Capítulo 10: Chapter Ten
Pre-Chapter AN: Hey, thanks for reading this. It's literally my favourite thing to write these days. Enjoy the chapter, and let me know how it sticks if you enjoy it.
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He rushed out of the forest, keen to avoid being drawn into a battle of attrition and surrounded by my clones. In much the same vein, they rushed at him, but they were water clones at the end of the day. Each one of them only about 30% as powerful as I was. That meant they were all 70% slower, weaker, and dummer. They ran at him headlong, and the Uchiha showoff jumped into the air. I struggled to describe what exactly he did, but I did know for sure that anyone who tried to do that without a sharingan would end up tossing a shurinken in their own arse somehow.
Either way, he spun in the air and tossed shurinken in every which direction, but all of them hit their mark, and my small army turned to naught but puddles of water. Finished with his manoeuvre, he landed on the floor with a smirk on his face. I tapped the seal on my thigh guard, unsealing a single kunai, and ran right at him. He reached down to his kunai holster and ran at me.
Our kunai clashed in the middle of the arena and I met his eyes.
He slashed at me again when we separated, and I ducked underneath it and tried to get him by surprise from underneath, but he blocked the attack with an easy smile on his face. He kicked at me. I leaned out of the way but did not allow him to gain distance and pushed further into his guard. Ninjutsu was an unknown. I was probably much better than he was, but I didn't know it for sure. I did know that when it came to Taijutsu, I was the better. He attempted another punch out at me, and this time I allowed him to overextend before slamming my elbow down on his arm. He tried to snatch it back but was too slow as I forced him to the ground with a creative bit of footwork, and then I pointed my kunai right down at his throat to force him to surrender.
He smiled at me and then leaned forward to allow the blade stab through his neck. "Release" I screamed, feeling panic run through my body. I did it just tin time to see the fireball heading right for me. Fuck.
"Doton: Domu" I didn't have the time for a handset and could barely brace myself in time, hoping my chakra made it in time to execute the jutsu. And it did. Only barely. My skin shifted consistency to turn into a darkened stone like metal as the fireball hit me and exploded into a massive conflagration. At least my skin managed to shift for most of it. Not everywhere, I noticed. My arms were definitely burnt, and I felt the same feeling across parts of my body. My legs were the most affected in the end. The tenketsu there were some of the slowest to activate. Everywhere above the soles of my feet but below my knees stung to the high heavens. My armour had saved me from truly grievous injuries, but this was still bad. How? How did it happen?
"I knew you'd be confident about being able to detect my genjutsu. It's your one flaw, you know? For all you and my cousin piss each other off, you are both basically the same person. Your pride is everything to you. And your pride in your Hyuga blood and genjutsu resistance was something I needed to take advantage of. The Uchiha clan has existed for centuries. Do you think we had no way to place those with unnatural resistance to genjutsu under our influence all this while?" He asked me with a chuckle.
I scowled in reply. I knew one thing for sure, I was pissed. And also in a lot of pain. I'd stayed still since the fireball hit me. Not just because I was shellshocked from being caught in genjutsu, but because I knew that any movement ran the risk of triggering my burns. Even worse, this wasn't something like a cut or bruise that I could fix with my limited amount of medical ninjutsu knowledge. Burns were some of the hardest injuries to heal with chakra. And that was stacked on top of the fact that medical ninjutsu was hard enough to get right on its own. I'd fucked up.
"Good on you to take that with so little damage, though." He said with a significant glance down at my legs. I followed his gaze. My trousers were burnt through in that area, revealing red, weeping skin.
He ran right at me, perhaps sensing that I was not going to be moving much and risking aggravating my wounds for the next few rounds. But it wouldn't matter.
I brought my hands together in the snake seal and stretched my neck forward after taking a deep breath to clear my airways for what was coming. "Water Release: Water Severing Wave" I kneaded the chakra in my stomach before converting it to water, and then spewed out the high-pressure steam. A jutsu that would have been powerful enough to cut through the roots of the God tree in a future that would never be. Izuku jumped to avoid the stream, but I simply angled my head to track him. Dissuaded from his approach, he was forced to retreat in a zigzag pattern to avoid the rapid moving stream.
