The board hummed overhead again, names blurring into one fat, white smear.
I still had the afterimage of Sasuke's final kick burned into my eyes. Every time I blinked, I saw him falling with Yoroi, Sharingan red and bright and wrong. The curse mark at his neck had felt like a live coal from here, even though I didn't see it.
Click.
ABURAME SHINO
Click-click-click.
ZAKU ABUMI
"Next match," Hayate wheezed. "Aburame Shino… versus… Zaku Abumi."
The arena went a little quieter.
My stomach dropped.
Of course.
"That guy again," Naruto muttered next to me, leaning over the railing. "Tch. Guess he didn't learn the first time."
"He shouldn't be fighting," I said, barely more than a breath.
No one heard it but me.
Zaku jumped down from the opposite side of the ring with a swagger that should've been impossible for someone who'd had his arms turned into meat confetti a few days ago.
Fresh bandages wrapped around his forearms and hands, tighter and cleaner than before. He rolled his shoulders once, like he was showing off that they still worked. His chakra smelled metallic in my head, sharp and tinny, with weird hollow patches where it should've flowed under his skin.
Shino walked out like he was on the way to buy groceries.
Hands in his pockets, shoulders relaxed, sunglasses hiding his eyes. His collar was up, hiding half his face. The only sign he was actually engaged with reality was the faint, constant product-of-the-Aburame-bloodline buzz clinging to him like a second skin.
They took their marks.
"You," Zaku called, grinning. "You were with that pink-haired brat, right? The one with the traps?"
My spine tried to leave my body. I pressed my palms flat against the metal railing until it dug into my skin.
Shino didn't react. "Irrelevant," he said in that flat, mild tone of his. "Your focus should be on me."
"Oh, don't worry," Zaku said. "I remember you too. Bug boy."
He flexed both arms like he was cracking his knuckles. There was a faint, ugly creak from inside his bandages.
Naruto made a face. "He looks way too healthy for someone who got giant trap-slashed."
"Medical-nin can heal a lot," I said automatically. "Doesn't mean they should."
Hayate shuffled between them, coughing into his fist. "C-cough—begin."
He hopped back with a little burst of chakra and nearly doubled over trying not to cough in midair.
Then the match started.
Zaku didn't mess around. "Decapitating Airwaves!" he shouted, swinging his right arm up.
Even braced for it, the sound made my ears ring—a compressed roar, like someone had shoved a hurricane into a pipe and let it go. The blast tore across the arena, ripping a shallow trench into stone where Shino had been standing a second earlier.
Key word being had.
Shino had stepped aside with all the urgency of someone moving out of the way of a sleepy cat. His jacket fluttered in the leftover wind. He turned his head just enough that I saw his sunglasses glint.
"Kai," he said.
His chakra shifted.
I'd always felt the Aburame buzzing from a distance, like standing near a muffled beehive. Curiosity and fear finally shoved me over the edge. I pushed my senses out, careful, like cracking a door.
Shino's presence hit me like a crushed leaf smell.
A million pinpricks of dark-green light crawled under his skin—no, not under. Through. In and out, resting inside him like seeds in a pomegranate. Each one tiny. Each one alive.
They didn't move randomly. On the surface they swarmed and flowed, but underneath there was a slow, huge mind guiding the current—a tide-pull brain, content and patient and very, very hungry.
Shino's body wasn't really an "I" the way mine was. It read as… infrastructure. A hive corridor more than a person. A living, walking apartment building the bugs used.
The back of my neck prickled.
Across from him, Zaku's arms were worse up close. Chakra canals in your limbs usually feel like braided river paths, little streams splitting around bone and muscle. His looked like someone had dug tunnels through rock with a drill. Bad angles. Hollow spaces. Scar tissue.
The bugs noticed.
Little green stars seeped out of Shino's sleeves, invisible to normal eyes. They rolled forward across the stone like spilled ink, then slipped up Zaku's sandals, under his bandages, into the hollow pipes that weren't supposed to exist in a human arm.
Zaku didn't feel it. Or if he did, he mistook it for leftover pain.
He grinned wider and swung his left arm this time. "Try dodging this one!"
Another roar. Another gouge in the floor, closer to Shino this time. Dust jumped in a ring.
Shino didn't bother with a dramatic dodge. He stepped back. Jacket ruffled. Glasses caught the light again.
"You talk too much," he said.
Zaku spat on the floor. "You're all the same, Leaf kids. Think you're so—"
He cut himself off.
His hands twitched. The bandages on his arms bulged, then wriggled.
"What the—"
The chakra in his left arm jittered wildly. Something was moving against the flow, crawling upstream through the man-made canals.
