章節 37: Preliminaries Part 2

The next fight was Tenten verses Karin Uzumaki. This fight was mostly just Tenten spamming countless amounts of projectiles at Karin. Karin did well, holding up for five or so minutes, before the quantity of projectiles spammed at her crossed the amount she could block with her staff.

The fight was called off after Karin was struck by several kunai and shurikens. She was bloodied and covered in cuts. However, Tenten wasn't going for the kill and with her skill as a marksman, she easily avoided targeting Karin's vital organs. When Karin was healed by Chojusen, she easily lost any signs of being wounded after a minute of Water Healing.

Since this was Karin's fight, Chojusen had been keeping a very close eye for any signs of accidents. He had been prepared to teleport and save Karin if anything too dangerous came her way; luckily nothing too intense occured. As Chojusen was comforting Karin, the next fight began.

Naruto and Kankuro jumped down from the spectating area to the fighting arena and promptly started their fight. It was a one sided fight from start to finish. Kankuro was thoroughly beaten by Naruto's extensive collection of techniques. All Kankuro had going for him was being able to to show off all his puppets' attacks. Unfortunately, when his puppet's attacks did land, they always hit a clone; never Naruto's true body.

Naruto showed his proficiency in Wind and Fire Release jutsu through the fight. He used fire jutsu to singe away Kankuro's poison mist attacks and wind jutsu were used to ward of any projectile thrown his way. When he wasn't using elemental jutsu, he created a never ending stream of shadow clones that caused Kankuro to be hopelessly outmatched.

After Kankuro managed to eliminate fifty shadow clones, he gave up upon seeing Naruto make another hundred fifty more. Still, his efforts in the fight showed that he was between High Chunin and Low Jonin rank.

Sai and Shino were called to the arena and they began the most "colorful" fight of the evening. Shino used his bugs for ninjutsu and long range combat and Sai used paintings. Sai drew several beasts to rival Shino's bugs as well as a tanto to wield for melee. Since Shino was a long range fighter, Sai opted to push for taijutsu and kenjutsu.

When Sai's painted beasts came into contact with Shino's bugs, he activated the paper bombs he had placed within to explode. The explosions allowed him to clear entire sections of space to approach Shino. Shino feigned being pressured by moving backwards toward one of the walls; appearing cornered was part of his strategy.

When Sai "pushed" Shino all the way back, with Shino's back blocked by a wall, he started a CQC brawl. Shino applied the wind coating Chojusen had taught him on his hands and his own tanto sword and showed off his own taijutsu.

When he asked Chojusen for a wind coating, his plan was to use it to move faster, to keep his distance from his opponents; which he accomplished. However, Chojusen taught him more about the effects of the wind coating and this allowed Shino to adapt into a more well rounded shinobi; he could now use taijutsu with as much effect as his bugs.

With a wind coated tanto, Shino directly sliced through Sai's blade and stopped before his tanto touched Sai's throat. Sai gave up at that point and both contestants jumped back to the spectating area; the fight ended in less than a minute.

Up next was Temari against… Chojusen Akimichi. Temari cursed her luck and looked at Chojusen with eyes that solicited pity. Temari was one of the few people that knew a bit about Chojusen's real power, so she immediately gave up the psychological battle. Chojusen wasn't a monster… he would let her show off the best of her abilities before winning the match.

Temari immediately opened her fan completely and blasted everything around Chojusen with countless wind blades. Of course, when the wind approached Chojusen, all he had to do was put on a wind coating — like Shino did — and all the wind blades lost most of their power before reaching Chojusen's skin; he could just let the wind blades attack his body directly, the outcome would be the same.

Temari upped the ante and summoned a sickle wielding weasel. In combination with the weasel, she created a maelstrom of devastating wind energy that destroyed almost everything in the fighting area. The walls and floor were covered in long gashes, several centimeters deep. Honestly, the attack probably would have cut through the walls of the building and still had the energy to wipe out the trees outside. However, the supervisors cancelled out the energy of her attack before it reached that point.

Chojusen stood in the same spot he had been since the start of the fight without a scratch. Temari was a bit depressed. Not even a scratch? Could you at least pretend to be a little hurt? She gave up the match and walked back to the second floor.

The next fight was Sasuke Uchiha versus Neji Hyuga. In the fighting stage, the two kids not only represented themselves in this fight, they also represented their dojutsu; the older generation would see this as a fight between the Sharingan and the Byakugan.

When the match started, both Sasuke and Neji activated their eyes. Sasuke probed Neji by starting the fight with a large fireball attack. Neji dodged it and moved in to put Sasuke within his field of divination. When he was about to start closing off Sasuke's chakra points with the Eight Trigrams Sixty-Four Palms attack, he noticed Sasuke gather his chakra in his hand.

Neji approached regardless of the fact and began a barrage of attacks. One of the abilities of the Sharingan was the ability to predict what your opponent would do next to allow the user ridiculous evasive potential. Sasuked stressed his body to the greatest amount he could tolerate, to dodge Neji's relentless attacks.

