"What?!"
"He used Wind Release… to deflect an Uchiha's Great Fireball?"
"Control like that… and his timing was perfect!"
A wave of shocked whispers broke out across the arena, rolling from the floor to the spectator stands. To the untrained eye, it had looked simple enough—Kiyohara blew out a gust of wind, and Uchiha Tekka's massive fireball veered off course. Anyone with real combat experience, though, could see how absurd that was.
There were only two things that truly determined the strength of a ninjutsu: chakra, and understanding. The deeper a ninja's grasp of a technique, the more power and precision they could draw out of it. To redirect an Uchiha's Great Fireball with a mere C-rank Wind Release technique meant Kiyohara's mastery of ninjutsu was far beyond what anyone expected from a common-born genin.
Even the stern-faced examiner, a jonin with a scar near his eye, couldn't hide the flicker of surprise that crossed his expression. Under normal circumstances, a talent like this might already have been promoted internally without being dragged through a formal selection match. The fact that the Hokage had still sent Kiyohara here could only mean one thing—he wanted to see just how much this boy was worth.
The examiner's gaze sharpened. Based on that exchange alone, he was already leaning toward passing him. Win or lose, Kiyohara had shown enough to justify promotion.
No wonder Jonin Minato had praised him so heavily in the recommendation letter.
In the audience, Kurenai Yuhi and Genma Shiranui both let out quiet breaths of relief. At the same time, the surprise on their faces deepened. They had seen Kiyohara's performance at Kannabi Bridge with their own eyes, but watching him stand against an Uchiha in a formal arena somehow made the impact feel even clearer.
Across from him, Uchiha Tekka's expression stiffened for just an instant. He hadn't expected his Great Fireball to be neutralized so cleanly. But as a clan prodigy, his combat instincts were excellent. His surprise vanished almost at once, replaced by a cold, focused calm.
"You do have some skill," Tekka said, his voice edged with irritation as his hands dipped into his ninja pouch. "To cancel my Great Fireball that easily… among commoners, you could be called exceptional."
Several shuriken flashed into his fingers.
With a flick of his wrist, they screamed through the air toward Kiyohara.
At the same time, sunlight flashed off something nearly invisible—a thread as thin as spider silk, binding the weapons together.
Uchiha-style shurikenjutsu.
Kiyohara had been waiting for that.
If there was one thing every ninja knew, it was that the Uchiha excelled in two fields: Fire Release, and the art of turning shuriken into killing traps. Even if he had never fought Tekka before, there was no downside to preparing for the clan's trademarks.
Steel wire.
He caught the faint glimmer in the air and narrowed his eyes. If you didn't focus, it was easy to miss. That was how ninja fights worked—carelessness wasn't punished with failure, but with death.
"Lightning Release: Earth Walk!"
His seals snapped together.
Azure current burst across the ground like a pack of electric serpents, crackling and writhing over the dirt straight toward Tekka's feet. Kiyohara had reacted after the shuriken were thrown, yet his lightning still moved faster.
Tekka's pupils contracted.
He was forced to cut off his control of the wire and leap backward at once, narrowly escaping the crawling arc. The shuriken lost their coordinated rhythm the moment his attention broke and fell harmlessly away.
"The Sharingan's coming," the rogue ninja Kiyohara murmured from behind him.
The phantom floated just out of sight, his tone calm, almost bored. He had fought enough Uchiha in his own future to know the pattern. Once ordinary methods stopped working, they turned to their eyes.
"I know," Kiyohara answered inwardly.
Sure enough, Tekka's gaze changed the next instant.
Scarlet flooded his irises, and a single black tomoe emerged around each pupil, slowly revolving.
One-tomoe Sharingan.
The entire mood of the arena shifted.
With the Sharingan active, Uchiha Tekka's vision sharpened dramatically. Kiyohara's movements, the flex of muscle beneath cloth, the tiny shifts in balance before an attack—all of it became easier to read. To Tekka, the fight had slowed by a fraction, enough to matter.
He drew a kunai and rushed in.
Sparks burst between them in a harsh spray of orange light.
Kiyohara's black kunai met Tekka's blade head-on, then again, and again. Metal screamed against metal. Tekka cut low, then high, then reversed into a backhand slash. Kiyohara blocked, redirected, gave ground, and blocked again.
Clang.
Clang.
Clang.
Before the Sharingan came out, Kiyohara had been able to trade more or less evenly. Now the pressure changed. The gap between an ordinary fighter and someone backed by a dojutsu became obvious in every exchange.
Tekka didn't merely see the blade—he saw the intention before it fully formed.
Kiyohara frowned slightly.
There it was again. The ugly truth of the ninja world. In the end, so much of it always came back to bloodline.
The descendants of gods fought on a different track from everyone else, and ordinary people were expected to catch up through talent, suffering, or luck.
