[Straight-up mental breakdown]
[Forget being there in person—even watching from outside, that anguished look is giving me PTSD]
[Scene too cruel to broadcast]
[This isn't just a bad woman, she's an absolute bad woman!]
[My waifu didn't even have to throw a punch]
[But I wanted to see my wife's rope fight scene]
"Kabuto Yakushi concedes. The winner… Hyuga Hanabi."
Into all that hush, Hayate Gekko announced the result.
Kabuto Yakushi had been sent to test Hanabi, yet without using a sliver of his strength he'd taken a ton of psychological damage.
After conceding, he passed out cleanly—no telling how he'd be when he woke.
Everyone else swallowed hard.
They didn't know exactly what had happened, but the eerie state Kabuto was in was simply frightening.
To suddenly burst into tears and snot and lose all will to fight—any way you looked at it, that was a terrifying fight.
His body might be fine, but his mind definitely wasn't.
Sometimes that kind of mental torment was a hundred times more agonizing than the physical sort.
"Ah well, ah well—didn't think our Kabuto-senpai would go for the kill like that."
Anyone else would already have been stabbed to death by Kabuto.
Kabuto was a medical-nin to begin with; he understood a great deal of medical theory, so that opening kunai had gone straight for a major artery.
Lucky for her, Zhuixia's Resuscitation skill was very handy.
And Hanabi had discovered that while Zhuixia's Wound Carving made her pay a price, she could control it to a certain degree.
Put simply, she could lower the intensity by spreading the cost out over a longer period.
For instance, if the price was being whipped for one hour, she could, to an extent, convert it into something like being strung up for eight hours.
That way, paying the price itself could be made a touch easier.
Climbing the stairs in a kimono was a hassle; without relying on Zhuixia, she had to turn sideways and shuffle up one step at a time. Slow going—but no one thought Hanabi was slow.
Even Hayate Gekko only seemed to snap back to himself after Hanabi had reached the second floor.
"Cough cough—now then, the exam continues."
Hayate Gekko signaled that the exam could proceed.
"Some kind of Transformation-and-genjutsu hybrid?"
The Third Hokage was a man of broad experience, and he too was now turning over what had just happened in the match.
How to put it.
Hiruzen Sarutobi felt something was a little off.
"More than plain genjutsu, it seemed more like some kind of… mental-level attack? Was it intel? Did she dig up something like Kabuto Yakushi's psychological scar ahead of time?"
But Kabuto Yakushi was just a very ordinary Konoha Genin, wasn't he?
Don't tell me Hanabi had unearthed everyone's weaknesses? No matter how you sliced it, that was impossible.
Or was it all just plain coincidence?
"Oh…"
By now the second match had begun too. The bout was Yoroi Akado against Temari.
Yoroi Akado's ability was Chakra Absorption—drain another person's chakra and render them powerless.
But unluckily for him, Yoroi Akado's opponent was Temari of the Hidden Sand.
"Kamaitachi!"
This was simply the worst possible matchup.
Temari kept her distance, swinging her fan again and again to overwhelm Yoroi Akado with ranged attacks—a scene so cruel it was hard to watch.
Since the match was too dull, Naruto stopped watching it. "Hanabi, Hanabi, how'd you beat Kabuto-senpai just now? Why did Kabuto-senpai suddenly start shrieking like that?"
"Oh, it was nothing—I just got to know a tiny bit of our dear Kabuto-senpai's secret~"
Hanabi smiled.
She was, in fact, also probing. Not only testing Kabuto and Orochimaru, but testing Konoha's Scapegoat King, Danzo, as well.
If she knew secrets only Root should know, how would Danzo's side react?
Hanabi had no way to go to Danzo directly, because that didn't fit the "plot development."
So she needed Danzo's side to develop some interest first; only after they made contact with her would Hanabi have a "reason" to get involved.
"Say, Hanabi." Kakashi found Hanabi—there were some things he genuinely hoped he could make clear to her. "When you're up against ninja from our own village, Hanabi, I'd like you to avoid using this kind of psychological attack if you can… er, even some scary genjutsu or some technique is fine, but the attacks on the mind, you'd do well to rein those in a little."
As the first person to ever experience one of Director Hanabi's custom-made plotlines, Kakashi had a deep appreciation for this.
Getting hit by Hanabi's psychological attacks—that genuinely left you with mental scars.
"I'll try~ Mm, once the exam's over, I'll go pay Kabuto-senpai a visit. A small token of apology~"
"Uh… well, all right."
Kakashi couldn't shake the feeling that if Hanabi went over, the other party's psychological trauma might end up even worse.
"A guy with a mind that fragile doesn't deserve to be a ninja at all." Sasuke folded his arms, finding this whole crowd far too overdramatic.
It was only a little psychological attack.
—I'm Uchiha Sasuke, the one who crawled out of the hell of my entire clan being slaughtered. I've been through so many horrors that my heart won't stir in the slightest now.
[Honestly, Sasuke getting owned every time kind of looks self-inflicted]
[Setting up death flags like a pro]
[Skies cleared, rain stopped, and Sasuke figures he's hot stuff again lmao]
[You guys are being a bit harsh—our boy Sasuke actually has plenty of good points]
[Yeah, he's the most normal one]
[A pure, clear, unadulterated twelve-year-old "young man"]
The audience seemed to have spun up some peculiar headcanon about Sasuke.
"Ah, it's over." Hanabi, for her part, had been keeping an eye on that fight the whole time.
Yoroi Akado had gone down in the middle of getting kited around, full of bitter regret, never once managing to lay a finger on Temari.
The horribly mismatched Yoroi Akado had been hard-countered to death.
And once the second match ended, the names on the announcement board began rolling again.
"Oh?"
When the lineup for the third match was revealed, everyone found themselves drawn to what was on it.
"Hyuga Neji against Rock Lee?"
Sasuke looked across the way.
Rock Lee was already shouting, then leapt down excitedly from the second-floor platform.
Behind him, by contrast, Neji took his time, unhurried.
"Ara, ara."
Hanabi was a touch surprised too.
Plenty of people had imagined the scene of Rock Lee fighting Neji.
It was just that this present situation was a rare one indeed.
In the original work, Neji and Rock Lee never got to fight during the Chūnin Exam—something many had long lamented.
But the audience of this world was in luck: they could actually get to see that very scene.
Still, Hanabi was a little curious—because this world's Neji counted as a power-boosted version too. Could the current Rock Lee handle a Neji like that?