58. Neji vs Naruto III

Chapter 58: Neji vs. Naruto III

Neji stood in the center of the arena, arms still extended in the stance of the Gentle Fist, fingers rigid, palms open, every line of his body trained toward the boy across from him. His chest rose and fell in short, controlled pulls. The two hundred and fifty six strikes he had unleashed only moments ago had cost him more than he wanted to admit. His chakra network, so meticulously mapped and so proudly displayed, felt thin now, stretched like paper pulled too tight.

He looked at Naruto and something in his stomach turned cold. The boy stood with his hands loose in his pockets, shoulders relaxed, face unreadable. He did not look like someone who had just watched his own shadow clone get torn apart. He looked like someone who had simply been waiting.

"So you were really a shadow clone the entire time," Neji said. His voice carried no anger, only the flat certainty of a boy recalculating a battle he thought he had already won.

"Yes," Naruto answered.

Neji's Byakugan flared, veins bulging faintly at his temples as he studied the chakra coiling beneath Naruto's skin. "Then you've been watching this whole time. Studying my Gentle Fist. My rotation of palms. My footwork."

"Yes," Naruto said again, simpler this time, almost bored.

Neji's eyes narrowed to slits. "And you believe that will be enough to save you?"

Naruto's mouth curved, not into arrogance, but into something quieter and far more dangerous: certainty. "I know it will."

He drew his hands from his pockets at last. He rolled one shoulder, then the other, and the crack of loosened joints seemed absurdly loud in the hush that had fallen over the stadium. He tilted his neck to one side, then the other, working out a stiffness that had nothing to do with fear.

"Ready?" he asked.

Neji did not answer with words.

He crossed the distance in a blur of pale cloth, front foot driving into the packed earth, back leg coiling and releasing with a hiss of displaced air. His right palm speared forward, chakra already humming at the fingertips, aimed with surgical precision at the chakra points just beneath Naruto's collarbone.

Naruto was not there.

He had shifted a half step to the left, so minimal it looked almost lazy, and Neji's palm sliced empty air a finger's width from where Naruto's chest had been a heartbeat earlier. The whip of displaced wind tugged at the fabric of Naruto's jacket. By the time Neji's brain registered the miss, Naruto was already behind him.

Neji spun on his heel, robes flaring, his left palm cutting a vertical arc meant to catch Naruto across the jaw. Naruto ducked beneath it so smoothly that the strike passed clean over his scalp, close enough to stir his spiky blond hair.

A knee came up next, Neji trying to close the gap and force a point blank exchange, but Naruto twisted his hips at the last possible instant and the strike glanced off nothing but empty space where his ribs had been.

Neji dropped low and swept his leg in a wide arc meant to take Naruto off his feet entirely. Naruto simply left the ground, a small, almost contemptuous hop, and the sweep passed harmlessly beneath his sandals.

One more palm strike came up from below, aimed at the underside of Naruto's chin, and Naruto leaned back at the waist with a fluidity that should not have belonged to a genin fresh out of a three year absence. The palm whistled past his nose close enough that he felt the pressure of it against his skin.

The crowd had gone utterly silent. Somewhere in the stands, a jonin murmured to another that he had never seen anyone read a Hyuga's attack pattern in real time, let alone a boy people had written off as the class clown of his generation.

Neji staggered back half a step, chest heaving, sweat beading along his hairline despite the cool shade of the arena dome.

"You're really fast," he said, and for the first time there was something other than contempt in his voice.

"I know," Naruto said simply.

Neji reset his stance, feet shoulder width apart, palms raised, and something shifted behind his pale eyes. This was no longer a boy toying with an opponent he considered beneath him. This was a Hyuga fighting to understand a truth his bloodline limit refused to hand him easily.

He surged forward again, and this time his hands became a blur, strike after strike aimed at the chakra points running down Naruto's arms, his chest, the backs of his knees. Eight strikes in the span of two seconds. Then sixteen. The precision never wavered, each palm arriving exactly where Hyuga training demanded it arrive.

None of them landed clean.

Naruto moved through the barrage like something poured rather than something running, his shoulders rolling out of the path of one strike, his spine curving away from the next, his weight shifting from heel to toe in increments too small for the human eye to track and yet somehow always correct. A palm meant for his shoulder caught only the loose fabric of his jacket, snapping it taut for an instant before Naruto had already rotated clear.

