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The mist of poisonous gas generated by Karasu continued to expand through the pores of the sandstone, floating at ground level like a deadly blanket.
In the midst of that toxic atmosphere, Deidara remained motionless in the center of the ring. The mist was already surrounding his calves and beginning to climb up his legs.
However, instead of showing panic or attempting a hasty retreat, the Iwagakure ninja narrowed his blue eyes, locking them onto the silhouette of Kankurō, who was watching him sheltered behind an imposing stone column ten meters away.
"Did you think trapping me with your stinking poison was going to make me surrender?" Deidara's voice resonated deep, loaded with a cold, destructive rage.
"You think you're so clever for using low-level tricks and chemicals, but all you're doing is insulting the aesthetics of a true fight. I'm going to teach you what real art means!"
Deidara violently plunged both hands into the tactical clay pouches attached to his hips. Inside the pouches, the mouths located on his palms began grinding the white clay at a frantic pace, producing a wet, viscous sound that was unsettling amidst the silence of the arena.
A second later, he pulled out his arms and hurled a massive rain of small white sculptures in all directions, scattering them like hail over the sand.
"C1... Chain Dispersion!"
¡BOOM! ¡BOOM! ¡BOOM! ¡BOOM! ¡BOOM!
An unbroken, deafening sequence of detonations echoed against the walls of the arena. Centipedes, birds, snakes, and clay spiders began exploding chaotically.
The shockwaves were not aimed at directly hitting Kankurō; Deidara was using the expansive force of the small blasts to generate violent streams of compressed air. The wind produced by the explosions began sweeping the surface, pushing the cloud of purple poison toward the outer walls and clearing his immediate line of sight, while a dense curtain of dust rose in a scorching whirlwind.
On the observation platform reserved for the mentors, Kitsuchi contemplated the scene leaning against the stone wall. His face showed a mix of tactical calculation.
"He's spending an excessive amount of chakra and clay mass just to clear the field," Kitsuchi analyzed in a low voice, crossing his arms.
"Molded clay requires constant concentration to maintain chakra stability before detonation. If Deidara keeps exploding his reserves at that frequency within such a confined space, he'll run out long before he can set up a clean attack strategy."
A few meters away from him, Baki observed the bursts of fire intently, using his Byakugan.
"He isn't attacking blindly," Baki said to his two students, Temari and Kimimaro.
"He is forcing Kankurō to react. When you use a medium-range weapon like a puppet, you need visibility and terrain control. By filling the air with smoke, dust, and continuous blasts, he is disrupting Kankurō's perception."
At this, both teammates paid even closer attention to the match.
Down in the arena, Kankurō kept his guard high, protecting his face from the scorching heat emanating from the blasts.
His ten fingers remained taut, holding the invisible chakra threads that connected him to Karasu. Through the dust, he saw how Deidara's figure seemed to stagger, cornered against the back wall, continuing his defensive bombardment in an apparently desperate manner.
"He's running out of options," Kankurō thought, feeling cold sweat slide down his forehead beneath his kabuki paint.
"The explosions dispersed part of the poison, but the air is still saturated. He's burning through his chakra like crazy because he knows that in two minutes the contact poison will affect his nervous system. If I keep my distance, I win... but if I let him keep destroying the arena with his detonations, he'll end up grabbing me and that will be the end of me. I have to end this right now."
Decided not to grant him a single instant to reorganize, Kankurō made a drastic decision. He flexed the fingers of both hands to the limit, injecting a massive flow of bright blue chakra through the invisible strings.
Karasu, which remained perched to one side, deployed the joints of its limbs. The four steel blades dipped in poison gleamed under the torchlight. The puppet shot forward, crossing the curtain of smoke in a straight, lethal trajectory.
"Secret Technique of the Sand: Puppet Sacrifice!" Kankurō yelled at the top of his lungs.
Karasu charged headfirst at Deidara in a suicidal assault. The puppet spread its arms at an absolute angle, blocking any possible lateral or overhead escape route for the Iwa ninja.
The impact was sharp and heavy: the steel blades pierced through Deidara's tactical vest, sinking deep into his chest and pinning him against the hard stone wall of the arena.
"Got you!" Kankurō celebrated mentally.
Seeing his enemy completely immobilized and believing that the poison on the blades and the physical pressure of Karasu had secured a crushing victory, Kankurō abandoned the safety of his pillar.
