There is a universal law that states that only through sacrifice can one make gains. In economics, something Hoshikata was far more familiar with, it was you have to spend money to earn money. This rule applied to everything from gardening to training the human form. In his very specific case, it meant that for his new powers to develop, Hoshikata would have to ignore his old skills, retrain his body. It wouldn’t be the first time he did this, but each time got worse. The body and mind were finely tuned after years of working in a certain manner, and rewiring them, as he well knew, was no easy task.
His work was definitely cut out for him on retraining his latent shinobi abilities. Few could do as he could and use their minds to create such confusion in another person. Hoshikata’s genjutsu were pervasive, capable of entering the hardiest of minds and then expanding their influence to the point people would actually hurt themselves simply because they believed they were being hit harder than they were. To a man like him this was a godsend since he very rarely took the offensive measures in a fight to grant victory, preferring to survive over winning.
The process of removing his talents of the mental were simple, but tedious. He began to train his body harder, pushing the physical to the limits. Regardless of what some claimed there was no perfect person capable of being a genius at the spiritual, mental, and physical. You could master one, maybe excel at another, and just watch the last one wave at you as it walked off to find someone who cared about it. Hoshikata never before gave much thought to chakra based attacks, preferring to hit things and think at them really hard. So the new training of working with chakra and physical attacks was a good tool for blunting the sheer strength his mind had.
He was not amazed at his gains; for a man who put himself to a task could expect such if they truly wanted it. His body, never very large, soon began to fill out with muscle, a renewed sense of vitality taking over the formerly phlegmatic feeling he had about physical activity. His manipulation of chakra was similarly impressive, the man moving from merely being able to lift and move things with kinetic force, to dancing pennies in the air and weaving intricate patterns through the manipulation of the chakra in the world around him. A world of new possibilities opened up before him, making him wonder if he could, in fact, train all three arts at once.
Disaster came with that, as he attempted to hone one thing and realized that his sense of the spirit world was fading. For him it was not merely physical, mental, and chakra. There was the ethereal to consider as well. He could not give that up, it was in his blood, it was who he was, the ghosts of the world beyond could attest to that. Hoshikata grudgingly went back to training only his body and chakra, once more letting the ability to influence minds through genjutsu fall to the wayside. Genjutsu was like a muscle, if you didn’t use it you would lose it, so he stopped using it. It was a hard thing to do, having been his staple method of combat for his entire life, but times change and he was not the type of person to ignore times changing around him and push on anyways like a stubborn mule. He was not a Minamoto.
Hard work was something needed to get better; this wasn’t like a movie where you just show a training montage and within a few minutes the main character has mastered three forms of fighting, two languages, and befriended a nation of ragtag orphans or something. This was reality, and while his newfound abilities could alter reality in some ways, they could not defy the laws of the universe he lived in. Sacrifice was necessary. The sacrifice of time. He had five years he would be exiled out of Cloud, five years in the outskirts of the world to hone his new talents. Five years without Haruka. In that time many things could happen to her, things he would have no control over, but he had to use that time wisely, and he would not waste it on something as frivolous as nostalgia and contemplation when he could be working himself to new heights of power.
That first year saw the most improvement, as the sun rose and fell across his life his contract moving about toned up muscles he didn’t even know he had. His work with chakra also saw the most gain, as he went from barely using it to manipulate the world around him, to doing so every day as a test of how far he could go. Hoshikata knew the specifics of exercising the body, and he applied them to his coils of energy as well. He would repeat things by rote, repetitions of the same technique until his control over it was perfect, and then he would push past it. One day he could pick up a hundred pounds with little effort using only chakra, but the next he would be struggling with something that weighed in at one hundred and twenty five just to see if his abilities could compensate where they needed to. He was not disappointed when his body and his soul worked together to allow him greater control of the world both with physical and energy manipulation. IT was if he was meant to go this way all along, and that bothered him before he had never even thought of it before now. Could it be that his unleashing of the bound power that he was born with was altering his body and mind, pushing him down a road of knowledge and power it deemed suitable? Was that why the Seer begged him to leave it bound and not let it free to alter his mind?
The second year was also quite momentous for his new training. He could almost feel the power of his genjutsu dropping, as if his mind had decided to simply quit and go watch TV while he worked on the other parts of his life. He refused to let it become idle in the normal sense, however, working hard to keep his wit and intelligence as sharp as ever. While he wouldn’t be able to use genjutsu to make people do as he wished after this he had no desire to lose the ability to make them do his bidding through persuasion and deceit. He was not going to be goody two shoes with this ability; he was still looking out for himself. If all fell through with Haruka he would need to be able to get by in the world, and he refused to hamstring himself by getting rid of the brazen wit that had gotten him so far in this world throughout his long life.
It was in the third year everything began to slow down, his plateau coming nearer as he progressed his talents. This was also when he began to use his abilities in a more practical manner, taking his exile seriously. Hoshikata began hunting down those who preyed on the peasants of Lightning Country, using a mixture of taijutsu, ninjutsu, necromancy and his new powers to take down rogue shinobi, samurai, teenage mutant ninja turtles, power rangers, Robin Hood, brigands, highwaymen and thieves. He felt he was doing something right, as the most trouble he got was when three rogues ambushed him while he was tracking them.
It was a hard fight, a long one that lasted an hour at least. Hoshikata took one out early on, stopping a thrown shuriken and launching it back at him using kinetic force, then rushing in behind it and coating his fist with raw kinetic power and slamming it into the man’s gut. A fist should not pierce a human body like that, but chakra made many things possible. He spent the next half hour evading attacks, hiding, and deflecting those he could not dodge. He was not completely successful, taking his fair share of slices and burns from jutsu, but he got a lucky break when one of the attackers over extended for an attack. Hoshikata grabbed his wrist as he spun to the side and brought his forearm into the man’s elbow, shattering it and breaking the arm at an angle it was never meant to be moved. A quick fire ninjutsu left only ashes. The final attacker tried to flee at this point, and he was hunted down like a dog.
His last two years passed quickly, the former mentalist taking on a new method of combat that involved his body, mind and spirit working in concert to formulate and then carry out complex strategies. True, he lost his ability to mess with someone’s mind forcefully, but he felt the gains he made more than equaled the sacrifice of that power.
