Torune unsealed his puppet before Chiasa's hand finished dropping.
Torune's puppet burst from its scroll in a cloud of smoke. It was lean and dark-lacquered, taller than its operator, with a narrow face split by a single vertical line carved from forehead to chin.
Pakura didn't move.
She stood on her side of the arena with her arms folded, watching the puppet settle into its stance. Her brown pupiless eyes tracked its limbs, its joints, the subtle tension in the chakra threads that connected it to Torune's fingers. She'd fought alongside Karura long enough to know how puppets moved, how the threads telegraphed intent, how the delay between a puppeteer's finger twitch and the puppet's response created a gap you could exploit if you were fast enough.
She'd fought alongside the second or third best puppeteer in the village. This was not that. Not even close.
Torune stood behind his puppet, twenty meters from Pakura, his hands raised with threads fanning from all ten fingers. His expression was calm.
The puppet charged.
It crossed the sand in a blur, a retractable poisoned spike thrusting toward Pakura's chest.
Pakura sidestepped it.
It put the spike six inches from her ribcage. She felt the wind of it passing. Her eyes tracked the mechanism as the spike retracted and the left arm came around in a sweeping slash aimed at her head.
She ducked. The blade passed over her hair. She straightened and took two steps backward, maintaining distance, her arms still folded.
She hadn't attacked yet. She was reading him.
Torune noticed. The puppet pulled back, resetting to a neutral position between them. His fingers adjusted on the threads.
"You're not going to attack?" he asked.
"I'm waiting to see if you have anything worth attacking."
From the gallery above, Mai snorted loud enough for the entire arena to hear. "Show off!" She yelled.
Torune nodded. She was underestimating him. He sent the puppet forward again. This time it came in a combination, right spike thrust, left slash, then a sudden burst of senbon from the wrist panels. A dozen poisoned needles sprayed from the puppet's left forearm in a tight cone aimed at Pakura's torso.
Pakura's arms unfolded.
A Scorch orb ignited in her right palm, orange-white and humming. She held it in front of her body like a shield. The senbon hit the orb's heat field and evaporated. All twelve of them. The poison, the metal, the momentum, all of it converted to steam and melted metallic goo in the space of a heartbeat. The needles ceased to exist three inches from her skin.
The puppet was still coming. The right spike was aimed at her throat, the follow-up to the senbon volley, timed to arrive while she was dealing with the needles.
Pakura caught the puppet's wrist.
Her left hand closed around the wooden forearm, just behind the spike housing, and she held it. The puppet strained against her grip, Torune's threads pulling, the mechanisms whining, but Pakura's fingers didn't budge. She looked at the spike tip, inches from her throat, glistening with poison.
Then she pushed Scorch Style through her palm.
The puppet's forearm dried. The lacquer cracked. The wood beneath turned grey and brittle, the moisture evaporating from the grain in a rush of steam that hissed through the joints. The mechanism seized as the metal components expanded from the heat and the housing warped. The spike drooped, its spring mechanism fused, and the forearm crumbled in Pakura's grip like old bark.
She released it. Pieces of dried wood clattered to the sand.
Torune's puppet stumbled back on three functioning limbs, one arm now ending in a jagged stump above the wrist. The threads on Torune's left hand went slack as the connection points on the destroyed forearm disintegrated.
"That's one arm." Pakura pointed out.
From the gallery, Goza whistled low. Sayo watched without expression. Rasa was unimpressed.
Torune adjusted. His remaining threads redistributed to the puppet's intact limbs. The right arm still had its spike and the senbon launcher on the intact wrist still had ammunition. He sent the puppet in again, but this time from an angle, circling right.
Pakura turned with it. Her movements were unhurried. She formed a second Scorch orb in her left hand and held both at her sides, the twin spheres orbiting her body. A rotating field of heat that could handle any attacks in her weak spots.
The puppet lunged. The remaining spike thrust from the right side while the intact wrist launched another volley of senbon from the left. A pincer attack, spike and needles arriving from different angles at the same time.
The orbiting orbs handled it. The left orb swept into the senbon's path and vaporized the needles. The right orb swung toward the spike thrust. Torune yanked his puppet back just before the orb made contact, saving the remaining arm from the same fate as the first.
