Lee slams a cloth-wrapped fast into his open palm. "I see!" He pauses. "But could she not focus on tracking the ink as Sakura applies it, instead?" Lee leans over the railing and squints down into the arena, as if to pick out my teammate's individual brushstrokes from over a hundred feet up.
I lean in next to him and point at one version of Sakura as she darts past one of the Shodai Tsuchikage's trees, made of a stone so dark it's almost black, and sweeps her brush across its surface. "Look at the trees, Lee."
Fist, palm. "I see!" Pause. "What about the trees?"
Neji sighs. "They're dark. The ink blends in."
"Ah, my thanks!"
"Probably makes it a pain for her to keep track of her own marks, though," I muse, watching Koji drive another clone into the earth with her yari. Wow, she looks furious.
"She'll manage," Neji says, eyes intent on the fight. I blink.
"Have you been keeping track this whole time?" I ask. The Hyuuga prodigy grunts.
"She's almost done." Pupilless white eyes narrow, and a split second later every Sakura on the field but for one flickers and vanishes. "It's over."
"It looks like Haruno Sakura is on her last legs!" Itoh Jo cries, his deep, boisterous voice reverberating out from somewhere in the stands. "Koji no Senkou is closing the distance, and this might be the end!" As if to confirm the announcer's words, my teammate wavers and slumps against the trunk of the tree she's perched on. Koji snaps her spear out to her side, and as high up as I am, I can still see how the light bends around the blade's chakra-enhanced edge.
"Fifty yards between them! Thirty! Ten!"
Sakura brushes a hand against the tree, and the arena lights up.
I whistle lowly. "That's a big one."
Vibrant orange light springs up where Sakura's hand meets the stone, immediately jumping from tree to tree in either direction, outlining a massive circle that encompasses a good half of the arena. The two strands of seal-light meet on the opposite end of the circle a scant second later, closing the seal. Then, the barrier begins to form.
It's a sphere. As high up as she is, my teammate's barrier expands both up and down, enclosing her opponent almost before she can stop her charge. As it is, Koji hits a tree branch in a painful-looking crouch of arrested momentum, and immediately launches herself at the ground.
"Useless," Neji says disdainfully. "She's already trapped." The kunoichi from Iwa seems to agree. She hits the ground in another bruising crouch, glances around at the rapidly encroaching edges of the barrier, and remains where she is.
"What an astounding ruse!" Jo bellows. "She never saw it coming, and now there's no escape-!"
Koji flashes through hand seals and slams her hands to the earth, calling upon her great wall.
Hundreds of spectators cry out in mingled excitement and alarm as the stadium's very foundations shift, ever so slightly, around the Iwa kunoichi's wall. It springs from the arena's densely packed dirt floor, wider around than Sakura's barrier and far thicker besides. The wall rises, and where the late Tsuchikage's stone branches impede it the wall stalls, cracks, and breaks.
But it rises still.
Sakura's shimmering orange barrier closes around the wall, touching upon its edges- and stops. A sharp, grating chime cuts through the rising noise as my teammate's delicately wrought chakra construct clashes with tons upon tons of Koji's chakra-saturated earth. It chimes again and again, and then the wall rises above the top half of the sphere just as it begins to close, and the noise doubles as the barrier attempts to seal its top and its bottom.
One chime rings out sharply above the rest, and a jagged crack opens up on the bottom half of the sphere. I clutch the railing, willing myself to be right, willing Sakura to have listened-
"Her chakra is too weak to overwhelm the wall," Neji says in realization. "This whole match up until now was a ruse. Her opponent was waiting for her to activate the seal and give away her location." True to his words, the kunoichi from Iwa lifts her hands from the ground and reclaims her yari from her back in preparation for one last assault.
And in that single moment between reinforcing the wall with her chakra and leaping clear of the barrier, Sakura forms five seals and throws her hands out, palms facing the wall's peak.
"Lightning Release: Electromagnetic Murder!"
Electric blue chakra explodes from my teammate, lancing through the air and skewering the great stone wall in a hundred different places. Koji leaps into the air a split second before the lightning hits, her face a mask of panic as she realizes that she's too far away from any of the trees to land on anything but the electrified wall beneath her. Coming to a decision, she spins in midair and sweeps her spear down, stabbing it into the wall and landing atop its wooden shaft with shaky, one-legged balance.
"Clever," Neji murmurs, voice nearly lost with the crowd and Lee's own enthusiastic bellows of encouragement.
"Not good enough," I say, grinning ear to ear. Of course she listened when I told her about the encounter I had in the first task, and the ridiculous earth wall her opponent almost trapped me with. She's Sakura.
Koji perches on her spear, quickly regaining her poise, but it's too late. Before she can make the jump to safety the wall breaks beneath her, run completely through by a multitude of lightning tendrils. It falls, and she falls with it, tumbling back inside the sphere just in time for it to close around her with one last victorious chime. Koji bounces off one branch and rights herself on the second, dainty pink lips peeling back from her teeth as she flashes through a new string of seals-
And freezes as the barrier's interior comes alive with the light of dozens upon dozens of active exploding tags.
