Dream Synecdoche [t][o]

[Naitome]

<sub>--| Naitome sat upon a great upturned field of rock drowning itself beneath a shelf of desert thrown over more land; here in the killer's city of wind, the land of murderers and shadows and secrets. His mind was not yet clear, but with his legs crossed, and with Waking Dream silent and sheathed at his back, he could at least anchor himself to the relative tranquility of his surroundings. He closed his eyes, his simple small gourd opened and on his lap, as he began a pattern of gentle breathing designed to center his focus. This was an oft overlooked aspect of those who excelled at the combination of physical and mental; pure thought. He sought the revealing medium of meditation among the subtle grace of greater Sunagakure no Sato. His mind opened. He saw light.

Beyond...beyond the concepts of sight or time. Beyond mere shifting tides of intent and ambition as he sunk into a depth of unbridled and frantic concentration. It stirred something dark and dangerous at his core. He felt his understanding shift and expand. He breathed slowly as tiny flickering waves of chakra began to swell with the beating of his heart.

A counter-clockwise rotation of colluding energies fought for dominance. They pitched his perceptions into a field of colors so exotic and new he had no words to describe them. He saw his body free from the constraints and boundaries placed to ensure its survival. His thinking changed. A silent chromatic implosion rocked what could only be the link between his mind and the world around him, and he recklessly abandoned the shackles of inhibition, becoming something more.

He felt some cold ethereal breakage flood his consciousness. It was broken down into image and potential, the sub-atomic underpinnings of thought...raw idea. He felt his fractured bearings center themselves around a single goal. Freedom. Without retreating from the brutality of its scope, he was left to careen endlessly through the discomforting surreal plateau of analysis and processing that was his true self.

Deep inside, beneath the doubt and self-imposed revulsion, before reaching the unhealthy precipice of sanity that served to divide his thinking from that of the wild animal recklessness that was his 'other', Naitome experienced, for once, a fulfilling wholeness. He was slowly becoming something more than the renegade juxtaposition of man and dream, iron and will. His senses assaulted him. Along the informational underpinning of the world, all that defined him floated lazily through an infinite space of understanding. This was the calm before the sandstorm, and at the point of its placating origin was the newly reassured severity of a man who suddenly, easily, knew more.</sub>

[Naitome]

<sub>--| Energy flowed throughout his body; his hands went over the rudimentary seals representing various astrological bodies as an homage to their power and form, and the chakra moved begrudgingly towards his hands and feet, without being geared towards any specific technique. The magnetism his bloodlimit would create around him would not shift without more concentration, and he attempted to clear his mind of distractions. He allowed himself to become more connected to the gentle pulse and sway of the earth beneath him as he felt its rigidity reject his initial entrance, he allowed the slight chill of the surrounding magnetic field to feed into his ability to control it. Without words and with a heavy sigh, he clasped his hands together and pushed down forcefully, pulling up stray dirt. The ground gave a little. His hands seemed to flicker and vanish as he re-performed their deftly vanishing and reappearing complexity, breaking apart and reforming into a string of solid motions that soon betrayed themselves to the flexibility of expertise.

Another closing of his hands, another hard push of energy into the ground, and the force that had seeped part-ways into the dusted earth seemed to shake from the holds of gravity, and floated a column of iron sand into the air. He called up his natural affinity to create a more intense shell of pressure, and used the warring bonds of positive and negative energy to create a pulse, allowing its slow moving particles to create a rhythm in his head. It was like a heartbeat, and like a skilled surgeon, he used his chakra to divide small razor thin slits between each individual aspect, slowing the movement of the vibrating field down to almost absolute stillness. The temperature seemed to drop. As suddenly as he'd slowed down their motions in the air, he began to push out, spreading each bond further and further apart until the form of the iron sand changed. The suspended black powder separated and broke apart, and soon after, without the need to superheat, became a mass of dark matter. It formed a thick opaque cloud around his body that completely obscured his vision.