There was no opening. Pakura knew it. Torune knew it. Everyone in the gallery knew it. The gap between Scorch Style and a standard puppet was too wide. Every ranged option Torune had, senbon, spikes, poison, was nullified by the heat orbs. Every close-range approach risked losing another limb. He couldn't touch her without getting burned.
Torune pulled his puppet back to center. He reached into the puppet's torso compartment through the threads, triggering an internal mechanism. The puppet's chest panel slid open and a ball dropped from the housing, hitting the sand between the puppet and Pakura.
Purple smoke erupted from the canister.
The cloud was thick and acrid, spreading fast, and the color was wrong. Pakura caught the scent before the cloud reached her and her eyes widened.
Poison smoke.
She leaped backward, clearing the cloud's expanding edge, and held her breath. The purple haze rolled across a ten-meter section of the arena floor, obscuring the puppet and Torune's position. Visibility dropped to zero inside the cloud.
From the gallery, Karura leaned forward on the railing. Her Byakugan was active behind her transformation, seeing them perfectly through the smoke. Torune was repositioning, moving his puppet to the far side of the cloud while he circled to the other side.
Pakura couldn't see through the smoke. But she didn't need to.
She formed the largest Scorch orb she'd made all fight. The size of a melon, blazing white-orange, radiating heat that made the air around her shimmer. She held it above her head and released it into the center of the purple cloud.
The effect was instant. The heat evaporated the poison particles. The smoke thinned, then vanished, the chemical compounds breaking down under temperatures they were never designed to withstand. The arena floor where the cloud had been was bleached white, the sand dried to powder.
The puppet stood exposed. No cover. No smoke. No options.
Pakura walked toward it.
The puppet lunged one last time. Desperate. The remaining spike extended to full length, aimed at Pakura's heart. She caught it the same way she'd caught the first one, her hand closing around the forearm, Scorch Style burning through her palm.
This time she didn't just dry the arm. She pumped heat through the entire puppet, channeling it through the contact point and into the wooden frame. The chest dried. The legs dried. The joints seized. The chakra thread connection points warped and the threads snapped, one by one, the fraying ends whipping back toward Torune's fingers.
The puppet collapsed. It hit the sand in a heap of dried, cracked wood that looked like it had been left in a furnace for a week. The spike tip broke off and rolled across the arena floor.
Torune's hands dropped to his sides. His threads hung loose from his fingers, connected to nothing.
Pakura looked at the pile of wood that had been his puppet. Then she looked at Torune.
"It's over," she said. "Surrender."
Torune looked at his destroyed puppet. At the pieces scattered across the sand. At the bleached circle where the poison smoke had been. At the girl standing in the middle of it all with two Scorch orbs still orbiting her body and not a scratch on her.
He tossed a kunai that Pakura easily avoided with a lean of her head.
Then a cloud of smoke obscured his figure.
Substitution. The basic academy technique. The real Torune materialized behind Pakura, one step outside the orbit of her Scorch orbs, a kunai in his right hand. The blade was coated in the same purple compound as his puppet's spikes.
Pakura's eyes went wide.
She hadn't expected it. A puppeteer fighting without a puppet. A puppeteer closing to melee range against her. It was insane. It was suicidal. It was the last thing she'd prepared for because no puppeteer in their right mind would do it. Someone outside of Karura, fighting without their puppet?
Torune was in his right mind. He just didn't wanna give up in such a pathetic way. His puppet was broken and totally messed up but like, he still had working limbs. Damn it.
He was still a shinobi, damn it.
And his mind said: she thinks I'm useless, her guard is down, she's facing the wrong direction, and I have one chance to prove I belong here.
The kunai slashed across her abdomen.
Pakura twisted at the last possible moment. The blade that would have opened her stomach instead drew a thin line across her midsection, left hip to right, shallow but long. The poisoned edge bit through fabric and skin and left a trail of purple residue in the wound.
Pain. Immediate, sharp, and followed by a cold numbness that began spreading from the cut outward.
Pakura's elbow came down, a lightning strike to the back of Torune's neck that dropped him instantly. His knees hit the sand. The kunai fell from his hand. His eyes lost focus and his body slumped forward onto his palms.
He couldn't move his head. His vision was swimming. But he was conscious, and what he could feel from Pakura made him wish he wasn't.
Murderous intent.
She'd been hit.
She'd been hit by him. By the boy who ran away from Mai. And he'd cut her. Drawn her blood. Left poison in her body. Marked her.
