Two genin stood on the arena floor.
Karura on the south side. Small, even for her age. Yellow scarf, indigo eyes, a single scroll on her hip. She looked like she was waiting for someone to pick her up from the academy, not like she was about to fight.
Toma on the north side. Small too, but differently. Where Karura was small and soft, Toma was small and thin. Dark circles under his eyes. Sand-colored tunic. His forehead protector tied around his left arm, partially hidden beneath the sleeve.
He was looking at her with stars in his eyes.
Chiasa raised her hand. "Second match. Karura versus Toma."
She dropped her hand. "Begin."
Neither of them moved.
Toma took a breath. Then he bowed. A full bow, his torso dipping forward, his eyes going to the sand.
"Karura-san," he said. His voice was quiet but steady. "I want you to know that I've admired you for a long time. The things you've done for this village, the puppets you've built, the cacti you've planted for people who needed them. You've helped people who nobody else thought about. People in the lower district. People like me."
He straightened. His dark-circled eyes met hers.
"I won't hold back out of my respect for you as a person and a shinobi. I hope you'll do the same. It would be an honor to see your full strength, even if it means I might lose."
Karura's cheeks turned pink. She pulled her scarf up higher, trying to hide it, but the blush reached her ears.
"I, thank you, Toma-kun. That's really kind of you to say. I just do what I think is right." She bowed back. "I promise I'll take this seriously. You deserve that."
"Oh come on!" Mai's voice shattered the moment like a rock through glass. "Are you two gonna fight or go on a date!? Hurry it up, lovebirds!"
Both of them went red. Toma's dark circles couldn't hide the flush that spread across his cheeks. Karura buried her face in her scarf.
"Mai, shut up!" Karura called up to the gallery, her voice muffled by fabric.
"I'm just saying! Some of us have fights to get to! Save the romance for after the exam!"
Pakura, who had returned from the medical wing with a bandage across her abdomen and murder in her eyes, didn't comment. She was just irritated, period.
Karura took a breath. Composed herself. Pulled her scarf down. Her indigo eyes were watching. She reached for her hip. The scroll unfurled and three clouds of smoke erupted across the arena floor, thick and white, and when they cleared, three puppets stood in a triangle around their master.
Million on the left. Four arms, carved grin, bandage wrappings coiled and ready. The charismatic brawler. The crowd-favorite design that half the Puppet Brigade now carried copies of.
Reaper on the right. Hooded cloak, lean frame, scythe housings at the wrists. The lethal assassin. Silent and sharp and built to dangerously pressure things that Million didn't.
Moon at the center, behind Karura. Tall. Proud face. Long arms. And in her right hand, the massive iron war fan with three purple circles on its body.
Three puppets. Ten fingers. One eight-year-old girl controlling all of them.
The gallery went still.
"Three puppets at once?" Jomae whispered from the railing. He was gripping the metal bar so hard his knuckles were white. He carried one of her Million designs and had thought that was impressive. She was running three puppets at the same time. "She can control three at once already?"
"Did you know about this?" Kazane asked nobody in particular.
Nobody answered. Nobody had known.
The evaluators' section was alive with quiet, urgent conversation. Chunin leaning to jonin, jonin looking at the observation window above where the Third Kazekage watched. Three puppets operated simultaneously by a genin. The chakra control required, the spatial awareness, the experience. Most experienced puppeteers struggled with two.
Rasa stood at the gallery railing with his arms folded.
"It doesn't matter," he muttered. "Puppet, fan, scythe, whatever she brings. None of it would stand a chance against me or my gold dust."
Nobody heard him. Nobody was listening to him. Every eye in the arena was on the girl with the yellow scarf and the three wooden dolls standing around her.
Toma looked at the three puppets. At the grinning face of Million. At the hooded shadow of Reaper. At the tall, proud figure of Moon with its massive fan.
He smiled. Nervous. Genuine. Honored.
So this is the power of a puppet prodigy.
Sand erupted from beneath his feet.
It came from everywhere, pulled from the arena floor, from the walls, from every grain that the Demon Desert had left embedded in the stone. It gathered around Toma in a churning cloud that grew and grew, rising above him, swelling outward, until a wall of sand ten meters high and twenty meters wide loomed over the arena like a brown tsunami frozen mid-crash.
Then it lurched.
The tidal wave launched forward. A roaring, grinding mass of sand that covered the width of the arena and bore down on Karura and her three puppets with the weight of a collapsing building.
Karura's fingers moved.
Moon stepped forward. The war fan opened. One circle. Two circles. Three circles. Full spread. Three moons. Maximum power.
Moon swung.
The wind that erupted from the fan hit the tidal wave head-on. A wall of compressed air, screaming, visible as a distortion in the lamplight, that slammed into the sand and blew it apart. The wave shattered. Sand sprayed in every direction, raining across the arena, pelting the gallery walls, coating everything in a fine brown dust. The roar of the impact echoed off the stone ceiling and shook loose gravel from the walls above.
