Solo Training on my way "Home"

5 sets of Mat's cards all B-rank required training to create

Mat's new personal ability was one that he had yet to be completely explored. Mat had gained his new ability from a illusion copy, ghost spirit thing of himself after dyeing his skin grey. There was some other unique properties that came along with this entire progression of himself, but none of them interested Mat as much as these cards. When he awoke some time ago, he found only two, a single pair of cards, but his ghost spirit self had told him that they were a complete set. So the other fifty cards had to be somewhere right. Mat's new thought was he might just have to create them. Luckily for him, he had practice making cards. The only thing that seemed different about these was they weren't made of chakra. No they seemed to be made from something else entirely. This dark energy that seemed to course through Mat's body now. It sought out and destroyed chakra, leaving a void behind. Void energy. It had a nice ring to it. Knowing only that this energy was different but still was used to make these cards, Mat set out to begin the creation process.

Mat sat under a tree. He'd left behind one card with Neo after finally getting a face to face with Yvette. So he only had one to study and think about to being the process of making the others. He spun the card on his finger tip watching it. Balanced perfectly, razor thing, and weighed not far off of an average card from a deck, but still it was so so very different. Despite its size, it seemed oddly out of place heavy, but not really in weight. No, it was heavy in more of a pressure kind of way. They resonated power. They resonated with an emptiness. And they resonated with a curiosity that couldn't be sated. Mat started the creation process like he would for a tarot card. Slowly his void energy started to seep out of Mat's finger tips, much in the same way chakra did for a tarot card. Mat began rolling his fingers together. The escaping void energy slowly began to join together and take shape into a ball. Barely a centimeter at first then slightly bigger and slightly bigger until finally it was the perfect size. Mat took a moment to look over the energy ball. The void energy was an entire different feeling in his hand than when he used chakra to make a tarot card. Then finally Mat pulled at the void energy ball till it took on a perfect rectangle shape. The shape perfectly matched a normal sized playing card in every way. Holding the card, mat looked it over. It was still lit up with this dark energy, but slowly a pattern on the back and face of the card started to appear. On the face, a simple ace of spades, but something was odd about it. It seemed to have swirls of black in white, like pieces of two shreded cards had been sown together to make up a single card. Mat flipped the card in his hand to see the reverse. The reverse was the same, but had a much more shocking impact. The pattern was perfect. It matched the other two cards Mat had received, but again, with the appearance of two cards, black and white, sown together. Then in a puff and a spark the card destroyed its self. The pieces seemed to fall apart and fade away into oblivion as fast as the smoke and spark had appeared. His first failure it would seem. To bad he couldn't get it the first time, but everything in this world takes practice.

Mat was not discouraged by his failures though. After all he could not see himself just giving in and quitting. I mean come on. Could you imagine Mat laying down and just saying, "Nah do not have time for this. I will just stay weak for ever." Sounds like the making of a great shinobi. Sounds like the making of an even greater human though. Just to give up on something and not try to advance himself further. So Mat started again. The ball of void energy, starting off tiny in size and slowly growing as he rolled more and more void energy around with his finger tips. Then finally shaping the ball into the shape of a card. Each time Mat did this, he turned the card around and around in his hand examining every aspect of the card. Each one seemed to come out the same way, over and over. A perfect size. A perfect design. An imperfect appearance. A messy patchwork of black and white. The black and white pieces made no pattern or anything that made remotely any sense. More importantly than the color though, the biggest problem. Each card seemed to pop, fizzle, and fall apart. The pieces of each card faded away as they separated. It was honestly kind of sad. The process repeated and repeated and repeated until finally, Mat did quit. He let his anger flash. One final card popped and Mat could not help but scream out in frustration. his voice echoed around the forest a littler, causing a few birds and squirls to panic and scatter. The fit of rage was not completely out of Mat's character but it wasn't what he liked to show the world. "My god, kami, zeus, thor, canadian jesus, black jesus, bird jesus, Batman and Spiderman. Why will you not stay together. Is it so gosh darn it hard for you to do what I say?" Mat spouted out swinging his arms at the air in frustration. Mat reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the one card he had left on him. He flipped it around in his hand studying it. Seven of clubs. Nothing special about the face. White card, black symbols and numbers. Simple. Plain. Perfect. Then Mat rolled it to the rear. The pattern was beautifully painted on. Not to over complicated and busy but at the same time. Perfect. The problem here was the Mat, like the Mikaboshi before him. Had a very hard time seeing the details. More specificity, color. Their eyes saw shapes and designs and such, but color of things escaped him.