The bugs had found their way to the source of the blasts.
My fingers dug harder into the railing. "Oh," I whispered. "Oh."
Shino tilted his head, just a fraction. "You made a mistake," he said calmly. "You announced your technique."
Zaku's chakra spiked with panic.
He yanked his arm up, maybe to shake them out, maybe to fire again. "Get—get out—"
He fired.
The air wave started normally, compressed wind punching outward.
Halfway down the tunnel, the bugs clogged it.
Pressure tried to escape, couldn't, and backtracked.
The sound shifted from a clean roar to a horrible, wet popping.
Zaku's arms ruptured.
Bandages shredded outward. Flesh split along invisible seams. For a split second I saw bone—not white, but slick and red and wrong—before the spray of blood blurred everything.
He screamed. It tore straight through me, high and raw and animal. It was almost exactly the same as the scream in the forest when my trap had gone off. Same voice. Different direction of pain.
I flinched hard enough my glasses slipped down my nose. My brain spun sideways.
Tile floor. A different room. Not stone, but cheap fake wood with a sticky patch where someone had spilled something and never cleaned it. Yelling. "Look what you made me do." A forearm bent at the wrong angle, hand dangling, fingers still moving.
I blinked.
Back to stone and blood and the iron taste on my tongue.
Zaku crumpled to his knees. Bugs poured out of his ruined arms, rising in a black-green cloud before streaming back to Shino in organized lines.
The Aburame boy lifted a hand. They vanished under his sleeve like someone pulling on a coat.
"Winner: Aburame Shino!" Hayate shouted, voice cracking.
Med-nin sprinted in with stretchers, sandals slapping the stone. They didn't bother scolding first or making "tsk tsk, kids these days" faces. They went straight to work, hands already glowing green.
Zaku kept screaming.
Naruto exhaled hard beside me. "Man," he said, half-laugh, half-horrified, "I didn't think bugs could get more disgusting, but that was a new record."
The line hit my brain sideways.
A hysterical bubble of laughter slammed up into my chest. The urge to explain that beetles are actually incredible, actually, that colony behaviors are complex and beautiful and that wasn't the bugs' fault—
My hands were shaking.
I turned and grabbed Naruto's shoulder, fingers clamping down so hard his jacket bunched around my knuckles.
"What if that was you?" I heard myself say. My voice sounded thin and too high. "Sasuke? Me?"
Naruto jerked around, eyes wide. "Huh?"
He didn't pull away. That surprised me more than anything. His shoulder was solid under my grip, warm.
"What if that was us down there?" I snapped, words coming faster now that they'd started. "Just—arms blowing out, screaming, and everyone just—just watching because it's part of the exam."
Naruto's face did something complicated. For half a second, fear flickered across it, raw and very human.
Then he grinned.
It was half real, half armor. I could see the line where it changed.
"C'mon," he said, puffing his chest a little. "That's not gonna happen to us. We're the best ones!"
I loosened my grip on Naruto's shoulder. My fingers left little white marks in the orange fabric.
The med-nin finally got Zaku's screams down to ragged sobbing as they stabilized him enough to lift. Blood dripped off the edge of the stretcher in fat, slow drops.
He stared up at the ceiling, eyes glassy, jaw working.
I watched him go and tried to swallow the acid in my throat.
"I don't want to blow anyone's arms off," I muttered, more to myself than anyone else.
Naruto didn't hear, already leaning forward as Hayate hacked his lungs out and shuffled back to the center.
The board hummed again.
KANKURŌ
Click-click-click.
MISUMI TSURUGI
"Next match," Hayate coughed. "Kankurō… versus… Misumi Tsurugi."
The Sand siblings moved as a little cluster.
Temari shoved Kankurō with her fan. "Don't embarrass us," she said.
Kankurō clicked his tongue. "Watch and learn," he shot back, hitching the huge wrapped bundle on his back higher. He hopped down to the arena with theatrical flair, bandages fluttering.
Gaara didn't say anything. He just watched with that heavy, empty stare that made my skin want to crawl off and hide under a rock.
Misumi looked like someone had taken the idea of "ninja" and sanded all the charm off.
Plain Hitai-ate, plain jumpsuit, forgettable face. Orochimaru's people had a type.
His chakra was weird, though. When I let my senses brush against it, it felt… elastic. Grey and stretchy, like someone had made bones out of half-cured rubber. His joints didn't quite line up.
He walked out to meet Kankurō with a slow, measured pace.
"You're from Sand, right?" Misumi said, voice bland. "I'd say 'pleased to meet you,' but I don't like lying this early in a relationship."
