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She was still looking at Hitomi and was wondering what she wanted. Usually she didn't like people that got too close to her. People needed distance and for her to stand there beside her try to get conversation going was already a sin. But she waved it off, knowing that it didn't really matter what she thought. She was originally planning on reading the second mission in her mission logs and now she was instead facing a Konoha shinobi who thought she was also from Konoha. She guessed that she had enough time and energy to play the game since she didn't really belong to any village that was still thriving. As long as she didn't know her the snow village headband it was all good.

And now the girl was talking about her own training. She honestly was a relatively big talker, liking to talk and rarely listen. She just let her keep going until she had to take a breath again. She thought about interjecting a few sly comments in between just to catch the girl's reaction but she was going to be nice. Hitomi looked like someone she couldn't remember after all so she must not be that bad of a person. The only thing that's got cut out for her is the fact that she talked too much but it seemed that nowadays all girls were like that. She told her how she was having trouble with her own jutsus and that's why she had decided to come out here to the forest to train today.

That much she could sympathize with, maybe. She was trying to learn that A rank jutsu for a whole night now and hadn't gotten any further than she had when she first started. Learning jutsus wasn't all about hard work. Certain talent and skill was also needed. She was sure that she was going to be hearing a lot of her journeys in training which wasn't something she was greatly interested in. But it would be rude if she wanted to do so because she was supposedly this nice sweet girl that everyone liked.

And that was when she heard Hitomi ask her whether she wanted to train together. A spar? Honestly she wasn't really interested in a spar and Hitomi guessed from the way her eyes drifted to the pond that she didn't. Instead she thought of another to train together. They could train the same jutsu. That was going to be hard since they were supposedly not from the village. If she decided that she wanted to learn a jutsu that only could be learned by shinobi of konoha, her secret would be revealed. It was that simple.

So instead she said that she would spar with her. She couldn't have the chance of getting her secret revealed to a Konoha shinobi. Though she would probably have to give up some of her information if she decided to spar with her because she was going to be using Yukina Clan jutsus. She wondered if Hitomi even knew about the Yukina Clan or simply Yukigakure no Sato. She accepted the notion of the spar because she really wanted to get this over with. There was still a mission log that she wanted to read.

She was starting to have doubts when the chakra was starting to engulf into the pond water. She never liked it when she had doubts because it usually meant that she was going to have to try again. Her intuition was almost always right on the spot and that was why she hated when she could expect failure even before she could see it with her own eyes. If she could tell that she was to fail, then the chances of failing in actuality was between ninety to one hundred percent. Her doubts rose when the chakra enfused with the water and the clear liquid turned a light blue color because of the chakra. She was sure she would have to try again.

She kept on releasing her chakra and waited for the outcome. Not as worried about wasting as much as proving her intuition and doubt right, she was secretly praying that it wouldn't. The pond water started to turn into ice, which wasn't what she was looking for. Though she had trained the previous ranks of the jutsu, she had wasn't sure what to expect. That was when it clicked into her head that she hadn't used a water source back then. Simply because there wasn't one when she trained the jutsu. Now that she was using one, her Hyouton chakra mixed with the natural coldness of the water made the water freeze to ice.

She couldn't possibly use ice from a pond as a weapon when she fights with Yuki no Kami. Then she was certain that she was going to have to use the water particles in the environment instead since water particles weren't physical water that people could see and wouldn't freeze the air. Jotting that down in her head, she hurried to try again. She must learn jutsu at A rank because there were many other jutsus that needed A rank of Yuki no Kami to learn. She needed to raise the bar even higher.

At her level and at her Genin rank she could easily be satisfied with just learning solid B rank jutsus because they were already supposedly very difficult to learn. But after training a few of them she realized that she always need to challenge herself. The more of a challenge she out on herself the better she could be. She always reminded herself that she wasn't like everyone else. She was not going to be satisfied with the bare minimum. If she picked to be a shinobi she wasn't going to stop until she reached the highest rank possible. And it wasn't just for her own glory either. It was for the whole of Yukina Clan.

After the downfall of their village she had used such a long time to rebuild her memory. Now it was slowly starting to come back, where she at least knew her ancestry. She was actually very mad that her village had been destroyed during the war. If it hadn't, then she wouldn't lose her memory and end up being an outsider. She didn't have a home anymore and it was all because people were greedy and wanted power. They destroyed what was originally hers and she was out to take it back, each person, each village and each country at a time.

She went down to the pond again. After washing her face with the cold and refreshing pond water, she was ready to train again. She noticed how much focus she had placed on working on Yuki Bunshin no Oni that she had completely diverted from the actual training. At the beginning of yesterday night she had planned on training for Yuki no Kami. Instead, she had spent countless hours trying to get the clone right, a jutsu she had already learned and was merely supposed to be perfecting. The whole point was to carry on after the clone was made so that she could train-spar with it and hopefully get to the next level with Yuki no Kami too.

But of course she hadn't gotten to that point at all. Her clone was more insane than she was as a fighter. The jutsus that it had used against her and the speed of those jutsus had caught her completely off-guard to the point where all the remaining chakra in her body was poured to dodging them. It was definitely not a smart idea to spar with her own clone unless she had way more chakra to spare to put up the fight. But she had learned and this time it would be a completely different way of approach. She stood staring at the clear pond waters and thought long and hard.

For her training to actually start, she would have to define the object or objects she wanted to turn to ice. At the moment she had no real object around her that she wanted to turn to ice unless she wanted to freeze a tree. With her current strength in learning, freezing a tree seemed highly unlikely. But she also didn't want to have to resort to freezing a body of water either because that's just dull. So what are her choices? She thought it'd actually be good to start with trying to freeze a tree since there were so many around her being in the forests of Hi no Kuni. If there was anything that this forest didn't lack, it was trees.

