Mai stood on the south side of the arena. Her bandaged fists hung at her sides. Her glasses caught the lamplight. She was bouncing on the balls of her feet, the restless energy of someone who'd been sitting still for three fights and was finally about to let loose.
Rasa walked down the stairs. His Gold Dust container sat at his hip, the brass seal already loosened. The dark rings around his eyes had deepened. His narrow eyes were fixed on the girl across the arena with an intensity that made the air between them feel heavier.
Karura cheered for her teammate.
Pakura stood beside her, arms folded, the bandage across her abdomen a reminder of her own fight. She wasn't wishing for Mai's success. In fact, she was wishing for her failure. She refused to be the only member of their team to have not had a flawless victory. That scumbag Rasa better pull his weight after all that big talk during the first exam.
Toma sat on the gallery floor with his back against the wall. His tired eyes watched Rasa walk to his position. The boy who'd punched him for admiring Karura. The boy who constantly called him names. The team leader who'd hit him more times than Toma could count and never once asked if he was okay afterward.
Toma knew who he wanted to lose. He also knew who he wanted to win.
The two fighters took their positions.
"Alright, Gold Boy." Mai bared her teeth with a grin. "You ready to get your teeth kicked in by a cripple?"
"I'm honestly amazed you can think of yourself so highly despite your condition. The mind of a mentally deficient person is truly astonishing." Rasa retorted.
A few shinobi winced at the comment. This was definitely going to be a charged match for sure.
"Hoo yeah." Mai's grin widened. "I'm gonna hit you until the exam proctor has to tear me off of you, Goldie."
"I'll end your pitiful existence before you can even dream of such a thing." Rasa vowed.
Chiasa raised her hand. Dropped it.
"Begin!"
Dark rings bloomed around Rasa's eyes. His palms hit the sand.
The arena floor erupted.
Gold surged upward from beneath the surface, drawn from deposits buried deep in the earth below the tower. Bright, glittering, heavier than sand, it poured from the ground around Rasa's feet in streams that gathered and swirled and compressed into shapes that responded to the magnetic field his chakra generated. The cork on his container popped open and the stored gold inside joined the flow, adding to the volume, and within seconds Rasa stood at the center of a churning cloud of golden particles that filled the air around him like a living thing.
The gallery watched in awe. This was why the Third Kazekage had chosen him. This was Magnet Style. The kekkei genkai that mirrored the Kazekage's own Iron Sand, expressed through gold instead of iron.
Rasa shaped the gold. A wall formed in front of him, dense and gleaming, five meters wide. Behind it, more gold gathered into streams that coiled like snakes, ready to strike. He could feel every particle. Every grain.
He heard something flying toward him.
A kunai, thrown from across the arena, spinning end over end. Mai had launched it the moment the gold started rising, before the wall was fully formed.
Gold dust surged forward and caught the kunai in a wall of compressed particles. The metal disappeared into the gold, swallowed, trapped.
"Hmph, pitiful." Rasa scoffed.
The kunai suddenly exploded.
The explosive tag wrapped around its handle detonated inside the gold dust wall. The blast ripped the wall apart from the inside, sending molten gold and stone fragments spraying outward. The shockwave hit Rasa in the chest and threw him backward. He hit the arena floor on his back and slid, his ears ringing, gold dust scattering around him in a glittering rain.
He hadn't expected that.
He looked up.
Mai was on the gallery railing. She'd climbed back up in the half-second after throwing the first kunai, perched on the metal bar, and she had more in her hands. Three explosive kunai, fanned between her fingers.
She threw all three.
Gold dust rose to protect him while he was flat on his back. The particles gathered above his body in a dome, catching the kunai before they reached him. The explosions hit the dome in rapid succession. One. Two. Three. Each blast cratered the surface and sent gold spraying, but the dome held, Rasa pouring chakra into the magnetic field to reinforce it, his teeth gritted.
The smoke cleared. Rasa pushed himself up inside the dome and let it expand outward, the gold dust flowing into a circular wall around his position. He was bleeding from a cut on his forehead where a fragment from the first explosion had caught him. His ears were still ringing.
This freak was going to be more annoying than he thought.
