Every spot in the gallery was taken. Every railing was lined with bodies. Genin who'd fought, genin who'd lost, genin who'd been cut before the tournament even started, all of them pressed together, leaning forward, waiting.
The evaluators had stopped writing. Their clipboards rested on their laps. The chunin and jonin stationed around the gallery had abandoned their posts to crowd the railing. Even the ANBU, who weren't supposed to show interest in anything, had shifted their positions to get a better view.
In the observation room above the arena, the Third Kazekage sat in his chair and watched through the window.
Two genin stood on the arena floor.
Karura, on one side, just an eight-year-old girl in a yellow scarf with her hands loose at her sides, her body swaying gently, her weight shifting from foot to foot in a rhythm that had no music.
Mai on the north side. Bandaged fists. Swirly glasses. She rolled her neck left, then right. Cracked her knuckles, one hand, then the other. Rolled her shoulders. Bounced on her toes. Shook out her arms.
Just two girls and what their bodies could do.
The gallery noticed. The murmurs started immediately.
"Where are her puppets?" Jomae whispered from the railing. "She's not summoning them?"
"I don't know." Kazane said. She was staring. "I guess she's starting without them."
"Against Mai?" Nagi shook her head. "The taijutsu freak? Without puppets? Is she insane?"
Pakura stood against the far wall with her arms folded. She was confused just as much as everyone else.
Toma watched with confusion. He didn't understand why Karura wasn't using her puppets either. But the way she was moving, that gentle sway, the shifting weight, the rhythm, it was hypnotic. It also looked a little bit fun.
Chiasa walked to the center. She looked at Karura. At Mai.
"Final match of the Chunin Exams. Karura versus Mai."
She raised her hand. Dropped it.
"Begin."
Mai charged.
She'd waited for this fight since forever and she wasn't going to waste a single second of it pretending she needed to study her opponent. She knew Karura. She knew every puppet, every technique, every trick.
What she didn't know was what Karura looked like without them.
Mai closed the distance in three steps. Her right fist drove forward, aimed at Karura's chest.
Karura wasn't there.
Her body dipped sideways, hips turning, shoulders rolling, her feet tracing a quarter-circle in the sand. Mai's fist cut through empty air. The displaced wind tugged at Karura's scarf.
Mai followed with a left hook. Karura bent backward, her spine curving, the fist passing over her face by inches. She could feel the chakra in Mai's knuckles, the Erosion Fist energy that would scramble her network if it connected. The Byakugan behind her transformation showed her everything: the chakra points in Mai's fists glowing hot, the tenketsu strikes loaded and ready, the killing potential in every finger.
She couldn't let any of it touch her.
Karura spun. Her body rotated on one foot, the other leg sweeping out in a low arc aimed at Mai's ankles. Mai jumped it and countered with a dropping heel kick aimed at Karura's head.
Karura rolled sideways, her body flowing across the sand in a motion that was half tumble, half dance, her hands touching the ground and pushing off, her legs cycling through the air. She came up five meters away, still swaying, still moving, her feet never planting.
"You're faster than I thought without your puppets." Mai said while grinning. "And I thought all puppeteers sucked at Taijutsu."
"My Taijutsu is nothing special." Karura responded.
"Hah!" Mai barked. "Do you really think you can beat me without your puppets, Puppet Gal?! Then show me what you've got!"
She charged again. Faster this time. A combination that started with a straight right and cycled into hooks, elbows, knees, a relentless barrage of strikes that would have overwhelmed most chunin. Each one carrying the Erosion Fist's chakra-disrupting energy. Each one aimed at the tenketsu points that Karura's Byakugan showed her in glowing detail.
Karura danced.
Her body moved between Mai's strikes like thread through a needle. Hips turning to dodge a hook. Shoulders rolling under an elbow. Spine bending to let a knee pass over her chest. Her feet traced patterns in the sand, circles and crescents and figure-eights, each step flowing into the next, her weight never settling, her center never fixed.
She wasn't just dodging. She was reading. The Byakugan showed her Mai's muscle contractions before the strikes launched. She could see the chakra building in Mai's shoulders a half-second before a punch. Could see the weight shifting in Mai's hips before a kick.
Mai's fist grazed her scarf. The closest anyone had come to touching her all tournament. Karura spun away, and as she spun, her right leg came up in a rising heel kick aimed at Mai's chin.
Mai blocked it on her forearm. The impact pushed her back a step. She grinned wider.
"Wow! That could've actually hurt if it landed!"
Karura's second kick came from the ground. She'd dropped into a low crouch during the spin and her left leg swept outward in a wide arc. Mai hopped over it and countered with a stomping kick aimed at Karura's planted hand.
Karura pushed off the hand and launched herself into a backflip, both feet arcing toward Mai's face. Mai caught one ankle. Her fingers closed around Karura's leg as she aimed to disable her chakra points with her other hand.