Kankurō grinned under his hood. "Cute. You practice that in the mirror?"
They took their marks.
Hayate raised his hand, coughed into his elbow, and dropped it. "Begin."
Misumi moved first, but it was a lazy rush, almost casual. He didn't draw a weapon. He just closed distance, hands reaching.
Kankurō let him.
They traded a few blows, light, almost friendly-seeming. Kankurō blocked high, low, let Misumi's strikes skim his sleeves.
There was a little hitch in the way Misumi bent, though. His elbow went too far. His spine curved too smoothly.
He was baiting too.
Naruto squinted. "That guy moves weird."
"Stretchy shit," I murmured. "I don't like it."
Down below, Misumi feinted left, then struck right, hand snapping up toward Kankurō's throat.
Kankurō didn't dodge fast enough.
Or maybe he didn't dodge at all.
Misumi's arm elongated.
It didn't look like normal extension. No messy bone-breaking, no visible dislocation. His forearm just… stretched, skin ballooning, fingers skimming across the space between them as if his arm had become a length of rope.
He looped it around Kankurō's neck in one smooth, horrifying motion. His other arm followed, wrapping around the Sand ninja's torso, then his waist. His legs elongated too, coiling.
In seconds, he had Kankurō completely bound, wrapped up like a human constrictor knot.
My throat closed.
I could feel Misumi's chakra flowing through those stretched limbs, reinforcing the cartilage, locking it into a cage. It felt like someone had taken a normal skeleton and pulled it like taffy, then told it to behave.
"Got you," Misumi said softly, his mouth near where Kankurō's ear should be under the hood. "You can't move. If I squeeze a little harder… snap."
Up on the balcony, Naruto hissed. "Whoa. That's—"
Down in the ring, Hayate looked tense. "Misumi," he warned. "Remember the rules. If you attempt to kill—"
"I know, I know," Misumi said. "You'll stop me. I'll be careful."
His chakra tightened.
The sound reminded me of someone twisting a thick branch, waiting for it to break.
Kankurō's body creaked inside the hold.
For a second, his chakra flared, sharp and angry, but he didn't thrash. Didn't claw at the arms around him. He stayed… weirdly relaxed.
"Awfully calm for someone about to die," Misumi murmured. "You Sand brats really think you're something—"
Kankurō chuckled.
It was low and muffled, but definitely a laugh.
"Oh, I'm calm," he said. "Because you are hugging the wrong guy."
His face… slid.
No, that wasn't right. There had never been a face.
The thing Misumi had coiled around sagged. The hood tilted. The seams between "skin" and bandage-line didn't line up.
A puff of foul-smelling smoke burst out.
When it cleared, Misumi was wrapped around a puppet.
The fake Kankurō was a bundle of joints and painted wood, its grinning faceplate staring up at him with wide eyes and too many teeth. Its fingers twitched once, then went limp.
The real Kankurō stood a few meters away, bandaged "bundle" on his back now slightly unwrapped to show a pair of carved feet. He held his hands splayed in front of him, fingers twitching in tiny, precise movements.
Chakra threads glowed faintly between his fingertips and the puppet.
I sucked in a breath.
They felt… wrong and right at the same time.
Most people's chakra sits inside them, hot and contained. When they project it—into a jutsu, into a technique—it bursts and arcs and dissipates. Kankurō's didn't. He'd pulled strands of it out in thin, purple lines and connected them to Crow's joints.
To my senses, it looked like he'd taken his nervous system and run it outside his body. Externalized tendons. Nerves on strings.
If Shino's body was a hive corridor, Kankurō's was a control room.
He didn't have to move his own muscles if he didn't want to. He had another shell, another self, wired directly into his chakra. His body was a system. He just happened to be standing in one node of it.
Shino and Kankurō. Two very different answers to the same question: "what if I am not just this skin?"
I swallowed hard and put that thought in a box for later.
Misumi realized something was wrong exactly 0.5 seconds too late.
He twisted, trying to uncoil, but his elongated limbs were still wrapped tight. Crow's joints creaked—and then snapped inward.
Puppet arms and legs folded around him, hugging back. Metal-edged fingers dug in. The fabric that made up its cloak constricted, layers tightening like a giant, horrible muscle.
Misumi choked.
"W-what—"
Kankurō's fingers flicked. Crow squeezed.
Misumi's chakra flared in panic, then stuttered, like a candle caught in a gust.
Akamaru whimpered softly under Kiba's jacket. Kiba's jaw clenched, eyes narrowed in something like appreciation and disgust.
Temari smirked, fan resting on her shoulder. "Told you not to embarrass us," she called down. "That's more like it."
