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The link is also in the synopsis
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They sparred half a dozen more times before calling it to an end. The outcomes of the spars were the same as the first one. Takuma was barely able to hand clear hits, much less do any real damage by any means. The only time he managed to land a serious hit was by setting it up beforehand with genjutsu.
They restricted themselves to C-rank jutsu, but even then, the sheer difference in skill was crystal clear. Anko's growth in the same period had far outstripped whatever he had managed to achieve.
It was disheartening.
"Are you not training properly?" Anko grabbed his face by the cheeks, pulling him close, and stared into his eyes. "Your energy imbalance should've been resolved by now. Why is it still so skewed?" The location of flecks in the iris was used to discern the imbalance of foundational energies.
He managed to escape her grip and rubbed his stinging face. "Shadow clones are slowing down the progress," he said helplessly.
The current scientific zeitgeist recognised life experience, emotions, mental faculties, and physical and mental health, among others, as factors influencing spiritual energy—but simultaneously failed to find a reliable way to predict its patterns or control it. Unlike the straightforward physical energy, its counterpart was as fickle as the wind.
Circumstantial evidence made it quite clear that Takuma's use of shadow clones was raising his spiritual energy. He was experiencing more than a normal human would in a day through his use of clones. Furthermore, his experiments with Yamanaka Inenpachi, which enabled him to use shadow clones as he did, led him to interface directly with spiritual energy. The clone's experiences and memories were carried back to him in the returning spiritual energy.
He had managed to improve the imbalance rather than worsen it, albeit much slower than he would have without using the shadow clone jutsu, all because his strength and conditioning training with weighted gear was yielding phenomenal results, thanks to puberty and his chakra enhancement.
"That's worrying," Kurenai commented. "Doesn't that mean you'll have to indefinitely continue harsh physical training just to keep your imbalance from getting worse?"
"Fortunately, that's not the case," he sighed. "I've noticed that the rise in spiritual energy is gradually tapering off. My mind and body are getting used to this."
In truth, he was still worried whether the trend would continue when he started using a third clone daily. Because if that were the case, the burden would increase with each additional clone until he would no longer keep the imbalance steady, let alone improve it.
If only there were some prior research he could refer to. Unfortunately, he and Inenpachi were "pioneers" in the topic they had chosen to pursue.
"So what do you think?" he asked, changing the subject. "What must I do to get stronger? Because I need to get stronger." He was going to try what Anko was doing—raising his understanding of chakra—but he needed more concrete advice.
Anko nodded with a lack of sarcasm. "That's for sure."
Kurenai glanced at her friend. Anko had set up the sparring session because she wanted to get a measure of Takuma's combat ability. She didn't know why Anko wanted it, but she was adamant that he needed to improve himself in the short- to medium-term.
"What you need is to be challenged," Kurenai said, gathering their attention. "From what I saw, your fundamentals are sound, but your ability to tie them together cohesively needs work."
Takuma frowned, wanting to defend himself, but Anko spoke up before he could.
"That makes sense. Your current fighting style is a result of your experience—experience that you earned by actively fighting. It definitely works, or else, you would've been dead by now, but I'm not sure you know why it works."
His unsaid reply faded away. She knew about his past as an underground prizefighter and was correct in her assessment. Instinct and results—that was how he had learned everything he knew, during and after the Ring. When he was fighting as Scars, he didn't have time to think when his opponent was trying to bleed him. He used whatever came to his mind, and if it worked, he stuck to it until it failed.
As long as a method worked, he was more than happy to rely on it—pure unsupervised trial-and-error.
A part of him liked it because it was the opposite of his process for learning ninjutsu, which had him toil away for hours poring over theory in jutsu scrolls and academic texts just to understand what he was trying to do before he could even try. He knew he struggled with ninjutsu more than others, and the amount of effort afforded to him by shadow clones and his chakra reserves was the only thing keeping him afloat.
"To tell you the truth, there's nothing wrong with what you do. Most people learn the same way." Kurenai shrugged before fixing with a frank stare. "It's fine if you're satisfied with being 'good', but if you want to become 'great', I'm afraid you're going to find your efforts greatly inadequate."
Takuma felt a thump in his chest. This was coming from a jōnin. Even if Yuhi Kurenai was a genjutsu specialist, jōnin had lofty standards. She had to be great at other things as well, in addition to her speciality, to even qualify for jōnin.
He swallowed nervously before asking, "What do you mean when you said I needed a challenge?"
"They say: Don't mess with a winning formula. The issue there is that you might not get to fix it when it does fail. One unfortunate mistake in a fight and you're dead in a ditch somewhere. You need to reduce the risk you bear across the board obsessively. You might think your counter to a particular situation is good enough, but what if there's a better and safer option?
"You need to have every single choice you think is right or wrong challenged repeatedly. If it's right, it needs to be reaffirmed; if it's wrong, you either fix it or find an alternative, then challenge that new solution to see if it holds up. And at every step of the way, you must understand what you're doing. Even if you're not in a position to actively think about it during a fight, your subconscious and body must know it deeply enough to act on your behalf."
The crux of the solution was to break down everything he was doing during a fight, analyse every layer, put it through cycles of testing, and then repeat it in training until it was etched into the bone.
No matter how it was done, it was bound to be a time-consuming and taxing process.