He marched steadily toward the center of the ring, unrolling a short steel cable to deal the final blow with his own hands and seal the match in front of everyone, including his father and uncle.
However, when Kankurō stepped within barely two meters of the scene, an icy sensation ran down his spine.
Deidara's head, pinned against the wall by Karasu's wooden neck, tilted unnaturally.
His blue eyes lost all biological shine, turning completely rigid, opaque, and chalk-white. The skin on his face began to crack like dry mud.
"A... a clay clone?" Kankurō muttered with a choked voice, his pupils contracting in horror.
"Too slow, trashy marionette master!"
The clay clone's voice didn't come from its throat; it echoed from deep within its own structure. The mass of white mud forming the clone's body began expanding grotesquely, swelling like an out-of-control tumor.
The clone's hands, which remained trapped by Karasu's arms, transformed into soft clay tentacles that wrapped violently around Kankurō's own forearms and wrists, pinning him at point-blank range.
Kankurō tried desperately to break free and perform a backward flip, but the chakra clay was far too dense and sticky. His hands were completely sealed inside the explosive mass.
From the subsoil, right beneath the sandstone floor behind Kankurō, the ground cracked open. The real Deidara partially emerged from the surface, his eyes burning with absolute madness and his right hand forming the Snake seal.
"You got arrogant for relying on your wooden toys," Deidara whispered with a unhinged grin that split his face.
"My art isn't something you can catch in a cage... True art is an explosion!"
"KATSU!"
¡BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
A monumental, massive detonation of a destructive density never before seen in the exam illuminated the entire underground colosseum with a blinding white and orange glare.
The force of the point-blank blast challenged the structure's structural endurance. The shockwave was so violent that it ripped deep cracks into the stone floor, shattered the nearest defensive pillars, and sent a gust of scalding air that made the protective glass barriers of the upper balconies vibrate and rattle violently.
A ball of fire and dense smoke completely engulfed the center of the ring, making the pit roar as if a lightning bolt had struck its depths.
A thick, terrifying, sepulchral silence descended upon the colosseum as the thunder of the explosion slowly began to fade.
When the cloud of dust and white smoke finally began to clear, the scene revealed froze the blood of every single spectator in the stands.
Kankurō lay flat on his back on the hot, scorched sand, several meters away from the point of impact. His ninja clothes were completely destroyed, his face covered in burns and blood, and his breathing was a faint, agonizing whistle.
However, what drew a collective gasp of horror throughout the entire venue was the state of his upper limbs.
Both of Kankurō's arms up to the shoulders and both of his hands had been completely destroyed, erased from sight by the point-blank detonation.
There were no remaining pieces of Karasu or Kuroari left; all the wood had been turned to ash. The biggest surprise was how on earth Kankurō had even survived that blast.
For a shinobi whose life, discipline, and art depended exclusively on the agility of his ten fingers to guide chakra threads, losing his arms was not just a severe injury: it was the absolute mutilation of his existence as a ninja.
In the balcony and the area reserved for the Sunagakure delegation, the emotional impact struck like a sledgehammer.
Rasa stood up abruptly. The porcelain saucer for his teacup shattered on the floor, breaking into pieces. He kept his gaze fixed on his son's mutilated body. His jaw was clenched so hard the veins on his neck stood out, and his hands trembled slightly against the wooden railing.
Daigo, who had been watching the battle intently from the start, merely shook his head seeing one of his nephews in such a dire state.
Next to Baki, Temari covered her face with both hands, letting out a choked, heartbreaking scream that cut through the air of the box.
"KANKURŌ!" She lurched forward, leaning against the wall as tears instantly welled up in her eyes upon seeing her brother writhing on the ground in pools of blood and burned flesh.
Gaara didn't make a single sound, but the atmosphere around him grew instantly heavy. The sand inside his gourd began to levitate while small tremors echoed as though the ground itself was responding to Gaara's emotions.
In the center of the arena, the earth fully cracked open and Deidara emerged completely from underground.
He brushed the dust off his shoulder with indifference, although his face showed clear signs of fatigue and a couple of minor scrapes from the shockwave.
He walked slowly toward Kankurō's agonizing figure, stopping just two paces away. He adjusted the long blonde bangs over his left eye and contemplated the marionette master's missing arms with a vacant stare, devoid of any shred of pity.