Naruto's eyes were huge. "That's so creepy," he breathed. "But also kind of awesome? Creepy-awesome."
My skin crawled. At the same time, a nasty little part of my brain was making notes.
Threads like nerves. External shells. What could you do with a seal that tethered a paper construct to you the same way—
No. No, later. Do not brainstorm while a man is being crushed to death.
Misumi's face was turning red where it stuck out of the puppet's cloak. The rest of him was hidden by Crow's hunched frame, but from the sound—those compressed, cracking little noises—it wasn't going well.
"Stop!" Hayate coughed, stumbling closer. "That's enough! Release him!"
Kankurō didn't immediately respond.
His chakra threads hummed with satisfaction. The puppet's arms tightened another fraction.
For a second, I thought he was going to hold on just to prove a point. Let Misumi's bones go from crack to snap.
Then Gaara's voice drifted down, soft but carrying.
"Kankurō," he said. "We are done here."
Every hair on my arms stood up.
Kankurō's fingers twitched. The chakra threads loosened. Crow sagged, joints unfolding. Misumi dropped out of the puppet's grip like wet laundry.
He hit the stone hard and stayed there.
Med-nin rushed in again, hands already glowing. One of them shot Kankurō a sharp look over her shoulder.
"You're supposed to be demonstrating skill, not murder," she snapped.
Kankurō shrugged, shouldering Crow. "If he didn't want to get squeezed, he shouldn't have wrapped himself around a stranger," he said. "Winner's winner, right?"
"Winner: Kankurō," Hayate rasped, wheezing.
Temari clapped politely. Gaara didn't move at all, gourd heavy at his back.
Up near me, Naruto was still vibrating. "Puppets," he said, eyes bright. "I didn't even know you could do that. That's—what if I had a puppet that looked like me? And then when people tried to hit me, bam, they actually hit the puppet, and then the puppet explodes, and then—"
"You'd forget which one was the real you," I said faintly.
He blinked. "Huh?"
"Nothing," I said.
My head hurt.
Watching Shino's swarm and Kankurō's threads back-to-back had turned my chakra sense into static. Too many outside systems. Too many examples of people turning flesh into infrastructure, self into weapon platform.
My own chakra pool felt small and cramped in comparison, a little candle in a house full of industrial lighting.
I looked down at my hands.
They were steady again. Ink stains along the fingers. Tiny calluses where I held brushes and kunai.
I could draw tags that blew things up. I could put medical chakra into someone's chest and keep their heart beating. I could lay traps that turned arms into shredded meat.
Apparently, everyone else was very comfortable treating each other as spare parts.
I wasn't.
The idea of being down there, of having my name roll up on that screen and stepping into the ring with someone like Kankurō or Shino or Zaku or Misumi—and knowing the easiest way to win was to break them—
My stomach knotted.
I didn't want to die. I didn't want Naruto or Sasuke or Hinata or Kiba or anyone I knew to end up on a stretcher.
But I also didn't want to be the reason someone else never held a brush again.
The board hummed overhead, indifferent.
Names blurred. One of them was mine somewhere in the shuffle.
Naruto slapped the railing, yelling at it to "pick him already."
I stayed very still, watching the glowing letters spin, trying not to think too hard about bugs crawling through bones and puppets hugging people to the edge of death.
Trying not to think about how this exam wasn't just about who could win.
It was about who you were willing to break to do it.
The side room they gave him was too small for what he was about to do.
Bare stone, one narrow window, a low cot with a thin mattress. It smelled faintly of antiseptic and the metallic ghost of old blood. Someone had left a chipped teacup on the windowsill, long since dried into a brown ring.
Sasuke sat on the edge of the cot, back straight, hands on his knees. Sweat had dried in his hair in uneven spikes. The collar of his shirt was tugged down on one side, exposing the ugly three-tomoe brand on his neck.
It pulsed.
Kakashi could feel it from here—an oily, foreign chakra rhythm layered on top of Sasuke's own. The boy's natural chakra was sharp and hot, lightning waiting for a storm. Orochimaru's mark clung to it like rust on a blade.
"Lie down," Kakashi said.
Sasuke's jaw twitched. "I said I can still fight."
"And I said this isn't about fighting." Kakashi's tone stayed mild, but he stepped forward, one hand braced lightly on Sasuke's shoulder. "Humor your sensei."
For a moment, Sasuke looked like he might argue just to prove he could. Then the curse mark throbbed again under Kakashi's palm, a slow, ugly heartbeat.
He lay back.
Kakashi moved automatically. Years of battlefield triage and worse had turned this sort of thing into a sequence of motions: clear space, assess pattern, prepare countermeasure.
