all directions, flattening the grass around his feet and sending a small spray of dust into the air, before dying back down. The humming stopped, and his aura fell out of the normally-visible spectrum again.
Sasuke finished gathering his shuriken, and watched as Kurapika's nen flowed towards his right hand and began to compress itself into something solid and dense, creating metal from only aura and will. Now that he really had a good look at it, Sasuke noticed that, even aside from the chains, nen seemed a lot more dense overall than chakra was. Perhaps it was that quality that let it block physical blows so easily?
He also noticed that it seemed like everything Kurapika was doing with nen happened externally. There was a strange, looping mass of nen in the area of his heart - a Byakugan would have been able to give more detail there - but it seemed to be static, and it certainly wasn't producing anything; nen production didn't look like it was centralised at all, but that was all he could really tell.
There was a slight rattle of chains before, swift enough that Sasuke was surprised, the chain with the round weight shot forward and began snaking its way around the training post until there were five evenly-spaced points it was doubled up around. Then, without Kurapika moving, the chain suddenly began to constrict. The wood compressed at the doubled points, then splintered, and then simply began to crumble as it was pulverised. The chain worked with great and precise enough force that, as it retreated, its work done, the sections of wood that had been between the doubled points clattered to the ground intact.
Kurapika smiled a little. He wasn't impressed by his own work, but he was satisfied by it, and relieved. He didn't proceed to do the same to any other posts, however.
"What was the purpose of that exercise?" Sasuke asked.
"Just making sure that everything's still in working order," Kurapika said quietly, flexing the fingers on his chain-covered hand. "The man who taught me nen said that, since the long-term effects overusing the Scarlet Eyes are entirely undocumented, I always need to check myself for damage after recovering from a burn-out like that, especially if it knocks me out for more than a few hours." He didn't want to admit it, but he'd never been out of it for quite as long as he'd just had from overusing his eyes, and this was very concerning to him.
Sasuke looked surprised. "Your clan didn't teach you about that? It seems like an important detail to leave out."
Kurapika shook his head, seeming to find the grass incredibly interesting. "Much of our oral tradition was passed down mother to daughter or father to son, but. . ." he trailed off, and glanced up long enough to give Sasuke a meaningful look.
"What did they teach you, then?" Sasuke asked. It was probably a rude question, but politeness had never been his strong point.
Kurapika shifted uncomfortably. "How to make traditional clothes and shoes, how to cover your tracks when moving through the forest, what kinds of plants and insects are safe to eat, things like that."
"So. . . nothing about how to fight," Sasuke concluded. It wasn't entirely unheard of for a clan to not train its women for battle. It was more common eighty years ago, before the practise of multiple clans coming together to form a single, larger village had come into popularity. Back in those times, there was more danger of large portions of a single clan dying all at once, so it was a viable method of assuring that a bloodline survived. "You obviously know how to defend yourself, though. Where did you learn it?"
"Does it really matter?" Kurapika asked.
"No, I was just wondering." In reality, Sasuke wanted to know what kind of training Kurapika had on the off chance he could gain an edge by doing the same thing. The fact that Kurapika didn't want to share was incredibly irritating.
"That's not what your eyes say," Kurapika told him. "What is it you really want to know?"
Sasuke was deeply unsettled by how easily Kurapika could read him. He suspected it was part of Kurapika's special abilities to distinguish truth from falsehoods, but even so, he hated the idea that he was so transparent. ". . . I want to learn nen."
That gave Kurapika pause. "I. . . really have no idea if something like that's possible. I mean, you already have chakra, don't you?"
"We won't know if it's possible unless we try," Sasuke said. He wasn't willing to give up on this so easily.
"True. . . ." Kurapika considered it for a long moment. "If it is possible to use both, I'd like to learn what I can of chakra, too."
"Deal."
Kurapika glanced nervously over at the genin on the other end of the field. "Can we relocate to somewhere a bit more private?"
"Sure." Sasuke wasn't sure why Kurapika felt the need to be so secretive, but he wasn't about to argue about it. He led the way to a meeting room that was quite dusty from disuse. "This good enough?"
Kurapika nodded, and pulled up a chair at the main table. He started drawing a hexagon in the dust with one finger. "There are six different kinds of nen. . . ."