She walked over to the tree that was behind her. This tree was slightly bigger especially the trunk. The trunk sprouted about a dozen long winded branches which then sprouted another dozen smaller trees. It was a big tree. She surveyed her surroundings, trying to find a tree that was smaller. Thankfully she did. There was a tree that was closer to the pond which was evidently smaller, with a medium sized trunk and only half a dozen branches. It must be a new tree. She knew that she was going to damage the tree while trying to freeze it so she wasn't too concerned with that as opposed to trying to learn Katon jutsus and risking causing a forest fire.

She formed the necessary handseals for Yuki no Kami. It felt good to form the handseals because she was actually doing the training that she had wanted to do. She was going to train on an increment level where if she could freeze the tree in front of her, the smaller version, she would then move on to the bigger ones. She knew that this training would take a long time and was rather glad it did since she was certain she still had awhile to stay here in Hi no Kuni.

"Tomomi!" she called to the half burning building. She saw that the flames were about to catch on the wooden panels of the roof meaning that in seconds or even less than seconds the panels of the roof and the ceiling could fall on top of her. Since she had no Suiton jutsus, she could extinguish any of the flames here now. What was left for her to do was to try her best to find her friend before they both became prisoners of this burning house. She would start at the most dangerous ends of the house which was the second floor and then make her way down to the first. She first went to Tomomi's bedroom, opening the door and peering inside. Another waft of smoke filled her eyes and nostrils making it infinitely hard to breathe. She walked over to the bed and noticed that her friend was lying there unconscious.

That made her job a little easier because she had found her friend. But now the bigger part of the problem came. How was she going to get her friend downstairs. She only had so much strength and could hardly think that with breathing a difficulty, she knew she could barely make it out alive. The flames were engulfing every part of the room as she stood there to think. She walked over to the bed and tried to make her friend wake up. But it seemed as though she was already unconscious. There wasn't enough time for her to get water from outside and then come back in again. Every second mattered. She began to cough violently as the smoke became thicker. What was she going to do? The Yukina Clan specialized in only ice techniques and she had only learned ice techniques. Could she possibly freeze flame? The flame would just melt it.

She thought that both of them were just going to die there. But she knew that if she didn't try at least something, they'd definitely die without even a chance of survival. She ran towards the window and opened it, peering down below. She could use Yukigakure no Jutsu to her advantage. At least the temperature in the room would drop and she would have more time to think about what to do. She hollered for the men down below to hurry up and come up here while she formed the necessary handseals for the jutsu. Yukigakure no jutsu was only a deference and wouldn't be able to last too long. She called for them to bring a stretcher too as there was still someone trapped inside the room. They went ahead to do just that as she poured her chakra from her hands and to the air that was now drifting in from the open window. She wasn't sure how good it would work though

She called the name of the jutsu and immediately the temperature felt much much cooler. She had trained herself to a rank of that jutsu so that there was no chance she would and could fail on the first try. This was one of the first jutsus, other than Yuki no Kami that she had learned. With the temperature drop she was allowed to buy time. Incidentally she knew that the men outside who would be coming in shortly was not as prone to coldness but she knew that since she still had chakra she could form the jutsu more than once. Leaving Tomomi's bedroom for a few seconds, she would run along the hallway and initially form two Yukigakure no Jutsu so that the men were not too bogged down by heat. They would still need to be fairly careful with the burning flames though.

And because of that, when they got to where Tomomi was lying and took her out on the stretcher, she stayed behind them, just in case the burning flames would cause the roof to crash down. One of the pieces of wood came falling when they reached the stairs and she had had to use Yuki no Kami in desperate measure. This stopped the flame from further burning but it only lasted for a second. She was sure that if the man hadn't gotten Tomomi out of there fast enough, they would all be trapped there and would die.

It was very different fighting a person with a whip instead of a sword or saber. Tomomi had uncoiled her whip within three feet distance of Sayuri and tried to land an attack to her shoulder. The thing about whips was that they were harder to control because of the distance that was needed. Only the tip of the whip would land on her opponents whereas the sword was allowed to be maneuvered so that the blade could get very close to the person. It was the reason she chose a katana as her primary weapon.

She jumped to avoid the whip as it came crashing down on the snow creating a relatively deep mark of seperation. In the seconds that followed, she would return an attack at Tomomi in close range. That was the beauty of swords. She slashed at Tomomi's left shoulder. Since she was just recouping her whip, she hadn't quite noticed the attack until it landed. But she had gone soft and only cut her lightly with her sword. It was a friendly spar not one to the death. And she was her friend. They were both smiling and apparently having a pretty good time even if it was sparring match. 

Tomomi finally got her jutsu working and sent a firebal in her direction. She saw the fireball and tried to jump out of the way. But because she wasn't fast enough, her arm was burned a little by the fireball. They were both at similar levels of strength making a sparring match such a good thing. All the other members of the clan were too strong for her and would probably kill her. Only with her friends could she spar and still manage to learn something at the same time.

The spar continued. Though her arm hurt from the burn, it wasn't as bad as if she took a direct attack. They both continued, with Sayuri countering with a jutsu of her own. She chose to use swallows jutsu since the Yuki no Kami wouldn't really affect either of the girls having lived in Yuki all their lives. It seemed that though sustaining injuries, they enjoyed sparring with each other. From her standpoint she guessed that this wasn't the first time they sparred with each other. 

She thought that her dream was going to be just about the spar. But she was wrong. As she was just comfortable as a spectator, the whole place turned black. Not knowing what was going on, she would wait for it clear again. And that was when she heard a scream in the middle of nowhere. Looking left and right all she saw was darkness. Who was screaming and where?