He nudged the cot a little farther from the wall with his foot and knelt beside it. From his pouch he took out a roll of blank tags and a small, stoppered vial of ink that didn't look like much but hummed with carefully prepared chakra.
The brush felt familiar between his fingers.
He set to work on the floor first, drawing out the outer formation in smooth, confident strokes. Lines, arcs, small branching sigils—anchoring points to give the seal something to cling to other than Sasuke's raw flesh. The ink soaked into the stone, black and matte.
Over his head, the muffled roar of the arena swelled and dipped. Another match starting. He ignored it.
"Is it going to hurt?" Sasuke asked.
Kakashi glanced up. Sasuke's face was turned toward the ceiling, eyes fixed on some point in the stone. His hands were clenched in the blanket.
"It's a sealing technique interfering with a Sannin's little science project woven into your chakra coils," Kakashi said. "So yes. A bit."
Sasuke snorted once, short and humorless. "Better than letting his chakra decide when I fight."
"Exactly."
Kakashi finished the circle and uncapped the ink again.
Up close, the mark was uglier.
It wasn't just a stamp on the skin. Orochimaru's chakra had bitten into the pathways beneath, threads sinking down into muscle and coil. To his Sharingan, the pattern was clear: three hooked tomoe that wanted to spin outward, to spread, to take.
He could almost see the hand that had made it. Long fingers. Snake-pale skin. The same hand that had reached once for him, years ago, and been refused.
"You picked the wrong kid," Kakashi murmured under his breath.
Sasuke's eyes flickered toward him. "What?"
"Nothing," Kakashi said. "Hold still."
He painted the last, tight ring of characters around the mark itself—smaller, more delicate, each stroke a counter-command layered atop Orochimaru's. The seal he was about to use wouldn't erase the brand; even he wasn't arrogant enough to claim that. It would smother it, choke its activation, shunt its influence away until Sasuke was strong enough to handle it—or until Kakashi figured out something better.
Assuming they had that kind of time.
He capped the ink, set it aside, and pressed his palm over the finished array.
The air in the room thickened.
Sasuke's chakra rose to meet him, instinctive and defensive. The cursed seal flared in answer, black edges crawling just under the skin, eager to spread.
"Inhale," Kakashi said. "Slowly."
Sasuke did. His breath hitched once, then evened.
Kakashi let his own chakra flow—steady, practiced, wrapping around the boy's like a second skin. He'd always been good at this part: controlling output, filling the gaps without overwhelming.
Evil Sealing Method, he thought, fingers forming the last hand sign.
His palm pressed down.
The seal lit.
Black ink burned red, then white, then slammed inward in a rush. Orochimaru's chakra bucked under his hand, venomous and wild. It tried to crawl up his arm, to use him as a new anchor.
Kakashi held it.
"Ng—" Sasuke's teeth clicked. His back arched off the cot. A strangled sound ripped out of him, half snarl, half stifled scream.
The mark fought, tomoe twisting, but the seal lines closed over it, drawing in tight. Layer over layer, Kakashi flattened its reach.
From outside, the arena noise rolled like distant thunder. In here, the only sounds were Sasuke's ragged breathing and the low hum of chakra burning through ink.
"Almost," Kakashi said quietly. "Hold on."
Sasuke didn't answer. His fingers clawed at the blanket, then went slack as the seal finished binding.
The mark on his neck dimmed, its black edges shrinking back toward the center. The wild, invasive chakra retreated like a tide pulled by a stronger moon.
Kakashi let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding and took his hand away.
Sasuke went limp.
Unconscious, but breathing steadily. His chakra signature had smoothed out, no longer riddled with that foreign hiss.
Kakashi reached up and pulled the boy's collar back into place, covering the seal. For a second, he let himself rest his hand there, feeling the slow, human heartbeat underneath.
"Better," he said. "For now."
He straightened, rolling his shoulders. The small room felt even smaller suddenly. No windows big enough to jump from. One door. Too many memories pressing against the walls.
He turned toward that door, intending to check the corridor, maybe find a nurse to keep an eye on Sasuke while he—
The hairs at the back of his neck stood up.
A chill slid along his spine, not from outside the room, but toward it, like cold air being sucked in.
Kakashi's visible eye narrowed.
That chakra signature. Old. Familiar. Like stepping into a battlefield dream he'd been trying very hard not to have.
"So," he said softly, hand drifting toward his hitai-ate. "You've come closer than I thought you would."
In the hallway beyond, something moved—quiet as a shifting shadow, smooth as a snake changing its skin—and started toward the door.