Last Last Minute Training

Kaori was back at it again, ready to test the limits of her new capabilities after all her training. After some rest, she was faster, stronger, tougher.

She'd also become more competent with her ability to manipulate chakra over the last few weeks. While she had the ability to, she wanted to get the last few Ninjutsu under her belt that she was able to.

She had enough normal Doton, so it was likely a good idea to diversify. The Shadow Clone jutsu was a good one, so the Shadow Clone Explosion would be a nice trick for using against those tricky few close quarters fighters. Send in a clone, let them fight, and then when they get popped, it goes boom.

A good enough jutsu. She just needed to experiment with the ratios of the chakra while creating a clone. It took her a bit, but luckily there was little drawback to practicing Shadow Clone, since it didn't make her tired to do so after it popped. It was good and free training.

The Shadow clones with explosions didn't come easy though. She kept at it long enough until she got the jutsu down perfectly though. It took the majority of a few hours.

Still, if there was one jutsu she could have learned, this was a good one. People would expect her to be a Doton practitioner primarily, so it was good to have some good offensive techniques that weren't Doton. Just don't let the clone pop if it was close.

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Learned "Clone Great Explosion" [250/250]

She was a strong fighter too, a lot of her training was specifically gear to grappling. That meant that learning how to absorb Chakra would be a good thing to do. Chakra Drain was a particularly dangerous jutsu to use since you needed to get close to someone to use it properly.

Against Taijutsu users, it was hard to keep them locked down long enough. But she could supplement with traps and Doton and locks and grapples.

But she had the Magnificent Earth Dome of Nothingness thing that she'd learned. She could use that, or use this to disable opponents who were weaker than her without killing them.

Summoning a shadow clone, Kaori began to spar with it lightly, trying each time she made contact with it to begin to drain chakra from it. She didn't go full force, holding back significantly on speed and power. It was more so that she could get the draining of chakra done in each strike.

It wouldn't be perfect, it would take time as well. Chakra Drain took a solid connection. She'd need to focus mostly on maintaining a grab. Stopping someone from breaking the grapple, breaking the grab, but she just needed to know that she could get the technique down first.

Practicing with a shadow clone helped, since it was already designed to send chakra back to her when it popped in the first place. It took her a while, but she was eventually able to get the feel for it down.

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Learned "Chakra Drain" [250/250]

More than that, she was just getting started. There was another jutsu that she might be able to catch some people in that would let her establish a hold. If there was a single thing that made things difficult, it was capturing someone in a hold. Paralysis would assist with that. Long enough to get them beaten down, captured, or killed if she needed to.

Paralyzing Chakra Field would work for that. It created just that. Channeled through the ground, it worked well enough for her. Unfortunately since it wasn't a Doton jutsu, she couldn't use it without hand seals. This would actually be perfect to maintain a paralysis and chakra drain loop, assuming she wasn't fighting someone who couldn't use Sealless jutsu themselves.

Or get them and then use the coup-de-grace. It all depended on her opponent of course, but Kaori was fine with that. More tools in her tool belt, as it were.

Ram Horse Hare Ox. Kaori placed her hands on the ground. She double checked with her sensory to make sure nobody would be within range of it to get stuck in paralysis accidentally. It wouldn't work very well for her to practice techniques if someone accidentally got stuck in them. Large scale things like this, she didn't want someone to think she was attacking them.

The last thing she wanted was to piss off the wrong person. Things were going well for her at the moment, her training was going swimmingly.

Satisfied, she moved on to the next thing.

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-Sensory used
Learned "Paralyzing Chakra Field" [250/250]

There were some other jutsu she needed to master of course, and while Ninjutsu without an element were important, so too was making sure that she had the powerful Doton that there were as well. There were 7 for her to learn in short order. Probably better for her to begin with something so that she wasn't going to be observed practicing the stronger things that she needed to. After all, she didn't like people watching her.

Great Moving Earth Core would be the best. It was similar to some of the others that she'd used, but was just bigger. So rather than going all out on this, she would train Great Moving Earth Core but use it at a lower level so that she wouldn't be noticed with high skill jutsu. Probably could have done that with some of the others, but she hadn't really noticed anybody around, so that wasn't too bad.

Going through the hand seals, Kaori began to practice the new technique. She used the same feel of chakra as when she used Moving Earth Core. She seeped her chakra into her surroundings and realized that the Earth around her was all under her control if she wanted it to be. However, drawing back that control, she localized it to the same 50 meters as the lower level technique. The different hand seals would be enough for her to know whether or not the technique worked. In her experience at least.

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Learned "Great Moving Earth Core" [250/250]

With a large platform created, she knew that she would only be visible by someone at the level that she was on, so she didn't need to worry about anyone watching her at least. There wasn't much she could do about anyone with sensory, but she'd never been able to do much about that in the first place. At the very least, she could mitigate some of it.

It was rather annoying having to hide all of her practicing, but the exams were coming soon, so there'd be a lot less of the intense practice soon enough at least. It wasn't like she was doing all of this for nothing though; Kaori didn't want anyone to know her skills because these people might very well be her enemies one day.

Of course, she'd have to put some of them on display when she fought during the exams. Part of her was already set on not winning intentionally, so she wouldn't give up her true strength. Put in just enough effort to advance to the rank of Chuunin. Her skills were already on par with some Jounin, so it wasn't like she needed to go all out.

Throughout the day though, she trained. Perfecting the techniques she learned. The most recent one was a simple one with a gesture to direct the Earth skewers. Rock Pillar Spears, which would be easy to use in the middle of combat considering she didn't need to use more than a simple gesture, easy enough to mix into a Taijutsu sequence, or completely forgo the gesture because of her Sealless ability.