Anyone going through it would have to face their faults and bad habits and be forced to change them, which was rarely easy, especially when those "so-called" faults and habits hadn't created problems yet. Change was often difficult. Even if none of that were a problem, finding solutions to everything that's wrong would be a challenge, because the chosen solution might have a flaw that doesn't come up during training, leading to a flaw being replaced by another.
Was he ready to do this? With the squad finally getting to its feet, it was time for him to return to the field. His workload was only going to increase from now on. And it wasn't like he didn't have other things on his plate in regard to training that he could just dump.
"I know you're busy; there's no need to rush. This does need some serious commitment if you want to do it properly. But don't unnecessarily procrastinate on it." Anko put a hand on his shoulder. "You'll need a lot of help to get through this, but don't worry, I'll be there to help."
Takuma gazed at her. Her free-spirited smile never seemed more reliable. He closed his eyes and breathed out the tension in his body.
"Then I'll rely on you."
———
.
"That's good advice," Maruboshi said at the dinner table.
The first person Takuma talked to about Anko and Kurenai's advice was, of course, his most trusted person.
When Anko said that he would need a lot of help, she was understating it. To ensure a wide variety of issues were addressed, he needed to train against a range of opponents who could attack him with their own unique fight styles and insights. A treasure trove of insights like Maruboshi's was going to be crucial for levelling up his style.
"I hope you'll help."
"Of course, dear child. I'll help in any way I can," Maruboshi said as he put a picked egg on his plate.
Unlike his spars with his old mentor, where the latter would let Takuma try things out while occasionally throwing a question he had to figure out on the fly— a very gentle style of guidance—these spars were going to be different. Maruboshi and everyone else would be attacking him with the intent to exploit his every weakness to the point of frustration, so that he would've no choice but to change if he didn't want to get used to losing.
"I hope you realised that both of them recognised your effort with that advice," Maruboshi said.
"How?"
"They wouldn't have given you that advice if they thought you weren't ready. And I agree, I think you can handle it and emerge from the other side better," Maruboshi gently smiled.
"That's too much. I'm nowhere near that level." Takuma smiled, accepting the compliment with some self-deprecation.
"Who are you planning to ask?"
"Anyone I can get my hands on. Friends, people from work, war buddies…"
"Lady Uchiha?"
"Of course. I was going to ask her next," Takuma said matter-of-factly. He wasn't going to start this self-improvement project without both of his mentors' support.
"If she agrees, you'll have a unique advantage that not many would have."
"How so?"
"Don't you remember how Lady Uchiha described how she uses her clan's eyes?"
Takuma blinked before the realisation struck his mind.
"Of course!" he exclaimed.
———
.
The next day, Takuma cut off his clone's training time by an hour and sent it to meet with Mikoto to ask for her help.
"I don't mind," Mikoto readily agreed with a smile. "It'll be my pleasure to break you down into pieces."
"And then build me up better and stronger?"
She winked. "We will see about that after we break you."
Mikoto was already going to be immensely helpful because of her vast experience as a jōnin, but she also had the Sharingan, which itself was already a huge help. But Mikoto was also uniquely positioned to help him because of her unique way of using her clan's eyes that went beyond "monkey copy", as she called it.
She analysed her opponent's moves to figure out the perfect counter against them using her already massive cache of precious knowledge of the shinobi she had fought before that only ever grew with every subsequent fight.
If she used her methods against him, he probably wouldn't need anyone else because he would be fighting a catalogue of opponents, all targeting his weaknesses using their own unique methods.
Just thinking about it made him excited.
"But how about we make this interesting?" she said.
"I don't think we can."
But then an amusing smile appeared on Mikoto's face, which did worry him a little.
"What?" he asked apprehensively.
"Enduring a thorough and repeated trouncing by someone far stronger, like me, won't hurt your pride that much. Because you're going to expect it. But what about a peer? That'd at least bruise the ego, don't you think?"
Takuma blinked. "I…I'm not one to toot my own horn, but I'm not getting trounced by a peer, at least not in my age bracket. Defeat is definitely possible, but I'm not going down without a bitter fight."
He wasn't arrogant enough to think about himself as anything of note when he knew about the monsters that walked the land, but he did have the pride of being a tough opponent to anyone who could be called a peer. He was even confident giving Anko, who had suddenly shot past him, a decent challenge if they fought to their fullest.
"And your eldest son doesn't count. That's not a peer!" Takuma said quickly. Any and all scenarios involving that freak of a genius would end in defeat and possibly trauma. "Though I'd like to spar him at least once."
"Want me to ask him?"
"Would you? No! Actually, I'll ask him myself," Takuma said after getting tempted. It wasn't a good move to invite your boss to spar through the boss's mother.
"I'm not talking about my son. I'm talking about my other student."
"Izumi?"
After he had introduced the two Uchiha kunoichi, they had formed a student-teacher relationship much like the one between Takuma and Mikoto.
Takuma's eyes narrowed. "You're saying that Uchiha Izumi can trounce me?"
"I do," Mikoto said bluntly. "She's a talented Uchiha with a potent sharingan who adapted to my teachings like the highest-quality clay under a master's touch. You know that, despite my skill, genjutsu isn't my speciality, my dear. I've been teaching her my speciality. And unlike you, she has the time to meet me more than once a week for an hour, and I've been happy to oblige.
"You wanted a challenge, didn't you? Let's see if you can stand up to this one."
She was trying to provoke him, and he could tell because it was working.
.
———
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The link is in the synopsis!