The wave was gone. Scattered. Reduced to a cloud of falling particles that drifted through the arena like brown snow.
And through the settling sand, Million charged.
Four arms pumping. Smiley face leading. The puppet hit the ground running the moment Moon's swing cleared the path, sprinting through the debris toward Toma's position. Its right fist cocked back, wrappings trailing, aimed at Toma's jaw.
Toma's hands slammed together. Sand surged from the arena floor in front of him, compressing into a wall three meters high and half a meter thick. Million's fist hit the wall.
The impact cratered the surface. Cracks spidered outward from the punch. Sand rained from the top of the wall. But it held. Barely. Toma's chakra pulsed through the sand, reinforcing it, pouring energy into the structure to keep it standing against a blow that would have shattered stone.
Million pulled back for a second punch.
Reaper appeared behind Toma.
The hooded puppet had circled wide during the tidal wave exchange, using the falling sand as cover, moving along the arena wall while every eye tracked Million's charge. Its scythe blade extended from the right wrist in a chain of linked steel edges, whipping toward Toma's exposed back.
Toma felt it, the threat of death coming toward him from behind. He threw himself upward. Sand gathered beneath his feet in a compressed cloud that launched him into the air, and Reaper's scythe blade slashed through the space where his spine had been a half second earlier. The steel edges hissed through empty air and retracted.
Toma hung in the air on a platform of floating sand, ten meters above the arena floor. Below him, three puppets stared up. Million's grin. Reaper's hooded void. Moon's proud carved face.
And behind them, Karura. Standing still. Her fingers moving in patterns that ran three independent weapons simultaneously, each one capable of killing him, each one responding to her will with a speed and coordination that made them look alive.
If I wasn't fast enough to block that punch, it would have launched me straight into the scythe. Even after blocking, if I didn't get into the air, the hooded one would have cut me down from behind. And now I have all three of their attention.
He was breathing hard from adrenaline. From the pure, electric thrill of standing across from someone who'd almost ended this battle in the opening exchange and knowing that she could have made it faster if she'd wanted to.
He smiled down at her.
She's taking this seriously. She's taking ME seriously.
"You're incredible, Karura-san!" he called down. And he meant it.
"Ugh." Rasa's voice was barely audible from the gallery. His arms were tighter across his chest.
Something was chewing at him now. He was watching Toma dodge and block and fly with a competence that didn't match anything he'd seen in a year of shared training. The jinchuriki was a mess during their missions. Slow. Hesitant. Flinching at loud noises and apologizing for existing. But now? He was airborne on a sand cloud, creating walls that stopped puppets, reacting to attacks from behind that he shouldn't have been able to sense.
Has he been holding back this entire time? The thought made Rasa's blood run hot. The freak has been intentionally dragging me down?
On the arena floor, Karura looked up at Toma floating above her puppets. She hadn't expected him to survive the opening sequence. The punch-to-scythe combination was designed to end fights against opponents who couldn't track multiple threats. Toma had tracked all three and responded correctly each time.
He was better than she'd expected. Much better.
Her fingers twitched.
All three puppets attacked at once.
Million's wrappings launched upward, four streams of reinforced cloth shooting toward Toma's floating platform, reaching, grabbing, trying to snare his limbs and drag him down.
Reaper's scythe blades extended to full length, both arms, twin chains of linked steel that whipped upward in crossing arcs aimed at slicing through the sand cloud beneath Toma's feet.
Moon swung her fan. A focused one-moon gust aimed upward, a column of compressed air that would slam into Toma's position and scatter his footing.
Three attacks. Three angles. All simultaneous.
Toma's hands blurred through signs.
A wall of sand rose between him and the attacks. Not a thin wall like the one that stopped Million's punch. This was massive. It pulled sand from all around, gathering into a barrier that was five meters thick and ten meters wide. The wrappings hit it and stuck. The scythe blades cut into it and lodged. The wind blast hit it and scattered the outer layer but couldn't penetrate the dense core.
Then the wall flowed.
The sand curled inward from the edges, wrapping around itself, around Toma, closing like a fist. Layer upon layer of compressed sand, each one denser than the last, building and thickening until the wall became a sphere.
The sphere sealed.
Toma vanished inside a ball of sand four meters in diameter, so dense that the surface looked like polished stone. It hung in the air for a moment, held by the last of the floating cloud's chakra, and then it dropped. The sphere hit the arena floor with an impact that cracked the stone beneath the sand and sent a shockwave rippling across the chamber.
The wrappings from Million that had been stuck to the wall were ripped free by the sphere's formation. The scythe blades that had lodged in the sand were pushed out as the sphere compressed. Everything that had been touching the sand was rejected as the defense sealed.
Karura stared at it.
A shape formed in the air above the sphere. Sand, gathered from the arena floor, compressing into a small floating orb the size of a fist. It hovered above the sealed sphere, and its surface rippled once before going smooth.
An eye. Made of sand. Hovering in the air.