Feeling his way along the ground he began to cause reverberations in the structureless vapor before him, his hands still clasped together, pushing the fog out physically as well as with his combined chakra's energies. He inhaled and exhaled deeply, the gourd containing the majority of his initial supply close at hand, and watched his own breath fog in the magnetically charged chill he'd seemed to create. He focused, watched the small emissions of iron seize up unobstructed in their path forced out of his way, and exerted more forceful command over the magnetic field his chakra pressure had expanded. He allowed it to slowly swirl, found that he could push out past its normal boundaries, past the original weight of the wavelengths used. His eyes closed briefly, trying to grow accustomed to the darkness, before opening them suddenly and peering out across the outdoor training area he'd covered in his own essence.

Naitome's visibility was reduced to near zero. He gave a brief smirk, careful not to disrupt the held handseal, and experimented with more and less chakra. He dissolved the field of iron sand in front of him to restore a brief amount of visibility, watched subtle breaths cause his large blue kimono to push aside the black mist that flowed back almost instantaneously to reclaim its position. Letting his hands drop to his side, he pulled as much of his own chakra back into his body as he could, quelled the swirling storm of energy he'd called up, and stood in the placid miasma.</sub>

[Naitome]

<sub>--| A strong wind blew as a sandstorm came suddenly and without any forewarning of its severity; Naitome could hear the tumbling of badly patched shingles from the roof-tile altar-top a few meters away. As the combination of air and falling sand added itself to the black iron surroundings, he was dismayed to find it dissipate, clawing absentmindedly at the retreating gas wall as his vision returned. He ran through a string of different handseals, this time focusing on chakra control as opposed to simply pushing out masses of energy, and watched as the falling sand slowed and stopped with their completion; it was blocked by the swirling emission of magnetism . The black powder that had begun to disappear came back, this time reinforced by natural and 'unnatural' means. He held his hands together and repeated his earlier process of division.

He bound his own chakra within each particle of sand, however, and this made all the difference. Instead of first an impenetrable cloud forming instantly around his body, the sand seemed to creep out of the gourd from all sides. It spread inwards, pulled towards him, as he created it from the outside barrier of its range to slowly wrap around him. He mused that this would be better in combat anyway; he wouldn't want to give his opponent an opportunity to track his initial position and even remotely follow his movements through the iron sand. The clockwise spin of the internal chakra energies mixing and combining within him stalled as he prevented himself wasting more chakra, and Naitome experimented with its distance now, finding that after thirty meters or so, its intensity weakened to the point of restoring its transparency.

He imagined a cage in his mind, re-constructed the enveloping sands into more-or-less a spherical formation with him as the epicenter before pushing out with his chakra and surrounding himself in a small bubble of movable magnetically charged particles. As he moved, it moved, allowing him a type of visible movement his opponents might not be so lucky to have. The sand reacted to the physical impression of his body as if it were the most normal activity in the world, and this time, as his kimono swung within the maelstrom of forst, the powder folded and unfolded around the silken cloth. Everything had grown silent around him except for his own breathing and heartbeat, and he imagined it would be much easier in this artificially created environment to detect the presence of another. He allowed his muscles to relax slowly, and felt as one by one, regardless of his lack of strain, the black sand remained as a shield against the image of anything beyond it.

He felt as if he were caught in an enormous invisible net, as he could detect the slight pressures of the light storm pressing in against his body. This net worked as an anchor as well, as his own senses seemed spread out to mimic the expansion of the clouded field. He was not caught in the flux of chakra that had molded the iron sand, but those he faced would be, and it wasn't long before his breathing and heart-rate returned to normal. He stood and walked with new-found confidence through the mass of blackness, the light touch of dust surrounding and closing him in.</sub>

[Naitome]

<sub>--| His hands seems to vanish and flicker, breaking apart and reforming into each other as he ran through a string of handseals. He liked to call this his 'warm-up' set. They were movements designed to loosen him up and allow him the flexibility of adding or subtracting seals without losing chakra. Backwards and forwards he moved, as he attempted to break down a new found control into sections. This was practice designed to increase his manipulative pull, not crush an opponent, but it also contained elements of calling up his kekkei genkai's chakra nature, arguably the most powerful in the shinobi world; there was a reason those of the Zantetsuken were once considered royalty in Sunagakure No Sato.