He jumped into the tree line again, and I smiled before clapping both my hands together. The surrounding earth began to shake and vibrate. I formed a seres of seals before ending in the tiger seal. "Earth Release: Earth-Style Rampart" I proclaimed and forced my earth into the ground beneath me to form more earth beneath my feet that lifted my half of the field a dozen feet above the base level. I could spot Izuku's irritated face at the edge of the tree line and smirked in reply. He'd have a much harder time reaching me now. I'd changed the landscape of this battle, both literally and figuratively.
XXXXXXX- SAKUMO HATAKE
He watched his student fight with pride blooming in his chest. With this fight, he'd be the only one of the genin sensei to have all three of their students survive to the next round of the tournament. T isn't like he frequented the Jounin bars enough to brag about it, but the satisfaction was still immense. Especially when he looked towards people like Sarutobi Benzaiten, who had been very patronising in their countless attempts to offer him advice from their 'wealth of expertise in training genin'. Wealth of expertise that had got his team knocked out in the second round, not even making it to the tournament at the end of the day, he scoffed.
It. Might have been counting his chickens before they hatched, but he was confident. Shorirama was injured. His legs were probably basically useless at this point. The mere act of standing still as he was must have brought untold amounts of pain. Sakumo knew just how much burns could hurt. But the injury didn't matter. Because his student was finally taking this seriously. It showed in his transition from taijutsu to ninjutsu. Shorirama was a skilled taijutsu practitioner. His Hyuga blood would not allow him to be anything less, but the truth was that it was in ninjutsu where he really shone.
And so even though he'd just watched his student get ensnared in genjutsu because of his arrogance and watched him take an unnecessary injury, Sakumo was calm and expectant. The Uchiha boy could also read the writing on the wall, as he stayed still assessing Shorirama's position for a long while. Sakumo would not give many people good odds against Shorirama in this situation. He knew he'd be able to just rush him and overpower him with his experience and strength, but he could think of many a Jounin who would struggle to bridge this deficit.
Tons of space separating him and you, and a large platform from which he could see your every move and because of which you would not be able to easily approach him. An impasse.
Not one that lasted for long. Much like his cousin, Izuku Uchiha did not seem to have ample stores of patience. He formed a few seals that Sakumo recognised and slapped his hands against the ground. He created two copies of himself and all three of them ran as one. They covered the ground at impressive speeds, but clearly not fast enough.
The bird seal on Shorirama's hands made his next move obvious. All three forms separated as multiple air bullets smashed into their previous position. They tried to flank their opponent, one on the left, one on the right, and then one straight down the middle. Shorirama went after the one on the left first, weaving a series of seals before stretching out the first two fingers on his right hand. "Lightning Release: Lock on" A quick moving bolt of static negatively charged electricity hit the form on the right and did nothing. For a second at least.
With a focused look on his face, Shorirama slashed his hand to the side. Two separate sparks proceeded from the first form to the other two. He was slow with the technique, but beyond that, his execution was perfect. Thereafter, I waited for the second half of the combination jutsu he'd wrangled out of me. He weaved the seals with steady hands, and then spread out both hands once he finished. I'd told him that he didn't need to make it look like he was grasping at thin air when he used it, but he'd laugh out something about the 'dark side of the force' and ignored me. "Lightning Release Electromagnetic Murder" He intoned, and the normally difficult to aim jutsu spread out from his fingers and chased the three targets.
Whatever dodging was attempted failed from the beginning and in no time, Lightning release chakra had stabbed through all three forms, dissolving all the rock clones. Sakumo turned his attention to the base of Shorirama's section where his opponent had popped out of the ground from, and then began running up the wall.
"Why didn't he just continue through the platform and pop out behind him?" A chunin behind him asked another.
"Because of how the Earth Rampart Jutsu works. All that earth beneath Shorirama-kun was created by his chakra. Digging through that could be a death sentence" I explained to them even though I hadn't been the one asked. Both the chunin behind me nodded at my words, and I noticed that even more people had been paying attention to my brief explanation. It was all for the best in the end. The Earth Rampart Jutsu was one that Iwa had favoured during the First War. If they ever found themselves in conflict with them again, then it was probably for the best that they knew how to avoid being killed by the technique.