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Learned "Rock Pillar Spears" [250/250]

Good good. Now that she had her primary offensive ability, she was fine with some of the more interesting ones. She had the explosive shadow clone variant mastered as well, so she could utilize a new variant as well. There was a clone that was hard to kill, the Mud Shadow Clone. She couldn't use it very often, because it didn't return chakra to the user, unlike the original. However, it did repair itself until it ran out of chakra, and so would be very useful if she was already running low enough on chakra to only be able to rely on techniques that didn't have a lot left.

That, or she could use it to surprise an opponent who thought the clone was dealt with, only for it to reform behind their back. Then it could use some jutsu or from behind without her having to think about it all that much, or launch a sneak attack.

These were the sorts of things that made or broke a fight at high levels. You had to be able to out think, out play, outlast your opponents. Kaori wasn't the highest level Shinobi out there, but she was capable enough at least. It was a large arsenal that would make her dangerous as well.

Making the Mud clone, Kaori began to spar with it. After testing to make sure that the healing factor was working properly, she was ecstatic. Using Chakra Drain, she began to take the chakra back. While it didn't return chakra normally, she could given time restore herself.

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Learned "Mud Clone Jutsu" [250/250]

When she finished reabsorbing all of the chakra from the mud clone, Kaori took a breath. Next up, she needed something that was a powerful defense. There were sure to be all sorts of powerful people out there who could glass cannon some high level techniques. She needed to be able to defend from them in a pinch.

There was a multi layered wall technique that focused on making a massive number of weaker walls to rival some of the strongest defensive techniques out there, so Kaori decided that learning that one would be her ultimate defense. She'd be able to block the damage from even the highest tier of attacks.

She placed her hands on the ground and the walls began to sprout out of the ground around her, layering up on the defensive nature of each of them. If two walls could defend against an A rank technique, then 4 could go against even an S rank technique. 30 walls would be able to defend against multiple, which meant she could disperse them around a battlefield to continue protecting herself. Or use them to create a maze of defense.

Alternately, she could use it to create a maze of walls to trap an opponent into an area, to hide herself, or other such things. She could use it to defend against multiple people. That wasn't likely going to be an issue during the exams, so this technique was perfect for using during them, and even better afterwards when she might be fighting many.

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Learned "Muliple Earth-Style Walls" [250/250]

The next technique she needed to learn was one that could weaponize some of the other Doton jutsu that she had learned. Specifically, it required mud, but she wasn't lacking in any amount of that, considering she had been fighting a mud clone not too long ago. There was mud all over from when she'd been splashing it around.

She formed the hand seals to consolidate the mud into a dragon's head. The entire thing reared up and began to systematically start shooting at the walls, under her direction. Kaori's Earth walls smashed to pieces by the force of the mud bullets that the dragon could fire out.

That was a good offensive technique as well. Kaori would be able to use this as a turret to protect her, or to play a bit of tower defense. The best part of the jutsu though was that it was a lot more effective when she was able to use her sensory, since she didn't need to have eyes on who she was fighting, just know their location. This would be good to get set up with a vantage point to rain down attacks from above. Either that, or built onto some sort of massive scale flat plane.

She could do that sort of thing with her terrain altering abilities, so there was no reason to think she wouldn't be able to set up that sort of scenario. Mud could truly be devastating, she liked how strong it was.

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Learned "Earth Dragon Bullet" [250/250]

The best thing for her though would be to make a massive amount of mud so she could make multiple turrets. There was a technique called the Swamp of the Underworld that was perfect for that. The mud dragons she could create on that would let her put them into the capture of the swamp if they managed to avoid being caught in it first. Massive scale jutsu like that were all she needed in order to be effective, even if she wasn't the strongest around either. Something like the Swamp of the Underworld may have been useful even against something like the 8 Tails. These were the sorts of jutsu she'd need if she was going to be able to fight against those types of monstrous creatures.

And even stronger, of course. Swamp of the Underworld wasn't really enough on its own, but put it at the bottom of a Great Moving Earth Core and fill it with mud dragon bullets, Kaori would be able to deal a massive amount of damage to anything stuck in that.

It wasn't any one thing, it was just like the Multiple layered Earth walls. Stacking multiple attacks, multiple defenses, multiple traps. That's what would let her rival the strength of someone who could do more in one strike than she could. Doton was a powerful element, but often was overshadowed by the others for some reason or another. However, when it came down to it, Earth wasn't to be underestimated. And she was a powerful practitioner, since she was able to see most things and wait for the right moment to use them.

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Learned "Swamp of the Underworld" [250/250]

There was one final jutsu that Kaori needed to learn before she was sure she was ready. There were far too many Doton users entering the exams. Because of that, Kaori was happy to learn Iron Prison. While she wouldn't be able to use it to reduce the cost of her own jutsu (she was already as conservative with Doton Chakra control as she could be), she would be able to make it harder for her opponents to use Doton, and that was the important thing. Maintaining control of the Doton inside an area and making it her own.

While the walls would be powerful enough to withstand some damage to them should someone try and break out, Kaori figured that it might be worth using some of the other techniques she was learning to layer defenses and protected those Iron-like walls. This justu was unique for sure.

Don't let anyone out, create the arena, flood it with mud, make a bunch of mud dragon turrets, and then reinforce the walls with some layered walls. Maybe it would be too much of a set up to do without some time investment, but if she got it set up, then she'd be able to capture pretty much anything.

This was the last little bit of training that she had to do before she was truly ready. There were some other things she needed to attend to before the exams started, but it was time to end this bit.

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Exit
Learned "Iron Prison" [250/250]