As he studied the internal hollows of his thoughts, he saw that the elements of nature transformation and shape created a direct mental link with both his conscious and subconscious mind. He'd be feeding it instruction, allowing waves of energy to be formed from all areas that would then converge at it's center. He'd have to actually control the iron sand in an uncontrolled manner, transferring the huge elemental collision through the strongest point of each intended iron sand construct. He would first practice simply enveloping himself in his Satetsu Ryuuken Chakra Nature. He could feel it move within and around him. He held in his mind the image of a dragon, its inumerable scales, and shuddered at the glorious undertaking. He was anxious.

He felt as if he were caught in an enormous invisible net as the chakra enveloped him. He was assaulted by intense pressure from all sides but felt strangely anchored in its middle. He realized suddenly that this was the same feeling he would need to introduce to his personal magnetic field. Unfortunately, that could only come once he'd mastered his kekkei genkai, but he would not be deterred. He was comfortable in the iron sand cloud, though parts of his brain wanted to panic caught in the flux of chakra swirling about him. His body was strong however, and even though his Zantetsuken physiology pulled and begged at him to simply create the iron sand from nothingness, he resisted the near impossible temptation, and focused on extracting it from the gourd.

He felt suddenly, perfectly, at home. His muscle fibers and skin gave slightly to the unseen force of the magnetic wave. He inhaled and exhaled slowly, trying to remember the commands his most recent academy instructor had given him. At first, the breathing exercises amused him with their simplicity. He soon reconsidered his take on them once he felt their relevance to his training. Each breath inwards brought with it an intense sensation of control. Each breath outwards pushed reflexively at the wall or iron sand about his form, and told it what to do without words.


He felt that he could push and manipulate the chakra, move it around. In theory, this was a technique that was easy to perform, and with no specific jutsu to guide his crafting, what he could do with it was far more open to his own desires. But as the chakra moved, he felt different sensations. There was a low heat that obeyed the direction of his mind. He could collect it into his arms or legs, hold it in his chest, exhale it. With awe, he saw the rippling cascade of visible sand ebb and flow around his body, moving precariously towards his hands from within the gourd.</sub>

[Naitome]

<sub>--| He settled the energy momentarily. Looking up, he skimmed past any handseals and simply focused his mind, performing them instead mentally. He began going through those movements that represented each aspect of the constellations, but it was detached from anything physical, it was like a dream. He finished on the "Ram" symbol, the symbol for strength in stubbornness, the symbol for charging into a situation without foresight, reckless abandon. The iron sand was suddenly pushed away from him violently in reaction to concept alone.

He struggled to control it, imagined it spread out to form a lake. He formed small barriers of pressure within the sand, slicing premature shapes from its mass. He allowed the Satetsu infused chakra to 'get used' to him. He formed a small barrier against the onrushing walls of sand, letting it both rush out in great pulses, and centering its magnetic force around his own form. He felt his muscles loosen as the force enhanced chakra comforted his body. It coated him in powerful layers, made his body a part of itself.

He felt joined together with the essence of the desert and the dunes. He imagined a new cage in his mind. He constructed walls of falling sand in his mind before pushing out with his chakra and surrounding himself with a small sphere of iron. All was silent except for the faint sound of tiny metallic grains colliding within. He'd created a current that would serve as the core of a dragon-like shape. He opened his eyes, let his facial muscles relax, and continued breathing deeply, visualizing the ferocious image of a dragon.


It was an irregular form. This was shape transformation beyond any known henge, beyond the simple weapons that his control and heritage had told him were the height of manipulation. The iron seemed oddly hard and stable. He sat in its center, retreating light from the moon high above reflected and broken up into pieces that played across his skin. He couldn't quite call it a success He felt his chakra begin to dissipate with the strain of maintaining just this simple form. He balked at the idea of forming an entire dragon from the same volatile substance.