As he listened to Kurapika's long and comprehensive explanation in patient silence, Sasuke was already starting to see that nen, while powerful, was extremely limited. The rules for it were much more complicated than for chakra, and power was more-or-less inversely proportional to versatility. At the same time, however, it was fuelled by the user's emotions and resolve, rather than being a simple mixture of physical and spiritual energy like chakra was. Surely his hate, his pain, would be enough.
"Any questions?" Kurapika finally asked.
There was a detail that was bothering Sasuke. "You're a Materialization user, right?"
Kurapika nodded.
"Then how were you able to heal me like that? That sort of thing would require a combination of Emission and Reinforcement."
"The true power if the Scarlet Eyes is a Specialization ability called Emperor Time, which lets me use all six types of nen to their full potential," Kurapika said. "However, the full potential of a given type is still restricted by the fact I was born under Materialization. I'll still only ever be forty percent as good at Emission as I am at Materialization, and I'll still be hurt if I'm hit by a master of reinforcement nen using more than sixty percent of their power."
"And because you'd never healed someone else before, you weren't able to gauge how much energy it would cost you," Sasuke said.
"Yes." Kurapika looked away. "I'm sorry for having caused you so much trouble like that."
"Any trouble you might have caused me has been more than made up for," Sasuke said, smirking a little. "You have no idea how satisfying it was to see Kabuto's face the first time you shoved him across the room." He noticed that Kurapika looked a little nervous at the mention of that. "Wait, you're not scared of Kabuto, are you?"
"Whenever he looks at me I feel like I'm in danger of being dissected."
"Oh, that. You get used to that after a while."
Kurapika gave Sasuke an unamused look. "That's easy enough for you to say. You aren't expendable to them. As soon as they get their hands on an encyclopedia or a computer with an internet connection, I'm obsolete. If I'm lucky, they'll look up the Scarlet Eyes before they get rid of me, and, if I'm extremely lucky, I'll be sold to someone instead of killed."
"I'm not going to let them 'get rid of you'," Sasuke said, frowning. "My word has weight around here. I can protect you from Kabuto."
Immediately, it became apparent that he'd said something wrong. Kurapika's shoulders had tensed at the word "protect", and did not seem like they were going to relax again soon. "And what would you have me give you in exchange for your. . . 'protection'?"
"What makes you think I'd make you give me something for it?" Sasuke asked, brow furrowing very slightly. "I already told you I wouldn't let Orochimaru throw you to the wolves. That includes wolves with money, and it includes wolves who are named Kabuto." He stood up, pushing his seat back. "I'll be right back."
"Where are you going?" Kurapika asked, still uneasy.
Sasuke stopped in the doorway, and smiled a little. "To get a cup of water and some leaves."
It wasn't long after Sasuke returned that it became clear to Kurapika that this wasn't going to work. Sasuke's chakra was having absolutely no effect on the water or the leaf.
Sasuke, however, was not ready to give up. He tried to channel more of his anger, more of his hatred, and more of his pain into his effort. . . and that was about the point where the table caught fire. "Dammit!"
"I think it's fairly safe to say that nen and chakra are incompatible," Kurapika said gently as Sasuke jumped back and doused the flames with the water from the cup.
"I'm not ready to give up quite yet," Sasuke said. "Even if nen itself doesn't exist within me, it still might be possible to achieve something similar with chakra."
"Could you explain to me how chakra works?" Kurapika asked. "I don't really understand it very well."
Sasuke sighed, and started mopping up the mess with one of the rags he'd brought on the off chance that he turned out to be a Reinforcement type. "Yeah. We should probably go back to the training field for that one, though." He paused. "By the way, you showed me what happens when you do the test normally, but what happens if you do it when you have Emperor Time activated?"
Kurapika looked queasy at the thought. "I've only tried it once, but. . . the cup I used exploded because it couldn't displace three gallons of human blood fast enough."
Sasuke didn't have a good response to that one, except to be glad that Kurapika was on his side. The notion that Kurapika might ultimately decide not to team up with him didn't even cross his mind.
By the time they'd gotten back to the training field, Sasuke had already explained the basics of chakra theory, so Kurapika was about ready to put it to practice. Sasuke demonstrated the standard clone technique - something that was both very basic and somewhat similar in principle to Materialization nen - being sure to perform the hand seals very slowly. He noticed that, when Kurapika watched him, most of his aura was focused into his eyes. So, that was gyou, then.