"I told you right from the start," Deidara uttered in a clear, echoing voice that reached every corner of the stands.
"Your wooden dolls, your traps, and your stinking poisons are vulgarity without class compared to my art. You got confident thinking you had control of the arena... and now look at you."
Deidara turned around slowly, beginning to walk toward the arena stairs leading up to the exit and back to his team with his arms crossed behind his neck.
"You can start thinking about retiring from being a shinobi," Deidara added over his shoulder, letting out a mocking laugh.
"Because a marionette master without hands is absolutely nothing. You're just a useless hindrance."
The echo of his words hung in the air like a sentence.
"Match over!" Malenia's voice cut through the venue's shock, remaining professional yet carrying an evident gravity in her tone.
"Winner by total incapacitation of the opponent: Deidara of Iwagakure!"
Instantly, the side doors of the arena burst open. Sunagakure's emergency medical team, accompanied by four medical ninjas carrying stretchers and medical sealing scrolls, rushed onto the field at top speed.
"Bring the cauterization and chakra containment seals!" the lead medic shouted, kneeling next to Kankurō while applying a green glow of medical ninjutsu over his shoulders to stop the massive hemorrhage.
"The poison from his own puppet is starting to enter through the open wounds of his arms! We need an immediate evacuation to the Central Surgical Ward or he'll die in less than five minutes!"
The stretcher was loaded in a rush. Temari, who was about to run down to accompany her brother, was stopped by Rasa, who told her that she had a battle coming up and that he would go with Kankurō to ensure he survived.
At her father's words, Temari nodded, though her worried eyes remained on the verge of tears.
Fifteen minutes later...
The arena had been cleared. Sunagakure's maintenance ninjas used Earth Style jutsu to level the ground once more, filling in the cracks caused by Deidara's C3 and cleaning away the traces of blood and ash that still stained the sandstone.
Despite the effort to restore order, the atmosphere in the stands remained heavy, dominated by a mix of morbid curiosity, fear, and icy tension. The brutality of the first match had made it clear to all the qualifying Genin that the final phase of the Chūnin Exams was not an exhibition tournament, but a real test of survival.
In Konoha's delegation balcony, Naruto watched the center of the field with his fists clenched so tightly his knuckles turned white.
"That was... way too heartless," Naruto muttered, his voice trembling with rage.
"He didn't have to do that to his arms..."
Beside him, Sasuke didn't answer. His jet-black eyes were fixed on the smoke stains left on the walls.
The Uchiha gritted his teeth, processing the scale of destruction of the Iwa ninja and the coldness with which he had executed his deceptive strategy.
Suddenly, Malenia's firm, booming voice echoed once more from the edge of the ring, snapping everyone's attention back.
"Second match of the first round!" Malenia announced, unrolling the match scroll.
"Daiku of Sunagakure versus Sakura Haruno of Konohagakure! Both contenders, descend to the ring immediately!"
Sakura let out a long, shaky sigh. She closed her eyes for a second, trying to regain her focus and push the image of Kankurō's wounds out of her mind.
Before she could take a step, Kakashi placed a hand on her shoulder.
"Sakura, are you sure you want to fight him knowing your life is at risk?" Kakashi asked seriously, his tone shifting to that of an elite Konoha jōnin.
Naruto, who appeared beside her, also showed deep concern, and Sasuke felt the same. Although it annoyed both of them that Sakura hadn't taken her ninja career seriously in the past, neither wanted her to throw her life away.
Faced with the words of her sensei and teammates, Sakura took a deep breath.
"Thank you for the concern, but during these exams I've learned a lot, and I know what it means to be a ninja. If I go down there and die, at least I'll do it as a kunoichi and not as a fangirl playing ninja. I'll try to show my courage," Sakura said.
Hearing Sakura's words, both of her teammates felt reassured knowing she wasn't doing this to impress Sasuke or act like a fan.
Kakashi nodded, knowing that facing death was the only thing that could truly change a person—using himself as an example, he agreed, though his heart felt a sharp sting.
Sakura adjusted the straps of her elbow pads, tightened the laces of her ninja boots, and began stepping down the stone stairs leading to the pit floor.
Reaching the sandy ground, Sakura kept a safe distance, positioning herself ten meters from the center. She dropped into her basic combat stance: knees bent, low center of gravity, and fists raised in front of her face, keeping her eyes locked onto the opposite platform.