The entire history of the ninja world was, in some sense, nothing more than the endless aftermath of one family's internal feud.
And the rest of them? Spectators. Extras. Collateral.
Naruto talked about hard work and guts, but in the end he'd still become the biggest advertisement for inherited destiny the world had ever seen.
Child of prophecy. Son of the Fourth Hokage. Reincarnation of a demigod.
What was a commoner supposed to do with that?
Kiyohara suppressed the thought and focused.
He couldn't beat the Sharingan by complaining about it.
"If you can't beat them," he told himself, "then exploit them."
The rogue ninja Kiyohara hovered behind him, watching. If the Last Will truly connected him to all possible futures, then maybe one day a Kiyohara with a bloodline limit would appear too. A Kiyohara from some branch world where fate had placed him somewhere else, in some other house, beneath some other surname.
He didn't know if that would happen.
But he knew one thing.
If it did, he intended to take every advantage he could.
Across from him, Tekka's attacks only grew sharper.
"It's over," Tekka said coldly.
He saw the opening—a small weakness in Kiyohara's defense, nothing more than a subtle delay in the repositioning of his weight. With the confidence of someone protected by his clan's eyes, he acted instantly.
His leg swept low for Kiyohara's stance while, at the same time, a hidden shuriken slipped from his other hand, curving to seal off the best route of retreat.
The timing was vicious. Elegant, too, in a way only the Uchiha could make it look.
"Possess me," Kiyohara said inwardly. "When I jump, push me higher."
The rogue ninja Kiyohara sounded amused. "So that's what you're planning."
He had probably expected Kiyohara to hand over the entire fight the moment things turned bad. Instead, Kiyohara had chosen something trickier.
The Sharingan's greatest strength was that it turned motion into information. Tekka could see muscle, breath, chakra flow, intent. But that same advantage encouraged a certain arrogance. It made him trust what he saw.
Trust it too much, and it became a trap.
Because what the Sharingan saw was still only the body.
It couldn't account for a dead man's will hijacking that body for a split second.
Kiyohara moved exactly as Tekka expected—he leapt backward, seemingly panicked, as if he had no choice but to retreat straight into the shuriken's path.
And then, in that airborne instant, the rogue ninja Kiyohara took over.
Every self-protective limit in Kiyohara's body was ignored.
His waist twisted violently. His abdomen screamed with the strain. His whole body bucked upward with an explosive snap of motion that had no business existing midair, as though he had used empty air itself as a foothold.
For one impossible moment, it looked like he had stepped on his own foot and risen higher.
Tekka's one-tomoe Sharingan saw it clearly.
And because it saw it clearly, the shock hit him all the harder.
What?
How could he still jump?
How could his body produce force there?
That wasn't how a human moved.
Kiyohara reclaimed control the next instant, ignoring the sharp ache tearing through his core. His right hand, already prepared, flung out three shuriken in a single motion.
At the same time, his left flashed through seals.
"Lightning Release: Lightning Flow Technique!"
Crackling blue current surged along the copper wire bound to the shuriken. Lightning wrapped around all three at once, turning them into streaks of blue brilliance that tore through the air like living thunder.
They weren't aimed straight at Tekka's body.
They sealed his routes.
Left.
Right.
Above.
The Uchiha prodigy's expression finally changed.
For the first time since activating his Sharingan, real alarm flared in his face.
The arena erupted.
Even people who didn't understand the mechanics could feel that the momentum of the fight had shifted. A moment ago, Uchiha Tekka had been the one pressing Kiyohara into a disadvantage. Now, in the space of a breath, Kiyohara had overturned the board.
Kurenai leaned forward in the stands, eyes wide. "That bastard… he really was hiding things."
Genma let out a low whistle around the senbon in his mouth. "No kidding."
Down below, the examiner's stare grew even sharper.
Good tactical judgment. Strong composure under pressure. Creative adaptation in live combat.
This wasn't luck. This wasn't desperation.
This was chunin material.
Tekka grit his teeth, Sharingan spinning as he tried to calculate a way through the cage Kiyohara had built around him. He could see the attacks. He could see them perfectly.
But being able to see a blow wasn't the same thing as having time to answer it.
The three lightning-wreathed shuriken screamed through the air.
And for the first time since the match began, Uchiha Tekka realized that the commoner standing in front of him might truly have the right to drag him down from his clan-born high ground.
The thought felt like a slap to the face.
Kiyohara, breathing hard, stared at him with unwavering focus.
Let the bloodline monsters have their eyes.
He had his own path.
And if he had to claw every inch of that road out of fate's hands, then so be it.
This fight was far from over.
But now, at least, Uchiha Tekka finally understood one thing.
Kiyohara was not here to lose gracefully. He was here to rise.