A day of training [solo]

Shin slowly opened his eyes and looked around, it was just starting to get light outside. He sat up and stared outside, it was about the time he had decided to get up, but that didn't mean that he was exactly happy about it. He threw his feet over the side of his bed and got down off the bed, the floor was cold so he walked over to his sandals and slipped them on and walked over to where he had set out today's clothes and changed. It was his normal garb, nothing special. Shin rubbed his eyes with his hands trying to get that tired and crusty feeling out of his eyes, it only kind of worked, he got rid of some of it but not all. He walked over to where he kept a bucket of water and poked the water, it was cold as he had expected. He dipped his hands in and shook them off then used his now wet hands to rub his eyes effectively removing the rest of the stiff feeling around his eyes. He let loose a quick uncontrollable yawn and blinked a few times. The he spend a few moments preparing himself before dunking his head into the cold water and quickly lifting hit out, keeping his head over the water while blindly reaching for his towel with his other hand. He found it and wiped his face and dried his hair, he was a lot more awake now and he started planning his day in his head. He already had all the bandages he would need, and he had water, the only other thing he really would need would be fresh food. Shin walked over to where he kept his things and pulled out his wallet and checked how much money he had in it. He had plenty of money to buy the amount of food he would need for today, and he took out as much as he thought he would need to buy said food, he decided that he should visit a deli that was nearby, pick up some bread, meat, and cheese. Having decided what he was going to do about food he started packing things into his bag for the day, waterskins, bandages, a target he had made of wood, and 8 throwing knives he had bought earlier. Those were the bare essentials he needed in order to train or at least that is all he could think of at the moment that he would need.

Shin walked outside and looked around, it was brighter than it had been before, it might be a little while before the deli opened, so Shin took his time walking over to where it was located. It wasn't that far from where he lived in his little one room shack, and it had pretty decent food at good prices, he usually ate while he was out and about while working though so he didn't really know what they had right now. After about 10 minutes or so of walking down the dusty road he came upon the deli in question, as he had expected it was closed right now, but he saw people moving inside and assumed that they would be opening up soon, so he sat down nearby and waited for them to open, watching the people in the street pass by. After about 15 minutes or so, one of the employees walked over to the door and flipped the sign from closed to open. Shin got up and dusted himself off and walked inside, one of the employees welcomed him inside and shin started looking around. There was a lot of different cuts of meat, many of which he didn't actually know what they were and many different kinds of cheeses of all different colors. Shin stared at the different types of meat and cheeses until he found a few that he knew what they were and he knew he liked them. So he called one of the employees over and bought some bread, some ham and some cheddar cheese. It came out to a little less than he had expected, which was a pleasant surprise for him, and he wrapped up his purchase and put it in his bag and left.

Once he got outside he noticed that it was quite a bit brighter out now that it was when he had left his shack, however it wasn't bright enough that it was slightly blinding, at least not yet. Shin re-oriented himself and started to head towards his normal training ground in the forested area of the 7th district, so he needed to head the opposite was he had come from. He let out a quick little sign and started walking, it would take him about an hour to get there at a moderate pace. Shin was about to head out running when his stomach rumbled and he realized he had not eaten breakfast yet, so he took out a piece of the bread he had just bought and ate it quickly, just enough to settle his stomach down, but not enough to upset it with the running he was going to do. He decided to be on the safe side either way and decided to walk for a little while before jogging over to the forest. It took him quite some time to get over there, about 10 minutes of walking and about 50 at a quick jogging pace, and by the time he reached the forest he was quite out of breath, after all he had been going for quite some time. He plopped himself down against a tree and rested for a little while until he got his breath back. Then he started unpacking his throwing knives and his little target that he had made and set it against one the the tree trunks, leaning it up against it and walked off to about ten paced and set down the knives on the ground and started throwing them one by one at the target. The reason he was doing this was that he had little strength for knife fighting and he figured if he was able to throw knives like he had seen someone else do in the past it would greatly help him when the time came to actually fight. for now he was just practicing trying to get the blade to stick in the wood, totally ignoring how fast he was drawing it and throwing them, he wasn't going to worry about accuracy that much right now, he had little to none anyways right now because he had just started. He picked up the first knife and gripped it's handle lightly then threw it overhand in a spinning motion, it clanged harmlessly into the edge of the target side first, and the target wobbled a little bit. The second blade hit handle first, the third one however hit blade first, and made a light little cut in the wood, but it too just fell and clattered to the ground. He continued to practice, only being discouraged a little bit by the fact that he couldn't get a blade to stick in the wood. Quite some time went by without him being able to stick a blade in the wood. Eventually he decided to practice his speed in the forest, he set his things back in the bag and leaned it up against a tree and started stretching his legs and arms in preparation for running, he didn't want to injure himself by pulling a muscle or something, especially way out in the forest. He stared into the forest as he stretched, reading the environment. The forest where he was at had a lot trees that had a lot of little branches, and the floor of it was covered in fallen leaves and little branches and such with the occasional bush here and there. It was relatively easy as his forest runs went but he wanted to start off simple since today he would be practicing the whole day and didn't want to hurt himself. He started off light, just lightly jogging through the forest avoiding the trees, branches and bushes, being careful with his footing seeing as he couldn't actually see the ground under all the leaves. He didn't want to twist his ankle by stepping in a pothole so he was just getting used to the area for right now making sure it was safe enough for full sprinting. Once he was confident that it was safe enough for him to practice in he started running through it at top speed doing his best to avoid the trees, branches and bushes, at his top speed he mainly focuses on avoiding the tree trunks and then the bushes and large branches, though most branches weren't low enough for him to actually hit them. It was going pretty well until he encountered a large bush that he couldn't completely dodge, luckily he only got a minor scratch or two from the bush. This was how he usually trained his reaction speed and avoidance, though he was also starting to practice other things as well now, since he had met kuro he had started practicing more combat practical things like the knife throwing, he had also developed other training techniques as well such as circling and speed target practice.

