The instant Uchiha Tekka tried to move, Kiyohara hooked the fingers of his right hand inward. The hand that had just thrown the shuriken closed hard, and the nearly invisible copper wire hidden behind those three lightning-wreathed stars snapped tight in an instant.
Under Kiyohara's control, the three shuriken no longer flew in straight lines. Their flight path shrank abruptly, the arcs folding inward like a noose, all of them converging on Uchiha Tekka at the center.
"Oh no." Tekka's expression changed at once. His Sharingan had seen the trajectory, but seeing and reacting were two different things. He managed to dodge two of them, but the third, wrapped in crackling lightning, still skimmed across the outside of his arm.
Crack! The current tore through half his body in an instant. His arm went numb, pain burned through his muscles, and his whole body froze for the briefest moment. It was only a heartbeat, but on a battlefield, a heartbeat was more than enough.
Using the momentum from that earlier leap, Kiyohara closed the distance at once. His black kunai flashed out and stopped at Uchiha Tekka's throat, the tip resting there so steadily it seemed nailed in place.
"I lost..." Tekka forced the words out through clenched teeth. He used chakra to drive out the lingering paralysis from the lightning, but by the time he could move again, the result had already been decided. Pride kept his back straight. The flush of humiliation on his face was obvious, but he still did not make excuses. A loss was a loss.
Kiyohara looked at the complicated expression on the other boy's face and slowly withdrew his kunai. "I just got lucky," he said with a faint smile.
That was not because he wanted to steal a famous line from anyone. It really had been luck. If the rogue ninja Kiyohara had not helped him at the crucial instant, there was no way he would have won so cleanly, and whether he could have won at all was another question entirely.
Still, one thought rose in his mind with almost indecent satisfaction. Unfortunately, my ashes were hanging right over your Sharingan.
The referee stared blankly for half a second before finally snapping back to himself. Then his voice boomed across the hall. "Winner - Kiyohara!"
In the audience, Hyuga Tetsuya, who had been using his Byakugan to observe the contestants from start to finish, frowned slightly. The Sharingan could see chakra flow and movement with great clarity, but the Byakugan saw deeper than that. It looked past the skin, past the muscles, into the body itself.
That was why he could see more clearly than anyone what had happened in the last exchange. Kiyohara's final leap - the one that had seemed to violate the limits of the body itself - was not something an ordinary genin should have been able to do.
"A secret technique?" Tetsuya could only explain it that way. In the vast world of shinobi, secret arts and bloodline abilities appeared without warning all the time. Since he could not make sense of it through ordinary logic, he could only assume Kiyohara had prepared some hidden move in advance, one that had only become effective when he fought Uchiha Tekka.
At the side of the arena, the examiner lowered his head and found Kiyohara's name on the evaluation sheet in his hand. Without hesitation, he wrote one word beside it: Excellent.
There was open admiration in his gaze now. He thought to himself that Minato's eye for talent truly was sharp. This Kiyohara not only had a solid foundation, but also excellent adaptability and composure under pressure. By any reasonable standard, he had already surpassed the line for an ordinary genin.
Kiyohara took a moment to steady his breathing, then walked over and asked, "Examiner, when does my next assessment begin?"
The stern-faced jonin actually smiled. He tapped the board in his hand and said, "There won't be another one. What you showed in your fight with Uchiha Tekka already demonstrated enough - combat ability, tactical awareness, adaptability, and judgment. You've met the standard for chunin. Once the assessment rounds are over, everyone who passes will receive the green flak vest only chunin are qualified to wear."
A direct promotion.
For a moment, Kiyohara was stunned. Then delight surged through him. That saved him a great deal of trouble. He would not need to keep fighting through more rounds, and more importantly, he had finally reached the threshold he had been desperate to touch ever since Kannabi Bridge.
Did you hear that? he asked inwardly, speaking to the rogue ninja Kiyohara, the only other existence who could hear him.
"I heard." The rogue ninja Kiyohara floated quietly beside him, giving a faint nod. "Looks like you'll be able to fulfill my second dying wish very soon."
The rogue ninja's gaze lingered on the examiner for a moment before returning to Kiyohara. "Once you officially become a chunin, my consciousness will disperse. When that happens, you'll merge with what's left of me and inherit a part of what I was. But in the end... your road is still yours to walk."
