The board hummed overhead like it was bored with all of us.
Names blurred, spun, blurred again. Naruto was chanting something under his breath that sounded like "Na-ru-to, Na-ru-to," as if he could will the screen to pick him by sheer obnoxiousness.
Kiba elbowed him. "You're gonna scare it off," he muttered.
My stomach had been in a slow-motion freefall since Zaku's arms exploded.
Every time the names slowed, my pulse spiked. Every time they sped up again, it felt like reprieve and reprisal all at once.
"Relax," Naruto said, bumping my shoulder with his. "You'll be fine. You've got all your little papers and traps and stuff."
"Wow," I said. "Comforting."
He grinned. It worked, a little.
The screen hiccuped.
YAMANAKA INO
The first name clicked into place, white on black.
My heart did something horrible.
"C'mon," Naruto said. "Who's Ino-pig gonna—"
SYLVIE
"—oh," he finished weakly.
Someone tugged on my hair.
She didn't yank. Just slid fingers into the choppy pink at the back of my head and gave it a little playful pull.
I turned.
Ino stood there, close enough that I could see the faint freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her ponytail swung behind her like a banner. There was a familiar stubborn line to her mouth, but her eyes were… soft. For now.
"Win or lose," she said, "I promised I'd fix this. So after."
She gave my hair another tiny tug, more affectionate than teasing.
I swallowed.
The first girl in the Academy who'd looked at me, shrugged, and treated "Sylvie" and "she" as the most obvious things in the world. No debate. No questions. Just, oh, okay, sit with us then.
Fighting her felt like punching a lifeline.
"After," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "You better."
"Good." She flashed a quick smile. "Don't you dare make me cry ugly in front of all these people."
"Same to you," I shot back.
"Hey, hey, what about me?" Naruto yelped. "You two are acting like I'm not even here!"
Ino shot him a look over my shoulder. "You're loud. Of course you're here," she said, then flicked her gaze back to me. "Come on, shortcake. Let's put on a show."
She hopped up onto the railing and dropped to the arena floor like it was nothing.
My knees tried to fold. I made them stop.
Naruto grabbed my elbow. "You got this," he said, quieter now. "Remember the thing I called your 'Running Away Form'? Use that. Don't let her boss you around too much."
"Wow," I said again. "You're on fire with the tactical advice today."
But I squeezed his hand once before I let go.
"Thanks," I said. "That helps."
I climbed the rail and dropped down.
The air was cooler on the arena floor. Or maybe it just felt that way because everything suddenly seemed way too open.
Ino was already in place, stretching her wrists, rolling her shoulders. No flak jacket, just her sleeveless purple top and skirt and the bandages on her middle. She looked exactly like the kind of girl you shouldn't underestimate and absolutely should be intimidated by.
Hayate shuffled closer, hand covering his mouth as he hacked up another cough.
"Next–cough–match," he croaked. "Yamanaka Ino versus… Sylvie. Begin when I say."
He hopped back out of range of our potential bad decisions and nearly tripped over his own feet. Somehow, he landed it.
Ino shot me a sideways glance as we took our marks.
"Last chance," she said. "Wanna just forfeit and get your hair done without bruises?"
"Last chance," I said. "Wanna forfeit and keep pretending you're not worried about what's in my head?"
Her lips curved. "Oh, we're talking trash, huh? Cute."
My hands were sweating.
I wiped them on my shorts and tried not to think about the rows of eyes above us. Watching us. Turning this into another piece of entertainment. I flexed my fingers; the seal I'd laid on my own chakra pathways tingled faintly. Don't panic-trigger it, idiot.
Hayate's arm chopped down. "Begin!"
Ino moved on the echo of the word.
She came at me with kunai in both hands, no hesitation, no "let's feel this out." We'd sparred enough in class that she knew exactly how I liked to dance backwards and sideways.
Her first throw wasn't center mass; it was aimed at where my foot would go if I dodged normally.
I dodged anyway.
Kunai clanged against stone where my toes had been, metal skidding. I dropped my weight and slipped right, feeling the edge of her second blade graze my arm warmer.
The sting was shallow, but the message was loud: you can't just run forever.
"Sharp, sharp," Ino sang, spinning with me, her ponytail flicking around. "Don't slip, Sylvie!"
"Working on it," I gasped.
I snapped a tag from the little roll at my hip, fingers already finding the ink-scar notch I'd made for quick identification.
Seal: Smoke Screen Tag.
