Training in Haiti

Cocaine was sitting on his couch, doing nothing. Hearing of the ever present war that was going on Cocaine laughed at the fools, secretly wanting to join them, Cocaine doubted he was strong enough to sustain a kill amount and constant amount of death hanging about. Cocaine Got up from his couch and walked over to his fridge to pull out some soda. Upon pulling it out, Soakudo (His mental friend.) was standing there with a frown. Surprised of how he didn't even feel the entity leave him Cocaine watched him stare at him with a blank face.

<What are you doing?> Cocaine replied in an obvious Tone. <<Doing what I want?>> Cocaine laughed nervously as Soakudo gripped his head and slammed it into the fridge. <Lounging around like a damn fat ass.....> Soakudo didn't release his grasp as He dragged Cocaine down into the basement of the crack house. Cocaine was awoken to find himself in a huge box that was dimly lit. <<So, explain to me why we are here? I am missing Jerry springer>> A fist of water emerged form the ground and punched Cocaine vertically in to the air.

a harsh landing followed after it and Cocaine grumbled to himself. <You remember how we were "acquainted" don't you?> Cocaine nodded, like he could forget his forced fusion with this genocide monster. The fist of water came back to cocaine to destroy him again. <Idiot, I can read your thoughts. I was summoned from a sleep. I was sick of the worlds while my brethren decided to be idiots and selfishly ravage the lands. They called us the Negroes" You might have described them as a person from the lightening village. Although I was nothing of the sort.> Some quick nostalgia was floating in the mind of the Imaginary Friend as he thought of his next choice of words. <I am a pure Daemon, so you could simply state I was the only True one. Enjoyed your little history about me? You wont be getting them frequently. Your Current strength is failing and your weakness has been revealed. My own power is your downfall and when that fails. You have nothing else to rely on. Lets change that shall we?>

The Ninja's mind was boggling with the new source of information. He watched The dome fill with water halfway. Cocaine stood on the water and tried to pull some up. In angry disdain that Soakudo had taken away his power Cocaine looked at Soakudo. He was nowhere. Cocaine looked extremely confused and on the edge, he hadn't felt this desperation of life ever. He was afraid and Cocaine wanted to live. A bright ball appeared and clipped Cocaine at a high speed. Cocaine flipped back from the force and into the water.

Cocaine's eyes snapped open, pissed. Before he could digress his anger Cocaine felt a numerous amount of volts run through the water. Cocaine Screamed as his body burned in the water. Floating to the top of the water with his body smoking Cocaine stood up slowly. <<Damn...>> Cocaine looked at the ball of light. It soon stretched and took a form. Made out of radiating electricity he had arms and legs like he usually had. Except his face seemed to have a never ending open grin on his face. Cocaine cursed when he saw the hachiwara in the opposition's hand. This was not going to bode well.

Cocaine jumped back away from the being of electricity his snickering figure showing slight disgust in his smile. <<Ive never seen you use this power before. Explain to me why you held out on me>> Soakudo smirked at his supposed master's plight <You're pathetic Ishkur, If number 11 looked at you, he'd destroy you himself, Let me show you the first steps to how to improve your shitty self> From the lake below them 1000 blades of water came around himself. Radiating with electricity they were flung one by one at Cocaine. Cocaine eyes widened at the speed. Running to the left he pulled on enough strength to find a bo staff. Looking at the quality he cursed.

The Man himself was draining Cocaine of his energy. Cocaine flipped the bo staff around, his visage getting used to the weight of the weapon. Cocaine ran swiftly on the water, trying to get the upper edge on the Imaginary Friend. Much to his avail the Imaginary Friend was much, much faster than Cocaine himself. As Cocaine prepared a diagonal strike to his Imaginary Friend's chest, Soakudo took the hachiwara and simply tapped the weapon of Cocaine. The electricity conducted into the staff, the volts radiating through Cocaine as the man screamed. Cocaine took notice to how the electricity freely flew through his body. Cocaine mustered up some of his strength and jumped back. Trying to raise the smoking Bo staff he found his left arm was paralyzed. wracked with over exposure to electricity He screamed to himself.

The ninja was very apparent on the basics of how to start this generation of electricity, he was angered that Soakudo was able to control it freely is what pissed him off. <You retard....You could have ALL the power I posses and you still wouldn't be able to do SHIT at all! You know why? You lack the damn skill.> Cocaine seethed through his teeth a major frown do disdain appeared on his face as he said nothing. his pride has been trampled on. Cocaine lowered his hand to take a handful of water. He focused on the water his eyes deepening on the electricity. Soakudo didn't give him a chance. In a flash, Soakudo was right in front of Cocaine.

His electrified claw of the hachiwara skewering into his stomach. Cocaine coughed up blood, his insides been sizzled sue to the heat of the sped up oxygen cells. <HA!> Cocaine was pummeled into the water by the saw on the hachiwara,tearing at his flesh he sunk underwater. <Like your enemies will give you a chance....> Soakudo waited fro Cocaine to rise. Cocaine was smacked down and slowly waited to rise back up with empty, blurry eyes. His focused snapped back into place. He cupped water as he focused onto it. The H2O atoms, slowly breaking apart started rapidly converging. All the water in the area was tightly compacted and drawn into Cocaine's hand. Screaming he shot this ball of water as a beam at the ceiling and passed out. The rapidly moving electricity was able to allow Cocaine to make a small current of electricity. The electricity remained in his hand, being controlled under his will. His hand crackling with wild, ecstatic power.

Cocaine woke up in a cave, from the extreme amplitude of the blistering cold, Cocaine instantly covered his ears and huddled together. Seeing some cornmeal and chicken. Cocaine gobbled down the meal and went to sleep. Rudely awaken by a slice on his arm cocaine Jolted awake looking around to who had done it. Cocaine looked at his mentor, Soakudo smiling spoke with a tainted voice. <Well retard. I already know your wondering here you are. This is Genesis.> Soakudo threw him out the cave and up a hill, Cocaine found himself to be surrounded on cloudy mountain tops, as far as the vicinity was seen. Cocaine was rejected the time he had to marvel at the beauty before he was attacked by Soakudo and the hachiwara. <<I had no place an area like this still existed on earth...>> Cocaine stated while subconsciously jumped away from Soakudo's plight.

Soakudo stood in a curved way, the hachiwara snapped to his side and he pointed the hachiwara at Cocaine. Cocaine Found his hand running with the current he had before. Laced with his specific reiatsu Cocaine felt himself mold the electricity into his hands. Two ton fas made from electricity, wildly crackling appeared on his arm. Cocaine smiled feeling some sense of achievement, <<So I passes your sadist test huh?>> Cocaine didn't have the moment to make his comment. Cocaine watched an elemental blast explode in his face. Gusts of wind, lightening, bursts of fire, and torrents of water came crashing at cocaine as he was Thrown back.

Cocaine gripped the Ton fa, he was wildly confused and uncertain of what he could do. His previous knowledge of electricity simply contained of pure energy, but this...He could touch it, mold it, feel its essence within his hands. Cocaine stood up with a look of some unknown determination he hadn't felt in a long time. His anger was rising and he ran across the cloudy mountain tops at the Daemon. Cocaine held his right arm perpendicular to his body. The ton fa spiking at the stomach of Soakudo's figure. When Cocaine thrusted, a spike of electricity shot out like a spasm.

Soakudo simply absorbed this electricity and bashed Cocaine across the head to the left. Cocaine staggered for a moment while falling. His head bleeding Cocaine swung his right arm at the fiends legs. Cocaine smiled when he felt himself make contact with the being. his ton fa sliced against the Imaginary Friend's leg only to be absorbed and get kicked away brutally down a mountain. Soakudo pointed the hachiwara at the man and the earth under cocaine went to an extreme. Cocaine quickly began sinking and some of the mist that surrounded him at his upper body. the water constricting his chest and arms, slowly crushing. Controlling the oxygen around his mouth Cocaine's breathing became lapsed, his body having short spasms of Convulsion. Soakduo skipped over to cocaine victoriously. His smile reappearing on his face. the Daemon activated the saw on his hachiwara and easily passed through the water, drilling a slice through the chest of Cocaine.

Cocaine coughed out a multitude of blood and slumped over. His arms broken and body bleeding. The Earth of the mountain spot cocaine out, the water rerleased and Soakudo jumped back lookinga t the result of what hes done. <crap....I think I killed him..> Cocaine's eyes snapped open for the second time in his training sesison. Cocaine struggled to get up. His bark figure rising slowly. A look of unfinished bisuness flashed on the face of Soakudo. Cocaine remebered a skill he aquried from the man. pulse Cocaine appeared above Soakudo, his leg slamming on to the head of the man. Soakudo was berated down his hachiwara accedently stabbing himself. Cocaine used puled away, in a reverse he pushed Soakudo away from him, and teleported himsel to him. Sosaine opened his mouth from behind the Daemon.

Cocaine's eyes lit up and his mouth sprouted pure lightening, shooting pat the head of the Imaginary Friend. Soakudo quickly retalieated dodgeing to the left, his neck getting cut due to the speed and the power of the electricity. he pulled the claw out of his arm and pointed it at The other ninja. Sure to get a lick of damage in Cocaien Used pule again. His heels gainiing blades of electricity on the back of his shoes. He appeared with a flash behind Soakudo. His eyes still lit up with the use of AMP electricity to powering his Reflexes in addition to the original speed of "Pulse".

Cocaine twisted his body with the use of his hips to give a flurry of rapid kicks with the back of his heels to the back of the Imaginary Friend. On the ending kick,, he stuck his heels in the back of the ninja And flipped him over, ramming him into the ground. Soakudo quickly got up and transformed to electricity. He acted sentential, although that didn't stop Cocaine. The ninja jumped up at the Mental charector and exploded another bolt of polarized Electricity. Matching up ever single electron in the body of Soakudo, Cocaine;'s bolt completely overlapped Soakudo entire being. Cocaine watched the Hahciwara dropped to the floo0r and heard a voice in his head. <There are more than this world called "Genesis". Once you become stronger cocaine, You'll see again..I promise you...> Cocaine gripped the hachiwara with his teeth and sliced through the air. opening a portal he stepped through. To his surprise it was in his crack house. Laying on the floor his crackhead servants attended his wounds.

Wouldn't one love to know if growth was rewarded? Then wouldn't lead to a question of what would be the substantial foundation of the cultivable reward to see if the growth was wroth obtaining? Cocaine absolutely hated questions that could never answer itself. Jut led to more questions, ones that ran on forever. The Ninja found himself on the roof of the newly acquainted Ninja mansion (This occurring n a dream state like mind of course), roof was covered by a dome which was clear to see all of the sea life around himself. Sure, ilmenite was one of the things the Ninja's surely loved but this was over the edge. Soakudo had the nerve to leave Cocaine...again. Receiving a text message to meet him on the roof, here Cocaine was, three hours and still no answer. The roof was effectively sealed up in case the dome would untimely crash. Cocaine decided that he couldn't be bothered with this and moved on. The Ninja prepared to flip the switch to lower him into the his Mansion until the most contradictory action almost wanted to happen at the moment. Without warning, the dome above the Ninja crashed, and the millions of gallons and water pressure crushed and filled up the roof. In a split second, Soakudo materialized form the falling water and sunk down to cocaine, enveloping him as his world went black.

*Thwack* A sickening crunch was blown to Cocaine's stomach as the Ninja flipped awake and he looked around him confusingly. He was in the ocean, but he was sitting in a bubble of air. The bubble being 10 feet in radius, is extended with a bubble like dome on top. Cocaine could not clearly see the mansion and he looked at Soakudo who sat 5 feet away form him in the Zen style, smiling silently at the waking Cocaine. A hammer of the seawater came form the Orin above and smacked against Cocaine. The Ninja was knocked into a very undivided attention and a chock of apparel form the brutality of the Imaginary friend. cocaine rubbed his head, looking at the creature quizzically as the Ninja then received another one. Quickly getting irritated, the Ninja dodged the next one and yelled at the Imaginary friend.

<<Explain!>> The Imaginary friend stood up laughing giddily, he loved to torture his host, to a certain extent of course, he had to give him time to grow, time to resist. <I see you have fed me quite allot recently, and i sure do love it. Not if only they could make chicken shinigami...> The Imaginary friend trailed off into drooling and an assortment of of fried delectable of what the shinigami's contained. The Ninja was promptly fed up with the Imaginary friend's bullshitting. He wanted to get to the point, so he needed too. <Anyways, these shinigami's souls you've taken a chomp out of have innately mastered an ability called Focus. Which I am sure you are familiar with. Now, these tasty little creatures like to incorporate their Kidou training into their Focus, activating Shunko. This forms varies for each person and it all depends on how you get it started. Understand little boy?>> Cocaine just grumbled to himself as he prepared himself for a fleet of intense fighting. He hated these sadistic training session, but what could the Ninja do about it?

Soakudo prepared himself for the usual routine, The Imaginary friend upped his body, taking on his usual form. Electricity indubeded his body. Recently, Cocaine had been using this to speed himself up, and that was entirely no good at all. So to start off, he needed to Get Cocaine acquainted with the basic form of glorious Focus. Soakudo traveled at the speed of sound, which this time, Cocaine had enough training to keep up with without powering himself up. The Ninja skidded to the side, as the Imaginary friend snapped past him. Cocaine took out a dagger. Large scale weapons weren't suggested to be used against fast enemy's and Soakudo would be labeled as such. The Ninja's head whizzzed around the area in quick haste. Tracking the movements of Soakudo as he flew around him, flinging polarized chunks of water at him.

Cocaine flipped over the projectiles, knocking them away are he caught sight of Soakudo's directed path. The Ninja obviously could not move at the speed of sound without help so he pushed himself with chakra. The Ninja was going too fast, he heard a shock wave, and his body propelled faster than Soakudo's his eyes rolled back into his head as he crashed into the body of the propelled Imaginary friend. Cocaine abruptly received 100 thousand volts into his body. He jumped back violently, as he tried to calm himself. Soakudo laughed to himself <Careful boy..> The Imaginary friend raised his arms, now a solid piece of thing energy. The Ninja had a feeling that his Imaginary friend wouldn't hesitate to kill him.

The Ninja shot himself backwards. The push happened again as he smacked against the wall of the bubble. Cocaine stared at the approaching Imaginary friend. He was getting a grasp of what he was doing exactly. The Imaginary friend smirked and Cocaine positioned himself in front of him. He held the dagger outright and the Ninja pushed himself with the force of his own chakra. During his push, he felt the similar sonic boom and his body shook due to the G-forces that was smacked against his being. The Ninja moved his legs while doing so, giving him control of where he was going. Before he approached the Imaginary friend he swerved his way to the left, allowing the Ninja to deliver an intoxicating blow to his arm.

The pure speed of the Ninja lobed off the Imaginary friend's arm, effectively breaking the knife at the same time. Cocaine decided such things were completely unnecessary and he twisted hi body, pushing himself in the energy burst to strike a blow against the face of Soakudo. The Imaginary friend smiled, its arm brought up water form underneath them and it reformed, which exploded in front of the empowered Ninja; trapping him in a tight clasp of water. <Congratulations....you've gotten down Focus.>> The Imaginary friend flared its energy and the bubble exploded around them, water crashed down upon the two participants and Cocaine's world went dark.

Soakudo woke up screaming profusely, he found himself in the bottom depths of the ocean, the crushing pressure that was forced upon him by gravity was corroding his nerve cells. the area round him was dimly lit thanks to the little vents of volcanic connection that surrounded the Ninja. Cocaine looked confused, in essence he should be drowning right now. But no, he found something very obscure, something out of place. his back was on fire. The pain that was being released from the Ninja was too much.

The Ninja's hands rested on the roots on some of the volcanic spews, the tattoo of Soakudo was being inscribed with black energy, exploding as if it was a signal flare to the beasts of the deep miles away. Cocaine's hands dug into the rocks of the ocean and to his his surprise Soakudo rose form one vent and grasped the Ninja's forehead. <I am sure you are away that Ninja are not capable of Kidou. So we need to find you an alternative.> Cocaine growled underneath his labored breath. As if he could breath the water, yelled angrily, but the sound waves did not travel anywhere for the Ninja was interrupted. Energy form the tattoo shot up, extending 1.5 feet off of Cocaine's body; the same length crawled up to the shoulder and down the arms of cocaine. Stopping int the middle of his wrist, Cocaine would almost feel every part of his body.

Except he wasn't using any of Soakudo's power. this was the innate power of the shinigami he killed and ate. This is the power that these individuals were capable of. The artificial individual took on two of the being's top potential and incorporated it. The energy was being compacted onto itself and the spike of energy lessened to six inches onto his body.
Cocaine blew away the energy around him, it spiked up, absorbed energy particles and directly sent them into the Ninja's body. Cocaine felt the influx of energy into him, and he had no choice but to release it. it was starting to burn his hands, and he couldn't take such energy for much long.

Cocaine looked up at Soakudo, his feet gave a propulsion of energy as the Ninja was quickly at the Imaginary friend. He clasped his hands onto the side of the Imaginary friend. The compressed energy rippled into the Imaginary friend's head, and the whole body exploded into an array of blood and chunks of flesh. Cocaine panted and Soakudo reformed form the ever present water that surrounded them. <Now, now little boy. You need to clam that anger.> Cocaine choked upon the depleted power Soakudo acted quickly to avoid destruction again. He grabbed Cocaine by the neck, and pushed against him, a portal opened up underneath the Ninja and he was whisked away, leaving the calm of the deep ocean as it was before they appeared, undisturbed.