Finally after Mat's fit subsided and he calmed down a bit, his head cleared up and brushed off the clouds of anger, and Mat was ready to begin again. I would call it round two but in reality it would have been closer to like round two-hundred or so. Mat made a ball in the same manor as before. Void chakra seeped out of his finger tips and slowly and carefully he began moulding the energy together into a ball. The entire process took about five minutes. Far longer than any Tarot formation or any of his previous attempts. He took every second he could to put in as much effort and concentration. It did not matter how long it took to form the card as long as it was formed correctly. After all the first two cards had been around for a few weeks now. They did not seemed to fade away, but simply needed activating. So Mat finally began forming the card from the ball of energy. Slowly and carefully he stretched the ball out thin like a card. The rectangle shape taking form rather easily and quickly. The corners rounded off like a normal playing card would and the shape was clean and perfect in Mat's eyes. The pattern emerged seemingly as slowly as the ball of energy had been formed. As every card before it the face showed an Ace of Spades. It seemed like that was the next one Mat had to forge in his deck. Without taking time to really observe the card, Mat spun the card around to view the rear and the intricate design on the rear came in perfectly. It seemed like the perfect card. Exactly like the Mat's seven of clubs in every way, but the color. Again the color was a patch work of black and white in a super messy pattern. That was the mistake all this time, and Mat just could not see it. It was a shame to. Everything else seemed so perfect. It was like every time Mat started to make the card, two cards got mixed in the process. At least two shredded cards. Two cards. And with that, Mat nearly smacked himself on the forehead from his own stupidity.

Mat's cards were made in pairs. He woke up with a pair of cards. The cards were like window to each other. They functioned in pairs, and thus more than likely could only exist in pairs. So Mat started again. The creation process seemed to slow by a factor of like ten. Mat's void energy flowed slowly from his finger tips on both hands. The stream of energy bonded together ever so carefully as Mat rolled the energy around on his finger tips. The difference this time from every other time, other than taking way longer? Mat was forming two balls. One in each hand. The process slowed because not only was more energy having to be focused out of his fingers but he had to maintain the flow at just the right pace to limit the amount of excess energy being lost before it could be rolled into the ball. About thirty minutes into the process the balls reached just the right size, or at least the size Mat was comfortable with. The a thought hit him. I have to shape the cards. A process he had been doing by hand, stretching the cards out to their paper thin-ness and their rectangle like shape. This time around Mat couldn't do that with one ball in each of his hands. In stead he took the painstakingly long process of using two fingers to hold the ball and two more fingers to kind of tug at it. Between that, and flattening the ball by mashing it into his palm using his fingers, the cards slowly began to take a misshaped card look. No where near the perfect form from the attempts before. Mat twirled the newly created blobs of cards in his hand looking for a face and a rear, but it never seemed to appear. Instead the energy just turned darker and darker until finally, it faded away into nothingness. The card disappearing nearly infuriated Mat into another fit but he quickly got a hold of himself, taking a moment to keep his composure this time around. It was so so very close. It was just this final problem he had to figure out how to over come.

And so over the next three days Mat was travelling, heading towards the Shogunate, Mat would practice during every moment he could, just trying to form a card with one hand. And every night, after he had chosen a nice spot to rest for the night, he attempted to morph the cards using both his hands. The process that started out by him trying to form a single card, that took up some where in the neighborhood of five minutes to do, was now taking in the neighborhood of an hour to reach full completion. Finally on the third day, Mat made progress in his practice. It was not a complete success but instead it seemed that the cards shape was nearing perfection. The next day on the road, around noon time, Mat found a quiet place near a shrine some locals had put up. It was here he finally succeeded in crafting his next few pair of cards. It was funny though. The entire process seemed to click to him as he made the balls of energy, and with anger fueled muscles he swung his arms out, using the forces of nature to shape the cards, and like everything, the forces of nature seemed to shape them perfect. And the face and rear of the cards appeared, taking on the perfect shape and each, one black, one white.