When thirty of the sixty-four attacks passed and missed, Sasuke noticed an opening due to Neji's hesitation and used a Chidori attack to counterattack. Kakashi, Sasuke's Jonin teacher, had taught this skill to Sasuke before the Chunin exams; in fact it was actually this attack that gave Sasuke the inspiration to create Kirin.

Sasuke's Chidori screeched with a god awful chirping noise and just barely grazed Neji's left shoulder. This "small wound" led to Neji start bleeding severely. Neji retreated a couple meters and used some of the bandages he had wrapped around his hands and arms to dress the wound.

The Chidori was a savage attack that ravaged everything it touched, so the graze was not a clean cut. It was a very serious injury that would constantly decrease Neji's combat prowess as more time passed, so Neji chose to start using Wind Release techniques. The wind techniques would not only allow him to counter Sasuke's lightning attacks, they would also let him get close to Sasuke again to try and block of chakra points.

Sasuke didn't let Neji have his way so he blasted Neji with fireballs, flame dragons, and even a constant flamethrower, to counter Neji's Wind Release Vacuum Style attacks. Neji had to resort to using the Revolving Heaven technique to block these fire attacks, but that consumed even more of his chakra supply.

By the time he managed to get close to Sasuke, Neji was both physically and spiritually exhausted; the wound on his shoulder was also starting to set in, causing him to feel like his shoulder was burning. Neji's combat efficiency had dropped to the point where Sasuke could start to beat him in taijutsu. After a barrage of punches and kicks, Neji was downed for good.

Sasuke brought Neji back to the spectating area and Chojusen healed him.

The penultimate battle was between Kimimaro and Kiba. This was not a close fight at all. When Chojusen found Kimimaro several years ago, Kimimaro had been fighting entire squads of Jonin. He could only have gotten stronger as the years passed and his bloodline limit improved, so Kiba had no chance from the start.

Kimimaro took Chojusen's approach to "fighting," he let Kiba attack him with all his abilities to show just how futile fighting against him would prove. Kiba and his beast companion Akamaru used the Beast Human Clone technique to make Akamaru a perfect clone of Kiba and then the two used the Fang Over Fang technique to grind down Kimimaro.

All Kimimaro had to do to stop their spinning drill attack was to cover his hands and arms with bone armor and grab the two Kibas. Both Kibas were floored when the saw someone stop them, and they retreated back a couple feet before doing another combination jutsu. Kiba and the transformed Akamaru used the Inuzuka Style: Man Beast Transformation Combo: Two-Headed Wolf.

Kiba fused with Akamaru to become a large two headed canine and proceeded to try his spinning drill attack once again. This time however, the attack cut through the concrete floor like it was butter and rapidly approached Kimimaro with no mercy. To stop this version of their attack, Kimimaro made bones anchor his legs to the ground and a small bone wall appeared behind him to act as a buffer when he received their attack.

Kimimaro stopped their attack again, but this time he didn't let them get away. He punched the giant two headed wolf, dispelling the fusion transformation. When Kiba and Akamaru appeared, Kimimaro pointed a bone spear at Kiba and was deemed the winner.

The last fight of the day would be between Haku and Lee. Since there was an odd number of participants, Gaara was left with no opponent to fight. Haku and Lee made their way to the fighting area and their fight began.

Lee knew that Haku was no walk in the park, so he turned off his Gravity Seal. Lee exploded with speed and power that would put most Jonin to shame and directly punched Haku across the arena. When Haku's body collide with the walls, it fragmented to reveal that Lee had only hit one of Haku's Ice Clones.

Haku then appeared behind Lee like a shadow and pierced three of his acupoints with senbon needles. He then created a dome of ice mirrors and began to overwhelm Lee with senbon needles. Lee actually dodged most of the attacks, but he knew that eventually, he would be incapacitated if he didn't stop getting hit.

Lee had fought with Haku before many times, so he knew that in his base form, he could not leave the ice mirror dome, so he opened the first of the eight hidden gates. Everyone watching the fight could tell almost immediately, as Lee was emitting a terrifying pressure; the ground around him shattered and his hair started defying gravity.

With the first gate opened, Lee became five times faster, he directly punched Haku's ice mirrors into powder and Haku was forced to leave his icy domain. Haku also became more serious and started manifesting ice mirrors before himself to defend against Lee's attacks. He also created ice spears and launched them at Lee. To even out the playing field a bit more, Haku also used his ice energy to slowly encase Lee's limbs; cancelling out most of the boost he received from opening the first hidden gate.

Lee responded to this change of style by opening another gate. The icy frost that covered his limbs evaporated before the heat his body generated, and the ground quaked even harder than before. The second gate improved Lee's base stats by eight times. Now all of Haku's defenses and countermeasures against him vanished into nothingness and Lee could directly kill Haku with a well placed punched.

However, this wasn't a fight to the death, so Lee only caught Haku and released him, before Haku admitted defeat.