The eyes of the Ninja snapped open as he descended form the sky. Down upon the island the Ninja fell in silence, but his facade as quickly deafening. He was able to breath oxygen again, but he was plummeting toward an untimely death. The Ninja quickly recalled his experience form the deep see and attempted to recreate the technicality he possessed while under his Imaginary friend's subjugation. Cocaine focused onto the ta too on his back and focused his chakra to that point. His chakra exploded, and suddenly more was being fed into him, compacting his energy onto himself. The Ninja was still falling toward the earth, So the point where his own chakra sucks up energy form around him he changed the nature to release water in the form of the captured energy. Water exploded from his arms and he made a disk underneath him, the disk kept growing into a large ball which exploded, offsetting the force of which The Ninja was falling. On the ground of the surrounding forest, Cocaine looked around.

Expecting Soakudo too appear from nowhere, the Ninja traversed through the qualms of the jungle. Still in his unnamed formed, The Ninja felt a ripple of energy from his stomach, Soakudo emerged, drinking a purple substance and decided to educate Cocaine. <This is what you would call you, shunko form. I wouldn't suggest holding all that shit in, so lets expel some. The purple substance then turned into a hachiwara and Soakudo gave a smirk while he made a clean charge to the Ninja. Cocaine ran forward, his hands padded with the glowing black energy, he hit against the saw of the hachiwara, smacking it backwards as his other hand grabbed onto Soakudo's left. He hyper-extended the arm, bring it around the Imaginary friend and pinned him on the floor.

Giving a short grunt, the Ninja raised his free hand raised it above the Imaginary friend. Energy seemed to extend out then form a point at the tip of his fist. It exploded down almost like a cero. The Explosion was made form water and Cocaine had expected the high pressurised energy to deal a substantial amount of damage to the Imaginary friend. To Cocaine disarray, the tsu absorbed the water, giving a sneer laughter, his hyper-extended arm then turned into water, and gripped onto the hachiwara. It stretched, making its way around the back of Cocaine as it dug into his spinal cortex. The Ninja gave a painful groan, bringing his hands together, black wisps formed all around the his figure. Instantly it concentrated the previously compacted energy into a purple ball. Cocaine did not speak one word as he simply dropped the ball onto the back of Soakudo and a silent red dome of chakra enveloped them both. Cocaine was seen exiting the dome, his figure coughing widely and arcs of electricity flying around his clothes and fingers. His body shook violently, and his Shunko form deactivated. The Ninja dragged himself to a tree on the south side on the island and he pressed a mechanized rubber button. A capsule opened up underneath and took him down under.

“Relocating?” wondered Cocaine.

“Yes.”

“To where?”

“To the place where you will begin the first part of your training,” replied Soakudo.

“Where is this place?”

“If I tell you it’s in Roulsotha, will that mean anything to you?” asked an annoyed Daemon.

“No…” replied Cocaine sheepishly.

“Then don’t ask. Now, I’ll see you in the morning at nine o’clock, be up and ready to go by then,” the Daemon simply vanished.

Cocaine sat there for a little while, thinking, finally moving when the old man came by to pick up the plates in front of the drugged shinobi. Cocaine quietly made his way to his bedroom and went to bed. ‘He’s even more of a mystery than when I first met him,’ thought Cocaine.

“He’s like that,” said the Korean. “He tells you about himself in vague terms, so that it seems you know everything, but in reality you know nothing.”

‘Do you know of this Africaplace?’ asked the drugged.

“Nope, but I’m pretty sure it’s not in the ninja world.”

‘So we are going to travel out of the ninja world,’ mused Cocaine happily.

“Chances are, you’re already out of the ninja world,” commented Maria. “The fact that you saw about two seconds of darkness proves that it was quite a long teleportation.”

‘You know what kind of teleportation he did, can you teach me?’ asked Cocaine enthusiastically.

“Like he said, kit, he’ll teach you in good time. You aren’t ready for it yet, and it requires knowledge about concepts you don’t even know exist.” Cocaine pouted, but decided to be patient and wait. He wondered briefly what his training would be like before falling asleep.

Cocaine woke up the next morning an hour before nine, and lazily stumbled his way into the kitchen, where he once again found the old man at the stove.

“Breakfast is served,” he said without turning around. “I hope it is to your liking.”

Cocaine looked over at the dining table and was once again astonished by the variety and quantity of the dishes. ‘Wow, I wish I could have a cook like him forever.’ The drugged sat down and started practically inhaling his food.

“Now you see why the Daemon keeps this soul,” said Maria. “To be able to enjoy this kind of food everyday.”

“Won't Soakudo-sensei be eating too?” asked Cocaine.

“Master ate several hours ago,” replied the old man.

“Where is he now?”

“Master does not inform me of where he goes,” was the formal reply. “If you are wondering when he will be back, then I can certainly tell you that he will return by nine o’clock to keep his appointment with you.”

‘Weird,’ thought Cocaine before continuing his breakfast. After which he went to his room and made sure all of his things were ready to go. Having thirty more minutes till nine and having nothing better to do, Cocaine flopped down on the couch in the living room and waited.

Fifteen minutes later, “Come Cocaine, today your training begins,” announced Soakudo. He grasped Cocaine by the shoulder again and they were instantly teleported to their destination.

“That was quicker than last night,” commented Cocaine.

“That’s because we were only about 20 miles away,” said Soakudo nonchalantly.

Cocaine looked around and saw three wooden gates, each consecutively larger than the previous, in front of him. The supports on either side of each gate were made out of a dark obsidian stone, which reflected no light. A small cottage stood behind him. “Where do the gates lead?” asked Cocaine.

“Your training grounds,” replied the Daemon as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Here’s the thing, ninjutsu-wise you’re set. Your Doton and Suiton Supremacies basically cover all the ninjutsu you’ll ever need; of course, I’ll teach you some Raiton, Fuiton, and Katon. What you’re lacking in is genjutsu and, especially, taijutsu. The Maria did not spend much time in human form, so she doesn’t know any taijutsu styles.”

“That’s true,” said the Korean in shame. “That’s definitely one category I can't teach you anything in.”

“No worries, Cocaine, I’ll be teaching you several taijutsu styles,” reassured the Daemon, “but we’ll get to those later. First, you’ll need to increase your speed and reaction rate.”

“By wearing and training with weights, right?” asked Cocaine.

“Wrong!” said Soakudo forcefully.

“But don’t weights make you move faster?” asked Cocaine.

“No, quite the contrary, weights slow you down,” mocked Soakudo.

“Well, I mean when you take them off, later?” Cocaine tried to reason.

“That may be, but there’s a problem,” explicated Soakudo. “It throws off the mind and body. Your body gets used to being in a weighed-down state, so it’s going to feel weird without the weights. As for your mind, let's say it takes you half a second to respond to an attack, then if suddenly it takes you a quarter of a second to respond to the same attack you're going to feel off. It might be a better response time, but you don't want to feel off in a battle.”

Cocaine tilted his head to the side to ponder this. ‘That’s true, suddenly altering the state of your body in the middle of battle would make things rather awkward.’

The Daemon decided to provide an example. “It's like switching between fighting on solid ground to fighting on water. If you do that, you need a little time to adjust. However, in this case both you and your opponent are adjusting. With the weights, your opponent is just continuing his or her attacks and is not going to wait for you to adjust.”

“Then, how do you propose to increase my speed?” asked the genin.

“Naturally,” replied Soakudo. “I should actually say, out of necessity. You’ll simply need to be fast in order to go through the training I have planned.”

Cocaine nodded, “All right, let’s get to it then!”

“Yes, yes, but first hand over the weights Kurotsuki gave you,” ordered Soakudo.

“How did you know about those?” wondered Cocaine as he unstrapped the shin guards and the forearm protectors.

“I was spying on you on and Kurotsuki,” was the calm reply.

“But he’s one of the legendary three, how come he didn’t notice you?”

“Special stealth technique that simply erase your presence from this world,” was the explanation. “I’ll teach you those after your speed training, taijutsu training, and Void World training.”

“Void World?” asked Cocaine.

“That is a few years into the future, don’t worry about it now.”

“I though I had to be back in Konoha in three years?”

“Blah, blah… I’m not bound by any constraints,” he replied. “I’ll teach you as long as I want. If Konoha’s Kage doesn’t like it, she can suck my balls.”

Cocaine quirked an eyebrow at how calm Soakudo-sensei was when he said that. ‘This guy really doesn’t fear Tsunade whatsoever.’

“Cocaine, it seems you still have no idea exactly who you are dealing with,” thought the Maria. “Though I wonder what the Daemon’s agenda is? He couldn’t be doing this as a sign of good faith. Well, I’ll just have to watch and see… and make sure he does nothing to hurt Cocaine-kun.”

Soakudo took Cocaine’s weights and made then them vanish. “While we’re doing this, could I have your forehead protector as well?”

Cocaine grasped at the metal on his forehead. “Why?”

“Because if I’m going to have you doing missions, it’ll be for me and not for the Leaf,” explained the young man.

“Missions?” asked Cocaine. “What kind of missions?”

“Don’t get so excited, I’m not unleashing you on the world until after most of our training is done.” The Daemon grabbed the forehead protector from Cocaine’s hands and put into his inside pocket.

“Speaking of which, what is this training I’m going to be doing?” asked Cocaine.

“Well, if you wouldn’t interrupt me with all your silly questions, I would be able to get to it,” frowned Soakudo.

“Ok, I’ll listen.”

“Those three gates are the entrances to three obstacle courses,” explained the Daemon, “of varying difficulty. The first is a short length course, laden with mostly physical traps and genjutsu traps. The second is a medium length course, which has physical, genjutsu, and ninjutsu traps.”

“What about the third?”

“To learn about that one, you’ll have to pass trough the first two,” smirked the young man. “Now, moving on to testing. It is a three-part test: the first part is to be able to go through it avoiding all the traps; meaning you can't even trigger one. The second part is to then go through it purposely setting off the traps and being able to avoid whatever comes out without getting injured. Lastly, to be able to advance up to the next course, you must be able to pass both first and second part, and afterwards be able to beat an enemy that is of bit higher level than you.”

“Wait, for the second part you want me to set off the traps and then dodge the projectiles or whatever?” frowned Cocaine. “And not get hurt?”

“Precisely,” answered Soakudo. “After all the practice sessions you will have had, that should be a piece of cake.”

“Meaning the traps don’t change from time to time,” analyzed Cocaine.

“That’s right, you should be able to clear the first one within a week or two,” informed the Daemon. “The second one’s not really hard either. Both are really about building up your speed.”

“Why do I get the feeling that the third one is several times harder than the first and second combined?”

Soakudo’s face split into a maniac grin. “Because it IS several times harder than the first and second combined.”

Cocaine frowned, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’

“But no need to worry about that at this point in time, you haven't even gone through the first one,” Soakudo pushed him towards the first gate.

Cocaine sighed and walked toward the smallest of the gates. ‘Well, here goes,’ he thought and opened the gate by pulling on one of the triangle-shaped handles, which were pointing away from each other, and walked in.

Inside was a city landscape, devoid of people. Cocaine noticed some stands on wheels, and some other large metallic boxes with four wheels and six windows. (A/N: remember there are no cars in Cocaine’s world.) The buildings were at least ten stories each, though further on Cocaine saw buildings that were like 50-stories tall and seemed to almost touch the sky.

The street he was on, Cocaine noticed was completely straight and the other streets met it at a 90-degree angle. ‘This is way too easy, I’ll just run straight through the course at top speed,’ thought the genin arrogantly. Cocaine bent his knees and dashed forward. He didn’t make more than two blocks before he ran straight into an invisible force, and passed out from the force of impact.

On the outside, the Daemon slowly pushed the first gate closed. “Should I have told him that it’s a maze with invisible walls?” he wondered out loud. “Nah, he’ll figure it out.” Soakudo pushed in a stone in the left support, and six screens appeared on the gate. The Daemon walked over to the middle of the gate and put his palm into the diamond created by the handles. The six screens turned on and showed Cocaine, each from a different angle; Soakudo closed his eyes and the handles glowed lightly.

Inside of his mind, Soakudo could see a three-dimensional picture of Cocaine and his surroundings, as if the young man were actually there. ‘So he’s found the first invisible wall,’ commented the Daemon. ‘Though it looks like he ran into it first,’ he laughed.

Cocaine came to several minutes later, and cursed as soon as he remembered what happened. “Looks like it’s not as easy as it looks,” muttered Cocaine.

“You should never assume anything, kit,” said the Maria.

“Yea, yea, I know.”

“Not well enough apparently,” said the Korean in reference to the large bruise on the druggede’s face.

Cocaine growled lightly as he touched his wound, he then looked straight ahead and saw a straight street. He carefully stretched out his hand until it hit an invisible barrier, and ran his hand along this wall. ‘This is one hell of a genjutsu,’ thought Cocaine. “He could have warned me, that son of a *****.”

“It’s a very advanced form of genjutsu,” said the Korean slowly. “Try to mark it.”

Cocaine took out his kunai and stabbed it into the wall. Ripples spread out from the point of contact, but the no mark was made. “What the hell is this?” wondered Cocaine.

“A layer genjutsu, which reforms on top of the real wall, thus making it so that image is always constant,” explained the demon. “This is a memory test, you’ll have to memorize which walls are fake.”

“Memorize them, are you certain there is no other way?” the drugged asked. “Like maybe breaking through the wall and walking through the genjutsu?”

“No, breaking the wall is out of the question, you have no idea what is behind this genjutsu. The wall could easily have a chakra covering or be several meters thick,” she replied. “Plus, it would defy the point of this exercise.”

Cocaine looked around for any distinguishing marks, when it suddenly hit him. He quickly slammed his kunai into the ground, ‘If I can't mark the wall, I’ll mark the ground right next to it.’

“That’s a good idea, kit.”

However, there was a small problem with that plan. Cocaine noticed that the ground beneath him was made out of some kind of black rock that a kunai couldn’t really pierce. “Damn it! Is everything in this place unbreakable?” yelled Cocaine. ‘Wait just a second, my kunai might not work, but how about this?’ Cocaine pressed his palm to the ground and made the ground beneath him cave in, in the shape of an X. “There we go, marked!”

The drugged noticed that he was at an intersection, he walked to one side and stretched out his hand. It came into contact with another invisible wall, Cocaine nodded and marked the ground beneath him. The genin explored the opposite way in the same method and found that it was not a wall. Cocaine proceeded along the street toward the next intersection, having completely forgotten that this place was filled with traps.

The first presented itself when he stepped on a sewer cover, which promptly exploded and sent the genin flying forward. As soon as Cocaine had stopped rolling along the ground, a barrage of shuriken flew right at him. The drugged barely had time to think as he quickly leapt away and into the middle of the next intersection. However, as soon as he reached his destination, a kunai flew out of all four corners of the intersection, each of which had an explosive note attached to it.

“Holy crap!” screamed Cocaine and jumped up before the kunai could hit him. The explosive notes were expertly set so to explode right as the kunai reached the center, resulting in Cocaine being propelled upwards much higher than he had wanted.

Just as gravity was going to pull him down, Cocaine felt something brush up against his cheek. He turned wondering what it was and saw a thin, snapped wire falling away. ‘Trip wire,’ thought Cocaine and barely managed to flip his body so that a rotating steel beam didn’t hit him right in the face; it did however hit the drugged shinobi in the back of the legs. “Does this have an end?” he yelled.

Cocaine landed in the middle of a cross street and instantly jumped to the right wall. In midair, he watched as a dozen shuriken hit the place he had landed at just a second ago. “Damn, these traps are fast and very well configured. A combination of five traps, one being two-step, and the timing on them is superb.”

“As expected of the Daemon,” nodded the Maria approvingly. “This is an excellent exercise for you.”

“Excellent… sure, if I don’t die from them,” said Cocaine sarcastically.

“It’s made such that you have to always be on alert,” explained the Korean. “Then there’s also this issue of the invisible walls.”

“They probably hide the traps,” guessed Cocaine.

“Maybe, but I think they serve some higher purpose,” analyzed the Maria. “I have a guess as to what that purpose might be, but we’ll have to wait and see.”

“What is it?”

“You’ll have to figure this one out on your own,” she replied. “Just hope that he’s not as sadistic as I think he is.”

Cocaine grumbled and continued on through the course, this time taking his time and watching out for any traps. He stepped over several trip wires and walked along the wall for part of the way. ‘What is this, trip wire street?’ wondered Cocaine in annoyance.

Cocaine came to a corner in the road, real walls on two sides, and only one way to go. He followed this street for some time, not encountering any traps. ‘What the hell is going on here?’ Cocaine finally came to a new intersection, this time two of the ways were invisible and once again Cocaine only had one way to go. The genin continued on this street for three blocks since the side streets were all invisible walls, until he came to another turn into an alley.

Cocaine was about to take a step forward when his gut feeling told him to stop. He tilted his head to the side and saw several wires at eye-level in front of him, in a crisscross design. He tilted his head to the other side and saw more trip wires arranged in the same way. Cocaine looked around from several angles and saw that the entire alley was filled with trip wires in a crisscross pattern. “Damn sadist,” muttered Cocaine.

‘I could do a Doton jutsu and rip through this web, setting off every trap,’ considered Cocaine. ‘But Soakudo-sensei said that one of the tests is being able to get by all the traps without setting them off.’ Thus Cocaine sat down cross-legged and pondered this little dilemma. “Wait a second,” Cocaine looked up and saw that the wires only went up to the edge of the roof of each building. “I’ll just walk around them, by the roof.”