Shorirama weaved a series of seals and then the earthen platform he'd made shifted. Spikes formed all along the body. With his sharingan, his student's opponent was able to see the attack coming and push off the platform right as the spikes formed and avoid the damage. His retreat was hasty and clumsy, however. He landed right on top of a puddle that formed from one of Shorirama's destroyed clone. A puddle whose existence meant that it was still being maintained by Shorirama's chakra.
A quick ram seal later, and Sakumo was not surprised to see hands rise from the puddle and grab at the genin that had wandered into the Lion's den. His student transitioned from the Ram seal to the Tiger seal and then intoned; "Water Release: Starch Syrup Capturing Field", expelling a torrent of sticky syrup from his mouth that landed right on to his opponent has he finally managed to escape the grip of the half formed water clone.
The syrup did its duty, completely immobilising its target and the crowd burst into applause as Orochimaru-san declared Sakumo's most troublesome student as the winner after verifying that the other boy had no means of escape.
XXXXXXXX
"Winner- Shorirama Senju" I let out the breath I didn't even know that I'd been holding and allowed myself to collapse on my arse. Maintaining the water clone technique in its inactive form, the Earth Rampart Jutsu, and the Lightning Release techniques had taken so much chakra that I'd begun to wonder how I would; d have continued the fight. The sticky syrup jutsu had left me at the very edge of being tapped out, so if he'd somehow managed to escape that, it would have been it for me. I pushed down with hands and brought myself to my feet.
I bit back the scream of pain from stretching the burnt skin out by moving it. I would not allow myself to be taken in with a stretcher, of all things. Power lies where men think it lies, and I could already see the lecture from Tobirama if I committed such a ridiculous affront to the appearance of Senju dominance. Illusion might have been a more appropriate term, but that was beside the point. Chakra exhaustion was making me ramble, I decided. There was no other way to explain my brain's sudden decision to leave reasonable topics and move to the decline of the Senju clan as I knew it. Looking towards the section of the clan reserved for my clansmen told a whole story. Not one I wanted to think about now, however. On my feet finally, I lifted a single hand with a clenched fist to the heavens, and the crowd went wild. Of course, it did. This was easily the battle with the most displayed 'ninja magic'. I probably showed off more ninjutsu than every other person combined in this one round.
And then there was Izuku, who had been a terrific dance partner. I looked over at him to see him still stuck in the Syrup. The water making up the jutsu would evaporate on its own in barely a minute or so, but there was no need to force him to stay there for so long. I pulled at my chakra. It came to me, if a bit sluggishly, and I formed a ram seal to help my focus. Such a thing should have been sealless and easy for me, but in my present state, I couldn't risk it. Boiling the prison instead of deactivating it was always a possibility. Chakra exhaustion could cause strange things, I'd learned.
The syrup lost its adhesive properties and fell all around him. He walked out of the prison and then jumped up to meet me in seconds. I stared at him. He stared back. The crowd was silent all around us. And then he walked even closer to me. There was a collective hush. And then he stretched out a fist towards me. I smiled. He smiled back. I bumped my fist against his. And then the crowd exploded.
"Need help walking out of here?"
"Please"
_____
"Well, you've gone and done it this time," Tsunade said. I just looked up at her, unimpressed.
"Burns along most of your body, and severe Chakra depletion, just on the edge of chakra exhaustion. This is beyond the scope of most medical-nin to treat and get you ready to go back to the field in time for your next fight," She continued.
"But not you, right?"
"Who do you think you're talking to, Brat? I could fix you in seconds."
"Brat? You're only eight years older than me".
"Eight years is plenty of time, Brat."
"Okay, Old Woman"
"Do you want me to treat you or not?"
"Like I have a choice in the matter"
"I could always walk away and leave you here in a mess of your own creation. I've not been assigned to cover these exams as a medic. I could always leave you to the standard fare".
"Granduncle would kill you" I replied, still unimpressed with her posturing.
"Would he? He doesn't even know that I'm here. I came out of the goodness of my big heart to help my little baby cousin, and here you are being a massive brat".
"Bullshit. He sent you. Nothing else would have made you get off that arse of yours. Now come help me before I miss the next fight entirely."
"Say please. I could still leave, whether he sent me or not. The worst he could do is scold me".
"We both know you're not stupid enough to believe that. But please." I said, finally capitulating.
"Good," she said and walked over to my bed with glowing hands. I sighed as she placed her hands on my body, numbing the itching wounds with cool medical chakra.