"Now, these aren't actually solid," Sasuke explained, "but they take a lot less chakra to make. There's another kind that makes solid clones, but it's very taxing unless you have an unusually large pool of chakra to draw from."
Kurapika first practised on getting the hand seals right before he actually tried to perform the jutsu. He was disappointed, but not surprised, when his first attempt ended in complete failure for anything to occur. "How close was I?"
"You're doing the hand seals right, but the way your aura is flowing is all wrong," Sasuke said. "Your nen doesn't do anything while it's still in your body, so everything that should be happening internally either happens externally or doesn't happen at all."
"Are there any ninjutsu that don't require internal manipulation of chakra?" Kurapika asked.
"Not really. Even without the hand seals, they're all based on the same core principles."
Kurapika sighed in defeat. "If results like that could be accomplished by nen so simply, it would have already been figured out, huh?"
Sasuke nodded, just as disappointed as Kurapika was. "Likewise, if chakra could be used to get the same results as nen. . . they wouldn't bother teaching normal taijutsu anymore, for starters."
". . . I decided I'd like to take you up on that offer," Kurapika said eventually.
Sasuke smiled. He'd seen it as a foregone conclusion, of course, but it was still a confirmation that marked the official start of what he was sure would be a beautiful partnership.
Rating: 18+ overall; this chapter E for Everyone.
Warnings For This Chapter: None that I caught at this hour.
The next day, Kabuto gave Kurapika a clean bill of health, and he was allowed to go to the training field. Sasuke was already there, throwing shuriken at a target twenty metres away, at speeds that Kurapika couldn't even start follow with his eyes.
"Is everyone from your world that fast?" Kurapika asked once Sasuke ran out of shuriken and had to stop to collect them again.
Sasuke scoffed. "Of course not. Is everyone from your world as strong as you are?"
Kurapika shook his head. "No. . . but there are still plenty who are stronger."
Sasuke nearly dropped the shuriken he was picking up. "You. . . just mean overall strength, right? Not physical?"
Kurapika shook his head. "No. My eyes and the fact I've done weight training give me a bit of an edge, but it's still nothing compared to what can be accomplished by someone born under Reinforcement."
Sasuke grit his teeth at that. He still didn't understand the jargon Kurapika was using, but the meaning was clear enough: He had even further to catch up than he'd previously thought. He continued gathering up his shuriken in silence.
"Will anyone mind if some of these training posts get damaged?" Kurapika asked suddenly.
Sasuke looked up. "No, I break them all the time. Why?" He was absolutely certain that the posts were not sturdy enough to hold up to even a single kick from Kurapika.
Kurapika didn't answer. He was instead standing very still, facing a training post with his eyes closed. Sasuke surreptitiously activated his Sharingan to get a better look, and his suspicion that Kurapika was doing something with only his aura was confirmed. The very air suddenly began to hum, and - going by the surprised squawks from some genin training on the other end of the field - Kurapika's aura had just become visible to normal eyes. Then it suddenly flared out in all directions, flattening the grass around his feet and sending a small spray of dust into the air, before dying back down. The humming stopped, and his aura fell out of the normally-visible spectrum again.
Sasuke finished gathering his shuriken, and watched as Kurapika's nen flowed towards his right hand and began to compress itself into something solid and dense, creating metal from only aura and will. Now that he really had a good look at it, Sasuke noticed that, even aside from the chains, nen seemed a lot more dense overall than chakra was. Perhaps it was that quality that let it block physical blows so easily?
He also noticed that it seemed like everything Kurapika was doing with nen happened externally. There was a strange, looping mass of nen in the area of his heart - a Byakugan would have been able to give more detail there - but it seemed to be static, and it certainly wasn't producing anything; nen production didn't look like it was centralised at all, but that was all he could really tell.
There was a slight rattle of chains before, swift enough that Sasuke was surprised, the chain with the round weight shot forward and began snaking its way around the training post until there were five evenly-spaced points it was doubled up around. Then, without Kurapika moving, the chain suddenly began to constrict. The wood compressed at the doubled points, then splintered, and then simply began to crumble as it was pulverised. The chain worked with great and precise enough force that, as it retreated, its work done, the sections of wood that had been between the doubled points clattered to the ground intact.