The drugged shinobi climbed up to the roof and walked on its edge looking down at the mass of wires down below. Cocaine chuckled lightly, but it was cut short when he felt his foot get caught on something. Cocaine’s face went pale as he saw the three kunai with explosive notes flying at him. He had to think quickly, and was forced to jump over to the other building, though that didn’t save him when he realized that he had landed on an explosive note. Cocaine had two seconds to jump away before it exploded.

The genin found himself in the middle of the alleyway barely able to turn around without setting off some traps. ‘Oh god,’ thought Cocaine in fear, a bead of sweat rolled down his forehead.

“Cocaine, do you notice anything strange about some of the wires?” hinted the Korean.

“Strange?” wondered Cocaine and tilted his head to better see the wires. That’s when he noticed it, the wires that he could see from every angle were clearly anchored to the walls by very small hooks. “They are fake traps, aren’t they?” seethed Cocaine.

“Quite so.”

Cocaine cursed his teacher before moving to cut all the false traps around him. Now that he saw the trick, Cocaine realized that the real traps were mostly located on the bottom and on the top. ‘Right where people would go to try and avoid the traps,’ analyzed Cocaine. ‘Smart.’ Now that Cocaine knew the secret though, he quickly made his way out of the alleyway.

Once out, Cocaine looked to his right and saw that that way was a dead end. He looked to the left and saw a sight that looked somewhat familiar; he walked left. When Cocaine walked a block, he looked down in wonder, there was an X imprinted into the ground.

It only took Cocaine a moment to realize what the hell had happened. “ARGH!” screamed the blue-eyed shinobi. “I’m going to kill him!” Cocaine tightened his fist and punched the building next to him.

“It is what I feared then,” mumbled Maria.

“What?” snapped Cocaine. “You knew?”

“Well, I did tell you that the invisible walls served a higher purpose.”

“That wasn’t much of a clue,” seethed Cocaine and took several breaths to calm down. “It’s a damn maze. The invisible walls are set up so that I will be even more confused. You were right, this is a memory test.”

“That one turn you took, where the path became one-way. If you had paid attention to where you were going territorially you would’ve noticed that you were going backwards.”

“Yeah,” breathed out Cocaine. “So now I’ll have to mark every single opening, just to make sure I haven't been there before.” Cocaine started walking along the path he had previously taken, “Well at least that first set of traps will have already been tripped,” assumed Cocaine.

He saw the same sewer cover and thinking that it had already been spent Cocaine stepped on it. The genin was once again thrown forward by the explosion and had to dodge the shuriken. This time, however, Cocaine made sure not to jump into the middle of the intersection. ‘What the hell is going on here?’ he wondered. ‘I’m sure that I’ve been here before, but these are the same traps.’ Cocaine thought he would experiment and sent a clone into the middle of the intersection. He watched as the kunai came again and then the steel beam.

“The traps reset,” explained the Maria. “This place is made so that as soon as you’re out of the trap’s vicinity it reconstructs itself.”

“How is that even possible?” asked Cocaine.

“I have only heard about these kinds of jutsus,” continued the Korean in an awed voice. “It is called a World Enchantment; it’s basically a jutsu placed over a large area. The traps must be linked into it and it can also feel your presence. Hence when a trap has been triggered it registers it, and as soon as your presence has moved a certain distance from the said trap, the World Enchantment jutsu reconstructs the trap.”

Cocaine’s jaw hung slack, “You mean to tell me that no matter how many times I go through any trap it will remake itself?”

“Well, you’ve got to consider the fact that the traps must all be fully functional when you take the exam,” reasoned the Korean.

“That’s true, but I thought Soakudo-sensei would just go through this place and fix it up right beforehand,” said the drugged sheepishly. “Well, I can't just stand around here.” Cocaine walked across the intersection to make sure that the other ways were walls, and discovered that one of the them was a real way. ‘This is the opposite way of where I would have gone if I got caught in the trap,’ evaluated Cocaine.

“That’s the way it makes sure that you end up in the beginning,” added the Maria. “To show a rookie that this is maze, but not before he is forced to go through some tricky traps.”

‘Sadistic,’ thought Cocaine as he walked in the opposite direction he had last time. Two blocks away Cocaine was faced with a fork in the road, ‘Well, if I get it wrong I can always come back and go the other way,’ concluded Cocaine. The drugged walked to the right, where his gut feeling told him to go. He walked into a long stretch, that smelled like it would be filled with traps, but Cocaine could not see any trip wires.

“Not all traps work by trip wires,” reminded the Korean.

Cocaine nodded in agreement and quickened his pace so that the traps wouldn’t get him. Cocaine noticed that this street had a lot more stands than any other street, and so the shinobi made sure to stay clear of them. However, he quickly found out that that was also a bad choice when a huge paddle rotated out of a building and tried to hit the drugged in the back as he walked on the opposite side of street from the stands. Cocaine managed to jump up in time and have the paddle pass below him. The drugged then made his way to the middle of street so that he would have all directions at his disposal to dodge.

“No kit, get out of the way!” yelled Maria.

Cocaine instinctively listened to the Maria and jumped out of the way just as a blade came out of the ground. It sliced in a vertical arc and disappeared into the ground once more. ‘What the hell was that?’ yelled Cocaine inside his mind.

“An underground trap,” said the Maria. “You would have been sliced in half, if you hadn’t moved.”

“Thanks Kyu-chan,” said Cocaine gratefully.

“Looks like you are getting into the harder traps.” Cocaine nodded and advanced further, now keeping some chakra in his feet at all times. He encountered two more underground traps and one more paddle trap. The next street greeted Cocaine with net-type traps, one of which managed to capture Cocaine for a second before he quickly cut a hole and fell out of it.

“Do you notice how each street only contains one type of trap?”

“Yeah, except that very first series of traps,” agreed Cocaine. “He’s just introducing me to the types of traps I can expect to be implemented in combination.”

“Exactly, a good example would be catching you in a net and then using the underground-cutting trap,” Cocaine shuddered, but knew that such a trap was quite possible.

Cocaine made his way through some more blocks with mostly simple traps or repeats of what he had seen before. After a little more of walking he noticed a familiar X mark on the ground. It wasn’t the fork in the road that he was debating at before, but an area not far from there just before the underground traps were first introduced. ‘All right, at least I’m getting somewhere.’

Only a few more hours and Cocaine was already standing at the edge of a bridge on the other side of which he could see what looked to be the end. The drugged was tired, beat up, and his clothes were ruined by all the traps he hadn’t been able to avoid. ‘I bet this bridge is one whole trap of its own,’ Cocaine cursed a little before starting his run through. Cocaine evaded some traps, but most were still well hidden and he ended up setting them off.

“You’re passing under the first support tower, this is the only place where suspension traps could be used,” warned the Maria. Cocaine nodded and jumped onto the side of the support and ran along the wall, then jumped back down but closer to the edge, since traps were usually placed in the middle.

Cocaine jumped over an underground blade and suddenly stopped when he saw what was ahead of him. There were dual blades rotating on each edge of the bridge and a saw blade in the middle, which was constantly changing its height. “What the hell am I supposed to do, fly?”

“Time it,” answered the Korean.

“Time it, you say,” he sighed heavily. “This will take a while.”

The dual blades, at first they seemed to be rotating in perfect opposite accord, but as Cocaine continued observing he saw that they were slowly getting out of sync. ‘All right, I’ll only have one shot at this, I need to figure out the timing of the saw blade now.’ Cocaine switched his attention to the middle blade and soon had a good idea of its timing. Now all he had to do was to put all the timings together and decide when he would make his move.

After adding it all up, Cocaine realized that he would have to wait until the next time because the saw blade would be on the rise at the appropriate time to jump through the dual blades. Cocaine sat down to wait for the next time and got to thinking. ‘What kind of trap is this? I mean how could someone not see this?’ wondered the drugged. As soon as he thought that Cocaine started looking around to make sure there were no traps nearby.

“Throw a shuriken into each of the blades,” ordered Maria.

“What? why?” asked Cocaine.

“Just do it, kit.”

Cocaine shrugged and took out a three shuriken and three them into each of the blades. To his great surprise and anger his shuriken went straight through the saw blade. “It’s a genjutsu,” said Cocaine resentfully. He stood up and in a second jumped over to the other side; he landed on his palms and pushed off the ground and far from the blades. Just as he did that the spot right where he placed his palms exploded. ‘Typical, to booby trap the only place I can jump.’

Cocaine was now halfway over the bridge, he noticed that the second half of the bridge was filled with boxes and stands. ‘Practically a mine field,’ thought Cocaine. ‘And it’s under the second support tower.’ The Leaf shinobi took a deep breath and increased his pace to a light run. Once he felt that he was right at the beginning of all the traps, he increased his speed to full and flew through the last part of the course; surprisingly none of the traps were sprung. ‘Hmm…?’

Cocaine slowed down to a walk and advanced towards the fountain in the middle of a grassy lawn. As soon as he reached the fountain, the world in front of him twisted and the wooden gate appeared. Cocaine looked back and saw the fountain through a window, ‘Weird,’ he thought and turned back to the doors.

Cocaine opened them and found the Daemon sitting right in front of him. “Soakudo-sensei, I’m back,” he announced.

“I know,” was the calm reply. “So how’d you like it?”

“That was hard,” said Cocaine. “Those traps are really tricky.”

“Any questions?” asked Soakudo in a tone that hinted there should be at least one.

Cocaine thought a moment, “How come the last several traps weren’t set off when I straight ran through them?”

“Remember what I said about this training in the beginning?” asked the young man.

“That it is the easiest of the three?”

“No,” Soakudo closed his eyes. “This training is to increase your speed. Meaning that these traps are motion sensitive.”

Cocaine frowned, “So you mean if I just ran through the entire course, none of the traps would have gone off? What about the trip wires, those go off if you spring them?”

“Well, I can't expect you to be so stupid as to run through everything,” chuckled the Daemon. “You’ve got to be able to apply your brain and figure out when you can run through the traps and when you have to pay attention and carefully go around the traps; though the situations can overlap.”

“Uh huh, I see,” said Cocaine slowly. “Oh yeah, and how come you didn’t tell me that it’s a maze with invisible walls?” yelled Cocaine.

“I was supposed to?” wondered Soakudo. “You figured it out well enough on your own.”

“That may be, but you should have still warned me about the invisible walls.”

“So that you don’t run into them?” smiled the young man.

“Exactly… hey, how’d you know about that?” demanded Cocaine.

“Because I was watching,” he replied innocently. “It was quite comical.” Cocaine growled a little. “But seriously, the enemy is not going to warn you about their traps, and intelligence isn't always correct or up to date. You have to be ready for anything,” lectured Soakudo.

“I understand,” said Cocaine.

‘It seems like you haven't figured out the little trick yet. Well, not like you can get through the first test without it,’ thought the Daemon. “Well, the day is still young, I want you to go through the maze at least ten more times.”

“Ten?” questioned Cocaine.

“Is there a problem?”

“It took me almost three hours to go through it, so ten more times would make 30 hours,” said Cocaine.

“The first time always takes the longest amount of time,” clarified the Daemon. “As you get more and more accustomed to the maze, and start memorizing it, you’ll start flying through it, an hour being your max.”

“What about food?” asked Cocaine. “It’s not like I can hunt in that place.”

“Oh that, every five times through a dining table covered with food will appear before the fountain.”

“I wanted to ask about that, how does that world know those things?” asked Cocaine. “What is this World Enchantment?”

“So the Maria has heard of it,” mused Soakudo. “We’ll cover it later, closer to or after dimensions. It’s impractical to implement as a high-level ninjutsu, it works much better if you interweave it with a Void Field.”

“Wha…?” said Cocaine as all that information passed over his head.

“Never mind, it’s concepts that I have yet to explain the basics of,” said the Daemon. “You’re at least two years away from learning this. It doesn’t matter, just go do your training!” ordered the Daemon.

Cocaine shook his head to clear out all that confusing information, and walked over to the gate again. ‘Here we go again,’ he thought as he opened the gate and stepped through. Cocaine was once again thrust into the cityscape; he looked around and was satisfied to be in the same place as before. Cocaine ran over to the very first invisible wall, or what was supposed to be an invisible wall since there wasn’t an X on the ground below. The drugged reached out and touched the invisible wall, making sure that it was indeed there.

‘Well that’s weird,’ he thought. ‘Oh… the world must reset every time I leave and enter,’ concluded Cocaine with annoyance. He wondered briefly if the world would reset every time he finished the course and concluded that that was probably true. ‘A true test of memory, not even giving me a chance to cheat.’

Cocaine had a very vague idea of how the maze went, and would need to go through it several times before he finally had more or less a feeling of where to turn. Though it wasn’t all bad because in the process of memorizing the map, so to speak, Cocaine was also starting to memorize the traps. A sort of, turn here avoid a shuriken trap then make sure not to run by the right-hand side. It was primitive, but effective.

Though, even after ten tries through the maze, Cocaine was still unable to make it so that none of the traps triggered. He knew there was something he was missing, some little detail that kept slipping his mind.

The drugged was now sitting outside the gate, racking his brain trying to figure it out. It was dark now; the sun had set several hours ago while Cocaine was still in the training course. It was a cool night, but not so cold that a jacket would be needed. A light breeze picked up and Cocaine’s nose caught the smell of freshly prepared food, and his stomach grumbled.

The drugged got up and headed to the cottage, from which a faint light shined through the single cross-framed window. Inside, the cottage had a nice lively feel to it. The bedrooms were on the left, the living room on the right, and the kitchen was diagonally to the right. Even though from the outside it looked like it was candle light, the house was wired with electricity, the lights were just dim.

Cocaine walked in to the kitchen and was shocked to find the Daemon making their food. “Didn’t expect me to be culinary literate, did you?” asked the young man, Cocaine shook his head. “Well, everyone has at least one hidden ability.”

“What are we having?” asked Cocaine and the pair started up some small talk; neither mentioning Cocaine’s training. Cocaine went to bed that night tired, full, and happier than he had been in a long while. ‘Soakudo-sensei sure knows how to make you feel at home,’ thought Cocaine before dozing off.

The Daemon watched Cocaine as he went to sleep and smiled softly, ‘Good kid.’ He then walked out into the hallway and stood right in the middle, below the chandelier. The young man took his index finger and drew an archaic symbol in the air in front of him and mumbled a few words. Soon a black, spiraling space opened up beneath his feet and Soakudo slowly sank into it. Once his head disappeared the opening closed and it was as if nothing happened.

For the next week, Cocaine would wake up early in the morning, eat a breakfast that had somehow been prepared for him, and jump into his training. He would go through the course 15 or 20 times, or until the Daemon called him out; it turned out that Soakudo could project his voice into the obstacle course. The Daemon would then have Cocaine do some highly demanding physical labor to build the druggede’s muscles. Cocaine would then have dinner with Soakudo and go to bed exhausted.

Thankfully, the Daemon had given Cocaine some special clothes that mended themselves at the end of the day, so that Cocaine didn’t ruin his real clothes. This was a completely black jumpsuit, with some red writing on the front, back, and each pant leg; Cocaine had no idea what the writing meant. The drugged asked the Daemon once what was written on his jumpsuit, but all the young man said was that those were the ruins that repaired it at the end of the day.

Only once during that time did the Daemon say that there indeed was a little trick to the obstacle course. Cocaine still hadn’t been able to figure it out and the Maria was refusing to tell him, saying that it was his responsibility to find the answer. Cocaine had first thought that it might have something to do with the invisible walls, like maybe them not having any traps or definitely having traps but of only one kind; it turned out to be false. Cocaine had then considered the placement and order of the traps, maybe there was some sort of way they were organized and then he would be able to know which one was coming up next and act accordingly; that idea was annulled when he remembered he could simply memorize the order of the traps.

From there the list gets blurry with ideas that only lasted for several moments before the drugged found something to counter them with. It was nerve wracking to know that there was an answer, but that you’ve seemingly considered everything and still not found it. It occurred to him that this trick wasn’t related to the surroundings, but to the traps themselves. Cocaine analyzed the traps in his mind, while he worked out, but still was unable to come up with anything concrete.

Finally Cocaine just started sending clones in to trigger the traps to watch what would happen, hoping to figure it out that way. That was when he noticed something strange about the paddles that were coming out of the walls, they came out at an angle; it was as if someone was rowing. ‘Why the hell would they come out at an angle?’ pondered Cocaine. He quickly realized that the dual blades on the bridge were on an angle. ‘The blades I can understand, it’s so that I don’t crawl under them, but why the paddles?’

Cocaine suddenly lifted his head as an idea started forming in his head. ‘All the traps are set, in position and in motion,’ he analyzed. ‘If a trap is triggered, it executes in the same way every single time. So if a shuriken trap is designed to shoot down, it cannot be re-angled to shoot up.’

Cocaine laughed, it had been in front of his face the entire time. Were the traps set off when Cocaine passed them? Yes and no, they were set off when Cocaine passed in the area where the trap was aimed to hit. Meaning that if he were to run above a shuriken trap that was aimed down at the street, it wouldn’t activate because Cocaine had not passed in its field of function. Since Cocaine had memorized all the traps by now this would be a piece of cake.

Cocaine implemented this theory the next time he went through the course, and found that it was indeed true. He managed to successfully pass through the entire course without setting off a single trap; he was now half finished with the first course. The problem now lay in being able to avoid all the traps after triggering them. Some of the traps were simply too fast for Cocaine, and at the end of the course they were set up to in a long combination.

The Daemon had praised him on figuring out the trick and congratulated him on, technically, passing the first test. “You’ll, of course, have to pass both tests consecutively,” he explained. “But you’ve got the first one down, so now all you need to do is increase your speed and you’ll be able to get through the second one too.”