"Yield!" Sakura calls, hands poised to activate the tags and blow her opponent to pink mist. Koji snarls, not continuing with her technique, but not backing down, either. I can practically see the plans being formed and discarded in her head from here.
Thankfully, Itoh Jo performs a flashy leap onto the tree branch beside Sakura and raises her arm up, rendering the point moot. The announcer beams at my teammate, and then at the crowd, crying out for all to hear, "Winner of the ninth match between Haruno Sakura of Konohagakure and Koji no Senkou of Iwagakure- HARUNO SAKURA!"
The crowd goes wild, for good and bad, but I'm too busy whooping and hollering and high-fiving Lee until my hand goes numb to pay them any mind.
"That's my teammate! I knew she had it!" But wow, that was the ninth match? How long was I gone, exactly? "Hey, when are you guys fighting?" I ask my fellow Konoha nin, shouting above the noise.
Neji snorts in a most dignified fashion, leaving Lee to answer. "I'm afraid Neji and I have already had our matches," he shouts back. I groan.
"Really? Man, I'm sorry. I should have been here!"
"We won," Neji says simply, turning away from the arena and crossing his arms. "Your presence wouldn't have changed that."
I frown. "Still, it would have been nice, you know?"
"Next round," Lee says, patting me on the back with less force than usual. So, still a lot.
The announcer eventually calls for the next two competitors, and Kankuro saunters out of the genin box along with a kunoichi from Kiri. So whoever wins that fight will be Sakura's next opponent, if I have the seeds right in my head. What was Kankuro's gimmick? Puppets, I think? And the girl from Kiri... what was her name again?
A hand on the back of my neck- a very big hand- firmly derails that train of thought, along with the deep, rumbling voice that accompanies it.
"We out."
The world flickers and blurs around me, the same as it did the first time Samui's sensei did this to me, and I come to my senses a moment later out in the hall. I blink, realizing we're close to the light that I dismissed while first searching for the genin box, and we're not alone. Samui, Karui, and Omoi are here as well, watching me with varying degrees of distrust and confusion, Omoi being the closest to hysteria and Samui being the calmest.
I cock an eyebrow as their sensei moves into my field of view. "What now, B?" Samui blinks, looking startled for some reason, but doesn't comment.
"Time for some words," Killer B says, crossing his arms. His sunglasses are inscrutable, but there's a subtle tension his jaw, and his emotions speak loud and clear to the wind.
"Disappointed."
"Did I do something wrong?" I ask, taking cautious hold of my chakra in case I need to book it back to the genin box.
Killer B waves a hand, dismissing the thought. "Nah, man. I hear you've been gettin' some mess from these nerds, talkin' 'bout demons and leaf dogs, y'heard?"
Whatever it is their sensei is getting at, the genin of the team aren't giving me anything to go on. Omoi is alternating between fiddling with a lollipop and scratching at a fresh set of bandages that must have come from his fight. Karui is glaring daggers at me, and on the flip side, Samui is doing her level best to look anywhere and everywhere but me. I wince.
"Yeah," I admit.
Killer B humphs. "I heard from the bird. That shit's just absurd." Bird? "So, apologies from my herd and the wrath they incurred." He tilts his head down, revealing a sliver of dark brown eyes above his shades, and winks at me. "Don't want no hard feelings when the lines start to blur." In spite of my sincerest wishes, I feel my cheeks heat up. Now it's my turn to look at anything but my partner-turned-opponent.
"It's fine," I manage to say. Killer B nods, satisfied, and whisks me away as quickly as I'd come. Rather than taking me directly back to the box, though, he stops us outside the ruined doorway.
"Now don't go and mope," he says, his voice low enough that only I can hear. "They told me 'bout Omoi's suspicions, but he ain't a logician, and bein' a surprise Bijuu's one helluva condition. You could be on that demon game, but could's a real steep slope- this might just be the end of your rope."
"Doubt," the wind whispers. Despite what his students said, and despite what I told him about the voices, Killer B doesn't think I'm the Kyuubi. Somehow, just having that one affirmation lifts a weight from my shoulders, small as it may be. But even so...
"What if it's not a coincidence, though?" I ask him quietly, afraid to be overheard, afraid to be heard at all. "What if I am involved with the- with the Kyuubi?"
Killer B studies me for a moment. "You wipe out any villages lately?" I snort and shake my head. "Then nope. Looks to me like your chakra's just hella dope." He offers me his fist.
I sigh, and bump it. "Six paths, I hope."
...
AN :
Hey everyone, this fanfic will be on hiatus for a while longer. There haven't been many updates or much support for it lately, and it's already been on pause for months.
the last 10 chapters posted here were originally posted on my Patreon, but I decided to share them here as well so everyone can read them.