Karura twisted. Her free foot kicked Mai's wrist and the grip broke before the chakra could penetrate. She landed in a handstand, pushed off, and flipped to her feet three meters away.
Close. Too close. Mai's fingers had been on her for less than a second. Another half-second and the pathway in her leg would have been disrupted.
"Almost had you." Mai's smile was predatory.
"Almost." Karura smiled back.
They collided again. This time the exchange was longer. Twenty seconds of continuous combat, fists and feet and elbows and knees, two bodies moving at speeds that did not match regular genin. Karura's style was an everflowing continuous technique. Offense, evasion, and mobility. Her entire body being a weapon. Mai's style was pressure and aggression, closing distance, cutting angles, herding Karura into positions where dodging became harder.
Mai was better at pure taijutsu. Karura could feel it. The raw technique, the combinations, the transitions between strikes, Mai had been doing this her entire life. Every hour of every day since she learned she couldn't use ninjutsu or genjutsu. This was her art. Her life's work.
But Karura had her unique kekkai genkai... Something that regular talent, however prodigious, could not bridge unfortunately.
Mai threw a punch with all of her strength behind it aimed at Karura's chest. Karura could tell if that punch landed, not even she could say who would win afterwards.
Karura slipped it. Her body turned sideways, the fist passing her ribs, and she countered with a spinning back kick aimed at Mai's exposed side.
As the kick launched, Karura formed three seals. Formed in the fraction of a second between the spin's rotation and the kick's extension.
"Transformation Jutsu!"
Her leg changed.
The kick that had started as an eight-year-old's leg expanded mid-swing. The calf thickened. The thigh widened. The foot grew from a child's size to something that belonged on a person three times her size. The transformation was instant, localized, affecting only the striking limb, and it hit Mai with the mass and force of a leg that was no longer attached to a small girl.
The impact launched Mai sideways. She flew six meters, hit the sand, rolled twice, and came up on one knee with her arms crossed in a guard that was already too late. Blood dripped from the corner of her mouth.
The gallery went silent.
Karura's leg returned to normal. The transformation released, the limb shrinking back to its original size. She stood on two normal legs, still swaying, still dancing, her scarf settling around her shoulders.
"What..." Mai stared. She wiped the blood from her lip. "What the hell was that?!"
"Transformation Jutsu," Karura said. "Applied to one part of my body instead of all of it."
"You can do that?!"
"I wasn't sure until just now."
"YOU WEREN'T SURE?!"
In the observation room, the Third Kazekage leaned forward in his chair. His yellow eyes were fixed on the arena floor. Beside him, a chunin evaluator was scribbling furiously on his clipboard.
"That technique…" the Third muttered.
"It resembles the Akimichi Clan's secret jutsu," An ANBU member mentioned. "But that's a technique from Konoha. She's replicating the effect through the basic Transformation Jutsu?"
"A basic academy technique, producing a similar result that Konoha guards as a clan secret. How talented…"
Mai was back on her feet, still grinning but more excited now. She'd taken a hit that had rattled her bones and she knew there were more coming. The rules had changed. Karura's kicks couldn't just be blocked without thought anymore. Any one of them could transform mid-swing into something that hit like a battering ram.
She rushed in anyway.
The next exchange was different. Mai couldn't just trade blows anymore because any of Karura's limbs might expand on contact. She had to read which strikes were real and which ones were traps. A kick that looked weak might grow mid-swing. An elbow that looked like a fake might become an attack the size of Mai's torso.
Karura used it twice more. Once on her fists, a downward strike that expanded mid-fall and nearly buried Mai in the ground. Once on her left leg, an axe kick that grew as it descended and cratered the sand where Mai had been standing a half-second earlier.
Each time, the transformation was instant. And the affected limb returned to normal the moment the strike completed. The more she used it, the easier it became to utilize in combat.
Mai adapted. She started reading the seals that preceded each transformation, watching Karura's hands that meant a limb was about to grow. When she saw it, she disengaged. When she didn't, she pressed. It turned the fight into a guessing game where every exchange could end with a normal kick or a devastating one, and Mai had to decide in a fraction of a second which it was.
She guessed wrong.
Karura spun into a low sweep that Mai jumped. Mid-air, Karura's hand formed the seals. Her sweeping leg didn't grow. Her other leg did, the one she was standing on. It extended upward as Karura uncoiled from the ground, the rising knee expanding to three times its normal size, and it caught Mai in the stomach while she was still airborne.
Mai folded around the impact. The air left her body in a rush and she hit the arena floor on her back, hard enough to leave an impression in the sand. She lay there for a second, staring at the ceiling, her hands pressed against her stomach.
"That is so freaking freaky, Karura!" She wheezed as something dark was oozing its way out from her heart.
Karura stood over her. Normal-sized again. Still swaying. Her indigo eyes were not cocky or arrogant. They were just as gentle as they were in the beginning as she took this fight as seriously as she promised.
Mai rolled to her feet. Slower this time. The hits were accumulating. Her arms ached from the leaping smash. Her stomach was cramping from the knee. Her lip was still bleeding.