‘Easy for him to say,’ thought Cocaine. Soakudo showed him once how easy he could go through the traps; it seemed to Cocaine that Soakudo wasn’t even completely concentrated on the task at hand.

“It’s rather easy, you feel the projectiles coming and jump away,” explained the Daemon. “And since you’ve memorized the course, you know where you can land and where it is simply better to jump away. Also the weight training and labor I have you do daily is strengthening your muscles. Even though strength isn't required for speed, it does help. The time between knowing what's going to happen and countering it, either blocking or dodging, is your reaction rate. Yours is pretty bad right now, you correctly analyzed that I wasn’t even thinking about the traps when I did the demonstration, I don’t need to, these traps are really slow.”

“Slow?” wondered Cocaine in amazement.

“Yes, when you get up to my speed, you’ll see it that way also.”

Cocaine listened to Soakudo’s advice and worked harder to increase his speed. It took him several days, but he managed to do it by using his heightened senses to improve his reaction rate. Within four days Cocaine was able to dodge all of the traps without getting nicked, and was set to take the exam the next day.

Cocaine and Soakudo were now sitting at the kitchen table eating dinner. “Soakudo-sensei, I was wondering what is that dual bladed trap for? There’s no possible way someone wouldn’t notice it.”

“It is meant to throw you off the first time you go through the course,” explained the Daemon, “and to show you that not all traps are hidden.”

“But why wouldn’t someone hide a trap?” asked Cocaine. “Is it to throw the enemy off and have them stop in front of it and then get them with some other jutsu?”

“Yes, if I remember correctly you sat for five minutes in front of those blades thinking, calculating their timing. Imagine what the enemy could have done to you in those five minutes. They could have trapped you in a genjutsu, used some sort of projectile ninjutsu from behind to push you into the blades, or they could have done nothing and simply used those five minutes to erase their presence and disappear from the area.”

“But in the real world, you would have to stop and examine the trap before concluding whether or not it’s dangerous,” said Cocaine. “So you set yourself up for this no matter what.”

“No, because all these contemplations are already finished by the time you get to the trap,” replied Soakudo. “Or at least that’s how it has to be.”

“Sounds difficult.”

“Nah, the third obstacle course is difficult. The first two are merely introductions, the third one is where all the training happens,” foreshadowed the young man. “This is just to give you the basics.” Cocaine shuddered thinking of exactly how hard the third gate would be. “Like I’ve said before, don’t worry about it yet, you still have to go through the ninjutsu trap training in the second course.”

Next morning, both teacher and student stood outside the gate. “Now Cocaine, come back out here when you’ve gone through it the first time,” ordered the Daemon. “I’ll tell you whether you pass or not, and then we’ll move on to the second test… or not.”

Cocaine nodded and stepped through the gate. The drugged was now completely familiar with the obstacle course and he quickly and expertly made his way through it. The first series of traps are actually very easy, since they were all aimed into the middle of the street, so Cocaine simply stayed to the side. The underground traps were only set off if the person was set to walk into them, and the paddle traps you had to be in range of for them to come out. All in all, Cocaine made it through the course in about twenty minutes.

He came out and was greeted by the sight of Soakudo holding up a soul charm. “You passed, Cocaine-kun,” said the Daemon. “Now time for your second and third test.”

“And third?” wondered Cocaine.

“Why yes, you’ll have to go through the course setting off the traps and not getting hit and if you pass that this person will be waiting for you at the end and you will have to fight him.”

“That’s my opponent, there in the soul charm?” asked Cocaine.

“Yes, he’s not a really high level fighter, though his style will be something you are not accustomed to facing,” explained Soakudo. “Knock him unconscious or kill him, your choice.” The Daemon walked over to the left support and placed the soul charm into a slightly hollowed out space. The charm stuck and glowed a dull red. “There it is set. If you do not see your opponent at the end, it means that you have failed the second test.”

Cocaine nodded and stepped inside the gate once more. He sighed and ran through the course setting off all the traps and effectively dodging the effects, until he was over the bridge and face to face with his opponent. (A/N: author is tired.) The man was dressed in a kimono, and had two samurai sword strapped to his side. ‘This is going to be a sword fight,’ thought Cocaine. ‘Except that I don’t have any weapons except kunai and shuriken.’

Cocaine made a clone and sent it at his opponent to test him. The samurai destroyed the clone without even drawing his sword. Cocaine knew that this man’s taijutsu was much higher than his and the close combat was out. The drugged then crouched down and put his palms to the ground, making the ground beneath his enemy explode.

The man didn’t expect it and was thrown across the field, but landed on his feet and charged at Cocaine with his sword drawn. The man was fast, Cocaine leapt away trying to find a time to do another Doton, but not being able to. The drugged shinobi was forced to use Kawarimi when the samurai was going to chop him in half. This gave Cocaine a little bit of time and he managed to hide underground while several of his clones stayed on the surface.

His speed was much greater than Cocaine’s. To the drugged that meant he needed a way to slow him down. ‘I’ll turn the entire area into a quicksand pit, and then I’ll be able to kill him while he is bound,’ planned Cocaine, and did exactly that. He surfaced to, indeed, find his opponent stuck in the quicksand. Cocaine calmly walked up behind the man and went to slit his throat, when the man did a simple sword move and slashed Cocaine across the stomach.

The drugged ninja double over in pain, his eyes looking up the man in hatred. Cocaine activated his Doton Supremacy and made a dozen spikes come up from the ground around the samurai, at such an angle that they would all pierce the man. Cocaine watched as the man was practically ripped apart by the spikes and then cancelled the jutsu dropping the bloody, mangled corpse onto the ground.

The world around Cocaine twisted and he was back outside the gate. He held his right hand over the wound that he had received, while he watched the Daemon simply pull out the soul charm. “I passed, right?” asked the drugged.

“Yes, you did,” confirmed Soakudo, “but not as well as I thought you would.”

“I got careless,” said Cocaine shamefully.

“Careless indeed, if that had been a shinobi he would have come free of your jutsu and killed you in the instant that you were down.”

“I know,” said Cocaine slowly. “It was my mistake and it will never happen again.”

“I hope not, this opponent was actually weaker than you, overall,” explained the Daemon. “He was a samurai during his life, he knows nothing about jutsus or chakra manipulation.”

“Then, why did you pick him?” wondered Cocaine.

“To give you a feel of what it’s like to fight sword specialists,” said Soakudo. “But mostly because I have had his soul for far longer than I should have. I thought this would be a fitting last task.”

The Daemon kneeled and drew five archaic symbols into the ground, in the shape of a plus. He then put the charm onto those symbols and channeled chakra into the system. The symbols lit up in a brilliant blue and in a few seconds the charm faded and out of the symbols a white transparent figure rose. The figure was in the shape of the man that Cocaine had just fought, the man bowed to the Daemon and disappeared from where he came.


The Daemon pressed his right palm to the gate and leaned on the right gate. “This one I actually have to tell you about, or else you’ll get stuck there for a day not really knowing what to do,” mild disappointment laced Soakudo’s voice as he said this.

Cocaine sighed in relief, ‘Sadistic bastard,’ he thought.

“For the basics: it is a medium length course, in which you will face ninjutsu, genjutsu, and taijutsu traps. The objective is the same as before: to get to the end.”

“But there is a catch,” stated Cocaine.

“Yes, it’s not really the end, per say”

Cocaine scrunched his brows together, “What do you mean, it’s not really the end?” questioned the druggede.

“I stated that in too confusing of a way – I’ll admit – the end isn't how you perceive it. The setting this time is a castle, somewhere in the midst of which is a statue, of a baboon,” the Daemon snickered lightly. “You have to get to that statue.”

“And it could be anywhere inside the castle?”

“Well, you’re pretty much guaranteed that it’s not within the first half of the course,” pointed out Soakudo.

Cocaine nodded, that much was obvious; he would be expected to go through at least half of the course. Though it still bothered him that if the statue’s position doesn’t change from the first time, then during the second time, and any after, the course would be significantly easier.

Cocaine voiced his conclusion to the Daemon who smirked in response. “That’s good. Very good observation, and without even having to step foot inside the course,” praised Soakudo. “Well, let’s just say that I’ve left you some surprises,” the young man winked.

Cocaine groaned, just guessing at how hard this would turn out to be. “No invisible walls or ceilings this time, right?”

“No, no, nothing of the sort,” sympathized Soakudo.

“Good, I don’t need to hit my head at full speed on a barrier I don’t even know is there.”

“Well, they were just there for complexity because without those walls the first course would have been too easy,” explained the young man. “Don’t worry, everything in the second course is quite visible, except the traps of course,” he smiled. “C’mon, give this one a whirl and then the rest of the day we’ll spend doing something else.”

“Like learning jutsus?” wondered Cocaine.

“Not quite,” curtly replied Soakudo. “There are a lot of other things you don’t know, and jutsus are best used in combination with other skills.” Cocaine grumbled a little, but walked over to the second gate wanting to get his first run through it over with and done, and get on to whatever the Daemon was going to teach him next.


Cocaine pushed chakra to the soles of his feet and started walking forward, ready to jump away at the slightest hint of a trap. He hadn’t walked more than two steps when he heard the rustling of leaves to his right and immediately jumped forward and to the left to avoid the incoming projectiles, or snare, or perhaps a fireball. However, nothing of the sort happened and the forest was still as Cocaine sat and watched from his horizontal position on a tree’s trunk. Then he heard it again and turned his head to look before jumping. Cocaine couldn’t help but laugh at himself; it was just wind blowing through the branches and rustling the leaves.

Paranoia is a powerful thing. There had been no wind or any kind of weather effects in the first course, so if Cocaine had heard something it would undoubtedly have been a trap, but such was not the case here. The druggede looked around, seeing the thin rays of light move as the branches and leaves quivered. A faint breeze rolled through the canopy as Cocaine extended his hand into the sunshine and actually felt warmth. There were no animals, at least none that he had encountered yet, but the weather effects were real; an added element of difficulty, no doubt. This, however, did not have Cocaine as irked as usual; in fact he was sort of glad that the training field was more realistic. After all, where in the Shinobi World would Cocaine encounter the kind of terrain, if it can be called such, which was present in the first course?

Cocaine sighed, and thought about what the Daemon had told him in regards to the statue and the castle. He realized that the young man could have lied about it all just to throw him off, but somehow could not force himself to accept that. He cursed lightly, realizing that the first thing he needed to do was to get a feel for how big this place was. Following his first impulse, Cocaine climbed to the top of the highest tree to have a look around. He jumped onto the tree trunk, such that he was standing perpendicular to it and ran up the trunk all the way to the top.

The view from the very top was spectacular, the tight bunching of trees spread out like a blanket of green and brown over a mile in every direction. Cocaine caught a sight of several large, dark colored birds flying in the sky; though he couldn’t be sure on the color since they were flying right in front of the sun. The young shinobi squinted and looked down and farther into the distance. A very large castle rose up out of the majesty of the jungle. It looked to be made completely out of gold, considering how it reflected the afternoon sun. The design of the palace was that of a rectangle, and Cocaine was looking at it head on with only its shorter side visible to the druggede, so he did actually know that the palace was about half a mile in length. On the very top of the castle something seemed to be moving, but being so far away Cocaine couldn’t tell for sure.

“Whoa,” Cocaine immediately realized that the Daemon had given him a huge clue as to where the statue was. “So that’s what he was talking about. Though it still doesn’t make sense that the said the course would take place in the castle if the castle is only where the statue rests.”

“The majority of the course must be within the castle then,” reasoned the Maria.

“Within the castle, eh?” mused Cocaine wondering if that part of the course would be anything like what the first course was like.

“I suggest you get a move on,” said the Maria. “You have about a mile of jungle to cover before you even reach the castle.” Cocaine nodded and started to climb back down.

Upon reaching the forest floor, Cocaine moved forward through the jungle along a makeshift path since he couldn’t go left or right because of how the foliage. Abruptly the makeshift path ended and Cocaine had an infinite number of directions to go in. The druggede didn’t let this faze him as the jogged onwards.

Unexpectedly, Cocaine felt the earth beneath him shift and he had a split second to jump away before it exploded right under him. ‘What the hell was that?’ thought Cocaine in alarm. ‘I couldn’t feel it beforehand nor could I force it to stop, what the hell is going on here? And why do I get the feeling that Soakudo left out a few key points in his explanation.’ Cocaine later found out that the Daemon had tweaked the last two obstacle courses such that the demon-carrier would not be able to use his Supremacies.

Cocaine tried to run once again, but it seemed every other place he put his foot down, a trap would activate. Thus, the druggede was forced to jump from tree to tree. This, of course, held its own difficulties. Within the trees were hidden needle launchers, which were triggered by movement and seemed to almost predict where Cocaine would jump to and fire to that location, leaving Cocaine with several cuts and scratches; to which the druggede paid little attention. ‘My healing factor will take care of little things like these,’ he thought. Little did Cocaine know but the needles were coated with certain chemicals, nothing life-threatening, more like mind-altering; something Cocaine’s healing factor wouldn’t catch as harmful until too late.

Within several minutes of being hit by the needles Cocaine did start to feel light-headed. Soon after the colors of the forest started changing, and Cocaine had to stop and do a double take on the fact that leaves were now blue. ‘What the hell is going on here? Genjutsu?’ wondered Cocaine. The young shinobi made a simple seal and said, “Kai,” but the colors did not go back to normal. ‘What is going on here? Maria?’

“You got careless, that’s what happened,” she growled lightly. “I only managed to get half of it, but you’ll just have to survive through the effects I couldn’t prevent in time.”

“What do you mean?” asked Cocaine confused. A soft wind rippled through the forest and swung a lonely vine in front of Cocaine, who immediately jumped away in fear. However, having only a mild sense of where he was going, Cocaine ended up sprawled out on his back on the ground. “Where the hell did that giant snake come from!” yelled Cocaine. “And how come I hadn’t felt its presence until it was upon me?” before the Maria could answer a rumble was heard beneath Cocaine and he frantically rolled to the side knowing what was coming. He could not get away fast enough and was blown into the deep shrubbery by the force of the explosion.

“That’s not really a giant snake,” calmed the Maria. “Those needles were coated in a drug; a hallucinogenic. My demonic chakra is not conditioned against these kinds of things and so you got hit with half of it before I forcefully stepped in.”

“You mean my healing factor failed?” inquired Cocaine in shock.

“In a way, yes,” she explained. “This drug is not life-threatening, that is why your healing factor didn’t catch it.”

‘I see,’ thought Cocaine gravely as he realized that he couldn’t afford to get hit by any more of those needles. That made things a lot more difficult for Cocaine, who had wanted to simply explore the second course. ‘This one is definitely a class up in that sense, but the traps themselves aren’t that much faster,’ analyzed Cocaine before realizing that he had barely entered the second course. The druggede, by now, had managed to crawl out of the shrubbery and jump up to a tree branch, which he sat with his eyes closed for several minutes waiting for the drug to wear off. This didn’t take a long time with Maria directing her demonic chakra to the necessary parts of Cocaine’s brain.

As soon as he was ready, Cocaine made his way further into the course mostly encountering only the old kinds of traps with shuriken, needles, or the occasional Doton ninjutsu trap. All this made him relax and worry at the same time. He knew this was just the beginning, but how long would it last? Cocaine knew that he had traveled at least three quarters of a mile, meaning the castle was just up ahead. Was the mile, or so, of jungle really just a recap or was it only made to seem that way? Maybe the Daemon wanted him to be more relaxed so that he would fall into traps easier; that was always a possibility.

Cocaine continued on this train of thought until his feet brought him to the edge of a clearing, the floor of which was entirely covered in vines. ‘This just smells like a catastrophe waiting to happen,’ Cocaine’s ponderings came to an abrupt end as he looked around before cautiously stepping out onto the vines.

For the first several steps nothing happened and the druggede dropped his guard minutely. About halfway through the clearing, he felt a mild stirring below his feet, but as he tried to jump away a vine quickly rose up and grabbed his foot pulling him back down. “SHIT!” Cocaine tried to break away from the vines, but they just kept tightening their hold on him and pulling him down into the ground. ‘Damn it! Without my control of Doton I won't be able to do anything,’ thought the druggede frantically, as his wrists were drawn apart from each other and he was pulled farther and farther down. ‘Hana! What the hell do I do?’ the druggede yelled in his mind. ‘I’m going to die!’

“Don’t panic,” she said calmly.

‘Don’t panic! How the hell am I supposed to not panic?’

Before the Korean had a chance to answer, Cocaine saw a flash and the next thing he knew, he was back in the beginning of the training course. “I told you not to panic.” Cocaine scowled a little.

“So, got caught in a trap already?” asked a voice behind Cocaine. The druggede turned around to find the Daemon sitting cross-legged with his eyes closed. “I thought it’d take you at least 30 minutes.”

“How come I can’t use my Doton Supremacy?” asked Cocaine.

“I disabled it,” was the curt reply. “You need to learn not to depend on it.”

“I’m not dependant on it,” argued Cocaine. “It’s simply a nice ability that simplifies a lot of things.”

“And if I were to send you to Makai and attack you with a Doton jutsu, would you really be able to defend against me?” asked Soakudo in a slightly amused tone.

“What does Makai have to do with this?” wondered Cocaine. “All of my battles will take place on earth.”

The Daemon sighed and opened his eyes, “I just want you to become versatile, and not think that you are god with your Supremacies.”

“But when it comes to humans, I am practically god, so what does it matter?” asked Cocaine defiantly.

