>>5819618You close your eyes. You were getting too tired to continue. You begin to slowly drift away. Eventually you manage to open them again, and you can blurrily see Naoki sitting there, reading a book. He turns a page idly.
“... Naoki?”
“What?”
“Were you the one softly caressing my hair?”
“I inspected your skull for contusions at one point, but I was hardly gentle. Must’ve been someone else. Or a ghost.”
“... That’s… gay…” You say, drifting off into sleep.
He responds, but you can’t understand him anymore as you disappear into dreamland.
—
The following week sucks. It only takes another couple of days before you can move again, but it’s difficult. At least you learn something new about chakra based on this: The higher the percentile of your reserves that remain, the faster it replenishes. If you had expended half of it, you might replenish with a day of rest. If you expended all of it, it would take over a week. Those weren’t hard numbers, but a good ballpark understanding of it. All in all, for your own knowledge about how to manage your chakra levels, it was a good lesson.
There are a couple of weird things that occur while you’re recovering. For example, you briefly forget whether you’re right handed or left handed. You also get confused about what happened to your hot water knob in the shower, did you remove it or something? Why the fuck would you do that?
Confusing stuff aside, Hotaru berates you for similar reasons Naoki did during her after action report. She didn’t blame you for getting your chakra wiped by a demon, but she did absolutely blame you for stubbornly continuing afterwards. She doesn’t go as far as to imply personality flaws on your part like Naoki did, but the standard message of thinking like a full unit instead of an individual does drive itself home. You manage to whine slightly about how Naoki and Masami left you out in the cold to get lost in the woods, which she does agree with you on. She is extra tortuous to them during their training on the following day as a result, whereas she tells you being bedridden is significant enough punishment for you.
While you’re lying in bed, Hotaru sits down with you to teach you the basics of using the Water Spikes jutsu. You can’t practice it quite yet, but you memorize it easily with a voracious aptitude for it, and you’re fairly confident you can make it work easily. You generally only need to have a jutsu explained to you once before it immediately clicks. This provokes you to just ask her outright to keep them coming, but Hotaru shushes you and tells you that learning too many jutsu too fast would be detrimental to your growth because knowing how to use them would actually be a hindrance if you couldn’t use them by muscle memory.