He tried to create another burst of magnetic chakra that would exist solely on the inside of the fledgling shape. A secondary under-skin of internal pressure to hold it together. As part of the Zantetsuken, he had the chakra pool necessary to perform such a string of high level modification. However, he felt that it was the aspect of chakra control that he was lacking. In much the same way as the first learning of his Iron Sand Dominion had provided some difficulty with control, sheer magnetic force was an even more difficult thing to rein under his command. His mind fluctuated, like the sands moving violently through Kaze No Kuni.</sub>

[Naitome]

<sub>--| He disassembled the rough spherical shaped block of sand. It collapsed around him as he took a deep breath. This was a thought-form, created through sheer willpower. He would be bringing the dragon into physical reality with the precise application of spiritual and physical control. His chakra seemed to cling to him lustfully, but he pushed it away with his own mind, and again formed the core of the creatures body. His gourd emptied. The shell of force vibrated.

Ripples frozen in time could serve as the beginning of its protective armor, the scales. His hands remain clasped together as he continued. He shook his head to clear it, imagined the voice of his 'father' calling him a failure as he sat in the solitude with only the sound of the desert creatures to comfort him. He tried to internalize the feelings of anger and hatred that gave him greater focus. He created three small protrusions of hardened iron. He began the breathing exercise again, this time much faster.

Instead of power and size, he focused simply on control, spinning them, making the protrusions slowly rise in the air. He imagined that the tiny world of conflicting pressure within the shape was also his to command. He let the three shapes sluice into one. He recreated the simplicity of the sphere he'd first fashioned around himself. He allowed a thin layer of the hardened chakra that was its outer surface to soften. It became a cloud, then solidified, then unraveled into dust again.

It ran back into the center of the shape. It did not compromise the integrity of the structure, and he was glad. He felt like an architect or an artist, and mused at how similar the act of ninjutsu was to art. He formed a tight bubble out of the black powder inside the shape. He reestablished his mental connection, momentarily shaking the images of anger and memories of pain, maintained his steady breathing. The bubble seemed to expand and contract with his lungs.

He allowed the bubble to rotate, and before the spinning motion forced it to pop, collected the iron sand along the sides of the form. As the metal settled flat into its pointed lower section, he shifted the swaying motion of his magnetic energies, like the moon affecting the tides of the sea. The diamond of sand was sitting in front of him, gave off the appearance of boiling, and began spinning in a counter-clockwise manner. Something was off. He knew from the ingrained pattern of his hair that his chakra spun with a clockwise rotation, and that anytime the movements didn't sync up, the technique he was attempting to perform would fail.

He steeled his mind, his body. He prepared himself to continue.</sub>

[Naitome]

<sub>--| Like a delicate balancing act, he shifted the entire sphere itself to begin a clockwise spin. He stopped controlling the iron inside of it altogether. He liked to follow the movements of the spheres spin with his eyes, darting back and forth and around. It looked like a miniature whirlpool sucking in the last bit of dry oxygen left inside of the creation. He stopped the spinning movements. He pushed out with his chakra to continue the outside rotations in the right direction.


He felt the iron sand around him flow freely in protest to the incredible pressure he'd created within the structure. He finally attempted to slow the spheres inner magnetic rotations down by force. He heard a sharp and distinct crack as the hardened powder holding it all together split apart. It returned suddenly to the dry earth. He sighed deeply.He began a slow fluctuation of energy designed to recall a mass of sand quickly back before him. He reformed the shape within the cloud of metal, this time, a great sunken swirl winding its way in reverse.


Instead of drawing matter into itself, it would expel solidity with every turn. His 'practice' dealt exclusively with the act of creation, and Naitome attempted to remember that. He felt the strain of such strictly controlled chakra begin to spill out of his body. Would he truly be able to control so many elements within the fully formed dragon, while still allowing it to be just one object? Could the technique work practically in battle? He kept up the outpouring of chakra and pushed through the strain.

A tiny swarm of flies, no doubt let in though the small secret opening that led to a series of encloseed above ground training areas, appeared suddenly. They had begun to fly in lopsided circles as they buzzed dejectedly for food. He followed one with his eyes; large, green, bulbous, there was every chance it was seeing its last day of life right now. He calmed the rapid swirling of chakra within himself and focused on the flies. He formed a tiny sphere-like shape around each one. He constricted its movements. Eventually, it succumbed to the overwhelming satetsu with a dry sucking sound.