“Wrong!” Soakudo raised his voice. “Konoha’s Sannin could kick your ass, the Akatsuki could kick your ass, and anyone else on an S-class level can kick your ass. Hence, you are not god.” Cocaine growled, but before he had a chance to make a retort the Daemon added in a cold, threatening tone, “And I could kill you using only my left leg. So shut up, little kid, and learn respect for your betters or they will kill you and not think twice about it.”

That, in combination with the Maria warning him that he was in way over his head, made Cocaine release the killer intent that he had gathered and hang his head in defeat. “My apologies,” he muttered.

Soakudo sighed, ‘Rebellious teenagers, they are all the same: I want to kick the crap out of every one of them.’ Soakudo motioned for Cocaine to follow him out of the training course and then pointed at the spot in front of him telling Cocaine to sit across from him. “Today I’ll be teaching you about meditation.”

“Meditation?” wondered Cocaine. “But I already know that.”

“You know the basics,” explained the young man. “I’m going to teach you advanced meditation. The first step is the same as what you usually do; however once you have reached the first level you must then lightly focus on something.”

“Wait, aren’t you supposed to keep your mind completely blank?” asked Cocaine.

“Yes and no,” sighed Soakudo. “To enter the trance world, as I like to call it, you do need a completely blank mind, but to further your journey in that world you need a focus.”

“What kind of focus?”

“This is where it gets tricky, you focus on whatever you want to improve,” explicated the Daemon. “If you want to, say, improve your hearing you would focus on your ears and dive into them, in a way… It’s hard to explain, it’s more a feeling than anything else. The easiest to start on is your heartbeat, just focus on how your heart is beating and then visualize your heartbeat in the same way that it would appear on a heart monitor.”

“What will this do for me?”

“Calm you down, make you a generally more collected person,” said the Daemon. “You don’t really need it, but it’s just the best introduction. In reality I can't tell you how to meditate past the first level, it completely depends on your body and mind, and how they work together.”

“So I will have to figure it out by myself?”

“I can give you pointers, but yes you will have to figure it out by yourself,” replied the young man. “You’re lucky actually, the Maria can make suggestions in your mind while you are meditating,” he thought for a moment. “Actually, it might be better if the two of you meditate at the same time and then synchronize, as if into one being.”

“That’s an interesting idea,” said Maria enthusiastically. “We need to try it.”

“However, be careful not to disrupt each other,” warned Soakudo. “The trance world is based on feelings, not words. Speaking to each other in the trance world would likely result in a break of meditation.”

Cocaine nodded and put on a thoughtful look as he prepared to meditate. It didn’t take him long to achieve the first stage and then focus on his heart rate and achieve, what he thought at least was the second stage. Cocaine tried to explore the place he ended up, but was quickly kicked out to the first level.

“You can’t forcefully explore,” calmly lectured Soakudo without opening his eyes. “Everything is done through feelings and calm feelings at that.”

Cocaine once again concentrated on his heartbeat and made it into the second stage, this time feeling around much more calmly. He thought he felt something, but it slipped out of his hands – so to speak – and he once again made too hasty of a grab at it and was tossed back into the first stage. This continued many more times until Cocaine could calm himself enough to actually hold it.

On the outside, Soakudo watched his student with a satisfied smile on his face. ‘You’re picking it up quickly, Cocaine. That’s good. You’ll need the extremely developed senses in the last course,’ he paused in his thoughts to consider the rough training plan he had laid for Cocaine. ‘Hmm… maybe I should move up the taijutsu training… since I don’t have you for that many years. As arrogant as I was with Kurotsuki, I do have to return Cocaine in three years, Ningenkai time, if I don’t…’ The Daemon looked down at his student as he felt Cocaine’s human chakra and the Maria’s demonic chakra start flowing at the same rate. ‘This synchronization will definitely help in the future… especially in a way neither of you realizes is possible,’ he smirked slyly.

Soakudo submerged himself into his own high-level meditation, which involved a lot more than just improving some senses, and thus left Cocaine to his own doings for the rest of the day. When he finally came out, he saw Cocaine a little ways away doing sit-ups with a boulder he had found nearby. Soakudo got up and walked over to the shinobi, “Hey, how are you doing?” he asked.

“Good, I’m on the fifth hundred,” said Cocaine and went back to his exercises.

“You do know…” Soakudo trailed off when he realized that Cocaine in fact didn’t know. “Well, you don’t know yet, but the back room of that house,” the young man motioned with his head, “is a weight training room.”

Cocaine stopped what he was doing and looked at the house in amazement, “Bullshit! There’s no way you could fit any kind of decent equipment into that shack.”

Soakudo laughed, “C’mon, I’ll prove you wrong.” Cocaine got up and followed the Daemon into the house and then to a far door, that the druggede had always assumed led to the backyard. Soakudo opened it and stepped inside, Cocaine followed closely behind and felt his jaw drop a moment later. The room was huge, bigger than the cottage by several times, and was filled with every single kind of machine he had seen in Konoha’s gym and more.

“H-H-How?” was the only thing Cocaine could say.

“You’re wondering how this all fits in the cottage,” said Soakudo. “Well the truth is, it doesn’t.” Noticing the bewildered look on Cocaine’s face, the Daemon knew he would have to elaborate, no matter how much he didn’t want to. “I don’t want to tell you too much this early in the training, especially since you won't be learning this stuff until, at least, two years from now. But basically, this is another dimension and that door there is the gateway, a permanent gateway mind you. This room is actually accessible from any of my places of residence. Why do I do this you ask? Well it’s simple, why keep rebuilding gyms when you can have a universal one? No reason to, so I simply have a door that is linked to this place in all of my houses.”

Most of that explanation went over Cocaine’s head; the druggede was mostly focused on all the work he could accomplish now. “Thank you very much,” he said in dreamy voice.

The Daemon laughed, “No problem, you’re welcome, enjoy,” with that he left Cocaine to his training. Soakudo positively noted just how worn out Cocaine was that evening. The druggede would have gone to bed without eating if Soakudo hadn’t intercepted him and dragged the boy to the dining table. After which he had to again drag him to bed, but this way he knew the boy would be able to get up tomorrow and train more.

The next day, Cocaine woke up a little later than usual and got up to find his breakfast sitting on the table with a little note from the Daemon. Soakudo simply apologized for having to leave early and advised that Cocaine meditate before going in to the training course. Cocaine nodded in agreement as he finished reading the note, ‘Calm myself, maybe raise my senses a little and then go through that course like a hot knife through butter,’ he laughed.

“Yeah, you wish kiddo,” the Korean laughed with him.

After a quick half hour meditating session, Cocaine spent the rest of the day in the second training course. Soakudo had come back just in time to activate the gate and watch his student barely avoid being turned into a porcupine. Cocaine, overall, was fairing much better than he had been the day before. Though, if you consider that he hadn’t made it to the toughest part of the course, that wasn’t saying much. The Daemon continued watching as Cocaine expertly avoided a Katon jutsu and then used a vine to swing over a Doton-trap-infested clearing, but as soon as he was far enough over and had enough velocity, Cocaine let go of the vine seconds before high-voltage electricity went through it. ‘He’s learning to use his surroundings, but at the same time be aware that something useful at one moment can become deadly in the next.’

Soakudo soon discontinued watching Cocaine, knowing that the druggede would soon be out of there and would talk about his experiences over dinner. Soakudo chuckled as he remember setting up these three courses, ‘The second course, was the highest my previous student could get though, then again that was the last one back then,’ thought the Daemon and his smile dropped. ‘But he was an idiot, and I an even bigger moron for actually seeing something…Now the third course was built to entertain and challenge me. If Cocaine can get through it, even with getting smudged once or twice by a trap, he’ll definitely be worth training.’

Cocaine came in two hours later than the Daemon had expected him back in a very angry mood. “It's impossible!” yelled Cocaine as he walked into the cabin, slamming the door behind him. The boy's clothing was torn, cut, and dried blood could be seen at the edges. His normally druggede hair was dirty with mud, some of which had dripped down onto his face, making it dark brown and slightly red. Cocaine was very irked at having to spend the four hours trying to get through that damned place. “It’s impossible! You hear me?”

“Anything is possible,” the Daemon tried to counter, but was cut off.

“No! That military base is IMPOSSIBLE to get through!” roared Cocaine. “Practically every single step is a trap. There’s some weird circular shit in the ground that I'm quite sure would do something horrible if I were to step on them. Then the fire, wind, and lightning jutsus that are placed perfectly that there is no way to dodge, except into another trap that is as dangerous or worse! So tell how the hell am I supposed to get through that?”

“Military base...” Soakudo mouthed in deep thought, his mind running through the entire course trying to figure out what it was that Cocaine was talking about. ‘What military base is the kid talking about?’ He thought for a few more moments. ‘Oh that military base...

'well, hah, I should have known he would end up there,’ the young man mentally laughed.

“Don't know anything about that...”

“Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about!” accused the angered Cocaine.

“I can't say anything,” solemnly replied the Daemon. “It's,” he paused, “something you have to figure out on your own.” He observed as his student panted heavily not just from anger, but also from the near torture he had been subjected to. ‘You'll understand one day that some of the safest routes are the ones that look the most dangerous.’

Cocaine growled, “There is no fucking way I can get through that base unless I somehow grow wings and fly,” said Cocaine. “And I have thought about how I might just catapult myself over it, but that idea didn’t turn out too well,” he added the last part sheepishly.

“I would have thought the Maria would discourage you from such idiotic behavior?” asked Soakudo barely suppressing a smile.

“She wasn’t too happy with me,” replied Cocaine and the Daemon laughed. “But still, are you telling me that there is a way through that place that doesn’t involve flying?”

Soakudo sighed, “All right, let me ask this, why do you want to go through it? Why not go around it?”

“There is no way around it, the electric fences lead to it, if you can call it leading,” replied Cocaine. “That reminds me, the Maria told me to tell you that that was a great idea with the Raiton-infused fences,” Cocaine’s face fell a little. “Though I think it gave her some weird ideas…”

“Well, she was always kinky like that,” commented the Daemon. “That reminds me, I need to take you to a night club one of these days and get you hooked up with some ladies.”

Cocaine placed his hands over his face and mumbled, “Why are all my teachers perverted? Is it just a curse I’m stuck with?”

“No, you don’t have a curse on you,” said the Daemon seriously. “If you did I would have taken it off already. As for the perverted part, I’m just a healthy male that lusts after girls,” he shrugged. “Nothing perverted about it… well maybe the occasional S&M session is, but that’s another story for another time.”

Cocaine tried his best to ignore what both the Maria and the Daemon were talking about as he finished his dinner and went to his room to sleep. ‘God damn you… beings!’ he thought in annoyance.

After a good night’s sleep it was back to training for Cocaine. The druggede found himself, once again, standing on the edge of that accursed military base that lay right between the jungle and the castle. ‘No walk in the park,’ randomly thought Cocaine. He remembered what the Daemon had said last night about finding a way around the base, but for the life of him could not see any other way to go except forward.

‘I’m missing something,’ concluded Cocaine for the umpteenth time. The question was what. ‘All right, let’s say I do have to go around it. Where is the detour? It’s definitely not here; even if I were able to climb over the fences I would still end up on the territory of the military base.’

That left only one conclusion: that the detour was somewhere behind Cocaine. But behind him were just more rows of fences, so it was before the fences, before Cocaine even had any kind of knowledge that the military base existed. A fork in the road, that is what Cocaine had to search for. A fork in the road that he had obviously missed. The problem was that the course was pretty linear, there seemed to be a set path that had been intended for him to take despite the abundance of jungle around him.

“Then it is a hidden fork in the road,” advised the Korean. “Something that you did not see and/or did not consider taking.”

Cocaine had backtracked along the electric fences looking for any other way he could go until they ended, but found nothing. He continued his track for several dozen more minutes, still finding nothing. He was about to leave when the Maria stopped him. “Cocaine, I think you should look around this area a bit more,” she said.

Cocaine turned back in confusion, but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. “There’s nothing here Hana,” he said slowly, his eyes digging into every detail of the landscape. “I don’t see any…” his voice died in his throat as he caught a slight opening in the cave-like rock formation to his left. Cocaine walked over for a closer look and pushed lightly on, what he thought was a wall, only to have his hand pass through it. “Genjutsu,” he mumbled.

“Told you so,” Maria teased arrogantly.

“But this really isn't even genjutsu, since my hand can pass through it,” said Cocaine as he examined the opening. “And it doesn’t get dispelled when I put my hand through it. Incredible,” marveled the druggede, “such a level of genjutsu.”

The Maria was herself amazed, but didn’t let it show and instead bade Cocaine to explore the cave. At first the druggede was quite hesitant, after all who wants to go explore a completely dark cave in a training course that could very well kill you if you weren’t careful. But seeing as there was really no other way, Cocaine decided to risk it and stepped into the cave. He cautiously progressed forward in small steps holding onto the wall with his right hand just in case. Cocaine couldn’t have gone more than 20 yards when he saw two lines of fire, each on one side of the cave, coming straight at him at a remarkable speed; he barely had time to pull his hand away before it was caught in the flame.

Cocaine looked back, following the path of the light, and noticed that there was no opening behind him anymore, but a solid wall with a faint faded out picture on it that looked like a bird or something. The druggede turned to the side to look at the flames that were burning on top of water, or so it seemed. He thought it strange at first but then remembered that some liquids had flammable properties, and nodded in understanding.

The cave was now not a cave at all, but rather a hallway with some random designs carved into the pale yellow-stoned walls. The two lines of fire very well lit the hallway, and following the lines farther on Cocaine could see that the hallway turned to the right in about 50 feet. Having no other choice, Cocaine followed the passage through it’s twists and turns until it ended in a ladder that led up to some sort of trap door. There had been no traps through the passage and Cocaine relaxed quite a bit, but this trap door just set off all the alarms in the druggede’s head. But what choice did he have? That was the only way to go, the only way to advance in the training grounds.

Cocaine carefully climbed up the ladder, and even though it looked to be ages old it was sturdy as if it had been made only the day before. He slowly and cautiously pushed the trap door up several inches by the large circular handle on the near side and peeked out; all he saw were leaves and branches. Cocaine pushed the door up a ways more and peeked out once again, this time being able to look left and right; he still saw nothing but shrubbery. The druggede was getting annoyed and decided to risk it, he flung the door open and ducked up hoping to avoid any incoming projectiles. But none came and after a couple seconds Cocaine climbed out of the passage to see where he had ended up.

It was a courtyard, a humongous rectangular courtyard lined with giant stone pillars supporting an overhang that only covered the space between the pillars to the walls. The rest of the ceiling was completely open proving a view of the magnificent clear blue sky. However, the courtyard was in ruins, vines were crawling up the pillars and walls, weeds grew from in between the cracked giant stone plates that had once made up the floor of the glorious courtyard, shrubbery – like the kind around where Cocaine was standing – was scattered through out. The entire place seemed to have had the life drawn out of it, the pillars and walls had lost their original color, cracks were visible in everything, and an unwavering desolate feeling hung in the air like a horrid stench.

Cocaine looked down into the passage way and noticed that it was completely dark as the cave entrance had been when he first stepped in. ‘So it’s made to light up only when someone goes in there, clever,’ thought the druggede. He shut the trap door and went to explore the courtyard. After several minutes he discovered that there were three doors, one on each of the longer sides and another one on the shorter side opposite the trap door. The only difference between the doors, other than location, were the different symbols carved into them. In a clockwise direction from the trap door, the first door had a shining sun, the second had a crescent moon, and the third had a large oak carved into it.

“The sun, the moon, and the earth,” remarked the Maria thoughtfully.

‘But which one’s right?’

“Who knows,” answered the Korean. “On the one hand, it might be the earth since this course started out with a jungle, but on the other maybe it’s not the earth because the first part was a jungle.”

Cocaine nodded gravely, he could see the dilemma that he was faced with, pick the wrong door and who knows what could happen. And at the moment Cocaine was torn, his gut told him to go with the sun, his reason had already picked out the earth, but the crescent moon just looked so enticing. Cocaine thought back to Soakudo’s explanation of the course and noted that once he had stepped into it, the castle clue seemed to make no sense at all. Using that logic the earth door didn’t fit, since it had a whole lot to do with this course and the moon door, which seemed to have nothing to do with the course, was now the better choice. However, the sun also didn’t fit in anywhere, except for the fact that it was constant daylight in the training course.

The more he thought about it, the more it confused him, so finally Cocaine decided to just go forward and deal with the consequences later. Thus Cocaine found himself at door number two, or the crescent moon door. The druggede walked in to find himself on the edge of a long drop with only the walls on either side still intact, only about 50 feet across did the floor continue again. Cocaine sighed, he could try and jump that, but had a feeling he wouldn’t quite make it. This left him with only one choice, to wall-walk to the other side, which he could do without a problem because of his good chakra control.

The real problem came halfway through the walk when a row of spears unexpectedly came out of the wall and stabbed Cocaine through the foot; the spears disappeared a moment later leaving the druggede in horrible pain. Only when the spears retreated did Cocaine feel the pain of having his foot stabbed clean through, he screamed in pain and lost control over his chakra, thus causing him to fall. Cocaine’s reaction rate had improved since the first obstacle course and the druggede grabbed an exposed edge before he had a chance to fall too far.

He hung like that until the pain had subsided and Maria’s chakra had fixed up his foot, after which he instantly pulled himself up and, by channeling chakra to his fingertips, was able to climb up onto the wall once more and stick to it using his feet. He cursed Soakudo in any way imaginable while he tried to figure out how to get around the row of spears. The spears would come out when ever anything was put in front of them; Cocaine figured this out the hard way when he waved his hand in front of them, luckily he got off with no more than a scratch, which was instantly healed.