Nobody outside her teammates was supposed to be able to do that excluding Rasa. She was Pakura. Scorch Style user. A kekkei genkai that, as far as she knew, no one else in the world possessed. She was the future Kazekage. She was supposed to be untouchable and this, this nobody, this puppet-less, plan-obsessed, cowardly little...
Her fist ignited.
Her entire fist, wrapped in Scorch Style, glowing white-hot, the heat warping the air around her knuckles. She drew it back. Her eyes were fixed on Torune's upturned face. The blow she was about to throw would kill him. It would evaporate the moisture in his skull and leave a mummified corpse on the arena floor.
She swung.
And Torune realized he was going to die.
Thankfully for him, Chiasa caught her wrist.
The proctor's hand closed around Pakura's forearm six inches from Torune's face. The grip was iron. Chiasa's sun-darkened fingers didn't flinch against the residual heat radiating from Pakura's Scorch Style. Her flat, lined face showed nothing. No alarm. No judgment. Just the calm authority of someone who had stopped worse than this.
"The match is over." Chiasa said.
"Let go of me!" Pakura hissed.
"Winner: Pakura."
Pakura's fist trembled in Chiasa's grip. The Scorch Style flickered. Flared. Then died, the heat bleeding away, the glow fading, leaving her knuckles red and shaking.
Chiasa released her wrist. Pakura didn't lower her arm for three more seconds. Then it dropped to her side.
The arena was silent for a moment until laughter could be heard.
Mai was laughing.
A loud obnoxious howl that bounced off the arena walls and filled the underground chamber. She slapped the railing. She doubled over. She pointed at Pakura and laughed harder.
"She got HIT!" Mai wheezed. "The scorch princess didn't get her perfect win! By a puppeteer who wasn't even Karura!"
Pakura's head turned toward the gallery. Her brown pupiless eyes found Mai's laughing face and they turned fiery.
Medical nin appeared on the arena floor. Two of them, moving toward Torune. A third approached Pakura.
"You've been poisoned," the medical nin said. "Please come with us to the medical wing. We need to treat the wound before the poison spreads."
Pakura didn't respond. She was still looking at Mai. Still hearing the laughter echo off the stone walls.
"Ma'am. The poison."
Pakura turned and walked toward the medical wing entrance. Her stride was stiff. Her fists were clenched at her sides. The cut across her abdomen was already turning purple at the edges, the numbness spreading, but she walked like it wasn't there.
As she passed through the archway that led to the medical wing, something rolled off her in a wave. Cold. Heavy. The kind of pressure that made the air feel thick and the skin prickle and the instinct to run fire in the back of the brain.
Killing intent.
Aimed specifically at Torune.
The two medical nin flanking her stopped walking. Their hands went to their kunai pouches. Their eyes snapped to each other, then to Pakura's back, then to the archway behind them.
"Control yourself," the senior medical nin said. Her voice was firm. "You're in a medical facility. We're here to help you. Control your emotions or we will have to restrain you."
The killing intent wavered. Thinned. Didn't disappear entirely, but receded enough that the medical nin's hands left their kunai pouches.
Pakura walked on. Into the medical wing. Into the treatment room. Onto the cot where they cut away the fabric around her wound and began extracting the poison.
She stared at the ceiling and said nothing.
On the arena floor, Torune was being helped to his feet by the other medical team. His neck felt like it was broken and his legs were unsteady, but he was conscious. He looked at the pile of dried wood that had been his puppet. At the bleached sand. At the archway Pakura had disappeared through.
He hadn't won. He knew that. Pakura was stronger, faster, and possessed a kekkei genkai he had no answer for. She'd destroyed his puppet, neutralized his poison, and dismantled every option he'd brought to the fight.
But he'd cut her.
In a fight he was always going to lose, he'd found one moment, one opening, one chance to show that losing didn't mean lying down. He'd used the most basic technique in a shinobi's arsenal, the Substitution Jutsu, and turned it into a weapon that drew blood from the untouchable girl.
That was something.
The medical nin helped him toward the archway. As he passed beneath the gallery, Ryusa was leaning over the railing.
"Torune! Are you okay?!"
He looked up at her. His neck was killing him. His head was ringing. His puppet was destroyed.
"I'm feeling better than I look." He said.
The distance between them and Lord Ebizo's team wasn't as wide as everyone believed…