Another strike aimed square at his sternum forced him into a twist so sharp his jacket flared outward like a flag caught in wind, and the palm passed a hair's breadth from his ribs, close enough that he felt the heat of the chakra Neji had layered into the blow.

A third strike dropped toward his thigh, meant to collapse his footing, and Naruto simply lifted his leg and let it pass beneath him as though he had rehearsed this exact sequence a thousand times in some other life.

A fourth strike rose in a vicious arc toward his throat, and Naruto tilted his head back just far enough that the knuckle of Neji's hand brushed the collar of his jacket without ever touching skin.

Up in the stands, murmurs rippled through the crowd like wind through tall grass. Nobody could explain what they were watching. A Hyuga prodigy, the top graduate of his year, a boy who had dismantled a fellow genin without so much as raising his heart rate, was throwing everything he had and touching nothing but air.

Neji's breathing turned ragged. He forced himself faster, past the edge of what his chakra reserves could comfortably support, and for the first time one of his palms clipped Naruto's shoulder, a glancing brush rather than a solid strike, more contact with cloth than with flesh. It did nothing. No tenketsu closed. No chakra pathway sealed.

That was the opening Naruto had been waiting for.

His fist snapped forward and caught Neji square in the ribs, a short, compact punch that carried far more weight than his lean frame suggested it should. Neji's breath left him in a sharp grunt and he staggered sideways.

Naruto followed immediately, a palm strike of his own driving into Neji's shoulder, spinning him half around before he could recover his balance. Then a third blow, this one aimed at the center of his chest, sent Neji stumbling backward across the packed dirt until his legs gave out beneath him. He hit the ground hard, rolled once through the dust, and came up on one knee, breathing like a man who had just run the length of the village.

The stadium had gone eerily quiet, the kind of silence that falls over a crowd watching something they were certain could never happen. The genius of the Hyuga clan, the boy who had spoken of fate and destiny as though they were carved in stone, was being outpaced by a boy the crowd had spent the entire exam whispering about as the dead last.

Neji forced himself upright. Blood traced a thin line from the corner of his mouth, and bruises were already blooming beneath his robes where Naruto's strikes had landed. His breathing came in short, controlled pulls, discipline the only thing holding his composure together.

"Your speed is insane," he said, wiping the blood from his lip with the back of his hand. "But speed alone will not be enough to save you."

He settled back into the stance of the Gentle Fist, arms extended, palms forward, feet planted with the precision of a technique passed down through generations of his clan.

"You are once again within range," he said, voice steady despite the tremor in his exhausted limbs.

Naruto's smile did not waver. "Are you sure about that?"

Neji did not answer. He simply moved.

His palms became a blur too fast for the untrained eye to separate into individual strikes. Two blows in the first instant. Then four. Then eight, sixteen, thirty two, each one aimed with lethal accuracy at a different tenketsu along Naruto's frame, a closing net designed to seal his chakra pathways one by one until his body could no longer channel a single ounce of energy.

Naruto matched him.

His hands rose and fell with a speed that should not have belonged to any genin, blocking one palm with the flat of his forearm, deflecting another with a twist of his wrist, slipping a third entirely by rotating his hips out of its path. Where Neji's strikes sought precision, Naruto's answers sought only survival, and somehow that was enough.

In the stands, the murmurs grew louder, no longer able to stay contained as whispers. A chunin leaned toward the shinobi beside him and asked how it was even possible for someone to keep pace with a technique that had reportedly never been broken. Genin along the railing gripped the wood with white knuckled hands, eyes wide, unable to look away.

"There's no way," one spectator breathed, loud enough for those nearby to hear. "Nobody keeps up with that speed. Nobody."

"Look at his footwork," another voice answered, hushed and disbelieving. "He isn't guessing. He's reading every single strike before it lands."

Sixty four palms passed between them, Neji's strikes growing marginally slower as his chakra reserves bled dry, Naruto's counters growing marginally sharper as though the fight itself were feeding him strength. One hundred and twenty eight strikes came and went, a storm of palms and forearms and shifting shoulders, and still no chakra point closed.

Then came the full two hundred and fifty six, the technique Neji had unleashed on the clone only minutes before, the technique that had seemed, in that earlier moment, to be an unbreakable wall of precision.

Naruto answered every single strike.

