Six months of drills, bruises, and aching lungs meant nothing to the sand. It swallowed their footprints the same way it always had, burying each day's sweat and struggle beneath an endless tide of gold and grit.
The academy cared, though not in any way that offered comfort. In Sunagakure, that meant less leniency, not more.
The cold season had arrived, bringing nights that could strip the warmth from skin in minutes and mornings that punished with a dry, searing heat the moment the sun broke the horizon. The air in the training yards no longer shimmered with oppressive heat, but the wind had turned cruel, cutting through their tunics, carrying with it fine needles of sand that stung exposed skin and blurred the edges of vision.
Instructors barked orders with sharper tones. Mistakes were corrected faster, punishments delivered without hesitation. Rivalries had stopped hiding in whispers, they now played out in the open, with eyes watching for weakness like hawks over the dunes.
For Isan, the six months since the specialization trials had worked like a slow crucible. He'd watched the others harden alongside him: Daiana's gaze more focused, Shira's limbs thicker with muscle, Temari's strikes sharper; but it was his own transformation he felt most. Every day stripped away something soft and replaced it with something harder, something less forgiving.
The morning drills, once a gauntlet, no longer posed a true challenge. Sprints across shifting dunes, sandstone wall climbs that tore skin from knuckles, chakra-control walks up vertical surfaces, Isan moved through them with ease, keeping pace with Shira's raw speed and Temari's precision, stride for stride.
Daiana wasn't far behind, pushing herself until her breath came sharp and fast, nearly closing the gap on the leaders. Isan couldn't help but think: if he wanted to keep growing, he would have to raise the stakes, more intensity, more difficulty, or both.
In the afternoons, he looked like any other diligent student. He worked steadily at sealing scrolls, drilled taijutsu forms in the sand, and refined the core jutsu every shinobi was expected to master. His clones were solid, his substitutions sharp enough to pass inspection, and his transformations precise enough to fool most casual observers. That was all anyone needed to see.
What no one saw was what he did after the village slept.
Beneath the academy's laundry hut was a crawlspace no one else knew about, a cramped pocket of earth he had quietly cleared, smoothing the sand into a narrow oval where he could kneel. At night it was cold enough to bite through his clothes, but it was hidden, and that was all that mattered.
There, in the dark, he practiced.
Shadow Clone no Jutsu had been his first target. For a third-year with no clan name to shield him, it was absurd. But after months of straining his chakra control to its limits, grinding through failure after failure, and pushing himself until his head throbbed, he managed it.
Six months in, a single solid clone stood before him, breathing and blinking like a mirror image. The drain hit him like a weight, forcing his knees to buckle as his breathing turned ragged, but it was real.
That wasn't the only secret.
He had also been shaping the Earth Release: Mud Wall no Jutsu. At first, his attempts barely formed a mound of loose sand and grit, crumbling before it could stand. Now, he could raise a wall high enough to shield his body, though it left him drenched in sweat. He didn't have the reserves of a jinchūriki or a prodigy, but with careful control and slow growth, he could manage it.
Another technique, Earth Release: Double Suicide Decapitation, was more troublesome. Information was scarce, and practicing it without being seen was risky.
And the risk was the real problem. Rasa wouldn't see these as signs of promise. He would see it as an unpredictable element. In Sunagakure, unpredictable elements didn't get second chances, they disappeared.
So Isan smiled during drills, missed a target here and there, and let the instructors think of him as promising and disciplined, but ordinary.
The truth stayed buried, under the sand, with him.
Daiana had changed as well.
Her hands no longer shook when she measured out toxins. Her brush strokes on sealing parchment were deliberate and clean, each kanji holding its shape under the slow hum of chakra infusion. The medical corps tent had become her second home, and Mistress Ibara, her steady anchor.
She'd treated more desert hares than she could count, their frantic breathing calming under the soft pulse of her chakra. Once, she even stitched a sparring wound on an older boy too proud to see a real medic.
Every skill she mastered made her more valuable. In the academy, value was dangerous, it drew eyes, and not all of them friendly. Some of the puppet corps boys had started watching her too closely, the kind of students who thought poison was their domain.
She ignored them. The scent of salves clinging to her skin was her shield, and the steady beat of her own chakra through her hands reminded her that her skill belonged to her alone.
Shira's six months had been nothing but peaks and valleys.
The weights strapped to his limbs had doubled; the sprints had tripled. The desert fought him for every step, the dunes shifting treacherously underfoot, the wind driving grit into his eyes until they burned. His legs, once wiry, had become thick with muscle, every strand tuned to moving faster, hitting harder, and lasting longer.
His chakra control was still a running joke among instructors, he could barely stick to a wall for more than three breaths before sliding off, but in taijutsu, his endurance was unmatched. One afternoon, he'd fought three opponents in succession, vest weighing on him like a slab of iron, and still remained standing.
The whispers about his right to be there had stopped. They'd died the day one of his loudest critics challenged him to a spar and ended up in the sand, gasping for air, his arm bent the wrong way.
Temari's fan was no longer just a weapon, it was an extension of her.
Wind drills filled her afternoons. What had started as clumsy gusts strong enough to nudge a paper target now split the bindings of straw dummies with precise, scything strikes. Her taijutsu had grown sharper as well. Shira's raw strength still surpassed hers, but her technique kept her a step ahead, though that gap had narrowed considerably in recent months.