I slapped it to the floor between us and sent a quick flick of chakra through the ink.
It popped with a soft whuff and then the space filled with thick, choking smoke. Dark gray. Not elemental; just dense particulate clogging the air.
I heard Ino cough. Her chakra flared, a bright yellow-blue swirl in the murk, startled.
I used the cover to backpedal, counting under my breath. One, two, three—
A knife whistled past my ear.
She'd thrown blind.
I dropped flat, sliding on my hip. Stone scraped my skin through the shorts.
"I know all your tricks, you know!" her voice drifted out of the smoke. "The basics, anyway. You always run left first!"
"Do not," I muttered, even as I ran left.
The smoke started to thin at the edges. I popped back up into a crouch, already reaching for another tag.
Flash-bang this time.
My fingers were shaking as I pressed the paper to the stone and sent chakra into it. The ink array drank it greedily, little lines lighting up.
Seal: Flash-Bang Tag. Small radius, big pain for unprepared retinas.
I whispered, "Sorry, sorry, sorry," in my head and braced.
The tag detonated.
White light blew the world out for a second. Sound slapped us both—sharp crack that made my ears ring.
Up in the stands, someone swore. Another voice—Gai, probably—yelled something about "brilliance of youth."
I squeezed my eyes shut in time. The flash still punched color spots across my vision.
Ino yelped.
My head throbbed. Overusing those always poked directly at the weird wiring in my eyes, leaving this bright ache behind.
I pushed through it and sprinted sideways along the wall, trying to get a better angle.
Ino staggered into view, eyes squeezed shut, one hand up in front of her face.
"Cheap shot!" she shouted.
"Legal shot!" I shouted back.
A couple of leaf jonin chuckled behind their hands.
I tugged another tag free. This one had a slightly thicker feel to the paper; different ink recipe. Adhesion Tag.
I thumbed the corner and flung it low, aiming for her feet.
Ino heard the flutter and jumped on instinct. The tag slapped stone where her sandal had been a heartbeat before and spread in a quick, glossy puddle of chakra-sticky glue.
She hit the ground on the other side, skidding, one eye cracking open just enough to squint.
Her face went from annoyed to calculating in half a second.
"Oh," she said. "You've been busy."
"You know me," I said, forcing my lungs to keep up. "Little projects."
"Yeah," she said. "And I know how long you can keep that up."
She was right.
My chest already burned. Chakra felt thin in my veins, like watered-down ink. My tags were cheap, low-rank tricks… but they added up. Every detonation was another little sip from a very small cup.
Ino straightened, shaking her head once. Her eyes cleared. "My turn."
She came in again, kunai reversed in her grip now, ready to hammer the hilts into joints instead of trying to cut.
I slipped into what Naruto had once yelledly christened my "Running Away Form"—lots of backsteps, side-slips, letting her attacks pass through where I had just been. Letting the terrain and my tags do the work instead of my fists.
I dropped under a swing, rolled, and came up behind the strip of dried glue I'd laid.
"Ino!" I shouted. "Left!"
She didn't fall for it. Of course she didn't. She vaulted over, sandals barely kissing stone.
We traded like that for a while—her lunging, me skittering away, occasionally throwing a tag or a kunai to buy breathing seconds. She went for my wrists a lot, trying to stop me using my hands. I kept my fingers just out of reach.
The crowd noise blurred into a general roar. The only clear sounds were our breath, the scrape of our sandals, the clink of metal on stone.
"You're just running," she panted at one point, panting, as our forearms slammed together and we shoved off each other. "As usual."
"Staying alive," I shot back. "As usual."
She bared her teeth. "You can do both."
We broke apart again.
My legs were starting to shake. Sweat stuck my shirt to my back.
She saw it.
Her chakra shifted—quieter, then sharper, like someone had pulled thread through a needle.
Ino suddenly stopped pressing.
Instead, she backed off three big steps, putting space between us.
Every instinct screamed at me not to let her stand still.
I grabbed the last tag I dared use—the small square one I'd inked directly onto my own skin yesterday, hidden under the band of my arm warmer. A little "just in case" mark keyed to my chakra network.
I pressed my fingers over it, feeding it the tiniest push. Not enough to trigger, just enough to start the countdown I'd built into it.
Four heartbeats.
Ino brought her hands up into a seal I knew too well.
"Uh oh," Naruto said somewhere above us. "That's the scary one, right?"
"Shintenshin no Jutsu…" Shikamaru's voice drifted, lazy but worried. "Here we go."