He growled lightly, ‘If you can't go through go around, right?’ Cocaine remembered Soakudo’s advice. ‘But it’s a fucking wall, how am I…?’ the druggede trailed off as he realized he could jump to the opposite wall and continue from there. ‘But what if that wall also has a line of spears?’ he hesitated.

“Did you notice that the spears don’t go out very far?” suggested the Maria.

‘Yes, but how will that…?’ Cocaine trailed off as a light bulb went off. ‘Oh I see.’ Cocaine had already been sitting in a crouched position, so as soon as he came up with the idea he immediately executed it. The druggede jumped for the other wall, however not straight to the other wall but diagonally so that when the spears did come out of both sides, Cocaine passed right between the tips with only some torn clothing. The young shinobi did a half flip and landed on his feet sticking to the opposite wall with a confident smirk.

The next trap on the wall was a Katon jutsu forming an impenetrable wall of fire every couple seconds and then fading out, but not enough to safely walk through before the next wall of fire was made. This forced Cocaine to time the trap perfectly so he could slip through it right before the wall of fire was made again; this time, same as last time, he was forced to jump diagonally to be able to make it through safely. Finally he made it to the other side where he could walk on the floor once more.

After following the corridors for some time, avoiding all the projectile traps and jutsu traps, Cocaine caught sight of something golden in the room behind two revolving pillars covered with blades that were moving from side to side, which were easy enough to pass through once you’ve figured out the timing of when to jump between them. But if that was indeed the end then this last stretch of corridor will have to been killer. Cocaine had long ago figured out that going into the next trap infested hallway headfirst was going to get your head chopped off, so he quickly made the very familiar cross seal and created a single Kage Bunshin to test it out for him. Cocaine had poured quite a bit of extra chakra into his clones so that he could withstand several hits; the proportions being about five percent of Cocaine’s overall chakra per hit, so these kinds of chakra reinforced Bunshin weren’t very practical in real battle, but in situations like these they were quite good.

What Cocaine saw made his jaw drop to the floor, the Kage Bunshin didn’t get much more than five yards before he was destroyed by a combination of darts, Katon and Raiton. Jumping away from the darts had triggered a Katon jutsu to come out of the floor and jumping away from that onto a nearby wall had triggered the entire wall to light up in a Raiton jutsu.

Cocaine rubbed his head as he analyzed the situation. He couldn’t walk on the floor because of the little holes, which were littered along the entire corridor, shot out fire. The druggede wouldn’t be able to avoid the fire by walking on the walls because one touch and electricity would roll through them. Cocaine found himself laughing bitterly when he realized that he would have to walk on the ceiling, barring the chance that the ceiling was also trapped.

Cocaine scrutinized the top of the passage for any kind of openings and not finding any jumped up and started walking upside down across the corridor. He was forced to jump away many times to dodge projectiles, jutsus, and sometimes both, but he finally made it to the other side and then jumped through the last trap to where he was sure to find the statue of the golden baboon.

Cocaine did find it, but there was a complication. The statue was inside a large steel dome cage, while Cocaine was outside of said cage. The druggede fiercely gripped the bars of the cage and violently shook it with a ferocious yell; the cage didn’t even budge. He had done all this work only to find that the statue was inaccessible. Cocaine checked every single spot on the cage and in the room, hoping to maybe find a release switch that would open the cage, but to no avail. That’s when Cocaine caught sight of it, a small indent on one of the tiles inside the cage. The druggede knelt down and leaned forward until his face was against the bars so that he could see it better; from what he could tell it was like a small handle. Cocaine stood back up and walked around the cage, maintaining his eyes on the handle in the floor and noticed that some cracks between the tiles around the notch were thicker than others.

“Damn,” muttered Cocaine. “It’s a trap door. I have to find another passage that leads to that trap door.” The druggede punched the wall next to him as he looked back from where he came. He would have to go through all those traps once more so that he could make it out to the courtyard and choose another door.

“Or you could die,” suggested the Maria.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ replied Cocaine sarcastically, ‘I’ll just kill myself and restart the course, is that right?’

“Well, yeah actually. Unless you really want to go through all those traps back to the courtyard, which is through a door that you don’t even know you can open from this side.”

‘Well then, all mighty Maria, how do you propose I kill myself?’ asked Cocaine in annoyance.

The Korean sighed, “There is that whole corridor filled with traps behind you.”

‘I don’t fancy the idea of being burned alive,’ countered Cocaine.

“Then get shot in the head, or better yet, just walk up to the rotating blades and get chopped in half,” recommended the Korean morbidly. “Of course, going back through all those traps will just be more training and the more used to it you get, the easier it’ll be later.”

Cocaine grumbled but knew that she was speaking the truth, so he backtracked his way through the traps and out to the castle courtyard. Considering that the distance between the cage room and the courtyard was pretty small, and the fact that Cocaine knew where all the traps were, the druggede made it back within a half hour.

Night had fallen several hours ago outside of the training course, a light breeze rippled the grass and a half moon was shining brightly over the meadow and cabin. The Daemon was on a small hilltop across from the three gates patiently waiting for the arrival of his student. He had arrived at sunset, but decided to meditate instead of spying on his student; after all, Cocaine would tell him about it anyway. Soakudo placed a fifth teacup in an orderly line to his right as he heard the dull sound of the second gate opening, and looked up as Cocaine trudged out the gate and towards him.

“You’re looking rather beat up,” he commented jokingly.

Cocaine frowned in response, “That place is absolutely infested with traps.”

It was a statement that bordered on a question because of the tone of Cocaine’s voice, hence why the Daemon felt the need to reply. “Yes. But I think the variety and difficulty makes this course a lot more interesting than the previous one.”

“It’s definitely not bland, if that’s what you’re trying to say,” the young man nodded. “But I’m irked about the fact that after going through two of the doors, and having to restart from the very beginning more than half a dozen times I might add, that I still haven't been able to actually get to the statue.”

Soakudo stood up and motioned for Cocaine to follow him, “Come, we’ll talk about it over dinner.” However, the young man wasn’t heading toward the cabin, and noticing Cocaine’s confused look elaborated. “Oh yeah, forgot to mention, we’ll be eating out tonight.” Cocaine looked at him with even more confusion, “What?” the druggede boy just shrugged and followed his teacher through a black portal that had appeared before them.

They were suddenly on the outskirts of a small festive town that was bugging with energy. After taking a little whiff, Cocaine came to the conclusion that they were close to the ocean. Inside the town looked the same as any town, rows of vendors and small restaurants, bars, and clubs. This was the main street, of course, and from it Cocaine could see several alleyways leading off to the residential parts of town.

Cocaine looked up at his teacher and noticed that the young man was now dressed in baggy black pants and a dark red t-shirt, over which an open sleeveless gray jacket hung. Remembering that he had just come out of the training course, Cocaine looked down at himself in horror knowing he would find training clothes that were full of cuts, tears, and partially burned parts. However, he was shocked to find about the same outfit as the Daemon had on except that he had no jacket and his black t-shirt, which was a little tight, had some writing on it, “Monster,” was written in red in the middle, above it were some red claw slashes, and made to look like blood was dripping down from the letters and slashes.

Cocaine grimaced, what would these villagers think of him now? They would probably glare and try to push him around, how could the Daemon have done this to him, wondered the young boy. However as they continued walking, Cocaine noticed that the villagers were just passing him by not even looking at him, and if they did look at him then it was just a curious or thoughtful look. The druggede also noticed several girls looking at him with a light blush, while guys gave him a nasty jealous look. ‘What the hell is going on here?’ wondered Cocaine. The Maria simply smirked; she understood what the Daemon was trying to do.

“Umm, Daemon-sensei, where is this place we are going to?” asked Cocaine.

“It’s on the other side of town,” replied the young man. “I kind of forgot where it was and hence teleported us the wrong place,” he lied. “You like your clothes?”

“They’re all right,” replied the Maria carrier. “How did you do that, by the way?”

“That portal we went through has the ability to change things about the person, or people, going through it,” explained Soakudo. “Nothing on a physical level, but it can change clothes, hair styles, equipment you’re carrying, that kind of stuff.” Before Cocaine could ask another question, they had reached their destination.

It was a small restaurant with no distinguishing features, except the dull orange lamps that illuminated the outside and inside. The waitress was a kind young girl with long black hair and a slender build. She walked the two of them to their table, gave them their menus, and with a kind and shy smile said that she would be back with their water and bread. Cocaine looked around and only saw several other people sitting at far ends of the restaurant, soft music was playing through the speakers in the ceiling, and the atmosphere was perfect for relaxing after a long day of work.

“It’s a nice place,” commented Cocaine.

“It has the best lobster,” happily said Soakudo. “If you can't tell, I absolutely adore seafood.”

“I wanted to ask,” said Cocaine meekly. The Daemon looked significantly at his student waiting for the question. “Why did you give me this t-shirt?” he finally asked.

“You mean does it have the words ‘monster’ and ‘dare to fight?’ written on it?” Cocaine nodded. “Well, because in a way you are a monster,” said Soakudo and watched his student’s face harden. “Oh come on, wouldn’t you tear apart a villager from Konoha and then bathe in their blood?” the young man laughed when Cocaine’s face shifted first into a confused and then an agreeing look. “Look kid, we’re not in Konoha. Here people don’t look at you like you’ve just summoned the devil himself when you mention monsters or demons. Actually in most places around the world, things written on t-shirts are mostly for laughs and/or to show off.”

“Oh,” the druggede paused. “Yeah, I did notice that they didn’t look at me hatefully. It’s just really weird for me to walk down the street labeled, this time by my t-shirt as a monster, and not have people glare.”

“You get used to it,” shrugged Soakudo. “You also get used to young pretty girls looking at you like they want to eat you, but that is a little different.”

“I noticed girls looking at me,” said Cocaine, “not quite in the way you’re describing though.”

“This is a pretty secluded fishing village,” explained Soakudo. “People here are a lot more formal and virtuous, if you were to go to a mainland city that is complete with a red-light district and the girls are a lot more open, so to speak, then you would find that look.”

“I take it you get it all the time,” stated Cocaine.

“Well, when you’re a handsome devil, got money to spend, and show off a few insignificant shinobi-like moves, women – especially those not from a ninja village – tend to swoon over you,” the Daemon laughed. “But 95 percent of those are just common groupies that are only with you for your name, or money, or status in society.” The young man shrugged, “I’m not looking for a wife right now, so I don’t care too much.”

“You know most people would say girlfriend instead of wife,” observed Cocaine.

“Yes, but on my life scale, having a wife is the same as having a girlfriend on a human scale,” reasoned Soakudo. “The only difference is the kids, grandkids, and great grandkids.”

“You think I’ll ever have a wife?” asked Cocaine somewhat sadly. After all, all of the girls in his life never gave him the time of day, and if any of them ever found out he had the Maria inside of him they would probably run screaming.

“Of course,” was the absolutely confident reply.

The reply came so quickly that the druggede doubted his teacher for a moment, “Really? You’re not just saying that out of pity?” Soakudo shook his head. “You think she’ll be better than the Maria?”

At this the Daemon paused a moment to think. “In a way, yes.”

Cocaine tilted his head to the side, “In a way?” Soakudo nodded. “You know something, don’t you?”

“I know a lot of things.”

“About my wife, I mean.”

“You don’t have a wife,” retorted the young man with a sly smile.

Cocaine seethed, “I’m not going to get any information out of you about this matter, am I?”

“Nope,” was the short and definitive reply.

“Where are we, by the way?” asked Cocaine.

“In a great seafood restaurant,” replied Soakudo sarcastically.

The druggede took a deep breath to calm himself, “Where are we geographically?” he emphasized the last word.

Soakudo laughed, “We are on a small island in the Water Country, about 500 miles north of the Hidden Mist.”

“And I was wondering, where is that cabin in relation to all this?”

“Well,” the Daemon seemed to be mulling over the answer in his mind. “The easiest answer is that it’s not in this world. Of course I could superimpose the cabin’s astral plane onto this world’s and in that case it’d be somewhere in the Lightning Country, but now you have no idea what the hell I’m talking about.”

Cocaine nodded, “You’ve really got to teach me about all these dimension things; I don’t seem to be able to understand anything you say.” Soakudo laughed at this and promised Cocaine that he would indeed teach him about it, but a lot farther down the road.

They ate calmly, not hurrying anywhere, and chatted about the training that Cocaine was going through. The druggede mentioning the dome cage within which the statue resides, and then also mentioning how he went through the sun door because his gut told him so, but only ending up looking through a glass ceiling up at the statue and still not being able to reach it. Soakudo laughed both times, but told his student that that was very good. He honestly hadn’t expected Cocaine to get through the traps as fast. Cocaine bragged about he’d used a Kage Bunshin to figure out what traps lay ahead and only afterwards going in for real. The Daemon nodded in approval, but also told him to enjoy it while he could, because in the next course that tactic would be useless.

“So what happened with the earth door?” asked Soakudo. “I have a hard time believing you gave up and just came out to eat.”

“I got caught on the quicksand that appeared out of nowhere, in the mountains!” Cocaine stressed the location.

Soakudo shrugged, “I thought I’d switch things up a little. Plus, quicksand can be made anywhere, it doesn’t have to be a desert, and then you just hide it with some rather nice genjutsu and the enemy doesn’t realize what’s really happening until it’s too late.”

“Wouldn’t they easily realize what’s happening? The enemy will be slowly sinking, how can they not know that they’re stuck in quicksand?” questioned Cocaine.

“Simple, because to them it’ll still look like they are sinking into rock,” explained the young man. “Hence they’ll think they are simply stuck in a genjutsu, and if you’ve put a decent genjutsu, then by the time they get out of it and realize that they really are stuck in quicksand it’ll be too late.”

“What level do you consider ‘decent’?” asked the druggede.

“High-chuunin, preferably jounin,” Cocaine nodded. “I’m not big on genjutsu myself, I kind of consider it cheating.”

“How so?” wondered the druggede.

“Well, at my level I can dismember most high-level jounin within a minute,” Cocaine’s eyebrows rose. “So to distract them with genjutsu while moving closer to beat the shit out of them with taijutsu just seems unfair. Plus I can cross a stadium length in five to ten seconds, depending on whether or not I’m being serious. So let’s say I cast a decent genjutsu and it takes my opponent three seconds to get out of it. Well, that leaves them with two seconds to notice that I’m attacking, get ready to block, and maybe think up a counterattack; though most people won't get to the third step. So my opponent is on the defensive for the rest of the battle, not even having had the chance to think up ways to attack me.”

“So you beat the shit out them even faster?” analyzed Cocaine.

“Exactly,” replied Soakudo. “Trust me, Cocaine, when you get up to a high level, like S-Class and/or a Kage level or even my level, finding a good fight where you try not to allow for openings but your opponent still finds them and can hurt you quite a bit, is very difficult.”

“But no one is on your level,” realized the young druggede.

“I have to toy around with Sannin level shinobi that are going all out to get anything even remotely resembling a decent fight.”

“What about Hisoka and maybe Naru when he’ll have the Sharingan?” asked Cocaine.

“Those kinds of people become dependant on their special abilities, AKA bloodlines, and if you know how to null those abilities they become lost and scared and you kick the shit out them much like you would to someone on Yatsu’s level.”

Cocaine choked on his food at that point. The Daemon could compare Hisoka to Yatsu, ‘So that’s the kind of level he’s at,’ thought Cocaine in amazement.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be teaching you how to negate the Sharingan,” said Soakudo offhandedly as if it was the most common thing in the world. “Or at least some aspects or it. Mangekyou is a little harder to negate, per say, since it’s not really a negation. Either you’re stuck in it or you’re out of it, there can be no middle ground.”

“But you can do it no problem, right?”

The Daemon shrugged and tossed his head form side to side for a dozen seconds. “Well, see, at my level I can actually twist the world enough so that I use his own Mangekyou against him, but for that you need very fine tuned control and maybe even an Daemon link to the world.”

“Meaning, I’ll never be able to do it?” inquired Cocaine.

“When I teach you enough, you won't need to,” assured Soakudo. “To do the Tsukiyomi aspect of the Mangekyou the Uchiha has to be standing still. They do not have nearly enough demonic blood running through them to create dimensions on the run.”

Cocaine’s eyes widened, “Demonic blood?”

Soakudo sighed, “I may as well give you a little history lesson on the Uchiha, since I mentioned it and all.” Cocaine looked at this instructor in great interest; just the idea that the Uchiha had demonic blood in them was captivating enough. “Background info for this is that only beings with demonic blood running through them can create other dimensions; I wasn’t going to tell you this until we started your dimension training, but consider it a little teaser. Anyway, I’m sure you’ve heard of the Hyuuga clan, right?” Cocaine’s eyes narrowed as he nodded. “Well, I’m not going to go into much detail about it, but they are originally of angelic descent,” Soakudo spoke the last part in a bitter, angry tone.

“I don’t know exactly when it happened, but one of the demons that I brought up to Ningenkai fell in love with a member of the Hyuuga. Naturally, the Hyuuga clan didn’t want a daughter of theirs married to a demon, so the couple ran away and had kids and all that good stuff,” Soakudo waved if off as an unimportant matter. “The fact of the matter is that the Hyuuga were gifted with the ability to see dimensions being opened and, back then, had the ability to counter them. By counter, I mean that they could prevent the person making the alternate dimension from entering it, or prevent the person from leaving it, or better yet catch that person as he was leaving it and kill him before he could even do anything.”

