The Red Shark - Chapter 0013

Chapter 13 — One Week of Progress

The week after Father gave me the scroll ran together into one long stretch of sweat, falls and small victories that never lasted. The scroll lived in my tunic during the day and under my pillow at night. I went through the compound’s routine like everyone else, ate with them, trained with them and laughed when they laughed, but half my mind was always back at the oak, working on the helix. I was still the youngest, the one my brothers teased and looked out for. Now I also had something none of them knew about.

Every morning started the same way. I woke before the birds, in the gray light that came through the dormitory shutters. The room smelled of sleep, of the herbal ointment we rubbed on our bruises at night and of the sea, which got into everything. Kenta always stirred first, kicking his blanket off with a grumpy sigh. Haruto would announce, hoarse with sleep, that he was starving. Toma rolled over and buried his face in his pillow as if that could cancel the day. Rokuta was always last.

“Why does the sun hate us?” he’d groan, and pull the blanket over his head until one of the mothers came to drag him out.

Daigo’s mat was usually empty and already folded. As a genin he kept his own hours, and missions or extra training often took him out before dawn. I envied him a little. It also got me out of bed faster.

I dressed in the half dark. My tunic still smelled of hearth smoke from drying overnight, and my muscles ached from the day before, a deep, steady ache I had stopped minding. The scroll went into the inside pocket, against my chest.

Breakfast in the main hall was all steam and noise. My mother, her red hair tied back, stirred the big pot of miso. Hanae sliced fish with quick, exact cuts, and Sae chased small hands away from the food before it was served. When my mother filled my bowl, her eyes went to the bulge in my tunic. She didn’t ask, though I could see she wanted to.

“Eat it all, Arashi,” she said. “You’ll need your strength for whatever your father has you doing.”

My brothers were louder than usual. Kenta and Haruto fought over the last piece of fish until Toma, laughing, took it away from both of them. Rokuta talked with his mouth full.

“What’s that lump in your shirt, little brother? Hiding sweets again?”

Shun snickered and Nao rolled his eyes. Daigo, on the mornings he was there, just gave me a short nod.

“Ignore them. Focus.”

It was as close as he came to saying he knew. Around us the mothers traded stories about the babies, and my brothers bragged about whatever they’d done in training the day before. For the length of a meal I was one more kid at a crowded table, and it helped.

After breakfast came physical training with Kazuo, Father’s chūnin, who watched us with the same flat face whether we did well or fell on our noses. Push-ups until our arms shook, squats, laps through fog so wet that breathing felt like drinking, then kata. Every day my body handled it more easily, and every day my mind wandered further. I treated all of it as a warm-up for the afternoon.

As soon as the midday meal was over and Kazuo dismissed us, I slipped away to the woods.

It became a ritual. The oak waited every afternoon, huge and indifferent, and my feet wore a path into the clearing. I spent the first hour against the rock rereading the scroll until the paper went soft and dark at the edges. Then I went to the trunk and fell off it.

The first day had been bad. The second was worse. The bruises from the day before made me slower, and I began to wonder seriously whether I could do this at all. On the third day I tried a running start: three quick steps across the grass, a jump, and my first foot hit the bark high with the chakra already pulsing. Heel, arch, ball, toes. The second foot followed. I went up faster than I ever had, and halfway up the trunk the spiral faltered. I slid, fell and landed badly. Pain shot through both ankles.

I sat in the grass rubbing them, and a memory came back.

In my old life I’d read a lot of fanfiction, and one story had stayed with me: Naruto: The Outsider’s Determination. Its protagonist hit the same wall I had, and he got past it by going back to the ground. He trained on slopes, then on steeper slopes, letting his body learn the feeling a little at a time, the way you do push-ups on your knees before you do them on your toes. That was what I’d been missing. My body needed to learn the helix without the fear of a vertical trunk. The sole had to grip in sequence, heel for stability, arch for balance, ball for the push and toes for the release, before it could hold my whole weight at ninety degrees.

That afternoon I changed my approach.

There was a gentle, grassy slope near the clearing. I climbed it slowly, paying attention to nothing but the contact between my sole and the ground. Heel down, a pulse of chakra to anchor it. Arch, more flow for balance. Ball of the foot, the push. Toes, a soft release. The helix was weak at first and kept flickering out. Each time my foot slipped, I stopped, crouched and worked out why. Too much in the toes, and the heel came up early. Too much in the heel, and the toes never caught. I went up and down that slope for hours, until my calves burned and the light started to go, and little by little the flow grew smoother.

On the fourth day I found something steeper, a rocky outcrop with a natural ramp of bare stone. It was hard and unforgiving, and it pulled harder. Heel, arch, ball, toes. My calves were on fire and my balance wobbled on the uneven rock, but somewhere in that afternoon I stopped having to think through each part of the helix. My foot started doing it on its own, the whole sole gripping at once.

On the fifth day I went back to the oak. I still fell, but the falls had changed. They were shorter, the slides slower. The chakra bent with the bark now and kept time with my heartbeat. Six steps. Seven. A moment where I felt weightless. Then down again, from higher than I’d ever been. Every fall showed me a little more about where the pressure needed to go.

On the sixth day I ran at the tree. Three steps to build speed, then the jump. My first foot landed high on the trunk with the chakra already bursting through it—heel, arch, ball, toes—and the second followed. The helix locked in. Then I was walking. One step, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. The bark held and the suction held. Ninety degrees felt almost natural, as if the tree were pulling me in.

Then my feet slipped.

I didn’t fall far. Halfway into the slide my palms slapped against the trunk, and the chakra went to my hands before I could think about it. I stopped. I hung there breathing hard, sweat dripping off my chin, and looked up into the branches.

My feet had done everything right: the placement, the sequence, the helix. What had given out was my ankles, and weak ankles I could push through, at least for one climb.

I dropped to the grass and went again, faster. The helix formed clean, and every step landed firm. I climbed past the place where the trunk split into branches and kept going until there was nothing higher to climb. My ankles burned, and my tendons felt stretched close to tearing. I made it to the top anyway.

I sat on a high branch with my legs hanging over nothing. Below me the fog lay over the forest like a sea, and through it I could just make out the roofs of the compound.

“Very good.”

The voice came from below. Father stood at the edge of the clearing with his arms folded, so still that I hadn’t noticed him. I had no idea how long he’d been there.

“You reached the goal,” he said. He didn’t raise his voice, but it carried up through the branches anyway. “Tomorrow, first light. The training field.”

Then he turned and walked back into the trees.

Coming from Father, “very good” was practically a speech. I stayed on that branch until the light went gold, swinging my legs like the four-year-old I was supposed to be.