At first, it seemed as if nothing happened. Then, slowly but surely, tiny rivulets of black powder began to rise from the surface of the earth. They melded into an opaque sphere that completely surrounded each fly. The shapes took cue from his own chakra nature and began to spin in tiny silent revolutions. More iron, more magnetism, was produced within the sphere. At first, the flies merely beat themselves stupidly against the lightless walls. Their compound eyes registered what must have seemed like hundreds of grains of deadly desert.</sub>

[Naitome]

<sub>--| When they finally stopped buzzing about, Naitome imagined that the iron within was like a pair of hands. ,They were capable of opening and folding, giving life and crushing it. He tried to find this balance. He brought the tiny amount of sand within each semi-crystalline structure to its center. Like the folding of his hands, he allowed the flies to meet a pulverizing defeat at their centers. His shape manipulation control had grown noticeably in just a few short practiced seconds.

He spent a considerable amount of time just breathing sharply, in and out. He was elated that he'd gotten at least this first aspect of control down to an almost scientific repetition of intent. When he felt his heartbeat return to its normal steady pace, he focused on building his chakra level by level. First at a methodical pace that allowed him to think his way through each aspect of its power, then eventually quicker until he seemed able to instantly call forth enough energy to grind against the natural sand on the desert floor with his magnetic nature. He tried to shape the massive amount, and spent much time 'cutting corners', sculpting as if he were an artist, envisioning his opponents caged inside, struggling to breathe, struggling to survive.

He quieted the storm of raging power as quickly as he had called it up. He stared out across the sands with his eyes glowing faintly. His senses flared, then took in the entirety of the outcropping he walked through. He was searching for a target. His gaze finally met a small torch he'd set up days ago in an empty corner of a nearby cave wall. He stared at it, remembered all he had done to perfect the simple shaping of his power's most basic ability, and practiced a random assortment of seals to prepare himself.

The sand around the torch twitched, rose a few feet, fell again, then seemed to explode upwards as it literally grew over it. It hardened as it touched, somewhere between the shape of a dragon...and the shape of something that had never been and would never be anything close to a dragon. When he let go of his hold on the nervous magnetic wavelength, it dissipated as loudly as it had appeared, seeming to suck itself back down into the ground. It left Naitome amongst the dunes and wrecked torch, breathing heavily once more.

He cracked his knuckles and tried to clear his mind again. His chakra seemed to beg him to take the simple route. He could create the iron sand from surrounding minerals if he wanted too. But he refused. He moved his hands back into a comfortable position on his lap and sat once more, in meditation. His chakra flared out, searching, hungry.</sub>

[Naitome]

<sub>--| He would bring his hands swiftly together after allowing them to stretch. He wiped the darkened residue that mimicked ash clinging to his skin with a small damp cloth. His face was hard set and serious. With a quick succession of breaths he ran his hands along a series of seals set to mimic the internal alignment of the constellations. One deep exhalation, and he forced as much chakra as he could safely move out of his body into the tiny caged sphere.

The sand seemed to shiver with tension. It was held by nothing but his will. He struggled desperately to intervene at the precise moment that the ambiguous shape would normally lose its structure. This type of chakra molding was called interruption. When molding solid form elements, it was necessary in order to properly control the outcome of a technique. But it was not recommended for kekkei touta or kekkei genkai, and though the iron sand he controlled was solid and malleable, his 'element', for lack of a better term, was atually magnetism itself.

It had formed about 5 feet high. It was bulbous and glistening and hard-edged. It threw the room into more silhouetttes and shadows as it shook slightly in place, outlined by a whirring of electromagnetic sparks. His secondary nature, Raiton, was interfering, and the two forces mingled to create something more powerful than the original, but also, less controlled. The iron shape moved like a living creature, almost scared, without purpose. He could feel the core of magnetism in its center struggling to escape, and he gave it purchase against the walls of its own structure. He commanded the tiny pulses to meet at the center only when they'd reached their highest point of escalation at its sides.

