Seeing the wind dragon coming at him, Ren's perception of time slowed down and for a brief moment, his mind experienced a 'WTF' moment.
He wondered how a single clone could pull out something like this but then he realized he destroyed two clones already and their chakra went back not only to the original Ino but also to the remaining clones so the last one had a little less than two clones' worth of chakra at its disposal.
Even then, this was most likely a one-and-done 'fuck you' technique, and Ren doubted the clone was going to last past using it.
Still, it was an immensely impressive jutsu.
The thing with Ino was that her ability to practice control, elemental or otherwise, and create techniques in her mindscape where the time is slowed down was simply busted. Ren loved to call it a cheat. Because that's what it was.
Sure, she could not increase her chakra reserves, physical prowess, or get combat experience by training there. But it was a little bit over six months since Ino started training under him and created said mindscape training technique for herself.
Ren remembered making some halfhearted calculations in the past and while he didn't have all the necessary data to make them completely precise, he could still say that during this past half year, Ino trained her control and wind nature for at the very least a decade and a half in her mindscape.
No rest. No sleep. Just all her time of work put together.
He was not exaggerating when he said the girl was putting inhuman effort into her training. It just... wasn't readily visible because it happened in her mind.
To be frank, Ren stopped paying attention to her advancements in wind nature manipulation because of this. She was so far along the proverbial development line that what she was doing might as well be magic to him.
People said that Sarutobi mastered elemental manipulation but that's a misnomer. What the old man did was to master all the exercises available. There was way more to controlling wind-nature chakra. Things that ninjas haven't discovered just yet.
Ino, however, was fully intent on making headway and creating her own control exercises. Her own techniques. Her own way of controlling the wind. She even got it into her head to use the wind chakra to recreate the sword slashes Ren described when telling her about One Piece swordsmen.
There was simply no way to keep up with the cheating blonde when it came to elemental manipulation.
To give a better picture, Ren doubted that the Hokage could use this particular wind dragon technique even if Ino was willing to teach him. That's how much wind chakra control was necessary to pull it off.
The thing was just slightly smaller than the Hokage monument, for sage's sake.
Putting together all the time Sarutobi spent training wind nature chakra in his lifetime, nothing else included, would at most amount to maybe a year? Year and half? At best? It still wouldn't be enough.
Ren was probably overestimating it anyway. Sarutobi knew wind techniques and 'mastered' the wind nature chakra exercises available but the wind was not his go-to elemental nature.
But Ino did not need to sleep or eat in her mindscape. She could just... grind. And grind. And grind some more.
She was the same kind of freak as Naruto when it came to the ability to train. And much like his future self, she had bullheaded determination in spades.
Sometimes Ren wondered if he wasn't in some alternate universe where Ino was the protagonist.
But that sounded a bit too far-fetched.
In reality, the strength came from training. Not missions. It wasn't like in those stupid fanfictions where the main character goes on a mission and somehow gets a power-up along the way because the author decided so.
Fighting strong foes was not how people got strong. That's how they get killed.
Missions and fights to the death only enable people to learn how to give it their all. Nobody functions at one hundred percent all the time. But in that moment of life and death, a person is capable of breaking past his limits and giving it his all to survive.
It is not a power-up, though. No. Those happen in the training field. By learning new techniques. Training control. Increasing chakra pool. And so on. It is why ninjas spend so much time training. They did not have Super Sayian shenanigans going on.
Participating in a mission is, in fact, hindering their strength development. Ninjas go on missions for the village and to earn money. Not to get stronger.
M. O. N. E. Y.
The thing that moves the world.
Missions can last weeks. Weeks with almost no effective training and more often than not, no combat. It is more likely that when a ninja returns from such a mission, he will need to do some catch-up training to fix the slight decrease in his prowess because skill and muscle atrophy were a thing for the average scrubs that did not have Ren's gravity seals.
May they all suck in peace.
The only reason why Ino was not an S-rank ninja by now after spending over a decade and a half training her wind nature chakra, was that her chakra reserves were still at around mid-chunin range and her physical prowess was also definitely not on jonin level yet.
For an academy student from the Yamanaka clan? That was already impressive. The last half year of training did her a lot of good.
But Hinata and maybe Sasuke, probably the only ones in her generation, still had slightly more chakra available than her.
... Naruto did not count. He was too Mary Sue to make the list.
That and Ino lacked combat experience. She lacked that a lot.
Because really? All that prowess and control that would make even Tsunade look like a particularly dimwitted academy student, and the thing Ino's clone decided to do with it is throw a big-ass wind dragon at him? One that would delete all her remaining chakra out of existence?
Ren was impressed she had enough control to reduce the chakra requirements of that massive wind monstrosity so much to be able to pull it off, yeah.
But he was also impressively disappointed.
Just from the top of his head? She could have learned how to change the temperature of her wind. Making it scalding. Or freezing. Or how to solidify it. That would have cost her much less chakra and would have been much more effective.
Hell, he could do that with wind nature to a much, much smaller degree. Increasing or decreasing the temperature by one or two degrees was not that hard. He just lacked the control to go plus ultra with it.
And Ino clearly lacked creativity and ideas. Maybe even scientific knowledge but that was not her fault since it wasn't readily available in this world.
Elemental bullets and dragons… that was where the fantasy ended in this world for your average ninja. Literature was abysmal and the fantasy genre was almost nonexistent. Ren started telling the girls stories from his past life for fun and to inject some much-needed imagination into their thinking capabilities.
But clearly, Ino wasn't using utilizing it much when it came to practical application.
She could have separated the individual gasses to siphon oxygen from the proximity of his enemy.
Or maybe even changing the air to be poisonous gas without any visual clue just to check that particular part of the Geneva checklist and introduce the ninjas to some good old chemical warfare.
Now, after he created his salt alteration seals, Ren knew it should be possible. Hard as hell and probably improbable for your normal jonin to ever get to that level of elemental manipulation even if they did have wind nature, but Ino was an outlier.
Ren failed to do that. And he did try. But he wasn't that good with wind nature to manage it so he pretty much gave it up in favor of sealwork. That worked for him very well so far.
But now? He decided he would need to sit the girl down and give her some pointers on killing efficiency one of these days. As cool as big-ass dragons were, they just weren't it for a ninja fight.
Alas, for now, he needed to deal with the big-ass fuck-you dragon coming at him courtesy of his impossible blonde.
Bringing out the sole windmill shuriken he had stored in his storage seal, he decided to go all out as a string of characters started to slither across the massive shuriken while his chakra pool started to rapidly deplete, creating one big-ass exotic explosive seal for the big-ass dragon.
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Author Note:
Eh, I started explaining Ino's BS and I couldn't stop myself from making it into an entire chapter.
Honestly, this practically wrote itself.
Not really all that happy it interrupted the fight scene but... it is what it is, I guess.
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Author Note:
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