“Wait a second,” something clicked in Cocaine’s head. “If demons are the only ones that can create other dimensions and the Hyuuga can stop them, and you said that they were of angelic descent, then…”

“Yes,” affirmed the Daemon, “the Hyuuga were placed on earth to counterbalance the demons that were placed on earth. Basically to make sure that the demons that were placed on Ningenkai didn’t take control of the world, as they very well could if left unchecked.”

“But they don’t seem all that angelic,” remarked the druggede.

The Daemon’s tone turned incredibly bitter, “Because they aren’t anymore, those bastards,” he scowled in anger. “Enough about them for now, they piss me off too much.”

Cocaine’s eyebrow rose at how much Soakudo seemed to hate the Hyuuga. ‘I really do wonder why.’

“Anyway, I’m sure you’ve heard rumors that the Sharingan originated from the Byakugan,” Cocaine nodded. “Well, that is true, what happened was that the Byakugan was altered by the demonic blood running through its new host, thus it evolved. Being able to see chakra stayed the same, however, lost was the telescopic ability and the all around sight. What was altered was the ability to see the dimension gates. This turned into being able to predict movements, which stems from two theories. The first being that a person’s mind could be considered another dimension and the second that states that for every single decision a person makes another dimension is created, one in which they made choice number one, another in which they made choice number two, and so on. So being able to see dimension gates can transcend into being able to see movements because you see how each separate dimension is created and then there’s the Sharingan’s innate ability to combine theory number one and theory number two, and hence be able to see what the person is going to do next because they have already made the decision in their mind and by filtering out the possible other moves.”

Cocaine’s mind was racing at breakneck speeds trying desperately to figure out what the Daemon was talking about, but was failing miserably. He heard the Daemon reassure him that once they started dimension training that it would explain all the basics and that this would make a lot more sense, but that really didn’t help at the moment. He finally heard Soakudo start talking about the Mangekyou and willed himself to pay attention, even if he didn’t understand any of it.

“The Mangekyou is, in simple terms, a dimension maker,” continued the Daemon. “It makes what is called the Void World, in which the maker has absolute control over time flow, scenery, distance, and a few other things. I’ll explain this in detail later, but for now I’ll give you the overview of the Tsukiyomi. The Void World is – was – an interrogation technique. The person that makes that world can force memories, his own or the other person’s to surface and project themselves within the Void World. Now the Tsukiyomi is a modification of all this, what it does is exploit the set up link between the Void World and the mind of the captive person to make whatever happens in the Void World, also happens in the mind of the captive. Basically a reverse, instead of pulling memories they are added. Since time is an aspect controlled by the instigator, he can say ‘experience event A for three days straight’, and the event will in fact go on for three days in mind’s time of the captive, which is a theory I really don’t want to get into right now. Basically whatever the instigator says is what happens in that world. Ok?” Soakudo stopped at that point as he noticed his student’s glazed eyes and timed nod that meant he had lost track of what was being talked about a long time ago.

It took a minute for Cocaine to notice that the Daemon had stopped talking and that he was still nodding at a timed rate. The young teenager shook himself out of his daze and apologized for zoning out. Soakudo simply laughed it off and said that he also zoned out when it had first been explained to him, the young man did note that this was one of those things that are a lot easier to understand if you’re experiencing or doing it. The rest of the dinner passed without event and soon they were already on their way back to the portal that would take them to the ‘training course’ dimension.

Cocaine was once again amazed and slightly unnerved by the how all the people were looking at him. It wasn’t hate; it was admiration from the girls, jealousy, maybe some anger, from the guys, and just a general neutrality or indifference from everyone else. It was, weird; that was really the only way to describe it. That was it; a night out to dinner, a good night’s sleep, and Cocaine was back in the training course the next morning.

Since the problem was finding a way through the castle to the statue of the golden baboon, Cocaine had made sure that he was fluent with the trap in the jungle and could easily go through them with out even setting them off. Thus, getting to the castle if he ‘died’ was, tedious, but easy nonetheless. The main problem was setting off the quicksand-based vine trap and getting away. He would need to do this to pass the exam, but the only way he could think of was to just drop a clone in there while he easily passed over it. Cocaine realized that this was cheating, but couldn’t think of any other way to do it; he hoped that when the time of the exam came that the Daemon would understand his reasoning and let him do so.

Cocaine was now standing before the earth gate. The young druggede took a deep breath and opened the door. He then quickly ran through the first room to the double doors on the other side. Once he was behind the double doors he let out the breath he was holding and continued on with the course. That first room was something that had caught him off guard on the very first try and sent him back all the way to the beginning; a room filled with a gaseous poison that kills within a minute. Now, though, Cocaine knew better and held his breath all the way through, running briskly to the other side and out of the room as quickly as possible.

The next part was the same as the first part of the moon door and Cocaine easily got through it. He also easily made it through the next couple of corridors that contained some basic or mid-level traps, which Cocaine had already gotten used to. Cocaine quickly made it past the quicksand, but was instantly faced with an even harder problem: to get through, or around, a lake of lava. A first he thought it would be easy, just run along the wall to the other end, but the walls have streams of electricity running through them at a timed interval and are too far apart for Cocaine to jump from one to the other to avoid the attack.

The druggede started pacing along the edge of the lake in deep thought. He looked up at the ceiling but didn’t find one as his eyes fell on the blue sky in which a single white cloud was floating lazily; so that plan was out. ‘What the hell am I supposed to do, fly?’ wondered Cocaine. The teenager suddenly stopped as his ears picked up a very quiet crackle. The boy tried to pinpoint its origin, but was left staring straight ahead across the lava.

“Genjutsu,” hinted the Korean, and Cocaine immediately canceled it. The young shinobi raised an eyebrow at what he saw in front of him. Four ropes were hanging in a row above the middle of the lava pit electricity visibly running consecutively through each one with only a couple seconds of delay. What they were hanging from, Cocaine did not know, but figured it was probably something beyond his current understanding of the world.

‘So I have to jump from one rope to another quickly enough so that I don’t get shocked,’ thought Cocaine with a sigh. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded considering that the ropes weren’t very close together and Cocaine would have to swing back and forth once or twice before he built up enough momentum to carry him to the next rope. ‘Well, here goes,’ thought the druggede as he jumped up to the first rope just as the electricity was leaving it.

It took Cocaine ten tries before he realized that the ropes weren’t the only things that had been hidden in genjutsu. During one of his falls, Cocaine ended up breaking a rib from landing on something right above the lava momentarily before slipping off the said something into the lava, which earned him a one-way ticket to the jungle. Needless to say, the druggede lay in pain on the forest floor until, miraculously, the Daemon arrived and set his broke rib back into place. The young man then poured, what seemed to be, an enormous amount of healing chakra into the druggede’s body.

“You didn’t have to heal it up, you know?” asked Cocaine.

“I figure with all the wear and tear the training course puts on you, this is a nice break for the Maria’s chakra,” reasoned Soakudo. “Plus, it’s not like I’m going to need chakra in the near future.”

“Soakudo-sensei, I thought you said that there wouldn’t be anymore invisible objects in this course?” questioned Cocaine.

“Did I really say that?” wondered the Daemon in a dazed tone.

Cocaine nodded, “Yes, you assured me that there wouldn’t be anymore.”

“No, no, my dear boy,” chuckled the Daemon. “You asked if there were any invisible walls or ceiling, and I replied – truthfully – that there aren’t any.”

Cocaine scowled at being caught on technicality, “Then how do you explain the ropes hanging in mid air?” he asked defiantly.

“The ropes,” wondered Soakudo absentmindedly.

“The ones hanging about the lava pit,” elaborated Cocaine.

“The bending of the physicals laws of the world,” said Soakudo as if flying ropes were an everyday occurrence; Cocaine sweat-dropped at his teacher’s antics.

The boy got up and it suddenly registered that he was still inside the training course. He looked up at his teacher skeptically, “If we are still in here, then how did you know that I had been injured?”

The Daemon slowly rolled his eyes around clockwise, “I smelled it?” he asked not really trying too hard to lie, but hoping at the same time that Cocaine would buy it.

Cocaine, of course, didn’t buy it. “You smelled it?” he said slowly; the Daemon briskly nodded like a little kid that had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, but was still denying it. “How about the truth?” asked Cocaine briefly wondering how the Daemon could act so silly and still be, well, The Daemon.

Soakudo fake-pouted, “Fine, I’ll tell you my secret. I can see anything what’s happening within the training course, by using a special jutsu from the outside.” Cocaine nodded, he had long ago noticed that the Daemon seemed to have foreknowledge of had transpired in the training course before Cocaine even had a chance to open his mouth at dinner. Soakudo’s face suddenly turned serious, “Things like that don’t matter much though. What matters is that you have yet to even reach the golden statue for the first time,” he said in a surprisingly serious tone. With that he disappeared leaving Cocaine to redo the course once more.

Thirty minutes later Cocaine was once again standing at the edge of the lava lake. He guessed on where it was that he had fallen and indeed noticed that the texture of the lava around there wasn’t constant. “The intense heat is making the genjutsu waver, while it doesn’t disappear completely, it is noticeable.” Cocaine smirked, if he could jump down to whatever it was down there and wait out the electric current he would be over to the other side in no time. The druggede boy did just that, but when he landed on the hidden object, he found that standing on top of it was proving exceedingly difficult every second. Before he knew it, the thing he had been standing on seemed to twist forward and Cocaine was left to fall backwards into the lava.

“God damn it!” he yelled as he saw the familiar sight on the beginning of the course once more. ‘What the hell was that thing?’ wondered Cocaine.

“Probably a thin cylinder that starts spinning after a certain time,” analyzed the Maria. The druggede sighed; this was going to be a long day. He would have to jump off the cylinder before it started spinning, but after the electricity had left the rope.

It was late in the night now; Cocaine had been in the training course for over twelve hours now. The Daemon was patiently waiting for his student to return. He knew the difficulties that lay with the second test, and it wasn’t just the three doors that Cocaine had to go through; it was the final step that was the hardest. Then, of course, there was also the whole thing with having Cocaine fight a cage-match with a rather difficult opponent. This time around the Daemon wasn’t going to give him some pushover like that samurai, this time Cocaine was going to have to fight a very difficult taijutsu master. This opponent might be easier in comparison to Lee or Gai – Soakudo had, of course, been there for the prelims of the chuunin exam – simply because he couldn’t open the gates, but still had a lot of speed and experience.

Now experience was something that can't be taught, you have to learn it on your own. Lee might be a very good and strong fighter, but he does not have the experience to predict what his opponent is going to do next. Cocaine didn’t have much experience at all; Konoha genins did missions suitable for community service in a completely peaceful country. ‘D-Rank missions,’ the Daemon scoffed. ‘If the Hidden Leaf was under attack the genin were practically evacuated with the civilians.’ Of course their explanation being that the next generation would survive and then rise up from the ashes and rebuild Konoha, or some bullshit like that.

But the Daemon knew that first year rookies were, generally, no more useful than a sack of potatoes. He knew why the genin exams had a 66 percent fail rate, because most of the kids were just infatuated with the idea of becoming heroes but otherwise weren’t nearly cut out to become shinobi. This was exactly why chakra control wasn’t taught in the academy, if 66 percent of the kids wouldn’t ever use it then why waste the effort to teach them. Wasted effort, this was one of the reasons the Mist had previously had that barbaric genin exam, so that parents wouldn’t enter their kids into the ninja academy as if it was a regular school.

Then there were the stupid rules of the chuunin exam: it’s not against the rules to kill; yet they will stop the match if a person is going for the kill. Seriously, genin in Konoha are so sheltered. The Daemon idly wondered how the most peace-loving country that was smack in the middle of the shinobi world had survived for so long. He knew the reason was the management, of course, if the Hokages had been chosen slightly differently Konoha might have already been a hole in the ground. ‘Oh well,’ shrugged Soakudo. ‘Not that it really matters that much now.’ His thoughts coming to a halt as he saw Cocaine walk in, take a seat across from him, and quietly begin eating his dinner.

Soakudo quirked an eyebrow, Cocaine was never this quiet. “Hey kid, how’d it go?”

Cocaine looked up at the Daemon, “I reached the end,” he replied monotonously. “Except that it was still a glass ceiling above which the statue stood.” The druggede lowered his head back to look at his food as he continued to chow down.

“Well, you’ve got to look underneath the underneath, Cocaine-kun,” said the Daemon in a voice that was not his own.

Cocaine’s head shot up as he recognized the voice of his former teacher, SiC. “Jesus!” cried the druggede and fell backwards in his chair.

‘SiC’ was having a hard time keeping a calm face, then decided it wasn’t worth trying anyway and doubled over in laughter. A white wind snaked around his body from head to toe to reveal none other than Soakudo. “You fell for it,” he managed to say in between fits of laughter; the young man tried to calm himself, but to no avail.

Cocaine grimaced; he’d been easily fooled. Even the Maria was betraying him and laughing with the perpetrator. He picked up his chair, placing it in its proper position before sitting down and finishing his dinner.

“Seriously though, Cocaine,” said the Daemon, “this course is made so that you have to use your brain, not just your brawn.”

“So you’re saying that I missed something important?” asked Cocaine.

Soakudo sighed, “Look, last hint of any sort that I’m going to give you, think about what you know about castles and then see if you really did miss something,” he finished in a slightly annoyed tone. With that Soakudo bid the teenager a good night and walked out of the cabin.

Cocaine thought on what the Daemon had told him, but couldn’t come up with the missing link of information that he was missing. He had been absolutely enraged when he finally came to the end of the course, or so he thought, only to find that he was once again faced with the glass ceiling that separated him from the statue. Cocaine tried to break the glass with his fists, feet, the Bomb, and any other kind of technique he knew, but it wouldn’t budge. Being tired and really angry, Cocaine didn’t want to deal with all those traps and just jumped into the pool of lava, so that he could get out of the training course.

“Hana, what’s so special about castles that I’m completely missing it?” asked Cocaine.

“There are a lot of things that are special about castles,” stated the Korean. “But I think the thing that the Daemon wants you to focus on is the fact that they have many secret passages.”

‘Secret passages,’ thought Cocaine. ‘That’s it!’ It would be like the passage through the cave and the trap door that leads inside the castle in the first place. Now all the druggede had to do was find this secret passageway. But where would he start, he wondered. It’s not like there was going to be a big crack in the wall showing him that this was indeed a secret passage. Cocaine drifted off to sleep as he was replaying the course inside his head trying to find something that stood out.

The next morning the Daemon was nowhere to be found and neither was the customary breakfast that he would leave Cocaine. The druggede was slightly alarmed by this and became worried that he had done something to upset his teacher. Thus he fished out some food from the fridge, ate it as quickly as possible and ran off to the training course to beat the puzzle.

Cocaine had to go through the earth gate three times, back and forth, before he finally noticed it; a small niche that was way too precisely carved to be a normal crack. Previously, Cocaine had thought that finding it would be the hardest part, but he was wrong; getting to it was going to be twice as hard. The niche was located on the upper part of the left wall that bordered the lava pool. It seemed that the Daemon wanted his student to jump from one of the ropes to the niche, activate it, and not get hit by the electricity that was going through the ropes and the walls. ‘Great, just great,’ thought Cocaine.

The druggede boy took a deep breath and jumped onto the first rope, using his momentum he only needed to swing once before he could just over to the next one; doing the same going for the second rope. The third rope, however, is where things got tricky. Cocaine couldn’t use his forward momentum because he needed to change direction by 90 degrees so that could jump to the left wall. Cocaine decided to use the minimal most speed while swinging from the second rope to the third rope so that he wouldn’t have to wait long until the rope was swinging in the right direction.

The one good thing was that making the secret passage open wasn’t as hard as Cocaine thought it would be, all the druggede had to do was simple touch the indentation in the wall and it opened up revealing a dark corridor. This one was indeed devoid of light; Cocaine stumbled blindly through the passageway, holding onto the wall for support and as a guide for the turns. Finally the gloom ended and several faint streaks of light coming out of small holes in the ceiling became visible, and Cocaine hurried over to them. The sources of light were small cracks in a trap door; Cocaine hoped that he had indeed found the door he had been looking for.

The druggede pushed up on the trap door and was greeted by a large quantity of light hitting him straight in the eyes. “Argh!” he cried and shut the trap door as both hands went to cover his eyes. After a few moments, Cocaine tried again, this time opening the door slowly and gradually, squinting at the light that broke through. Finally Cocaine got used to it and jumped up, pushing the trap door completely open as he did so, and landed on the level above him. Cocaine looked around and smiled, he had made it, in front of him stood the statue of the golden baboon. The druggede didn’t want to touch it yet, knowing that he would just be teleported outside of the training course; he wanted to bask in the glory of being able to get to the end of this forsaken course. Once he was done, however, Cocaine did touch the statue and he was back out in front of the cottage.

The next week was split between meditation training and obstacle course training. Once Soakudo had found out that Cocaine made it to the end he insisted that the druggede boy had to improve all of his senses so that he would be able to survive the third and final course. Cocaine didn’t mind too much, since after he improved his visual senses he noticed that seeing in the dark tunnels became a bit easier. Soakudo explained that with enough advanced meditation a person could force his eyes to see in the dark, especially if that person already had connections to animals that have night vision.

With the numerous amount of times that Cocaine had gone through all the traps, the only difficult part of the exam would be the fight against which ever opponent Soakudo was select against him. Somehow he knew that that samurai guy from the last test was easy compared to what he was going to get this time around.

“You ready?” asked Soakudo on the morning of the exam.

“As much as I’ll ever be,” replied Cocaine.

“Now remember, first time through you have to avoid all the traps,” the Daemon recapped the rules of the exams. “And second time through you have to set them off and afterwards you’ll be fighting against an opponent of my choosing.”