He reached out tentatively to touch the structure, pushed his hand through the forgiving powder. He gasped in surprise as its ends extended, formed plates like armor which slid over and re-formed the sphere into something slightly avian. From its sides, two flat concentrations of metal stretched, covered in the same droplet-like scales as the central sphere. He noticed a pattern amongst the shapes, the sizes, and his level of concentration. With an intense outpouring of chakra to extend several meters around the entire construct, he moved his hands as well, tucking or folding in hardened sand where it was necessary.

The shape held. Eyes peeked out from the black depths held together with chakra pressure and thought. A grouping of ridges sprouted up from it middle, ran back and forth like a spinal column shaking itself finally free. It moved effortlessly from a roughly sculpted shape to a creature, something that pretended to breathe as small nodules burst from its bottom and reached slowly for the ground. These would be legs, and clawed attachments formed from the iron sand as well. With a sigh, the enormous creature hovered in mid air, several meters long and ferocious.

It was a dragon. A single shape divided into individual plates arranged in layers, but still one thing.

A dragon.</sub>

[Naitome]

<sub>--| He dispelled his chakra until all had grown quiet around him. He had to find a target, now that the rudimentary shape had finally been achieved. He focused on creating a tunnel, from his heart out to his hands. The heart was the focal point of chakra circulation throughout the body. He held on to the final ram seal once more, stubborn and unyielding, and he focused his vision to a tree twenty-five meters off in the distance.

He closed his eyes and visualized the dream-scape; a flat land expanse of perception and concept inundated with flow and ebb, like an ocean contained in the spaces of his head...the cold and warm currents of idea, the tiniest fragments of existence shattered against themselves as he was collected into a path of the dream pool divergent from want, this was purposeful intent and drive, motivation in the face of the surreal, an emotive echo of what was... opened them. Created.

He heard the air pressure shift around him. The ground swayed. His chakra began to filter mineral ore out of the very sand ground of the environment. As he slowly squinted, he saw that the dragon had quickly manifested in almost full completeness. There was a knot of pressure at its center as wings exploded outwards rapidly. Black beating impressions, like blades waving in the aether.

It extended its back end into a powdery tail that thrashed around and slapped against the ground. Pulses of magnetized waves gently rocked back and forth within the core. He saw bubbles of iron floating up throughout it while trapped air tried to escape. His eyes flickered over to the tree in the distance. As he raised his hand, he saw the dragon of iron beat its mass of wings slowly and rise a bit into the air, carried by his own energies.

He thrust his arm suddenly forward. The dragon took flight. Tiny collections of chakra and densely packed air seemed to evaporate out into the air as it flew. Its clawed hands outstretched and reached for the tree. It's iron tail snapped, and Naitome could feel the pull of chakra still connected to his hand and heart. With a dry soundless roar the dragon plunged the entirety of its body into the tree. Conflicting internal pressures ripped the tree apart, tore through the trunk like paper.

The iron sand used for the technique imploded around the destroyed piece of nature. It recollected around the other end, reforming the dragon's body from solely its chakra-based memory of shape. His manipulations seemed finally complete and with a heavy sigh, he allowed the chakra to float away back into the air. Silence returned as the dragon became a pile of dark grains behind the ruined surface of the tree.</sub>

[Messatsu!]

+100

[Naitome]

<sub>--| He cleared his mind of all unnecessary thoughts, letting a peculiar quiet evolve from his sense of satisfaction, allowing the dragon to recede into nothing. His hands began to expand and contract, forming pointless handseals as nothing more than shapes in the void of night. He still sat, his legs crossed, on the ground that was his training area as he envisioned the end form of what he hoped to accomplish. Mastery. This first training was purely about visualization. He'd imagined a black sphere of chakra in his earliest dreams, and now...now he could arrange that dream into reality.


As the chakra subtly rose within him, his thoughts drifted to a vision of the pyramid-like structures dotting the Kaze No Kuni coast he'd wandered as a child, collecting itself in mid-air, surrounding him. His muscles tensed in anticipation while his mind wandered. Negatively charged chakra was difficult to mold, and as it wasn't normally in the spectrum of magnetic force needed to create solid forms, even more difficult to envision. It was created through the manipulation of positive and negatively charged chakra particles melding into each other, but in a manner that allowed the negatively charged particle to take over. This wasn't balance, it was just more interruption, and his control would have to be up to the task.