He decided that it was about time to practice circling so he went back to where he had left his things and pulled out four of the throwing knives he had and walked back into the forest until he found a relatively large, but yet still soft sapling, he stabbed in a knife in each direction so that no matter where he was there would always be a knife in view, then be backed out to about 50 paces and started running around the tree while trying to still avoid the branches and bushes, it was a lot harder to avoid them while keeping an eye on the knives and the tree in question, occasionally he would be distracted by what he was trying to avoid while circling the tree and lose track of where it was, but that was to be expected, he had created this training in order to train his eyes, it helped him notice smaller details while moving at high speed as well as sharpening his peripheral vision. He was doing pretty well until he tripped on a large root and tumbled into some bushes. His ankle started to hurt a little bit from that once he started to practice more and so he decided to take a break and have some lunch. So he walked out of the forest after removing his knives from the tree and putting them in the bag, then he pulled out the bag from the deli and his normal small knife that he always carried with him. He started cutting slices off the meat and cheese as well as the bread, eating them together in small bites. He had recently learned that Kuro training him may in fact be illegal so he had started to train seriously on his own so that he wouldn't have to rely on kuro so much anymore. He had also figured out that Kuro couldn't really teach him that much anyways until he learned to harness his spiritual energy better, which reminded him that he should practice that too, though he wasn't exactly sure how he should do that, after a while of thinking about it he decided that he would try through meditation and hope that worked, if it didn't he would just have to try something else. He munched on some more of his lunch before packing it back up and trying to meditate while resting. He wasn't that good at it however and kept getting distracted by the wind and noises from the forest as well as random bugs and itches on his body. Eventually he just thought back to the one time he had actually be able to feel his spirit power, back when he was training with kuro, and kuro had freaked him out and he was running for his life. As he started to remember the feeling that he had when it happened he began to mentally try and feel that out in his body as he sat there meditating. It took a while but eventually he started to notice it flowing through his body, just like a pulse. He started trying to manipulate the energy a little bit, causing it to flow into some areas more so than others, mainly into his legs. Then he slowly got up and started to jog into the fields on the edge of the forest, trying to keep the energy balanced while increasing his speed, it wasn't working that well, and after a little bit of practice it still was not working as much as it had back when he was fleeing from Kuro. He decided to put that on hold for now and ask Kuro about how to train it later and decided to go back to throwing some knives until he felt his stomach was settled enough to move onto the next running practice. Unfortunately he didn't fair any better at getting a knife to stick in the target than he had earlier, he wasn't discouraged, he knew it would take quite some time to get good at it and he just kept at it. Eventually he got bored of throwing the knives and decided to do his last practice of the day, seeing as he was almost out of energy and was starting to get pretty tired and it was still a long walk home.

He took the target and walked into the forest with two of his daggers and used one to pin the board to a tree as best he could, then he began jogging then running through the forest at random angles trying his best to keep aware of where the target was at all times, then he would dart in and try and quickly stab the target in it's center, sometimes he would stop and stab, but most of the time he tried to stab it while passing by, he needed to rely heavily on his speed in combat and couldn't afford to stop and go near the enemy. After a little while he had started to get used to the paths to and from the tree and his accuracy had gone way up because of the experience, so he moved the target from one tree to another at a different height and continued practicing his attacks. trying to weave through the trees and hit the target in the center, eventually once he had gotten good at throwing knives he planned to do this while also throwing knives at the target, but it would be quite some time til he was able to do such a thing. After a while he started to get short of breath, this was a heavy day of training for shin, and his endurance was almost shot. He decided that it would be best to save that last bit of energy for the walk home, so he packed up his thing,s munched on a little bit of bread and headed home, it took him quite some time to get home, almost two hours and by the time he was finally at his little shack he was exhausted and it was starting to get dark outside. He put his things back where they belonged, planing on washing and cleaning them tommorow and got ready for bed. Once he was in bed he fell asleep quickly, satisfied that he day had gone so well, and hoped that he could continue to train and hopefully impress Kuro the next time he saw him.