Ino held her breath. Fingers locked in the boar seal. Her chakra gathered at one point, bright and tight.
"Mind Transfer Jutsu!" she shouted.
It launched.
I had a fraction of a second to see it—a pale, thin line of her chakra shooting out of her body, straight toward me, like a thrown needle.
I tried to dodge.
The Adhesion Tag from earlier had dried into a neat, innocuous-looking patch on the floor. I stepped on the very edge of it.
My foot stuck.
"Shit," I hissed.
The world tipped.
Something hit me between the eyes—not physically, but in the space behind them. My body froze mid-step. The arena stretched into a long, dark tunnel.
Then everything snapped.
For a second, there was nothing.
No body. No pain. No breath.
Just I am, floating in a blank.
Then the blank filled in.
I was… in my own head. Literally. Which was deeply unfair.
It didn't look like a calm zen garden or a nice white room. Of course it didn't.
It looked like the inside of my notebook threw up.
Pages hung in the air in stacks and spirals, sketchbooks cracked open to half-finished drawings, seal diagrams pinned to invisible cork boards. There were corridors made of piled paper, ink running in slow drips down the edges to pool on the nonexistent floor.
Snatches of images flickered at the edges like bad film cuts.
A small, cramped bedroom with posters peeling off the wall. A mirror too high for a child, showing a body that didn't quite line up with how it felt from the inside—too angular here, wrong shape there. A voice off-screen, sharp and contemptuous, saying a name that isn't mine and never was.
Blur. Static. Someone slamming a door. The taste of copper on my tongue from biting it hard enough not to cry.
All of it slightly out of focus, smudged, like my brain had taken a big paintbrush and wiped across them to stop them being too clear.
"Whoa," another voice said, echoing in the archive. "This is…"
Ino.
She appeared between the hanging pages in a sort of hazy outline. Not her body exactly, but the impression of her: ponytail, sharp eyes, hands on hips even when she was just… mind.
"What a mess," she said, but there wasn't really any heat in it.
I tried to move toward her and realized I didn't really have legs. I was a bright knot of feeling in the middle of the room, a little ball of color among the papers.
"You're in my head," I said, or thought, or yelled; it was hard to tell what counted as speaking here.
"Yup." She sounded a little breathless. "Hi."
She turned slowly, taking it all in. Her chakra color—warm yellow-blue, like daylight through glass—washed over things as she looked at them.
Every time her attention brushed a memory, it flickered.
Wrong-bodied mirror. Her presence hit it and stopped. The feeling bloomed: that sick hollowness of looking and looking and not recognizing what you're stuck inside.
Ino sucked in a breath.
"Oh," she said softly. "Oh."
She didn't get details. No voiceover explaining "this is why I am the way I am." She just felt it.
The constant, low-grade wrongness. The way every movement in that old skin had dragged. The relief when someone finally called me "she" and the world shifted a few degrees toward right.
A different image flared: the Academy yard, sunlight on dust. Me sitting alone on the bench. Ino plopping down next to me, talking a hundred miles an hour about hairstyles and how the boys were idiots and, "Of course you're a girl, what are they even on about."
The fragile, dizzy relief of it made the edges of the memory glow.
Ino flinched like she'd stuck her hand into too-hot water.
"This is—" she started.
She reached toward one of the jagged, blurred impressions—a half-seen hallway, someone yelling, somebody grabbing my wrist too tight. The emotion attached to it was raw, still bleeding.
As her chakra brushed it, it flared.
The whole archive shuddered.
I could feel her recoil. It was like having someone else's flinch buzz through my own nerves.
"Sorry," she blurted. "Sorry, I didn't— I just—"
Her voice wobbled.
"This feels like rifling through your diary while you're… having a breakdown or something," she said. "I didn't sign up for this much."
"Yeah," I said. "Welcome to me."
There was something vengefully satisfying about her being uncomfortable, and immediately on top of that, something guilty and small.
My preset seal pulsed.
I felt it like a drumbeat under everything—a little ink sigil I'd drawn on my own skin, down near my ribs, tied into my chakra network. Before this started, I'd fed it the tiniest flicker and set it ticking.
Four heartbeats. It had been counting quietly while the world turned sideways.
Now it lit up, bright and insistent, a ring of lines glowing through the pages.
"Ino," I said. "You shouldn't be here."
She laughed, but it was strained. "No kidding."
"Seriously," I said. "Get out."
She hesitated. "I can't. Not without pulling back to my own body, and that means dragging you with—"
"Good," I said. "We're both leaving."