This amalgamation of form and substance mixed with the absence of nature manipulation. This is what caused most shinobi to hesitate before attempting pure chakra techniques of an kind, but when combined with the inherent strengths of his kekkei genkai...the certainty of success was unknown. He'd seen firsthand, the only other Zantetsuken he'd ever known, Hirota, using nothing but magnetic entropy to repel or push whole caravans out of harms way. He wanted the same power. He wanted even more than that.

The chakra inside of his body raged. He could feel the faint sparks that rose form the positively charged particles. He could feel the coldness and absence of the negatively charged particles. Both floated throughout the air. They were tiny kinetic pops of energy attaching haphazardly to one another. His chakra reached out like a limb seeking to grasp and hold them together.


With great effort, he conjured a single flat square of chakra, which rose after being collected from various points on his tenketsu. It floated in front of him, while he stretched out his right arm and made a tight fist. The wall flattened even more, became rectangular as his fingers undulated above it It appeared as if they were communicating instructions, and the square grew larger and larger until it had formed a wall. This would be the first wall of the thought form bristling beneath his imagination. His left hand stretched out as well, sunk below the right, and formed a second fist, as the square tapered and narrowed off one of its edges.

He formed a lonely triangle of pure chakra, glistening brightly as the sun fell. Everywhere he looked was enveloped in darkness, save the pulsing light drifting off of the sliver of energy before him. The sword at his back seemed to lurch forwards, drawn, to a marvel of magnetism pouring into and out of the world.</sub>

[Naitome]

<sub>--| Shifting motions caught in a pattern of black-light that reflected off of itself. There was a flat positioning of chakra edging its way slowly towards a true prism. His chakra was difficult to rein in, and his control over minimizing the amount of energy he was putting out faded as time continued. His eyes were strained from lack of sleep, but he pushed the fatigue aside. This was to be his test as a shinobi. He allowed the first chakra construct to disappear completely. He took a few calming breaths. When all that could be heard was silence, his hands moved in a blur to form a string of calming handseals and begin anew.

What little illumination was given to his training grounds from the moon seemed to be sucked in towards Naitome. His hands stretched out. He was seeking to contain the invisible platform of physical and spiritual pressure leaking from his tenketsu. Again, positive and negative charges flowed through the chakra. He felt it take shape as subtle impressions of a pin-prick sensation spreading across his upper body. He moved his hands in a counter-clockwise rotation. He saw the softness of the malleable chakra follow his movements.


Suddenly, where before he'd only been able to form a single triangular wall, the out-flowing bubble of chakra visibly hardened into a black flatness. It stretched into a triangle, split at its center, formed two. Without any outward indication, a cracking sound began to spread from the shape, and Naitome struggled to hold on to the energy altogether. His palms began to itch as chakra lept out of him, spinning around the form, adding strength to it in its weak places, removing excess where it was no longer necessary.

A third triangular wall was created. The three shapes connected at both ends, while a flat square was stretched across their bottom. He'd formed the initial prism of chakra. Beside the near-pyramids top, a residual chakra signature evaporated into the night air. He closed his eyes and tried to feel it out with only his sense of touch. The combination of battling particles produced almost a breeze. He felt the faint touch of wind on his skin. The pyramid hovered a few inches from his face.

He senses stretched out to encompass the interior of the prism as well. The black cover of negatively charged force that had tainted the chakra construct were fading. They became a dull gray as his chakra fluctuated. He was tiring himself out from the efforts at control. With his eyes still closed he withdrew his chakra and took a sharp breath in. The object vanished from sight and the night was enveloped in quiet once more. He stood and stretched, before unrolling a small blanket and resolving himself to a brief nap before the next attempt.</sub>

[Naitome]

The sound of windows burst open. Everywhere, surrounding him, tunnels of light latched on to pollution-thick fog and floating dust and the bile and dung and overgrown molds of a hundred thousand lost creatures converging on a landscape that did not exist. He was deep within the clinging dream architecture of his own mind. There were stories and armor-shelled memories and daemons. There were monsters and atrocities of form committed to a purity of vileness so absolute that it made their grotesquerie seem beautiful. He was a stranger and a creator. An outcast. A god.

