>>5789221>>5789223>>5789228>>5789237>>5789248>>5789249>>5789300>>5789317Your first day was incredibly notable for you and so is every day that follows, but things settle into a steady rhythm. Academy 5 days a week, each day is 2 hours taijutsu, 2 hours yard, 2 hours classroom, 2 hours open after school where the Chunin-Senseis are available for students who want extra training, or you’re allowed to leave. Part of the design philosophy for having 6 hour class days with an optional extra 2 essentially comes down to the ninja clan structure: Some clans just want to train their own students and generic schooling fundamentally irritates them. On the other hand, some students were quite literally orphaned, or didn’t come from ninja families, or other myriad reasons why one student would just be fundamentally disadvantaged with extra opportunities. The village also had an interest in maintaining a generally accepted generic skillset minimum, and that required a bit of standardization.
All of this figure out yourself after thinking about it for awhile. In your position, you were essentially on par with an orphan like Masami: You couldn’t rely on your mom for any further training, so you had to keep an eye out for any possible advantage to keep yourself competitive.
At first you want to immediately take up Yuna on her offer to train in her family’s dojo, but on the second day of class she sheepishly informs all of you that her dad was strict about not allowing extra students in his home because, and I quote “It’s a waste of my daughter’s valuable training time to baby novices when that’s what Chunin-Sensei or for. Don’t invite anyone that doesn’t have a basic foundation.”
… Yuna really needs to stop quoting people exactly, because you honestly didn’t need to hear that.
Still, in school it’s not like Juro-Sensei isn’t teaching you anything. Generally speaking 4 days of the week in the academy dojo (Training Room 3) are spent on generic taijutsu tutelage. But you can’t say you’ve really gotten better at fighting: You’re memorizing the forms well enough, but whenever it comes to the weekly sparring day you’re still just locked into a holding pattern where you’re just feebly defending yourself from getting hit. You just weren’t thinking fast enough to put what you were learning into practice, and you had too much of a gentle mindset for hitting another person to come naturally to you.
To rectify this problem, you spend a lot of your time on strength and endurance training, reasoning that if you can just get used to exerting your body, you’ll not only get better at the raw endurance needed to get more training in (Instead of honestly just getting exhausted rapidly, which really limits how much sparring you can do.), but you’d also pick up the manual dexterity to use that stamina for a better purpose.
