The electronic scoreboard wandered through all the participants and settled on two names.
"Sasuke Uchiha will fight Tenten," Hayate said.
Sasuke smirked to himself as the other fighters retreated to balconies around the fighting area.
"Who would have thought it would be this soon," he wondered.
"How much have you been feeling when you draw on chakra?" Kakashi asked behind him suddenly drawing a reflexively wince from Sasuke. "I see, you had a run in with a man named Orochimaru, didn't you?"
Sasuke remained silent.
"That mark, if you draw on chakra, will draw out more and more of your energy until it kills you," Kakashi warned.
"That's my own decision, isn't it?" Sasuke asked.
"Shouldn't you have reported the injury before the end of the second exam?" Kakashi asked. "You've been here quite sometime."
"It's nothing," Sasuke said.
"Well, just to warn you," Kakashi said. "If it goes to far, your match will be canceled."
"Canceled?" Sasuke thought to himself in shock.
"Because I'll step in to stop it," Kakashi said.
Sasuke grimaced and turned to glare at his sensei, only to find a wisp of mist as Kakashi Body Flickered to the stands.
Tenten looked to her teammates and her sensei and nodded firmly. Before smiling and taking in her opponent and moving to face off against him.
"I won't fail to live up to your expectations, Sensei, Neji," she said determinedly.
Hayate explained the rules as the two listened and watched each other for signs of their intentions. As soon as the call was made to begin, each jumped back toward a middle range.
Then Tenten flashed into the offensive unleashing with a trio of shuriken in a test of Sasuke's defenses.
She frowned as the Uchiha genius sidestepped two and snagged the third even as he drew out a kunai and tossed both out against Tenten. The brown-haired girl nimbly leaped into the air firing a much more serious salvo of weaponry against the Uchiha.
Sasuke dashed forward wincing as a few shuriken grazed over his skin and turned about to release an intense gout of fire that filled Tenten's vision. Caught in mid-air she could do little more than wrap her chakra around herself to shield against the intense heat and push through.
Oddly, as she landed, wincing slightly at the light burns that she'd picked up from the heat that pushed through her chakra, it seemed to her that Sasuke was clutching at his neck. Maybe one of her weapons had struck home a little more than she thought it could.
She launched out with another salvo of summoned weapons as he rolled away, already on the defensive.
Gai frowned as he watched the interplay. It was clear that the two fought in similar manners, a mix of medium and melee range fighting. They had similar levels of speed and accuracy, as well as skill. Tenten was likely not as strong, but she clearly understood that given how she was keeping herself at range rather than closing with one of her melee weapons.
However, it was also clear that Sasuke was operating with a handicap. It put the young man in good stead that he was testing his youthful might even with such an injury as he suspected the boy had from the exchange between Kakashi and the Hokage earlier, but it meant that he was almost sure to lose this fight.
"I'm sorry, Kakashi," Gai thought. "Tenten is far too skilled to be taken unawares by your student here."
Across the way, Kakashi was thinking similar thoughts.
"That fireball almost was too much," he thought. "Is this as far as it goes?"
Sasuke focused on defense and dodging for the moment as he reasoned out what to do. His one attempt to use chakra to any degree had just about wracked him into uselessness. If he hadn't been resting the last day or more he would have probably lost the fight right there.
He needed to find something else to do. And he couldn't slip into his sharingan, as that was even more chakra intensive.
The Uchiha heir cursed as the weapon specialist pressed her advantage again and forced him to roll out of the way across a field getting more and more covered in sharp implements.
His eyes narrowed in a moment of reprieve and he reached out to snap up one of the discarded weapons as he reached into his own pouch.
Tenten smirked as she easily dodged aside one of her own kunai returned back toward her, not even glancing back as it struck into the wall behind her.
"Is that all?" she called out triumphantly.
Sasuke frowned and darted to the side, changing the angle of his attack and lashing outward again and again, Tenten dodging each time as she returned attacks of her own.
They circled with each other for several minutes, peppering the wall in holes as kunai and shuriken were embedded all over the area.
"What's this?" the Otogakure jonin overseeing the Oto genin wondered, Orochimaru hiding behind a false face. "Is he going to try to do this without using my gift? Heh, heh, that'll only handicap him further."
"Not a single scratch on Tenten?" Kakashi wondered. "Is she that good at dodging or did I overestimate Sasuke's....oh, I see what's going on."
In front of him, Ryoko watched intensely as the two fighters spiraled around in a familiar pattern.
"She's done," Shikamaru declared idly.
"Huh?" Lee said. "But she has him on the ropes!"
"If Shikamaru says it's done," Choji said. "It's done."
Tenten watched her opponent visibly tiring and failed to note her growing sense of complacency. Either she'd gotten an early lucky hit in, or the Uchiha genius wasn't as much as he was made out to be.
Another attack by Sasuke using her own weapons and again she liberally danced out of the way, barely noting how Sasuke was already diving for the ground to avoid her own attack.
He idly grabbed at the ground for new weapons out of the pile there, as usual, and then pulled back, with a smirk.
Tenten frowned briefly, already into her next dodge. She had barely time to note the shimmer of a wire gathered up in Sasuke's hand as he pulled his hand back. Then she felt herself slam into a virtual net of wires cutting at her clothes and exposed skin.
Sasuke then darted forward with more speed than she had thought him capable of.
She felt the wires pulling tight as he circled around her, binding her arms to her body.
Sasuke grimaced as he wrapped the wire in his hands around the handle of a new kunai and tossed it out to embed in the wall with the other kunai. However, if just one anchor point, it wouldn't last long.
He started to charge forward and stumbled forward as the pain ripped through him out of his shoulder. He could feel the bruise of the curse mark spreading over his body and gritted his teeth, aware of the lost time with each moment given over to that mark.
Or...he could just give in and use its power, hope that he could finish Tenten before Kakashi interfered and the match was called.
"No!" he snapped bitterly. "I'm not taking the easy route to power."
Through sheer force of will, he forced the pain down and the curse mark to recede and took to his feet again, dashing forward to slam into Tenten's trapped form just shy of her escape.
Sasuke watched the weapon specialist tumble across the arena floor as he followed and slammed into her again before she could reach her feet. Driving on sheer will, Sasuke ignored the tracery of pain in his neck and wielded his higher strength against Tenten repeatedly now that he was able to.
Until, finally, Tenten didn't stand back up but only lay on the ground, tangled up in the wires.
"The winner is Sasuke Uchiha," Hayate said.
A moment later, Tenten started to stir again as Sasuke bent down with a kunai to cut her free of the tangled wires. He started to bend over to pick her up when he found himself facing Lee's grim expression.
"I'll take her from here," the taijutsu specialist said through narrowed eyes.
"If you say so," Sasuke said, discarding the kunai and walking away.
Only to collapse himself a few steps away, caught from a complete fall by Kakashi.
Gai looked on seriously as Tenten was looked over by the medical ninja and was relieved to note the unworried expressions on their faces.
"That one is dangerous," he said cautiously as he considered where his eternal rival was taking the boy that had just beaten down his student to the back of the tower.
Tenten was already awake and in treatment, and so he looked up to see who the next fight would be.
See other episodes by Thrythlind
(Posted Mon, 20 Sep 2010 18:07)
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