Tsunade was a prodigy. The kind of genius that only came around once in a century. When it came to medical ninjutsu, she was unmatched. Everyone knew it. Even from when she'd been my age, she had already been one of the best in Konoha. Now, she was the best in the world. The Fire Daimyo paid Konoha millions of Ryo for her to check up on him once a year. Tobirama leased out her services for even more money to nobles from other countries. Famously, the Lightning Daimyo had paid the equivalent of a dozen S-ranked missions for her to help his sick wife. She was a national treasure in more ways than one. I was important to Konoha because of my last name. She'd become so influential on her own that her last name was an afterthought. Tsunade. Not Tsunade Senju.
That kind of skill showed in the way she addressed my injuries. True to her word, my burns only lasted a few seconds under her gaze. Of course, she could heal me better than she could with anyone else. Our chakra systems were shockingly compatible. Grandmother Mito said we were more like Siblings than Cousins based on our chakra alone.
"Your burns are easy, but the chakra depletion is another thing entirely. There are two ways we can approach this. You can either let me sedate you and then put you in a short recovery coma to accelerate the rate of recovery, or we could do it the slow way." No mystery as to which option she preferred.
"What's the 'slow way'?" I asked her.
"I give you a jump start with some of my chakra, and you let your genes handle the rest. My calculations say you should be at about two-thirds of your full capacity by the time your second-round fight comes about, assuming all the fights take just as long as they did in this round," she said.
"And why is the coma preferable?"
"Because it gets you back to full. And I don't have to listen to your annoying voice any more."
"What's the drawback?"
"Too many questions, brat. You doing it or not?"
I stared at. She matched my gaze, not giving an inch. I sighed.
"I strongly dislike you"
"You love me, and you're lucky you do because I'm the best Cousin in the world" she said and then placed her hand on my head.
"Count to 10," She said.
"1, 2, 3…"
When I woke up, it was to an entirely different medical wing than the one I'd fallen asleep in. Okay, that was a bit of an exaggeration. It wasn't wholly different. Just a lot more crowded. Omoikane, the Iwa girl, and I had been the only ones here when I'd gone to sleep, and now there were two more occupied beds. Toshiro, and Uraume. They'd fought each other, my brain supplied as I noted the marks on Toshiro's skin that oft appeared when one had their chakra networks forcibly closed. The fact that the marks were so visible to me, even from this distance, told me that the fight had been a very tense one for both parties. Uraume needed to have been fighting at her full power and putting everything into each thrust to get chakra scars like that.
"Ooh- Shori. You're awake?" Toshiro asked from his position on the bed. I noted that he was being treated by one of the nurses who had been tending to me before Tsunade appeared and basically told everyone else to fuck off.
"No" I replied sarcastically, lifting my eyebrow at him. I always wondered what purpose questions like that were intended to achieve. If I wasn't awake, then I wouldn't answer. If I was awake, then should it not have already been obvious.
"How are you feeling?" he asked, letting my sarcasm roll off his back without a reaction.
"Perfect," I said, pushing myself off the bed.
"I'm guessing my fight hasn't started yet" Surely, someone would have woken me up if that were the case.
"It hasn't. Uzume should still be facing off against that Kitsuchi guy from Iwa. Their fight was immediately after mine, and I strongly doubt that that fight would have ended without one of them being sent this way" I nodded at his answer. His logic made perfect sense. I knew Uzume well, and she was one hell of a fighter. Resilient as fuck as well. She wouldn't go down without being brought to serious harm. I also doubted that the Tsuchikage's son would be anything but equally stubborn as she was. Toshiro was right. A fight between them wouldn't end without serious blood.
"So what happened to the both of you" I asked them, noting that Uraume had not once looked in my direction since I'd woken up.
"I took some hits, but I won," he said. I nodded. Uraume remained silent.
"Uraume?" I called out to her.
"Leave me alone, Cousin," She said, and I nodded. If that was how she wanted to handle things, then so be it.
I stood from my bed and began to walk out of the medical bay. I wanted to see as much of Kitsuchi and Uzume's fight as possible. The man would be a powerful jounin in time, and Uzume was the closest thing I had to a rival in my generation, so I knew very clearly where my strength lay when compared to her. Now I just needed to find out where Kitsuchi fell in that ranking.
