Kiba stumbled back three steps from the kick, rolling his shoulder with a hiss.
To his credit, he didn't go down.
He squared up again, fixed his eyes on me, and grinned despite himself.
"Alright. You're actually good."
I know.
"I acknowledge that." He pointed at me. "But I still can't lose. Don't take what comes next personally."
He glanced sideways.
Akamaru looked up from the ground and barked once — short, sharp, ready.
Oh. He's pulling out the clan stuff.
"Ninpo: Jujin Bunshin!"
White smoke. When it cleared, there were two Kibas standing in front of me.
The crowd reacted immediately. Half of them had never seen actual ninjutsu used in front of them before. The gasps were audible.
"Ninpo: Shikyaku no Jutsu!"
The shift was instant. Kiba's posture dropped lower, wilder. The domesticated kid from class was gone. What replaced him moved like something that lived in the woods and ate things.
Both of them — Kiba and Akamaru-as-Kiba — split wide and came at me from opposite sides simultaneously.
Smart. Textbook pincer.
I heard the crowd's energy change.
He's going to lose now, right—
Against ninjutsu—
Has to be—
I raised my hands and ran through the seals.
"Ninpo: Chakra Bakuhatsu no Jutsu."
Boom.
A burst of chakra detonated outward from my body in every direction. Both of them caught the full force of it at point-blank range and went airborne simultaneously.
They hit the ground hard.
The smoke from Akamaru's transformation dissolved mid-fall. He landed back in his original form a few feet from Kiba, let out a weak whimper, and stopped moving.
Kiba was already scrambling toward him before he'd even fully registered that he'd lost.
"Akamaru! Akamaru—"
"Woof... whimper."
Alive. Shaken, not hurt.
Kiba exhaled so hard his whole body deflated.
"Sorry." I walked over. "My control on that one isn't great yet. I wasn't trying to hit that hard."
He looked up at me from the ground for a second.
Then he laughed.
"Top student to the end, huh." He stood up, dusted himself off, and held out the Seal of Reconciliation. "No hard feelings. Losing to that isn't exactly embarrassing."
I returned it.
Good. Now comes the part I was actually waiting for.
"Wait — where did you even learn that jutsu?"
Kiba asked it first, but he wasn't the only one thinking it.
Every head in the training ground had turned toward me. Iruka-sensei. The class. Sasuke, arms crossed, jaw tight, eyes doing that thing where he was trying very hard to look unimpressed.
I scratched the back of my head.
"Honestly? I kind of... made it up."
Silence.
"I've been working on chakra control for a while, and at some point I started wondering if you could just — compress it and release it as a direct impact. I don't know any real ninjutsu, so I had to work with what I had." I shrugged. "The control's still rough. That's why it came out stronger than I meant it to."
More silence.
Then someone put it together out loud.
"You created a jutsu. You just made one."
There it is.
The crowd noise shifted from amazed to genuinely unsettled. A few of them looked at each other like they needed confirmation that they'd heard that correctly.
Iruka-sensei had gone very still. The expression on his face was the one teachers get when they're recalibrating everything they thought they knew about a student.
Minato comparisons incoming in approximately three seconds.
"It's really not that impressive," I said, putting on something sheepish. "It's barely a concept. More of a rough idea than a real jutsu."
That made it worse somehow. Half the girls looked like they were about to pass out.
Approachable genius. Works every time.
The rest of the matches finished without incident.
Sasuke versus Naruto was almost painful to watch — not because it was close, but because Naruto kept yelling about rivalry while Sasuke was clearly thinking about something else entirely.
He beat him fast and clean, and then stood there with that distant look he gets.
He's been in his head since the chakra burst. Good.
We were heading back inside when he stopped me.
"Hey."
I turned around.
Sasuke. Arms crossed. Looking somewhere slightly past my shoulder in that specific way he does when he wants to say something but doesn't want to seem like he wants to say it.
"I acknowledge you."
...That's new.
Before I could respond, he reached into his jacket and threw a scroll at me.
I caught it.
"That should be what you're looking for."
I looked down at it.
Chakra and spiritual energy cultivation method. Uchiha clan notation on the seal.
Hold on.
I looked back up at him.
"You knew?"
I had been quietly working out how to get my hands on something exactly like this for weeks. I had plans. Contingencies. A whole approach mapped out.
None of those approaches involved Sasuke just handing it to me.
"Hmph."
He turned his chin up slightly. Classic.
"You've been looking for genjutsu training resources. Don't bother denying it — I noticed." He looked away. "Uchiha genjutsu is the strongest in the world. If you're going to learn it, you should at least start from the right foundation."
...
Of all the ways I expected this to go.