A palm aimed at his bicep met the hard muscle of his forearm instead. A palm aimed at his sternum found only the twist of his spine as he rotated clear. A palm aimed at the back of his knee passed beneath a foot that was no longer on the ground. A palm aimed squarely between his eyes met empty air as he tilted his skull back a mere inch, close enough that the crowd gasped audibly, certain the strike had connected.

The final palm of the sequence fell, and Neji staggered back, arms trembling, chakra reserves finally, truly spent. Naruto stood in front of him without a single closed chakra point, without a single stumble, breathing hard but whole.

The silence in the stadium broke into a low, disbelieving roar of murmurs. Guy sensei, watching from the railing above, pressed a hand flat against the stone in front of him, eyes wide behind his usual grin, unable to find words. Somewhere in the crowd, an old shinobi muttered that he had trained under the Fourth Hokage himself, and that what he had just watched carried the same impossible rhythm, the same refusal to be touched.

"I'm impressed," Naruto said, chest rising and falling. "That was incredible. But it's still not enough."

Neji's pale eyes widened, disbelief cracking through his exhaustion. "How?"

"Simple, I'm faster than you," Naruto answered. "Stronger than you. And I am better than… you."

He closed the distance in a single stride, and his fist drove into Neji's chest with enough force to lift the Hyuga clean off his feet. Neji slammed into the arena wall behind him and slid down its stone surface, dust rising around his crumpled shoulders.

Naruto did not let him recover. He was already there, a fist crashing into Neji's jaw, a knee driving into his stomach, an elbow following through against the same spot a heartbeat later. Neji collapsed fully to the ground, body broken, chakra completely spent, unable to lift so much as a finger.

Naruto stood over him, fist raised, ready to end it.

Chakra burst outward from Neji's prone body, a final, desperate reserve summoned from somewhere deep within him, and he began to spin, faster and faster, until a dome of swirling chakra surrounded him entirely. Rotation. The perfect defense of the Hyuga clan, said to repel any attack that dared approach it.

Naruto smiled instead of retreating. "Nice try."

Red chakra erupted from his own body in answer, thick and heavy, curling around his frame like living flame. His whisker marks darkened into jagged lines. His eyes bled from blue into a burning red, pupils narrowing to slits. The crowd's murmurs turned to shouts of alarm and awe in the same breath.

"He called on it himself," someone shouted from the stands, voice cracking with disbelief. "Nobody taught him that. He pulled the Nine Tails' chakra on his own."

"That's not something a genin does," another voice answered, hoarse. "That kind of control, at his age, without guidance. It shouldn't be possible."

Naruto drove his fist forward, wreathed in crimson chakra, and struck the spinning dome of Rotation head on. For a single suspended moment the two forces held against each other, chakra grinding against chakra, dust and wind howling outward in a violent ring. Then the dome shattered.

Neji was thrown backward across the arena floor, robes torn, body limp, and this time he did not rise.

"He broke Rotation," a jonin breathed from somewhere near the Hokage's box, voice barely above a whisper. "With his bare hands. That defense was supposed to be absolute."

"The son of the Fourth," someone else murmured, almost reverently. "It has to be. Nobody else could carry that kind of speed and that kind of power at the same time."

Naruto dropped to his knees the instant the fight ended, the red chakra receding from his skin like a tide pulling back from shore, leaving him hollow and trembling with exhaustion.

Hayate stepped forward, blade lowered, voice cutting through the murmurs that filled the stadium.

"Winner," he announced. "Naruto Uzumaki."

For a heartbeat the crowd said nothing at all, as though the stadium itself needed a moment to process what it had just witnessed.

Then the silence broke into a roar.

The cheer that followed was deafening, whistles and applause rolling through the stands in waves, shouts of approval crashing over one another until individual voices became impossible to separate from the whole.

"The Yellow Flash!" someone bellowed from high in the stands. "He moved just like the Yellow Flash!"

"Son of the Fourth Hokage!" another voice cried out, and the words spread through the crowd like wildfire, picked up and repeated until half the stadium seemed to be chanting a name that had not been spoken aloud in years.

"Namikaze! Namikaze!"

Naruto remained on his knees at the center of the arena, chest heaving, arms shaking from strain that had settled deep into his muscles. He had spent everything he had, chakra reserves scraped down to nothing, and every part of him felt it.

Medics rushed onto the field toward Neji, who lay motionless where he had fallen, his face pale beneath the dust and bruising, his breathing shallow but steady. They lifted him onto a stretcher with practiced efficiency, checking his pulse, stabilizing his neck, calling instructions back and forth as they carried him from the arena floor.

