Instead I lower my forehead and let it glance off my headband, then rip my own kunai free and clash with his back swing. Have to stay on the offensive. Always on the offensive. If it's just close combat, I know I can beat him.
...
We dance amidst the stoic black trees, throwing blow after blow at one another in ways that only we can. Most real life shinobi battles end pretty quickly, just because shinobi fights are bizarre, and if you don't know what to expect it's easy to be caught fatally off guard. Sasuke and I know each other too well for it to end so simply, though. We've learned new things over the break, entered different mindsets, but we're still fundamentally ourselves.
And at our most fundamental level, Sasuke and I put on one hell of a good show together.
"A furious assault!" Jo cries. "They won't give each other a single inch!"
He's not wrong, and that's the problem.
I take a strike to the juncture between my neck and shoulder, flinching away with a grimace of pain and just barely managing to avoid the punch that follows. We dance, but for some reason, I get the feeling that this new taijutsu style of his is just warming up. As the seconds of our fight gradually roll over into minutes, his reactions begin to sharpen, his strikes become that much more difficult to dodge, and the tomoe in his eyes spin ever faster.
Fucking Itachi.
"Gotta end this now," I mutter to myself as Sasuke throws another strike at me in an effort to make room between us. This time I allow it, feinting a botched spin and taking the hit. I skid back and watch him leap back up into the trees, heart pounding as he begins to run through hand seals.
The timing has to be perfect. It has to be completely, utterly, absolutely-
"Fire Relea-"
I sweep my left hand out wide, twisting it sharply at the wrist and calling upon as much wind as my tenketsu will give me. A loop of chakra explodes into life in front of me, comparable in size to the one I had used to throw off the water dragon bullet back in the third task. It shrieks as I thrust my left hand forward, sending it hurtling towards Sasuke without detonating it. My teammate's eyes widen, and he hastily anchors himself to a tree branch with chakra, forgoing the rest of his jutsu's name and instead breathing in deep.
Got you, motherfucker.
I yank back with my right hand, and the enormous loop of wind chakra contorts. It hurtles back towards me, but my left hand does not move, so neither does the mouth of the loop. A cyclone is the result, a wailing vacuum of wind that pulls Sasuke when he's expecting a push, leaving him entirely unprepared.
"Wind Release: Last Gasp!"
This is the jutsu Hatake meant to teach me with a tanto, the secret, nameless technique that some no name nuke nin had almost killed Konoha's Copy Cat with. A dirty trick of a wind jutsu that is unique in that it pulls rather than push or cut, and once caught in it, there's no where to go but the focal point- which should be my tanto, but is instead my clenched fist for obvious reasons.
But that's okay. I'd rather punch those pretty red eyes of his into the back of his skull than stab him, anyway.
"Come on!" I shout, wind coming alive along the edges of my knuckles. My last gasp tears Sasuke from his branch, pulling him along the current of my vacuum towards my waiting fist. Panic steals across his face, and I shift my weight back, bracing myself for any last minute tricks, preparing myself to follow through.
Then, about halfway into the vacuum, the panic vanishes. Sasuke forms a seal and utters three short words that stop my heart.
"Great Clone Explosion."
"Fuck!" I jerk back, cutting the connection that both my hands have to the last gasp, and force two loops of chakra into being beneath my feet as I struggle to get away. The clone goes up in explosive-tag levels of flames, and the inferno is all promptly sucked towards me by my own vacuum, feeding my opponent's jutsu and guiding it right to me.
My breeze step takes hold just a second too late, and though I manage to rush past the worst of it, a few strands of flame catch onto the wind being propelled from my feet and hungrily follow it to its source. I curse as heat rushes up towards my feet to consume me, and cut the breeze step just as I find myself within reach of a branch.
I claw up onto it, not even bothering to look around for Sasuke as I jump for all that I'm worth up and across tree branches, until finally the heat abates. I'm left panting, surveying the damage to my pants and the skin beneath them, and promptly dismissing it. I'll live.
"Another distraction! Uchiha Sasuke has retreated to the heights of the arena after turning Uzumaki Naruto's own attack against him, and he looks like he's preparing something big!"
Or maybe not.
I scan the tops of the trees, near the lid of the arena where walls give way to spectators, and find Sasuke perched atop a tree sitting below the Kage and Daimyo boxes. I can just barely make out his hands flowing through a string of hand seals- a slow, careful, long string of hand seals. I prepare another breeze step, a dreadful little whisper in the back of my head telling me it's already too late.
A moment later he proves me right, sliding his hands together in a tiger seal and cocking his head back. A sudden hush falls over the colosseum, and the name of his technique sounds clearly across the distance between us.
"Fire Release: Fire Dragon Bullet."
The sky above me turns to fire, and the crowds roar.
...
"Holy shit!" A boy that Kakashi vaguely remembered as being Inuzuka Kiba, Kurenai's student, blurted as Sasuke's technique blotted out an entire half of the arena from view.
"That is quite a technique," the boy's sensei murmured, gaze flickering to Kakashi with something close to reproach in its crimson depths. "You gave him permission to use that against Naruto, knowing about his disability?"
Kakashi heaved a silent sigh. He would never tell anyone aside from the boy himself, but it was really beginning to bother him how fixated everyone was on Naruto's chakra defect. In the beginning, it had no doubt been quite an intimidating obstacle to overcome, but he had long since worked past the most pressing disadvantages of it. At this point, all that was left to Minato's son was possibility. Why did it seem like the Hokage was the only other person in the village that saw that?
Still, Kurenai had something of a point. "I wasn't the one to train Sasuke over the break, actually," he said. "We have his older brother to thank for his performance thus far."
"The ANBU Commander?" Yamanaka Ino asked, astonished.
Kakashi nodded, humming thoughtfully as the dragon took shape below them. The jutsu began as a gout of fire not unlike the joint fire and wind technique that his two students had used in the third task, and only once it had amassed the proper amount of flame did it begin to take on the properties that gave it its name.
First came the head. All at once, the flames furthest away from Sasuke erupted into a yawning jaw that roared with all the force of the exploding clone he had fooled Naruto with moments before. The rest of the head thrashed its way free of the shapeless flames confining it, coal black eyes slitted and mindlessly furious. It growled, spewing smoke from its nostrils, and fixed its hateful gaze on a little speck of orange at the bottom of the arena.
Next came the body. The dragon dove, and from the mass of fire came a long, winding body covered in white hot scales mingled with blues, reds, and oranges. The whole thing, Kakashi, realized, was incredibly detailed. It was also incredibly dangerous, compared to typical examples of the same jutsu. It moved with a greater focus and speed, and Kakashi had no doubt that it burned a good deal hotter.
This was not the work of a genin with two weeks to learn an advanced technique. This was the work of a prodigy mastering a technique and then allowing his younger brother to copy it down using their shared bloodline.
"You're spoiling him, Itachi," Kakashi said ruefully, watching the dragon close in on the loudest of his three students.
"Why are you so calm!?" Kiba shouted, waving frantically down at the arena. "He's about to die!" All of the Konoha genin spectating had become quite tense, it seemed.
Asuma's team was looking on with varying degrees of unease- the Yamanaka was staring in disbelief, the Akimichi fairly crushing his bag of chips in his hands, and the Nara had abandoned his nap in favor of tracking the dragon with narrowed eyes. Even Kurenai's Aburame was buzzing faintly with anxiety.
...
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