The gold dust wall expanded. It grew taller, wider, the particles compressing into a barrier that surrounded Rasa on all sides and then kept going, spreading outward across the arena floor toward the gallery railing where Mai was perched.
Mai leaped to the ceiling.
Her feet found the stone surface above the arena and she stuck there, chakra channeled through her soles, hanging upside down. The gold dust wave crashed against the gallery railing and swept across the floor below her.
Rasa looked up. The gold dust responded to his gaze, to his will, rising from the arena floor in streams that climbed toward the ceiling. They reached for Mai like golden fingers, stretching, grasping.
Mai ran along the ceiling. The gold dust chased her, always a step behind, the streams adjusting as she moved. She was fast. Faster than the dust.
She dropped.
Straight down, twenty meters, plummeting toward the arena floor with her fist cocked. Rasa threw a wall of gold dust between them. Mai twisted in the air, pulled something from her pouch, and threw it at the wall.
The object hit the gold dust barrier and exploded in a poof of purple smoke.
Poison gas.
The cloud engulfed Rasa's position. He recognized the color instantly and held his breath, but he'd already been inhaling when the bomb hit. A mouthful of the acrid purple air entered his lungs before he could stop it. His chest burned. His vision blurred for a half second before he leaped sideways, bursting through his own gold dust wall to escape the cloud.
He emerged coughing. The poison was mild but present, a burning sensation in his airways that wouldn't kill him but would slow his reactions and muddy his concentration. His gold dust wavered, the particles losing some of their cohesion as his focus split between controlling the magnetic field and fighting the toxin in his lungs.
Mai's laugh greeted him.
She'd landed behind him. While he was focused on escaping the poison cloud, she'd dropped from the ceiling, circled through the dissipating gas, and closed the distance that Rasa had spent the entire fight trying to maintain.
Her fist sunk into his back.
The impact lifted Rasa off his feet. Not just the force. The chakra. Mai's fist connected with the space between his shoulder blades and something pierced through the contact point, a needle of energy that drove into his chakra pathway system and disrupted the flow along his spine.
Rasa hit the sand face-first. He pushed himself up, gasping, and tried to form the gold dust into a defensive shape. The particles twitched. Rose an inch. Fell back. His magnetic field was flickering, the chakra that powered it disrupted by whatever Mai had done to his back.
She was on him before he could recover.
A kick to his ribs that rolled him sideways. A punch to his stomach that bent him over. An elbow to the back of his neck that drove his face into the sand. Each blow carried the same piercing chakra that the first one had, needles of energy that found the pathways in his body and scrambled them. His arms went numb. His legs stopped responding the way he wanted them to. The gold dust, his gold dust, the kekkei genkai that was supposed to make him special, lay inert on the arena floor around him like dead leaves.
He couldn't gather chakra. His chakra was so disrupted that the energy couldn't flow from his core to his limbs to the magnetic field that controlled the gold. It was like trying to push water through a pipe full of holes. Everything leaked. Nothing reached its destination.
Mai stood over him. He was on his back, arms splayed, gold dust scattered uselessly around him. Blood ran from his forehead, from his nose, from a split in his lower lip. His dark-ringed eyes stared up at the girl standing over him with bandaged fists and a grin that was all teeth and no mercy.
She'd defeated him so fast.
Every technique. Every defense. Every gram of gold dust and every ounce of pride. All of it stripped away by a girl everyone called a cripple, whose fists could do something that he couldn't explain and couldn't counter and couldn't survive.
Mai dropped onto his chest. Her knees pinned his arms to the sand. She sat on him and looked down at his bloody face.
"Say you give up, loser." She punched him once. The impact snapped his head sideways.
"N-Never!" Rasa snarled through bloody teeth.
Another punch. Harder.
"Good! I won't stop till I hear those words from your mouth." She laughed.
She hit him again. And again. And again. Each blow landing on a face that was already swelling, already bleeding, already losing the sharp features that had made him look good. The dark rings around his eyes, the mark of his Magnet Release, looked like actual bruises now, lost among the real ones.
