</I>Wind Country
Diamond Maelstrom
<i></i>
Kato huddled in a sandy cave, practically at the point of ripping his hair out in frustration.
"Why in the hell wouldn't something like that be on the map? I mean really now,"<i></i> Kato thought to himself. It had been three weeks now since the boy had made for the desert, but he hadn't expected to run into this hell storm. The simple map he had only showed rough borders of different countries and terrains. It couldn't warn him that in this part of the world, the sand whipped through the air like granulated death from above. He had spent his time shuffling from shelter to shelter, buying his time until the storm would ease up for a few moments.
There had to be a better way to get through.
As the storm raged with an unhinged fury, Kato lit a small fire and rested against a wall. He had been thinking of trying a technique he had learned from his aunt, which had been used by his ancestors, and then by his father. Using the Earth chakra that Kato's clan seemed to have an affinity for, the Akimichi were able to channel their chakra along the entire surface of their skin. It worked as a sort reactionary defense, hardening the skin in a specific area of the user's body when it was hit. It caused the user to take on the look of rock, or hardly packed dirt, depending on the amount of chakra expended. Kato had tried using this jutsu as a youngster, but he never had the kind of control it took to keep his chakra circulating across the surface of his skin continuously.
But he had been training alone in the wild for years, and was confident now that he could pull it off. It's not like he was leaving this cave any time soon. So Kato got to work, remembering everything he could about the high level jutsu. He focused all of his energy, and sat calmly and quietly as he concentrated, and did his best to clear all other thoughts. The technique took crazy amounts of focus, and only a few had mastered it to the point where they could do anything more than simply move while using the technique. Anything else often took such a strain on the user's focus the technique wouldn't work.
When he finally felt that he had the concept of the technique down, Kato walked to the edge of the cave. The storm still raged outside the cave, which served Kato's purposes for now. He focused on activating the technique, on maintaining the constant flow of chakra, and stuck his arm out the mouth of the cave. Pulling it back in a few seconds later, a few grains of the hard sand had been caught in a rough rocky patch of skin on his arm, but quite a bit more of it was scratched and torn, now beginning to bleed. Still some tweaking needed.
Within hours, Kato had himself bandaged up, and was beginning to feel more confident in his abilities. Using a kunai to check the techniques effectiveness, Kato figured out he needed to balance more of the Akimichi Earth chakra into his technique. He felt he was ready for another field test. Going once again to the mouth of the cave, sticking his arm out. This time he felt no pain however, but was surprised by an unexplained <I>
tinking sound. He pulled his arm back inside to see it was shiny and silver, with several scratches in its polished surface. As he watched it, th silver softened and turned back to its rosy pink.
"What was that?"[/color=green]