He opened his eyes, or imagined he did, or hoped to, and saw himself sitting on a boat formed from the cobalt chitin of some gargantuan insect, the sky a swirling vortex of color and pattern that coalesced with a nearby system of hills and valleys. He sat atop water that shimmered in strange reflection of an alien heaven. He was not frightened. He observed.

The ocean around the large boat seemed sick with color, and from its depths, small aquatic thoughts jumped up and met the air and took the form of flowers or knives or pointed teeth. These things arched overhead, back and forth, and without much thought as to their purpose or his own, Naitome reached out with an interrupting wave of chakra, his only intention being control.

The wave of chakra was formed with Naitome's knowledge of...nothing, for what constituted knowledge in this place....as its base....so fleeting his thoughts were, so fragile and empty and full and emphatic and strange. He constructed a foundation of energetic rigidity, a contradiction. As such, his chakra sought mass and material with a kind of second-hand intelligence. It spread away from his body quickly. It gathered and pulled at the moisture in the air, the sand that was not on the ground (except in that far away dystopia where he lay), but hungrily sought other things as well.

It devoured the odd physical forms crossing back and forth over the boat. It bit at motes of dust. The chakra sought out the original hardness of his own skin cells. It probed through and deeply beneath the multicolored water. All was imposed upon to re-arrange itself.

All was introduced into the swirling mineral chasm of the surrounding few feet. It created a barrier of transformation that solidified desire into action. This barrier represented Naitome's expanding energies. He watched a thin crystalline frame spread out. Everywhere that it met solid matter, or his idea of solid matter, it grew larger and darker.

Thin veins of translucent sand bridged out from their origin point at Naitome's feet. They were finding connections and settling. Naitome felt a palpable tension in the air. His chakra drained slowly into the forming of metal that lost its sheen and gained it in the same instant, beneath a sun that had long vortexed out of creation. The front end of the boat took on a strange glow as the steady forward motion it navigated primarily on its own, slowed and eventually halted.

Over the sides, he could see the same particulate iron attaching like seaweed from the waters. It was creating multiple fractured facets reflecting his surroundings. They would soon goad all around him into stillness. He was becoming slowly encased in a thin layer of his own creation. From random rock and moisture, from solid molecule to splintered ore to the stiff center of matter itself, his influence opened him to the fragility of existence, then hardened.

It was not real...but it was a dream....so it was real.

[Naitome]

<sub>The surface of his skin was cold. It began to bristle with sensation. The creeping crystalline metal skein was now feeding. It collected amongst its mass more than just his own dead and insubstantial tissue. His chakra continued a quickening counter-clockwise motion as it spiralled out from his heart. It pooled into the air in a great gout of blood that became sand and laughter and dry air.

It surrounded him in a shroud of dense see-through material. It was thick and light violet in color, or black as midnight, or bright and blinding. It jutted up at bizarre angles that pushed through his skin in places without drawing anything but sound. It soon gave him the appearance of a statue, or of having been carved from discolored ice. He stood tall against the assaulting chakra that built a hard shield around his body, and forced his intense concentration to radiate inwards.

He felt as if he were pushing through the veil of physical being. Each of his heart beats brought with it another surge of magnetized energy. As his hands clasped together, his command of iron, his mastery, sluiced each harsh mineral component into a single construct. Everything seemed still. He became a single reflective spike in an ocean of ebony matter.

He pushed even harder with his chakra. He found that the wall of iron was pulling at its own internal components. What he'd formed was full of holes. Each one grew larger. They spread from the size of single pores into fist sized intrusions of blank space. He was nothing more than a shadow shaped hole in the world.

With an awkward lurching impression that threw him off balance, he heard the sound of cracking. It began at his feet. Slowly, it worked its way up and out. It spread to the solid ocean as well. He was in a cocoon of matter one moment, and the next, caught in a vortex of shards that rained around him and reduced everything still and perfect and stiff into a billion broken pieces.</sub>