Gotta Improve [P]

It was a good day to train. The sun was high in the sky, and people were outside; activity was good. Roku could hear children laughing and worried parents telling their children to slow down before they hurt themselves. He could hear shopkeepers advertising their wares to passersby with renewed enthusiasm each time. The air had a beautiful aroma to it. The boy could smell ramen from the ramen shop across the street and barbecue meat from the restaurant a few places down. The air had a slight chill to it, but nothing that would be cause to dress warmly.

Roku himself stood beneath an electronic lantern dangling from a cloth overhang that protruding from the front facing wall of a sushi bar. He wore black sandals that were mostly featureless and identical to that of almost every other Shinobi in the village. He also wore a white robe that drooped all the way to his ankles and opened up at the torso, exposing his bare chest. He wore it this way so that he could remove it as quickly as possible in a combat scenario and avoid it obstructing his bone techniques. He wore no shirt underneath because it’d just be torn to shreds anyway. He wore a pair of simple black cloth pants that were mostly obscured by the robe, but sometimes it’d billow in the right way for the pants to be visible. On the left shoulder of Roku’s robe was sewn the metal plate of the village’s forehead protector.

Today, the boy had been tasked with learning a new jutsu to improve himself. He decided that it was high time for him to learn the Sensory Ninjutsu so that he could find himself aware of his surroundings in a combat scenario. If there was anything that would be the boy’s downfall, it’d be the stealth of others. To this point, he had never had a means to detect hidden hostiles. A scroll lay open on the table to his right as a sort of manual to perform the Sensory Technique. Sometimes a Shinobi’s greatest tool was the written word; something most people were completely unaware of.

There were no handseals specified for use by the scroll to perform the jutsu, so Roku deduced the technique was probably more difficult. Usually, techniques that did not require handseals were more difficult because they relied on pure and precise chakra control. However, it actually suited his fighting style more, as often times he had a weapon of the Shikotsumyaku in his hand or a deadly bone spike protruding from his arm in such a way that performing handseals was difficult or impossible.

So Roku began. He allowed some ambient chakra to escape his body, floating harmlessly in his surroundings. This chakra then began to probe for other chakra sources. He knew people were in the area, yet he felt no chakra signatures. Angrily, his brow furrowed and he focused harder. He focused so hard, in fact, that a small stream of blood descended from his left nostril. He didn’t let up. He gained a severe headache. But… he could feel them. The numerous people around him, he could feel them all. And he slowly was able to let up concentration until he could perform the technique in passing. He could even multitask eating and performing the Sensory Technique.

He performed the technique quite a few times, each time getting better and better at it until he could do it and even participate in conversation with the chef of the restaurant he was eating at, complementing him on the dishes he had prepared for the young Shinobi.