Across from her, Daiku didn't use the stairs. The Sand ninja simply dropped down from the upper balcony. His body descended in a perfect vertical trajectory, landing on the sand with the lightness of a feather, without producing the slightest impact or noise.
Daiku just stood there motionless, his hand resting on the hilt of his weapon. His face and glowing pink eyes—just like those of his father and sister—showed no emotion at all. His gray and orange hair swayed in the breeze passing through, even though the arena was deep underground.
Sakura felt a shiver run down her spine as she met Daiku's gaze. The pressure emanating from the Sand ninja wasn't a loud or crushing surge of chakra like Naruto's or the others; it was a grave, sepulchral calm, like the presence of a predator that doesn't even feel the need to bare its fangs before striking.
Malenia raised her right hand, observing both contenders for a brief second, and with a quick glance looked at Daigo, who nodded.
"Green light... BEGIN!"
The word "begin" had barely left Malenia's mouth when the air surrounding Daiku's position exploded.
¡BOOM!
A sharp sonic pop echoed across the arena. The sandstone floor beneath Daiku's feet sank a couple of centimeters from the instantaneous force of his launch, kicking up a fine curtain of golden dust.
In that exact microsecond, Daiku's figure vanished completely from everyone's field of vision.
There were no hand seals. No substitution smoke. No visible fluctuations in chakra flow. It was raw, direct, monstrous physical speed that completely surpassed the visual reaction limits of any Genin.
Sakura didn't even have time to blink, adjust her stance, or send the nervous impulse to her muscles to initiate a defensive move. For the Konoha kunoichi, the world simply froze the instant she heard Malenia's voice.
¡SHING!
Before the small cloud of dust kicked up by Daiku's launch could even hit the ground, the Sand ninja was already standing directly behind Sakura.
His movement had been so fluid, clean, and surgical that the air didn't even have time to create a gust in his wake.
Without stopping his momentum and with the precision of an executioner, Daiku drew his katana in a strike so fast it seemed as if he had never moved it at all. Yet, for the observing Jōnin, they saw how in that single second Daiku drew his katana, instead of using the sharp edge, he flipped it—striking with the force of a steel hammer directly onto the side of Sakura's neck, right over the carotid artery and nerve point.
The impact was dry and lethal in its execution.
The blood flow to Sakura's brain was cut off instantaneously. The girl's eyes rolled back completely into her head, losing consciousness before her body could even process the pain.
Her knees buckled on the spot and her figure collapsed heavily forward, falling flat onto the arena floor without having had the chance to move a single finger, blink, or raise her arms to try and defend herself.
The entire fight had lasted less than two seconds.
A terrifying, thick, paralyzing silence took over the stands of the underground arena. Nobody spoke. Nobody yelled. The gap in skill displayed on the battlefield was so vast it felt unreal.
On Team 7's platform, Sasuke Uchiha stood frozen against the railing. His teeth were tightly clenched and a drop of cold sweat trickled down his cheek.
The Uchiha hadn't even been able to track Daiku's trajectory with his normal eyes; the Sand ninja's movement speed was completely beyond his scope of reaction.
Beside him, Naruto stood with his mouth wide open, his pupils dilated in pure disbelief.
"What... what just happened?" Naruto whispered, unable to comprehend that Sakura had been defeated without even taking a single step.
Kakashi simply sighed in silence, plunging both hands deep into his pants pockets while looking down at his student's knocked-out body—though inside, he felt relieved that Daiku hadn't struck her with the sharp edge of his blade.
Glancing at Daiku, Kakashi gave him an eye-smile before leaving the arena with his unconscious student.
On the upper floor, Daigo remained seated next to Sasori, who was watching the matches with a bored expression.
Daigo knew his son wasn't weak, and the moment he saw his opponent, he had already deemed it a victory. Still, he felt proud of how Daiku managed to make an impression on his rivals, even if the opponent was so weak. Although he didn't say it aloud to Sasori, Daigo was proud of his son.
Nodding to Kakashi and watching him vanish with Sakura, Daiku simply adjusted the collar of his tactical vest, turned around with firm steps, and began walking back toward the stairs in the direction of his team in absolute silence.
Malenia took two steps toward the center, pointed at Daiku's retreating figure, and announced in a clear, neutral voice:
"Winner in two seconds by direct KO: Daiku of Sunagakure!"
End of Chapter