Kiyohara fell silent. He understood that this was most likely the true final goodbye. The second wish had always sounded simple on the surface - become a legitimate chunin - but behind it was the lingering resentment of a man who had lived and died as a hunted rogue, never once receiving that proper recognition.
Without saying anything else, Kiyohara turned and headed toward the stands.
Kurenai Yuhi was already waiting for him there, a bag of freshly bought snacks in her arms. The moment she saw him approach, she stepped forward in a rush. "Kiyohara, that was incredible! You nearly scared me to death just now. When I saw him activate the Sharingan, I thought you were finished for sure."
"I barely pulled it off," Kiyohara said with a smile. That part was true too. His purity rating just happened to be a little higher than Uchiha Tekka's today.
He took the skewer of three-colored dumplings from her hand and bit into one. The sweet, chewy texture melted on his tongue, easing the fatigue that had settled in after the fight. It was only then that he realized how tense his body had been from beginning to end.
"What was that technique you used at the end?" Kurenai asked, still curious. "You never used anything like it in the Land of Grass."
"I came up with it myself," Kiyohara explained simply. "Lightning Release: Shuriken Lightning-Guiding Technique. It combines lightning release infusion with shuriken manipulation. Kakashi gave me some pointers on Lightning Release before this, which helped a lot."
"Kakashi..." Kurenai nodded, only half understanding. Lightning Release was not her specialty, and most of the technical details went past her. But one thing she did understand clearly: every bit of strength Kiyohara gained improved their odds of surviving the battlefield the next time they were sent out.
"Anyway, it's great that you've gotten stronger," she said sincerely.
Kiyohara continued eating his snacks while he looked back toward the arena below, where the remaining matches were still underway. Down there, other genin were fighting desperately for a chance to be recognized. Up here, he had already stepped through the gate ahead of them.
A one-tomoe Sharingan... it's strong, he thought. But that's only the beginning of the Uchiha's power.
There would still be two tomoe, three tomoe, and beyond that the legendary Mangekyo. There would be more terrifying eyes, more absurd bloodlines, and enemies far beyond what he could deal with now. Today's victory had only proven that he could stand at the threshold. It had not brought him anywhere close to safety.
That thought, instead of dampening his mood, made him even more curious about what he would inherit once he fused with the rogue ninja Kiyohara.
After all, that rogue ninja had only ever completed the dying wish from one future version of himself. He had died before he could finish the second one. Kiyohara hoped, selfishly and without shame, that what he inherited this time would include more chakra.
Right now, that was still his greatest weakness. He could have battle sense, sharpened instincts, and higher-level understanding of Wind Release and Lightning Release, but if his chakra pool stayed too small, then all of it would still be built on a shaky foundation.
And the ninja world was never forgiving to those with weak foundations.
Kurenai, standing beside him, noticed that he had gone quiet again. "What are you thinking about now?" she asked.
Kiyohara swallowed the last dumpling and smiled faintly. "I'm thinking that becoming a chunin only means I finally qualify to die in more expensive ways."
Kurenai stared at him for half a second, then almost laughed despite herself. "You really know how to ruin the mood."
"I prefer to call it realism," he replied.
But even as he said it, something inside him had eased. The crushing pressure that had dogged him since the mission assignment to Kannabi Bridge had finally loosened by a degree. Not because the danger was gone. If anything, the future only held bigger storms. But for the first time since arriving in this world, he had genuinely taken one solid step forward.
He was no longer just expendable battlefield filler, no longer a nameless genin whose death would not cause even a ripple. Now he had rank, recognition, and the right to reach for more.
Soon, very soon, he would fulfill the rogue ninja Kiyohara's second final wish. And when that happened, whatever remained inside that urn would become part of him for good.
Kiyohara looked down at the arena one last time, then at his own hands.
They were still too weak. Still too ordinary. Still too far from the monsters that would one day shake the whole world.
But now at least, he had proof that even an ordinary person could claw his way upward - one narrow victory, one stolen chance, one fulfilled last wish at a time.
And in this bloodline-riddled world, where geniuses were born with everything and commoners had to fight for scraps, that single fact was enough to make his pulse race.
Because today, at the very least, he had taken something from fate instead of letting fate take something from him.