Kurapika smiled a little. He wasn't impressed by his own work, but he was satisfied by it, and relieved. He didn't proceed to do the same to any other posts, however.
"What was the purpose of that exercise?" Sasuke asked.
"Just making sure that everything's still in working order," Kurapika said quietly, flexing the fingers on his chain-covered hand. "The man who taught me nen said that, since the long-term effects overusing the Scarlet Eyes are entirely undocumented, I always need to check myself for damage after recovering from a burn-out like that, especially if it knocks me out for more than a few hours." He didn't want to admit it, but he'd never been out of it for quite as long as he'd just had from overusing his eyes, and this was very concerning to him.
Sasuke looked surprised. "Your clan didn't teach you about that? It seems like an important detail to leave out."
Kurapika shook his head, seeming to find the grass incredibly interesting. "Much of our oral tradition was passed down mother to daughter or father to son, but. . ." he trailed off, and glanced up long enough to give Sasuke a meaningful look.
"What did they teach you, then?" Sasuke asked. It was probably a rude question, but politeness had never been his strong point.
Kurapika shifted uncomfortably. "How to make traditional clothes and shoes, how to cover your tracks when moving through the forest, what kinds of plants and insects are safe to eat, things like that."
"So. . . nothing about how to fight," Sasuke concluded. It wasn't entirely unheard of for a clan to not train its women for battle. It was more common eighty years ago, before the practise of multiple clans coming together to form a single, larger village had come into popularity. Back in those times, there was more danger of large portions of a single clan dying all at once, so it was a viable method of assuring that a bloodline survived. "You obviously know how to defend yourself, though. Where did you learn it?"
"Does it really matter?" Kurapika asked.
"No, I was just wondering." In reality, Sasuke wanted to know what kind of training Kurapika had on the off chance he could gain an edge by doing the same thing. The fact that Kurapika didn't want to share was incredibly irritating.
"That's not what your eyes say," Kurapika told him. "What is it you really want to know?"
Sasuke was deeply unsettled by how easily Kurapika could read him. He suspected it was part of Kurapika's special abilities to distinguish truth from falsehoods, but even so, he hated the idea that he was so transparent. ". . . I want to learn nen."
That gave Kurapika pause. "I. . . really have no idea if something like that's possible. I mean, you already have chakra, don't you?"
"We won't know if it's possible unless we try," Sasuke said. He wasn't willing to give up on this so easily.
"True. . . ." Kurapika considered it for a long moment. "If it is possible to use both, I'd like to learn what I can of chakra, too."
"Deal."
Kurapika glanced nervously over at the genin on the other end of the field. "Can we relocate to somewhere a bit more private?"
"Sure." Sasuke wasn't sure why Kurapika felt the need to be so secretive, but he wasn't about to argue about it. He led the way to a meeting room that was quite dusty from disuse. "This good enough?"
Kurapika nodded, and pulled up a chair at the main table. He started drawing a hexagon in the dust with one finger. "There are six different kinds of nen. . . ."
As he listened to Kurapika's long and comprehensive explanation in patient silence, Sasuke was already starting to see that nen, while powerful, was extremely limited. The rules for it were much more complicated than for chakra, and power was more-or-less inversely proportional to versatility. At the same time, however, it was fuelled by the user's emotions and resolve, rather than being a simple mixture of physical and spiritual energy like chakra was. Surely his hate, his pain, would be enough.
"Any questions?" Kurapika finally asked.
There was a detail that was bothering Sasuke. "You're a Materialization user, right?"
Kurapika nodded.
"Then how were you able to heal me like that? That sort of thing would require a combination of Emission and Reinforcement."
"The true power if the Scarlet Eyes is a Specialization ability called Emperor Time, which lets me use all six types of nen to their full potential," Kurapika said. "However, the full potential of a given type is still restricted by the fact I was born under Materialization. I'll still only ever be forty percent as good at Emission as I am at Materialization, and I'll still be hurt if I'm hit by a master of reinforcement nen using more than sixty percent of their power."
"And because you'd never healed someone else before, you weren't able to gauge how much energy it would cost you," Sasuke said.
"Yes." Kurapika looked away. "I'm sorry for having caused you so much trouble like that."
"Any trouble you might have caused me has been more than made up for," Sasuke said, smirking a little. "You have no idea how satisfying it was to see Kabuto's face the first time you shoved him across the room." He noticed that Kurapika looked a little nervous at the mention of that. "Wait, you're not scared of Kabuto, are you?"
