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.
...
Kakashi actually felt a little bad watching the Hyuuga girl have a silent panic attack, as cute as it was. Naruto had some good friends.
"The kid's wily," Asuma spoke up when it became clear that Kakashi had no intention to. "He knows how to treat fire, and he's been practicing with that shunshin knockoff of his. It'll take more than this to put him down." Kakashi nodded in agreement, watching as Naruto put said knock off to use.
Kakashi hadn't had the pleasure of seeing his student's first invented technique in action over the break, most likely because he'd been keeping it a secret from the Uchiha on the team, and that decision had been paying off well so far. Sasuke had known vaguely of what it did, but it had been clear that he wasn't prepared for the sheer jump in speed it gave Naruto the first few times he'd used it in their fight. In the beginning of the fight, this had allowed Naruto to take the initiative in their back and forths.
Now, it would allow him to survive.
Naruto dashed away from the dragon, leaving shockwaves of wind and sound in his wake. It wasn't as clean as a shunshin, but Kakashi couldn't fault the comparison otherwise. The blond shinobi crossed the distance from roughly the middle of the arena to the far wall in a scant few seconds, and then he crouched and leapt up onto the wall, scaling it in a blur of motion.
"I thought he couldn't mold chakra internally," Kurenai said, surprised at the apparent display of mastery over the tree walking exercise.
"He can't," Kakashi said pleasantly, tracking his student as he propelled himself up a vertical surface with wind and sheer momentum.
He made it about halfway up the walls of the arena before Sasuke's jutsu closed in on him, and then he skidded to a stop. The fire dragon opened its maw wide, and in the single moment before gravity took hold of Kakashi's student once again, he activated his jutsu and launched himself off the wall. A few of the genin gasped as he hurtled clear across the arena, just barely avoiding the flames and bouncing between a handful of trees in an attempt to slow himself down.
Asuma whistled as the fire jutsu crashed into the walls of the arena, its shape dispersing into plumes of multicolored flames. "Not a bad attack on the Uchiha's part. Too easy to get around in the end, though."
Kakashi was halfway through agreeing with him when the flames hugging the arena walls rippled and burst, a fully reformed dragon bullet gushing out after Naruto once more. The Hyuuga girl made a sound that was half squeak, half choke, and for the first time since the start of the fight Kakashi felt concern for the wellbeing of his student.
"Now that," he said, "is a problem."
...
I run as fast as the wind can carry me, stepping atop a breeze that can carry me hundreds of feet in seconds, and it isn't enough.
The trees, the people up in the stands, the announcer's frenzied commentary- it's all a blur. I've never maintained my breeze step for this long, never immersed myself in this new form of travel for more than a twenty or thirty seconds before. It's doing strange things to my head, reducing my thoughts and perceptions to simple blurs as well. Run, avoid, live are thoughts that pass through my head like wisps of air drifting away from a current.
The current in this case is rational thinking. Something that I need to start doing right now instead of this stupid panicking bullshit.
I urge yet more chakra in the soles of my feet, bouncing off a tree and launching myself up diagonally, away from Sasuke's jutsu. It crashes into the ground below me, but it doesn't even take a second to reform and pelt right back up at me. I push myself higher and higher up, leaping to and from stone branches so fast that I barely register them as pressures beneath my feet. I swipe a hand at my eyes and the sweat that's running into them as a result of the ridiculous heat from the dragon, and in the same motion tear my jacket off, sending it fluttering into the jutsu's gaping mouth.
No more distractions. Need to think. Need to get out of this mess. Need to beat him.
My mind whirls with a dozen different thoughts as I race through the trees, up and up, ranging from Itachi being a bastard to the current position of the dragon below me to the multitude of things that I can't do with my wind until I've dealt with this fire. Finally, I lock eyes with Sasuke, all the way up at the lip of the arena. He doesn't move from his position, probably because he can't without losing control of the dragon, but his eyes speak loud and clear.
Give up.
I bare my teeth at him and pivot, abruptly changing the direction of my dash. The fire dragon rushes after me, but it's not fast enough to run my breeze step down. All it can do is follow after me, up towards the lip of the arena. Up towards its creator.
I will never- never- give up.
The heat of the arena is becoming more stifling by the second. The dragon's head is snapping at my heels every step of the way, but its body is content to coil around the arena, locking off more and more escape routes from me as I climb higher and higher up. The ground level of the arena has become little more than a roiling sea of heat at this point, and it doesn't seem like the jutsu is going to be running out of steam anytime soon.
I shove those thoughts from my mind, focusing on getting to my opponent. This is the only thing I can do, and this is the only thing he can't do anything about. He can pilot the dragon, but there's only so much control you can have over a giant cloud of fire, and something tells me picking out one little genin standing right next to the guy controlling the giant cloud of fire goes beyond that control.
So here's your choice, Uchiha. Burn us both alive, or drop this stupid jutsu. I push myself past the last dozen or so feet between us, determination pushing my breeze step past its usual limits. One more leap, and I'll be on top of him.
Sasuke closes his eyes in concentration, and the dragon head below me disperses into formless heat. Relief courses through me, and I brace myself to push off towards him, already preparing another great breakthrough. Then the announcer's frantic hollering finally breaks through the haze of focus I had drifted off into, and I turn my head just as a new heat makes itself known.
Off to my left, maybe ten or fifteen yards away, one of the coils of the serpent's body that had been sitting around in the wake of my passage ripples and bursts. The dragon's head appears like some awful nightmare from its depth and barrels towards me, leaving me no choice. I spin, cursing everything under the sun, and run away in the only direction left to me. Away from my teammate, and up towards the stands.
Spectators scream in what I want to say is horror but is probably just excitement as the dragon hunts me down, coiling round and round the arena until there's nothing left to me but the open skies. I run, because that's all I can do. It's becoming a struggle to breath against the dragon's heat. My heart hammers against my chest, screaming at me to do something, anything.
In the end, I should have expected this. I've gotten good with my chakra since I became a shinobi, really good, even. But that doesn't make it different- it doesn't make it not wind. What did I expect Sasuke's trump to be? Fire beats wind, and the guy teaching him is the best shinobi in a clan of shinobi that are the best fire specialists in all of fucking Konoha. What the hell did I think was going to happen?
I clench my teeth, jumping and dodging and running away. I've come so far, but in the end it doesn't matter. In the end, a fifth of the world's shinobi are just better than me, because I don't have anything but my element to rely on. I am the wind, but that's all I am. I have nothing else, and it isn't fair.
I leap up from a tree branch, and suddenly there isn't anything left for me to climb. I look up at the thousands of people here to watch me die with something like dull shock, and they look down at me with staggering anticipation.
I twist, and the motion takes half an eternity. Sasuke's dragon bullet enters my view, swallows up everything else, until it's just me and the fire. The heat stings my eyes, but I can't bring myself to look away.
...
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