Guy watched from above, his usual boisterous grin nowhere to be found, replaced instead by a stunned stillness. Beside him, Tenten had both hands pressed over her mouth, eyes fixed on the stretcher as it disappeared beneath the stands.

In the Hyuga family section, Hiashi sat with his arms folded, expression carved from stone, giving away nothing of what passed behind his pale eyes. Beside him, young Hanabi leaned forward against the railing, watching Naruto with unabashed fascination.

"He's so strong," she said quietly. "Stronger than big sister Hinata said he was."

Hiashi did not answer. He only watched the boy kneeling in the center of the arena with an expression that revealed nothing and considered everything.

Down on the field, Naruto finally pushed himself back to his feet, legs unsteady beneath him. He looked out at the crowd, at the sea of faces still shouting his father's name, and he did not smile. He did not wave. He simply stood there, breathing hard, letting the moment settle into his bones without quite knowing what to do with it.

A soft puff of smoke rose beside him, and when it cleared, Sasuke and Kakashi stood in its place. Sasuke wore his usual dark blue shirt, the curse mark sealed beneath a fresh layer of paper tags, his Sharingan spinning lazily in both eyes as he took in the scene.

Kakashi stood a step behind him, visible eye narrowed in thought, his orange book tucked away for once rather than held open in front of his face.

"You're late," Hayate said flatly, sheathing his blade. "The matches were held up waiting on you two."

Kakashi offered a small shrug. "Had some training to finish. He's ready now."

Sasuke's gaze moved over Naruto slowly, taking in the black outfit that had replaced his old orange jumpsuit, the longer hair falling loose around his face, the tired but steady eyes that no longer held the same restless energy Sasuke remembered.

"You changed," Sasuke said.

Naruto met his gaze evenly. "So did you."

Sasuke's Sharingan spun once, taking in the stretcher vanishing beneath the stands, the exhaustion written across Naruto's frame, the lingering murmur of the crowd still repeating a name that did not belong to either of them.

"Did you win?" Sasuke asked, though the answer was obvious enough.

Naruto nodded once. "Yeah."

"Good," Sasuke said, a faint, sharp edge of anticipation creeping into his voice. "I want to fight you in the next round."

Naruto's mouth twitched into something almost like a smile. "You have to win first."

Sasuke's eyes narrowed, the challenge landing exactly as Naruto intended. "I will."

Naruto turned without another word and made his way toward the stairs leading up to the viewing balcony, each step slower than the last as fatigue finally caught up with him fully. He found a quiet stretch of wall near the railing, leaned his back against the cool stone, and let his eyes drift shut for just a moment.

Sakura was already waiting there, eyes wide, mouth slightly open as though she had been holding her breath through the entire fight.

"Naruto," she said, voice barely above a whisper. "That was incredible."

He cracked one eye open, glanced at her, and let the corner of his mouth lift just a fraction.

"Thanks."

Down in the center of the arena, sand began to stir against the packed earth, gathering itself into a slow, rising column. It spun faster, climbing higher, grains hissing against one another until the swirling mass towered several feet above the ground. Then, all at once, it dispersed outward in a fine, drifting cloud.

Gaara stood revealed at the center of it, arms folded across his chest, sand curling restlessly around his sandaled feet like something alive and impatient. His pale, ringed eyes lifted toward the balcony where Sasuke stood, and his voice, when it came, was flat and utterly without warmth.

"Uchiha."

Sasuke's gaze met his without flinching. "Gaara."

The crowd, still humming with residual excitement from the fight before, surged into a fresh wave of noise, the tension of anticipation rolling through the stands as thick as smoke. This was the match many of them had been waiting for since the tournament brackets were first announced, the last Uchiha against the jinchuriki of the Sand.

Sasuke stepped down onto the arena floor, his Sharingan already spinning, the curse mark dormant but present beneath his collar, his expression carved into something hard and focused.

Gaara's sand shifted faster around him, restless, hungry.

"I have been waiting for this," Gaara said.

Sasuke said nothing in return, only settled into his stance, eyes narrowing as he studied the shifting sand.

Hayate raised his hand between them, voice carrying clearly across the now silent arena.

"The match between Sasuke Uchiha of the Hidden Leaf and Gaara of the Sand will now begin."

The crowd roared.

End of Volume 1