"Whenever he looks at me I feel like I'm in danger of being dissected."
"Oh, that. You get used to that after a while."
Kurapika gave Sasuke an unamused look. "That's easy enough for you to say. You aren't expendable to them. As soon as they get their hands on an encyclopedia or a computer with an internet connection, I'm obsolete. If I'm lucky, they'll look up the Scarlet Eyes before they get rid of me, and, if I'm extremely lucky, I'll be sold to someone instead of killed."
"I'm not going to let them 'get rid of you'," Sasuke said, frowning. "My word has weight around here. I can protect you from Kabuto."
Immediately, it became apparent that he'd said something wrong. Kurapika's shoulders had tensed at the word "protect", and did not seem like they were going to relax again soon. "And what would you have me give you in exchange for your. . . 'protection'?"
"What makes you think I'd make you give me something for it?" Sasuke asked, brow furrowing very slightly. "I already told you I wouldn't let Orochimaru throw you to the wolves. That includes wolves with money, and it includes wolves who are named Kabuto." He stood up, pushing his seat back. "I'll be right back."
"Where are you going?" Kurapika asked, still uneasy.
Sasuke stopped in the doorway, and smiled a little. "To get a cup of water and some leaves."
It wasn't long after Sasuke returned that it became clear to Kurapika that this wasn't going to work. Sasuke's chakra was having absolutely no effect on the water or the leaf.
Sasuke, however, was not ready to give up. He tried to channel more of his anger, more of his hatred, and more of his pain into his effort. . . and that was about the point where the table caught fire. "Dammit!"
"I think it's fairly safe to say that nen and chakra are incompatible," Kurapika said gently as Sasuke jumped back and doused the flames with the water from the cup.
"I'm not ready to give up quite yet," Sasuke said. "Even if nen itself doesn't exist within me, it still might be possible to achieve something similar with chakra."
"Could you explain to me how chakra works?" Kurapika asked. "I don't really understand it very well."
Sasuke sighed, and started mopping up the mess with one of the rags he'd brought on the off chance that he turned out to be a Reinforcement type. "Yeah. We should probably go back to the training field for that one, though." He paused. "By the way, you showed me what happens when you do the test normally, but what happens if you do it when you have Emperor Time activated?"
Kurapika looked queasy at the thought. "I've only tried it once, but. . . the cup I used exploded because it couldn't displace three gallons of human blood fast enough."
Sasuke didn't have a good response to that one, except to be glad that Kurapika was on his side. The notion that Kurapika might ultimately decide not to team up with him didn't even cross his mind.
By the time they'd gotten back to the training field, Sasuke had already explained the basics of chakra theory, so Kurapika was about ready to put it to practice. Sasuke demonstrated the standard clone technique - something that was both very basic and somewhat similar in principle to Materialization nen - being sure to perform the hand seals very slowly. He noticed that, when Kurapika watched him, most of his aura was focused into his eyes. So, that was gyou, then.
"Now, these aren't actually solid," Sasuke explained, "but they take a lot less chakra to make. There's another kind that makes solid clones, but it's very taxing unless you have an unusually large pool of chakra to draw from."
Kurapika first practised on getting the hand seals right before he actually tried to perform the jutsu. He was disappointed, but not surprised, when his first attempt ended in complete failure for anything to occur. "How close was I?"
"You're doing the hand seals right, but the way your aura is flowing is all wrong," Sasuke said. "Your nen doesn't do anything while it's still in your body, so everything that should be happening internally either happens externally or doesn't happen at all."
"Are there any ninjutsu that don't require internal manipulation of chakra?" Kurapika asked.
"Not really. Even without the hand seals, they're all based on the same core principles."
Kurapika sighed in defeat. "If results like that could be accomplished by nen so simply, it would have already been figured out, huh?"
Sasuke nodded, just as disappointed as Kurapika was. "Likewise, if chakra could be used to get the same results as nen. . . they wouldn't bother teaching normal taijutsu anymore, for starters."
". . . I decided I'd like to take you up on that offer," Kurapika said eventually.
Sasuke smiled. He'd seen it as a foregone conclusion, of course, but it was still a confirmation that marked the official start of what he was sure would be a beautiful partnership.