By any reasonable measure, that fight had also been an instant kill.
"Instructor Abe..."
"Ah—right!"
Snapped out of his daze by Hagoromo's prompt, Instructor Abe finally moved. He crossed the training ground quickly, checked Guy over, and breathed a sigh of relief. Just unconscious. Nothing life-threatening.
Hagoromo had pulled the last strike. He wasn't capable of going all-out on his own people.
"Hagoromo," Abe said, after calling for the medical team, "I don't know when you got Lightning Release that strong, but I need to make something clear—techniques like that are not for use against your teammates."
"Understood, Instructor Abe." Hagoromo took the correction without argument. This had been his first time actually showing what he could do, and he'd misjudged the dial. If he'd been more careful, Guy wouldn't be unconscious right now.
The medical team arrived and collected Might Guy.
"Graduation exam, round two, match one—winner: Kamishiro Hagoromo!"
When Hagoromo returned to the spectator area, people instinctively stepped aside.
He suppressed a wry smile. He'd gone too hard today. Two opponents in a row, both knocked out cold. Kurenai was one thing—but Guy had looked rough. That wasn't a sight anyone enjoyed, and he probably wouldn't be recovering quickly.
"Hagoromo! You went way too hard on Guy!"
Obito came at him the moment he was back. Gotta hand it to the dead-last duo—even though Obito had gotten his own ass thoroughly kicked today, he was immediately jumping to Guy's defense.
"Let's check on him first."
Rin was already at Guy's side. A medical ninja was working through his injuries.
"He looks bad, but the damage isn't serious—all external. A few days of rest and he'll be fine." Rin had received proper medical ninja training by this point. Her assessment carried weight.
"Still Hagoromo's fault for hitting so hard," Obito muttered, circling back.
"Sorry. I didn't hold back enough on that last hit." Hagoromo meant it. He'd been so focused on fighting Guy seriously that he hadn't accounted for how much the guy could actually take.
"That said—fighting at full strength is how you show respect to your opponent. Would you have preferred I held back against you, Obito?"
"I..."
The logic wasn't hard to follow. Nobody wants to hear I could beat you at thirty percent effort. Everyone would rather hear I'm taking this seriously.
Even Obito could grasp that.
"When's he going to wake up?"
"He'll be fine—conscious within the hour," the medic treating Guy said, not looking up. "That said, putting an opponent in this state during a graduation exam is... not something we see often."
"..." Hagoromo's awkwardness deepened.
After round two, the mutual destruction between Hagoromo and Guy had left the four-person group with two survivors: Hagoromo and Rin, both now sitting in the class's top eight.
Then came round three, match three—and Hagoromo drew Nohara Rin.
"Don't forget what you just said," Rin told him across the training ground. "Fighting at full strength is how you show respect to your opponent."
Instant karma. Obito was watching from the sidelines like a hawk, fully prepared to charge in if Hagoromo so much as looked at Rin the wrong way.
Hagoromo raised his hand without hesitation.
"Instructor Shitakawa—I exhausted my Chakra in the match against Might Guy. I'm forfeiting this round."
"You—" Instructor Abe started to object, then stopped himself. Reconsidered. Hagoromo had used serious Lightning Release against Guy—actual elemental nature transformation, at his age, which was almost unheard of. It was entirely plausible. Maybe he was telling the truth this time.
He gave Hagoromo a look, accepted the forfeit, and announced: "Round three, Kamishiro Hagoromo forfeits. Nohara Rin wins by default!"
The truth was, Hagoromo had already done enough to guarantee graduation. Fighting Rin served no purpose. He ignored whatever expression she was currently making and walked off the training ground at a brisk pace.
Had he actually exhausted his Chakra? Of course not. He had plenty left.
His honest assessment of his own reserves was that he had no real baseline for comparison. But judging by his physical constitution and mental energy, he wasn't lacking. In practice, his Chakra volume was excellent for his age. Just excellent—not in the same conversation as someone with Senju or Uzumaki bloodline.
What he did have was something else: precision. Chakra control at a level that eliminated waste almost entirely. Where an ordinary ninja bled off a fraction of their Chakra on every technique, Hagoromo didn't. Same jutsu, thirty to sixty percent lower cost. Consistently.
Compared to his A-rank skill or his S-rank talent, that was actually what mattered most. The genuinely broken thing about him wasn't a technique. It was his brain.
Round four proceeded without him. Rin's luck ran out—she lost her next match.
Hagoromo's read on the exam had been right. Pass rates for Class One were high across the board. Even Uchiha Obito scraped through. Kamishiro Hagoromo, needless to say, graduated without issue.
They'd all graduated. Which meant the real war was right in front of them now.
Wartime deployment worked differently from peacetime. Instead of forming fresh three-man squads from new graduates, the Academy fed its graduates into existing units as replacements for losses. Assignments came out in pairs, for indivituals, and almost never for group of three.
Rin and Obito were grouped as a pair—filling out a two-man team somewhere. Guy and Hagoromo were both assigned solo assignments, each slotted individually into separate squads.
Except Hagoromo's estimate turned out to be wrong—about himself, specifically.
Nearly every new graduate was being shipped to the front. Nearly.
He wasn't included in that nearly.
No front-line squad assignment. No deployment orders.
He was stationed in Konoha, indefinitely, for reasons that had not yet been explained to him.