I reached for the seal.
In the outside world, it was waiting to dump a shock through my chakra network—a blunt, self-inflicted jolt meant to snap me out of genjutsu or invasive mental stuff. Here, it was like a big red EXIT sign.
I grabbed it with whatever part of me counted as hands.
"Hey, wait—" Ino started.
Too late.
I triggered it.
Light exploded outward, not white and sharp like a flash tag, but deep and blue, like someone cracked open a midnight ocean and let all the pressure out at once.
The hanging pages flipped furiously. Sketchbooks slapped shut. Seal diagrams tore themselves into shreds, ink flying.
The wrong-bodied mirror shattered. The shards inverted, turning black, swallowing their own reflections.
Ino's presence shrieked—not with pain exactly, but with overload, too much too fast. Chakra stretched thin and then snapped back.
For one dizzy instant, we were both everywhere in the archive, smeared across every page. Then the whole space folded like a paper crane, point to point, and vanished.
I hit my body like a rock thrown back into a pond.
Pain came first.
My head throbbed behind my eyes, like someone was trying to push them out from the inside. Every nerve buzzed. The seal on my ribs burned hot, then cooled to an ember.
Air tore into my lungs in a ragged gasp. My arms jerked.
Something soft smacked against the stone beside me.
I tried to roll and discovered I was already on my back, staring up at the unfinished ceiling of the tower arena. Dust motes spun lazily in the light.
Next to me, Ino lay sprawled on her back too, chest heaving, eyes wide and unfocused.
For a second neither of us moved.
"What—" she croaked. "What the hell, Sylvie?"
"Failsafe," I gasped. "Oops?"
Her laugh was pained and breathless. "You're insane."
"Thank you," I wheezed.
My tongue tasted like ozone. My fingers didn't want to obey commands beyond "exist."
Hayate's silhouette leaned over us, blurred by my awful angle.
"B-both combatants are… are unable to continue," he managed between coughs. "Double knockout. Neither advances."
The crowd murmured. A few people booed half-heartedly; most just seemed confused.
"HEY!" Naruto's voice cut through the noise like a kunai. "You can't just—"
"Those are the rules," Shikamaru drawled somewhere above, cutting him off. "Quit yelling. It's a drag."
I turned my head, very slowly, toward Ino.
Med-nin were already jogging over with stretchers. Their chakra felt brisk and competent, like clean sheets.
Ino's eyes finally found mine.
Her face did this quick, complicated thing—eyes crinkling, mouth trembling between a laugh and something else.
"You're still you," she said.
Her hand twitched toward mine. A medic tried to intercept, but we both stubborned through it.
Her fingers caught mine halfway, squeezed. Her palm was clammy. So was mine.
"Even in there," she added, softer.
Something stung behind my nose.
I swallowed it down. "You too," I said. "Bossy as ever."
The med-nin eased us onto stretchers, muttering about concussions and reckless children. My grip on Ino's hand loosened, then slipped as they separated us.
The ceiling started to move as they carried me. Or I moved under it. Hard to tell.
"SYLVIE!" Naruto leaned over the railing, upside-down from my perspective, orange jacket bright against the stone. His grin was wobbly but trying very hard to be pure bravado. "Guess I'll just have to win for both of you now!"
He jabbed a thumb at his chest, like the universe should be impressed.
"Don't you always?" I croaked.
He blinked, then laughed, loud and a little too high.
"Yeah! Of course! Believe it!"
The board hummed again behind us, calling up the next pair of names. The exam machine kept grinding.
The med-nin carrying my stretcher shared a look. One of them sighed. "You kids," she muttered. "Always trying to destroy yourselves and your friends at the same time."
"I didn't destroy her," I mumbled, words slurring at the edges. "Just… shook her. A little."
"Uh-huh," the medic said.
I didn't advance. That thought tugged at something low in my chest—a small, bitter disappointment, the echo of every rank and title I was supposed to chase.
At the same time, a thin thread of relief unwound through it.
I hadn't blown anyone's arms off. I hadn't crushed anyone in a puppet's ribs. I'd drawn a line and, for once, managed not to step over it.
Somewhere between headache and chakra crash, I decided that had to count for something.
Above the ring, Naruto was probably already shouting at the board again. Below, Ino's handprint still tingled on my skin.
"After," I whispered to no one in particular. "You better fix my hair, Yamanaka."
The stretchers turned a corner.
The roar of the arena faded.
My eyes slipped shut.