The arm.
That's what your thoughts keep circling around to. It's...
... Well, it's not nearly as crippling and potentially life-threatening both directly and indirectly as it might be for another academy student. Not for you. You've... it seems like you've managed to keep the coils that used to be in your arm, ripped them right out when you ran and that guy set it on fire. They're a lot clumsier than your fake coils, and those aren't exactly dextrous themselves, but you can still sort of make the hand-signs to use jutsu with.
So you aren't helpless and defenseless, here, with only scavenged and cracked blades to defend yourself with.
That doesn't mean this isn't a problem.
You tried just fighting with your eyes. That's something high-level Uchiha are supposed to be able to do. Particularly, Genjutsu is sort of the clan's thing, even if fire is also your thing, and much showier.
So you're supposed to be able to hypnotize things on eye contact.
... it's the sort of thing that might require training, actually knowing Genjutsu, or at minimum a lot of practice throwing enough Chakra to brute-force the issue. Because you tried that. Picked a dumb looking... Oni, you guess. Wrinkled, distorted face, horns and tusks, shaggy hair, fur cloth, lots of muscles and scars, and carrying a big club.
You looked it dead in the eye, gathered almost all the chakra you could spare, and then did your best to force it out through your eyes and into his.
"You want to help me." you'd said, fingers on your physical hand crossed.
"... Not really. I mostly just want to eat you." the Oni had replied.
Then it raised its club, and you had to devote the rest of your chakra to giving it the slip again.
... that hasn't worked out as well as you'd hoped. He keeps showing up now, like a particularly persistent but not very bright hunting dog that keeps picking the trail back up. Every few days, as best you can track the passing of days here. Not on a regular schedule. One day after another, or waiting a week before arriving again. Sporadic. You were already sleeping little, and lightly, but him smashing down the tree you pick to sleep in hasn't done much for your rest.
You're going to call him Dummy, you think. Privately, and in your head. Maybe outside of it too, he already wants to eat you. And hopefully kill you first.
He could want to kill you more, you guess. So maybe not.
In any case, he's not a fight you can win. Not directly, not as things stand, and not with one arm. If you had the materials to set traps... then maybe. But on the other hand, maybe not, because Dummy's brought a landslide, cliff, and fallen tree down on himself, and shrugged all of it off. You aren't sure how much exploding tags would do in the face of that, even if you sort of wish you'd at any point looked up how to draw exploding tags. Or had something to write them with. And on.
So over the last couple weeks of the several you've been here, it's become quickly clear to you that the missing arm is a problem.
A problem that needs to be fixed.
Floppy, clumsy coils and tendrils of chakra aren't going to work. You need an arm.
And in this situation, that means you either need to make an arm from the materials available... or take one of about the right size and shape.
---
[ ] Make. You have everything you need, probably.
- [ ] About all there is around here seems to be stone and dead trees. Can't be that hard to put a prosthetic together, right? Straight bit, bendy bit, fiddly gripping bits...
- [ ] The other thing that's here in abundance? Skeletons. Dusty, broken, but only sometimes walking around, but as a plus they generally have the right anatomy, less flesh.
- [ ] What you need to do is to make the chakra denser. Make it physical. Bijuu do it, why can't... you might be a little insane. But that doesn't mean it won't work.
[ ] Take. Plenty of arms about, attached to other things.
- [ ] There are impish little oni-like figures, Amanojaku that entertain themselves in tricking bigger and dumber monsters into fighting one another. Sometimes they laugh heartily from a distance at the show. Other times they are mangled for their trouble. Not all of their bodies are ruined, though...
- [ ] The spider that walks in the shape of a woman makes you shudder when she calls, and when she sings, to lure her prey nearer and nearer... until it is bound up in thread it does not and cannot see. She takes her time in eating them, when entrapped, and shares it bountifully out among lesser spiders. She has many arms to spare, though you doubt she will be eager to give one away...
- [ ] The bound corpse, chained and marked with ancient and crumbling sealing wards, even now seems to be reaching out from its still and permanent repose. One arm outstretched... the only portion that has not yet rotten away, but even so as black as ink or pitch and seeming like stone, with thin cracks...