Cocaine nodded, “What about the traps that are constantly in place?” inquired the druggede. “Like the electricity that goes through the ropes and walls?”

“You just have to avoid getting hit by that both times,” clarified the young man.

Cocaine took a deep breath and disappeared through the gate to the second course. Soakudo calmly walked up to the gate and activated all the cameras in the course, making them follow Cocaine’s movement and check that he did indeed get by all the traps without activating them. ‘Pretty good speed, Cocaine-kun,’ contemplated the Daemon. ‘But you will see soon that it is not nearly enough.’

Soakudo watched as Cocaine successfully completed the first part of the exam, and pulled out a soul charm in the shape of a ten pointed star, no bigger than one inch in diameter. He walked over the left side of the gate and placed the star into a special opening, which it fit into perfectly; it glowed a dull red. Cocaine came out of the gate a moment later and noticing the glowing charm, nodded in understanding, he turned around and walked back into the gate.

Cocaine reached the statue without much difficulty, even if he had to set off some of the most dangerous traps he had ever seen and barely escape them. As soon as he jumped up into the cage, Cocaine noticed the statue missing and in its place stood a solitary warrior. He was dressed in an all-gray fighter’s gi, he had long dark red hair, and his face was bowed such that Cocaine could not see his face clearly. The man was standing as still as a statue until Cocaine dropped himself into a fighting stance. At that point, the man raised his head and moved into a fighting stance of his own.

Cocaine couldn’t feel any chakra coming from the man, but could tell that he was a taijutsu expert. The druggede’s suspicions were confirmed when the man rushed him at a very fast speed. Cocaine barely had enough time to block, before the next assault came, and then the next. On the fifth strike Cocaine hadn’t been fast enough to block and the man landed a strong punch that sent the young shinobi flying backwards right into the cage wall behind him. Cocaine’s opponent didn’t waste any time as he continued his assault on the druggede boy.

However, right before the man struck at him again, Cocaine used Kawarimi on a clone that he had created in a second ago and had sent behind his opponent; thus allowing Cocaine to get behind his opponent. The red head was slightly confused for a moment, when the clone poofed out of existence, then he scowled and mumbled something in a language Cocaine did not understand. Not wanting to lose any kind of advantage he may have gained, the druggede instantly did several hand seals and pressed his palms to the ground. Giant spikes came out of the ground under the red-haired fighter, but he jumped out of the way and rushed at Cocaine once more not giving him enough time to complete his next set of hand seals, thus forcing the teenager to fight him with taijutsu.

The problem was that Cocaine’s taijutsu was the mostly the kind that he had been taught in the academy and the taijutsu master seemed to be able to predict anything Cocaine was going to do and counterattack on almost every single one of Cocaine’s strikes. At this point Cocaine took a deep breath and drew on the power of the Maria to enhance his speed and strength; for him this was the same as opening the celestial gates was for Lee. Power rushed through Cocaine’s body and pulsated as it reached the maximum capacity he could handle at the moment. The druggede boy dashed forward at a faster speed than the red head had used so far and managed to punch his opponent in the face.

However, the fight was far from over as Cocaine suddenly noticed that the red-haired fighter’s speed increased and he matched Cocaine’s perfectly, which for the druggede boy meant that he had once again lost his advantage. The Maria abruptly suggested that Cocaine should use his kunai and shuriken to give himself a little bit of an edge. Cocaine did as he was instructed and did indeed gain a good enough advantage where he could force his opponent into a defensive position, but still found it very hard to land a hit.

Overall, the red head managed to get in much more hits on Cocaine, but given Cocaine’s healing factor the wounds the druggede boy received about equaled the ones he was landing. The match continued as such for another ten or fifteen minutes, when Cocaine noticed that his adversary was tiring. Using this to his advantage, Cocaine pressed his attacks more, but while doing that got sloppy in his defenses and was thrown back. This would have been a lot worse, if the shinobi hadn’t noticed that with each passing minute the man seemed to tire out more and more.

Cocaine pressed the Maria to give him more chakra even though he was at his physical limit. The Maria, though worried about her container, gave Cocaine the chakra he asked for and watched as his speed once again surpassed that of the red head. Cocaine knew he wouldn’t be able to hold this state for a prolonged period of time, so he let himself slip into a semi-consciousness freeing up his rage and giving the Maria partial control of his body so that she could tear apart the red head.

So it happened that Cocaine was lying on the floor of the cage, breathing heavily while in opponent was nowhere in sight. Soakudo gently picked up the druggede and teleported out of the training course and into the cottage, where he laid Cocaine on his bed. Soakudo knew what Cocaine had done and thus let the Cocaine’s own healing abilities take care of the damage instead of healing his student. This way Cocaine’s body would advance to being able to support more of the Maria’s chakra at any one time. He briefly wondered if what had been achieved was indeed a fair victory, but decided that he had not made any special arrangements beforehand and thus could not hold Cocaine responsible.

The next day, Cocaine was already up and about. He had gotten up sometime after midday and, not finding the Daemon inside the cottage, stepped out into the warm sunshine outside. Cocaine spotted the Daemon meditating on top of the small hill in the direction of the obstacle course gates and made his way to his teacher.

“Good morning, Cocaine-kun,” greeted Soakudo in an amused voice. “Though perhaps it’s more accurate to say good afternoon.” Cocaine responded accordingly and asked if he had passed the test. “Yes, you did rather well.”

“But not good enough, right?” inquired Cocaine. “After all, I only beat that guy after I let the Maria take partial control.”

“That is not really what I was referring to,” clarified Soakudo. “You won mostly because the soul energy of that fighter had waned, and thus you were able to take him down. Though, you did pretty good considering that your taijutsu style is one of the worst ever created.” Cocaine grimaced. “Well maybe I shouldn’t say quite that, more like your taijutsu style is so basic that no matter which style your opponent used they would be able to guess your moves.”

“That’s bad,” remarked Cocaine in a mumble.

The Daemon nodded, “Yes, which is why I will be teaching you several other, much better, taijutsu styles.”

Cocaine’s eyes lit up, “Really?”

“Of course,” confirmed Soakudo. “In fact, I was hoping to have you start on the basic punches, kicks, and blocks now.”

Cocaine eagerly accepted, even though his body still ached from the over use of demonic chakra. “Wait, if I passed the test then shouldn’t I be moving on to the third course?” wondered Cocaine.

“Yes, but you need to become a lot more acrobatic before you go there,” explained the young man. “This style relies on speed and acrobatics, as you’ll notice soon. Thus I’ll have you learning the style while gaining the necessary skills to pass the third course.”

Cocaine thanked his new teacher, who just shrugged it off as a teacher’s duty. Cocaine then started working on the attacks and blocks of the new style by watching and mimicking what Soakudo was doing. By the end of the day, Cocaine had mastered the very first couple of punches and blocks and had a general idea of how to do the kicks, but considering the fact the style was based on acrobatics, most of the kicks were done in a spin or jump or a position where the other foot was not on the ground.

Soakudo called it quits a little ways after sunset. “Hey, you want to know an interesting fact?” asked the Daemon in an amused voice.

“Sure.”

“You know the whole thing with the three different doors and how you only picked the right one at the very end?” Cocaine nodded. “Well, actually, it’s set up so that you have to go through all of the doors before you can access the statue.” Cocaine’s face darkened. “See, no matter which two doors you would have gone through in the beginning, they would have all ended up as dead ends. Well, technically, the third one also ends as a dead end, but it is also the only one that switch for the trap door.”

“You mean to say that I spent all my time trying to pick out the right door all for nothing?” yelled Cocaine.

“You didn’t really spend that much time,” mumbled Soakudo. “And you should be happy, the moon door has the trickiest secret switch.” Something suddenly clicked in the Daemons mind. “Hmm, actually all you really had to do was simply open and close two of the doors, without even stepping through them, and the map would have been set such that the third door had the switch. I’ll have to make a modification on that,” mused the young man. “So how do I keep my mind clear?” asked Cocaine. “How do I suppress this dark side?”

“Clear your mind in about the same way that you would if you were meditating,” explained the Daemon. “Of course, unlike meditation you have to keep track of what is happening around you. However, we’ll do that training later; right now you have two choices: either we continue this spar, but only if your mind is clear, or you go into the gym.”

“Let’s keep sparring,” replied Cocaine.

Soakudo nodded, “Then get ready!” and then attacked his druggede student.

The next day Cocaine once again tried his hand at passing the third course. This time, however, he got caught in a complex Doton, Katon, and Fuiton trap right at the very beginning.

“C’mon, that was a fluke,” yelled the druggede. “And it was right at the beginning, it doesn’t even give you a chance to evaluate me.”

“I’ll have that chance tomorrow,” was the Daemon’s calm reply.

Cocaine was getting annoyed, “That was utter bullshit! Just give me another run at it right now. I’ll definitely be able to get through it.”

“You sure?”

“Yes,” was the confident reply.

“In that case, how about a sort of compromise?” suggested the Daemon.

“What sort of compromise?” asked Cocaine cautiously.

The young man grinned, “Well, I’ll give your another chance today by borrowing from tomorrow.”

“So if I fail I won't be able to try tomorrow, because it will have already been spent, is that it?”

“Exactly,” he noticed that Cocaine paused to think about it. “Of course, if you’re not sure you should just wait until tomorrow.”

“No, I’ll take that risk,” countered the druggede. “However, I have a question. If I make it through the course, but then fail to defeat my opponent will I be able to try and defeat him tomorrow?”

“No, passing the course and defeating him has to be done on the same try.”

Cocaine grimaced but didn’t change his decision. He took a moment to clear his mind and then walked into the gate. Unluckily for Cocaine, the first thing he saw was the thick foliage of a forest. ‘Well, shit!’ However, at this point Cocaine couldn’t go back; it was all or nothing. Since there was no time limit, Cocaine slowly and carefully made his way through the forest, and then a swamp and a small desert.

Deserts, especially ones that were completely filled with sand, are incredibly dangerous. Since the ground (sand) wasn’t solid the Proxy Seals could somehow move themselves, Cocaine guessed that there must have been two seals right next to each other and the movement one would activate before the seal with the jutsu. But no matter how it was set up, the problem was that Cocaine would think that he had managed to sneak past the trap when it was actually quite active and following him. The only upside was that the only seals in the deserts seemed to be moving ones, so if Cocaine simply ran through as fast as he could then the traps would just go off behind him.

After several other close calls, Cocaine finally made it to the temple not only in one piece but also unscratched. Just as the young shinobi was about to do a victory dance a black mist appeared on the other side of the arena.

‘There’s my opponent,’ thought Cocaine. ‘The black mist can’t be good.’

“No shit, stupid.”

‘Just commenting... Jeez.’

The Korean grumbled but focused its attention on the mist, “This can’t be good.” Then a sudden realization hit the Maria. “He couldn’t have…”

“Couldn’t have what…?” Cocaine couldn’t finish his question as his opponent stepped out of the mist and into the artificial light of the arena.

It was a dark blue creature standing several heads taller than Cocaine, a long scaled tail hung loosely on its right, scales of an even darker shade of blue covered its torso, more scales were visible covering its shins and ankles. The creature had long claws on its feet and hands; it stood slightly hunched over with its obsidian wings folded behind its back. Its black eyes seemed to focus on Cocaine and it snarled showing its very pointed, and probably very sharp, white teeth.

‘It’s a demon,’ thought Cocaine. ‘And given the ceiling clearance, those wings could very easily be used for flight.’

“Yes,” concurred the Maria. “And probably not from this world since it doesn’t seem to recognize me.”

Before Cocaine could make any more observations, the creature rushed at him at about the same speed that the Daemon used during their spars. Cocaine jumped to the side in an effect to dodge the creature’s claws. The demon let out a roar when it found that its prey had moved and quickly jumped after Cocaine.

Meanwhile Cocaine circled around the demon and tried to attack it from the back by throwing a kunai at the back of its neck. However, the kunai simply bounced off the scales, not harming the creature at all. Cocaine’s attack had of course alerted the demon to where the druggede was and it attacked at the same speed as before. This time Cocaine waited for it to get closer before jumping at the creature using the arm that it had stretched out to claw him as a stepping stool to get up to the demon’s eye level and knee it in the face, much like Soakudo had done to him only a day earlier.

Since the creature didn’t have any scales on its face Cocaine’s attack actually hurt it, but didn’t send it flying. So before Cocaine could get away, the demon grabbed him by his jacket and tossed him halfway across the arena. The druggede twisted his body around in midair and landed on his toes just in time to avoid another strike from the monster.

“Use your jutsus!” yelled Maria.

Cocaine blinked as he realized this wasn’t a spar between him and the Daemon, so he quickly made several hand seals, “Doton: Tracking Spikes,” he said as his palms touched the ground. The dozens of spikes that came up out of the ground didn’t just go straight up but followed the movements of the creature, thus cutting him up in several places where the scales didn’t cover. After the third or fourth cut the creature got tired of the spikes, spread its wings and rose up above them.

This didn’t faze Cocaine in the least as he started making new hand seals as soon as he saw the creature spread its wings. “Suiton: Teppo Dama,” Cocaine then shot out three bullets at the flying creature, but unlike that one time with Gamabunta this demon could maneuver in the air and the bullets simply missed him; the young shinobi mentally kicked himself for not realizing this. As he was consulting with the Maria on what to do the demon swooped down and managed to rip the flesh on Cocaine’s left shoulder before he could properly block or dodge.

Cocaine rolled away while holding his shoulder in pain, ‘Damn it! I let my guard down and I paid for it.’ The drugged quickly looked around the arena for anything he could use, but saw nothing. Meanwhile, the demon had soared up once more and was planning its next attack. ‘How the hell do I get up there? It’s not like I can fly,’ Cocaine’s mind raced to find some answers. The teenager was forced to dodge several more swooping attacks as well as one dive-bombing attack before he mentally slapped himself for his own stupidity.

He was a ninja after all and ninja could walk on walls, as well as ceilings. So he did what the Daemon had started teaching him to do: use his surroundings for as tools. The next time the creature swooped down to attack Cocaine quickly ran straight at the nearest wall and then ran up it a little ways, then pushed off of the wall while twisting his body in midair. The creature, it turns out, had stopped its dive and soared up diagonally at the same vertical rate as the druggede had been climbing the wall, thus it was right opposite him when he pushed off.

Cocaine couldn’t have asked for a better set up, he quickly grew out his claws and slashed at the unarmored spots on the creature’s body. The boy only managed to get two slashed in on its arms before the demon soared up and away, leaving the druggede to fall to the ground. Cocaine expertly landed in a low crouch and swore as he looked up at the creature. Several of his strikes had grazed the scales and he found that he couldn’t penetrate them at all. That didn’t leave him with many options, he was sure that water wouldn’t do much against the creature but that only left him with Doton and that was practically impossible while the creature was in the air.

‘If only there was some way to bring him down.’

“Rip off its wings,” she grinned slyly. “That’ll bring down quite quickly.”

‘And how do you propose I do that, almighty Korean mistress?’ he asked sarcastically.

“Run up the wall and along the ceiling towards it, and give me some control when I ask for it,” demanded the Korean.

Cocaine did as she requested, of course when he started getting closer to the creature it shifted away him slightly. However that was long forgotten as he gave the Korean partial control and watched as a tail of solid red chakra formed behind him. Then the tail snapped like a whip and flew off like an extra hand to attack the demon. Cocaine instantly realized that the Maria was directly controlling this chakra manifestation.

The creature didn’t really understand what was going on, but figured that the large red paw that was coming towards him needed to be avoided. However, it wasn’t going to be that easy as the Maria directed her chakra-paw to follow the demon, meanwhile telling Cocaine to attack again.

Cocaine realized he would need a jutsu that he control and since he was pretty far from the ground he was forced to forget about Doton and activate his Suiton Supremacy while doing a couple hand seals, “Suiton: Suiryuudan no Jutsu.” The water dragon that the drugged managed to create out of the water he had previously used for the Teppo Dama, twisted around itself for a couple of seconds before Cocaine gained full control over it and made it chase down his opponent.

While Cocaine was gaining his bearing after being forced to control a high level jutsu while hanging upside down, the Maria had managed to get several hits on the demon’s body. If the first hit didn’t get the creature’s attention then the second hit that easily cut through a scale on its shin certainly did. Thus after that point the creature was completely concentrated on avoiding the red chakra. It noticed that the chakra paw couldn’t extend beyond a certain point and tried to fly as far from source of the chakra as possible.

Just when the creature thought it was safe from the red chakra, it was slammed into by the water dragon. This, of course, gave Maria just enough time to tell Cocaine to move closer allowing the Korean to attack and rip off the demon’s right wing. Once the demon was rendered unable to fly, the Maria released the manifestation. Cocaine didn’t waste any time and jumped off the ceiling to do a Doton jutsu before the creature could recover.

The teenager did the necessary seals in midair and slammed his palms into the ground as soon as he landed. Cocaine had decided to trap the creature in quicksand, and then pull it down under the ground until it couldn’t breathe any more. Without its wings the creature could do naught but struggle, thus sinking farther and farther down into the ground. Once the creature was down to its neck in the quicksand, Cocaine used a technique similar to Aquasone’s and crushed the creature’s body.

A couple moments later, Cocaine watched as the demon’s head burst into black mist and disappeared; after which Cocaine was teleported out of the training.

Soakudo stood next to him holding the black soul charm with a sour look on his face. “I want to say that you cheated when the Maria created that manifestation, but then again I never directly forbade the Maria to help you.”

Cocaine rejoiced, “YES! If you look closely, we have won!”