She looked at Karura. At the girl who'd just beaten her in the one area Mai thought she couldn't be beaten. Not ninjutsu. Not puppets. Not strategy or planning or intelligence.
Taijutsu.
Her thing. Her only thing. The thing she'd built her entire identity around because it was the only thing her body would let her have. The thing she trained for every single day, sunrise to sunset, bloody knuckles and cracked bones and torn muscles and all of it, ALL of it, because taijutsu was hers and nobody could take it away from her.
And Karura was better at it.
Mai could accept this if Karura wasn't younger than her. If Karura trained anywhere near as hard as she did. And if Karura didn't also train in ninjutsu and puppetry as well!
Mai's fists trembled at her sides as she thought more about it. Her bandages were soaked with sweat. Her glasses sat crooked on her nose.
"You know what the worst part is?" Mai's voice was different. She wasn't grinning anymore. "I knew. I've known for a long time. Pakura said it earlier and she was right. We can't even see your back anymore."
Her eyes were wet. She blinked and they turned into tears that ran down her cheeks and dripped off her jaw and she didn't wipe them because her fists were too busy shaking.
"But this was supposed to be mine, damn it... Taijutsu. Fighting with my body. It's the only thing I have. No ninjutsu. No genjutsu. No kekkei genkai. No puppets. No fans. Just these." She held up her fists. The bandages were bloody. The knuckles beneath them were cracked. "This is all I've ever had. And you're better than me at it without even trying. Not even trying half as much. A fighting style you created on your own without once ever even asking me for help or Ebizo-sensei…"
The arena was silent. From the gallery, nobody moved. Nobody breathed.
"I wanted to die when I realized it." Mai said. Her voice cracked. "During this fight. Right now. When your kick hit me and I knew, I knew that you could do this the whole time. That even without your puppets you could beat me. That there's nothing I have that you don't have more of."
Karura's expression shifted. The fighting focus softened into something that ached.
"Mai..."
"Don't." Mai's voice hardened through the tears. "Don't you dare feel sorry for me."
She raised her right hand. Pressed her index and middle finger against her left temple.
Tap.
She moved her hand to her right temple.
Tap.
She moved her hand to her sternum.
Tap.
The air snapped as if a damn broke. The temperature around Mai spiked. The sand at her feet stirred without wind. Her skin flushed red, starting at her face and spreading down her neck, across her arms, covering every visible inch of her body in a deep, vivid crimson.
Her pupils vanished. Her eyes went white.
Her hair, normally hanging flat, lifted. Each strand rising as chakra poured from her body in a visible aura that distorted the air around her. The bandages on her fists unraveled from the sheer force radiating from her skin. Veins bulged across her temples, her forearms, her neck.
The ground beneath her feet cracked. From the pressure of her simply standing there.
From the observation room, the Third Kazekage stood from his chair. His yellow eyes were wide. For the first time since the Chunin Exams began, his composure broke.
"That's..." he whispered.
On the arena floor, the sand around Mai was swirling in a circle, kicked up by the raw chakra output pouring from her body.
The jonin in the gallery went rigid. Every single one of them. Eyes locked on the eleven-year-old girl standing in the center of a chakra storm that shouldn't exist.
"The Eight Inner Gates," an ANBU murmured from behind his mask. "She opened the Eight Inner Gates."
"That's impossible!" someone shouted.
"She's eleven! How does an eleven-year-old know that technique?!"
"That's a forbidden technique from Konoha! Who taught her that?!"
Every eye in the arena, every genin, every chunin, every jonin, every ANBU, the Third Kazekage himself, turned in unison and looked at one person.
Ebizo stood at the gallery railing.
Every gaze hit him like a spotlight. The accusations were silent but deafening. What the hell did you teach your students? An eight-year-old replicating Akimichi clan techniques through basic academy jutsu. An eleven-year-old opening the Eight Inner Gates. What kind of monsters are you raising?
Ebizo looked back at them. At the Kazekage's wide eyes. At the ANBU's rigid stances. At the jonin with their hands on their weapons. At every genin in the gallery staring at him like he was either a genius or a traitor.
He rubbed the back of his head.
"This is the result of their own talent and hard work," he said. A sheepish but proud smile crossed his face. "I didn't teach them anything beyond what's expected of a jonin squad leader."
Nobody believed him. But nobody could prove otherwise.
On the arena floor, Mai stood at the center of the storm. Three gates open. Her body burning with power that was tearing her muscles apart even as it gave her strength that no genin should possess.
She looked at Karura through white eyes.
Karura looked back.
The scarf settled around her shoulders. The dancing had stopped. She stood still for the first time in the entire fight, her feet planted, her indigo eyes locked on Mai's transformed body.
The arena held its breath.
Mai smiled as she was determined to risk everything to see just how far Karura's talent went.
"Round two, Karura. Let's see just how much of a freak you really are!"