It took me a few minutes to walk from the Bay to the Competitor's box and its front-row view of the fight unfolding beneath us. Within it, there were only two people. Kizuru, who looked overjoyed at my presence, and the silently brooding red head of Iwagakure's team. I guess that meant he was the one who won that fight. So where was the Kumo contingent? None of them had been at the med bay. Strange for the loser of a battle between Jinchuriki to be well enough not to need medical treatment.
I smiled at Kizuru, ensuring to return his enthusiastic greeting before walking straight to my seat to begin watching the fight. As I'd seen coming, the battlefield was a mess. The kind of mess that would make you compare a place to an active war zone.
Uzume, standing on one of the few trees that remained standing in the forested section, weaved two seals and took a deep breath. I saw the jutsu coming. Her opponent, standing in front of her, slammed his palms on the ground, forming a dome of tough stone around him. The flame dragon bullet hit the earth dome and failed to break it. I looked at Uzume. Really looked at her. She was exhausted. She was breathing heavily. It was clear that this fight had been going on for a while, and it hadn't been easy on her.
She leaned down to pick up her Uchiwa, and she held it in a tight grip as she waited for her opponent to show himself. It explained her position on the trees. The fact that she wasn't attacking the dome showed that she didn't believe he was still inside. And looking around, I could spot a myriad of openings in the ground. Kitsuchi was a practitioner of the subterranean voyage technique, it seemed. A skilled one if he'd forced Uzume into a tactic like this.
There was a heartbeat of silence. And then the dome exploded outwards, a volley of loose stones flying in every which direction. Unlike we'd expected, Kitsuchi was within the dome itself, and now he was out. Uzume jumped from her position, angling her body to ensure every single rock missed her by some margin. She even managed to look graceful as she did it. Her red eyes gleamed. Fucking Sharingan cheats.
Kitsuchi was careful not to meet them as he geared to square up with her in close combat. His fists, wreathed in stone, were lifted to either side of his head as he took a stance not unlike what a boxer from my old world would have. Uzume had no such stance. She came with pure fury. Her first swing was blocked by said stone gauntlet, and he tried to use the opportunity to land a powerful punch on her, but her body collapsed into a swarm of sakura flowers. She appeared a few metres away on his other side and prepared to land the attack on his unguarded side. Displaying agility that belied his frame, he leaned out of the way of the Uchiwa and punched right at the fan. It was too durable for him to break like that, but his force was enough to tear it out of her grip. Without her weapon, the Iwa Genin seemed to have decided she was less of a threat and quickly moved in to press his perceived advantage.
What a fool. The Uchiwa was a relatively new addition to her arsenal. She'd used it for less than a year, after all. She was more dangerous without it in her hands than she was with it. I saw it then. She snapped her fingers. Kitsuchi, for some reason, punched out in precisely the opposite direction from her. Genjutsu. Sound based. Interesting. So she'd found some way to either copy Kizuru's technique or create her own facsimile of the technique. Either way, she'd done it. She slammed her fist against the ground and lifted it up with a very familiar stone gauntlet on it. Kitsuchi continued to chase his illusionary opponent, and she limped towards his position, struggling with the earthen addition to her form. When she was close enough and Kitsuchi's 'battle' placed him in a convenient position for her, she swung.
The sound echoed across the quiet stadium—a thud. Kitsuchi presented no resistance, falling to the floor unconscious almost instantly. And then it came. The crowd was electrified—louder than I'd ever heard them.
"Winner: Uzume Uchiha", Orochimaru's voice was drowned out. Medical staff flooded the battlefield, seeking out both of the participants. Uzume had fallen on her arse the moment she'd knocked her opponent out. She was sitting upright now, and thanks to the big screen, I could see her face clearly. She looked pissed. Very pissed.
"Shorirama Senju and Roshi of Iwa, please make their way down to the field. The winner of this battle will face Kizuru Kurama after a brief break." Jiraiya's voice on the megaphone cut through the crowd's voices.
A/N; Very dialogue-heavy with Tsunade. They have a bit of a strange dynamic. Here you go. As I said earlier, the next chapter comes up next week or skip the wait and read the next three along with daily uploads on pa-treon. For the pa-treon, you can remove the hyphen between pa and treon and google it then search for my username- Oghenevwogaga. Or you could copy the link in my bio and remove the spaces before pasting in your address bar.
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