From the gallery, the arena was frozen. Genin stared in silence. The evaluators watched without moving. Karura exhaled. Rasa was out of line for saying all those horrible things to her but Mai probably didn't need to stoop to his level in retaliation…
Pakura was disgusted, angry, and disappointed. All that talk for what!? To be beaten so easily by a 'cripple'? What a loser! Now she was the only one on her team to have such a shameful performance.
Toma watched from the floor. His dark-circled eyes were wide. He'd seen Rasa hit people before. He'd been the person Rasa hit. He knew what those fists felt like, the sharp crack of knuckle against bone, the burst of pain, the helplessness of being on the ground while someone stronger stood over you.
Now Rasa was on the ground. Now Rasa was helpless. Now Rasa was the one who couldn't fight back.
Toma didn't smile. He smiled on the inside. Satisfaction at seeing Rasa in a position he's never been in before. By someone he looked down on just like himself.
Chiasa stepped forward.
She'd seen enough. The match was decided. The girl was pummeling a boy who couldn't defend himself.
A kunai flew towards her.
She caught it and saw a note was wrapped around the handle, sealed with a mark she recognized immediately. The Kazekage's personal seal.
She pulled the note free and read it. Her expression didn't change. Her eyes moved from the note to the observation window above the arena, where the Third Kazekage watched from behind the glass.
She folded the note. Put it in her vest.
She didn't step in.
Mai kept hitting.
Rasa's face was a mess. Swollen, split, purple and red where the blood pooled beneath the skin. His eyes were barely open, the lids puffing shut from the impacts. His Gold Dust container lay on the sand three meters away, knocked free during the beating. The gold itself was scattered across the arena floor, inert, useless, as dead as his pride.
"S-Stop..."
The word was barely audible. Wet. Slurred through lips that were too swollen to form consonants properly.
Mai paused. Her fist hung in the air. Blood, his blood, dripped from her bandages.
"What was that?"
"P-Please... I give up... I'm sorry..."
The arena heard it. Every genin. Every evaluator. Every person watching from the gallery. Rasa of the Sand, the Third Kazekage's personal student, the boy with Magnet Style and Gold Dust and all the pride in the world, begging a girl he'd called a cripple to stop hitting him.
Mai looked down at him with a wide grin.
"Good boy. It looks like you can learn." She gently patted his swollen cheek.
Then she flipped off of him toward the gallery. Two rotations. Clean landing. She stuck it on the arena floor near the stairs and turned to face her teammates.
Chiasa walked to the center of the arena. She looked at Rasa, still lying in the sand, blood pooling beneath his head.
"Winner: Mai."
Medical nin flooded the arena floor. Four of them, two carrying a stretcher. They surrounded Rasa and began emergency treatment, green-glowing hands pressing against his face, his ribs, the dozen points where Mai's strange taijutsu had disrupted his chakra network. He didn't resist. He didn't move. He lay in the sand with his eyes closed and his gold scattered around him and the sound of his own surrender still echoing off the walls.
From the observation window above, the Third Kazekage watched. His yellow eyes tracked the medical nin lifting Rasa onto the stretcher. His expression showed nothing.
Mai reached her teammates at the base of the stairs. Karura was already there, her hands clasped together, her indigo eyes wide.
"He was a jerk but that was a bit much, don't you think?" Karura's voice was soft. She looked past Mai at Rasa's stretcher being carried toward the medical wing. His face was unrecognizable.
"People like that don't change without a good beating." Pakura said. Her arms were folded.
"She gets it." Mai nodded happily. "You're too nice, Karura. You wouldn't understand how to beat people properly."
"I understand how to beat people…" Karura's voice got small.
"Sure you do." Mai clapped her on the shoulder with a laugh.
The arena floor was cleared once more. The stretcher carrying Rasa disappeared through the medical wing archway.
Chiasa stood at the center of the empty arena.
"The quarterfinals are complete," she announced. "Four matches. Four winners."
She looked at the bracket board.
"Advancing to the semifinals: Pakura. Karura. Sayo. Mai. The semifinals will begin soon. Pakura versus Karura. Sayo versus Mai." She paused. "Prepare yourselves."
Pakura looked at Karura. Karura looked at Pakura.
Pakura gave a competitive glare. Karura gave a polite competitive smile.
Mai cracked her knuckles. "Finally. The real fights start."