The eye rotated. It looked at Million. At Reaper. At Moon. At Karura.
Inside the sphere, Toma could see everything.
Three puppets stood around a sphere of sand that contained her opponent. She reached out with her chakra threads, testing the surface, feeling for weakness. The sand was compressed so tightly that the threads couldn't penetrate. She guided Million forward. The puppet punched the sphere at full force, all four arms rapidly punching against the surface at incredible speeds.
The sphere didn't crack or chip. The impact left a shallow dent that filled itself in a second later, sand shifting to repair the damage.
She sent Reaper's blades against it. The steel edges scored lines across the surface that healed as fast as they were cut. She had Moon swing a one-moon gust that blasted sand off the sphere's outer layer, but the inner core held and the stripped layer reformed from the arena floor.
The sphere was impenetrable. Toma had poured an enormous amount of chakra into this defense and it showed.
Then the sand came from everywhere.
The moment Karura's puppets took position around the sphere, Toma attacked. Sand erupted from the arena floor in geysers that shot upward like brown pillars, each one aimed at a different puppet. Three geysers, three targets, all at once. The sand eye rotated above the sphere, tracking the puppets' positions, feeding information to the boy inside who was weaving hand signs in the dark.
Million dodged left. The geyser punched through the space it had occupied and hit the arena wall behind it, spraying sand across the gallery's lower railing. Reaper leaped backward, its hooded form flickering, the sand geyser ripping through its cloak's trailing edge. Moon stood firm as Karura swept the fan in a half-swing that dispersed the third geyser into a harmless cloud.
Before the dust settled, the floor beneath Million turned to quicksand.
The puppet's legs sank to the knees in an instant. The grinning face tilted downward as the soft sand pulled at its frame. Karura pulled on the threads, Million's four arms grabbing at the solid ground beyond the soft patch, dragging itself forward. But Toma wasn't done. A wave of sand crashed into Million from the side while it was stuck, a horizontal surge that slammed the puppet sideways and sent it tumbling across the arena floor. Wrappings unspooled as it rolled. One of the lower arms cracked at the elbow joint.
Karura winced. Million's left lower arm was compromised. The joint still moved but the range was reduced and the wrapping spool on that arm was jammed.
Another attack. Sand rose beneath Reaper in a column that tried to encase the puppet from the feet up. Karura yanked it clear with the threads, the hooded form rising into the air, but the sand chased it. Tendrils of compressed sand whipped upward, reaching, grabbing, trying to wrap around Reaper's legs and pull it back down. The scythe blades extended and slashed through the tendrils, cutting them apart, but more formed to replace them.
Toma was using the entire arena floor as a weapon. Every grain of sand responded to his chakra. The puppets couldn't stand still for more than a second without the ground trying to swallow them. Couldn't stay in one position without a wall or a wave or a tendril coming from an unexpected angle.
And through it all, the sphere sat untouched in the center. Dense. Sealed. Impenetrable. The sand eye floating above it, watching, guiding every attack with perfect information.
Moon swung at the sphere again. A two-moon gust that blasted the outer layer into dust. The inner core held. Sand flowed from the floor to repair the damage before the dust even settled.
"He's regenerating it from the arena sand…" Karura murmured. As long as there was sand in the arena, the sphere would rebuild whatever she stripped away.
A sand fist rose from the floor. Literally a fist, five meters wide, shaped like a clenched hand, and it swung at Karura.
She backflipped. The fist cratered the sand where she'd been standing. She landed in a crouch and two more fists erupted on either side of her, closing in from left and right. Moon's fan swept a gust that shattered the left fist. Her own body twisted between the fingers of the right one, passing through a gap between the index and middle finger that shouldn't have been wide enough for a person.
The gallery murmured.
"He's targeting her directly now," Sayo said from the gallery. Her flat eyes tracked the sand constructs forming and reforming across the arena floor. "Took him long enough. If the puppeteer goes down, the puppets are useless."
"She's fast for a puppeteer," Goza said seriously.
"She's fast, period." Sayo corrected.
Karura was running. Not away from the attacks but in a circle around the sphere, keeping all three puppets moving with her, dodging sand constructs that erupted from the floor with increasing frequency. Toma was pouring chakra into the assault, attacking from every angle, trying to overwhelm her with volume.
A sand wave rolled across the arena floor, knee-high, fast. Million jumped it. Reaper sliced through it. Karura vaulted over it and landed on Moon's extended arm, using the puppet as a stepping stone before dropping back to the sand.
Sand tendrils caught Reaper's left leg. The puppet stumbled. A sand column slammed into its torso and drove it into the arena wall. Stone cracked behind the impact. Reaper slumped against the wall, its hooded form hanging at an angle, the cloak torn.
Karura pulled it free. The left scythe housing was dented. The blade mechanism still worked but the extension range was reduced. Two puppets damaged now. Million's arm and Reaper's housing.
Toma was wearing her down. Every attack forced a response. Every response cost attention. Every second she spent dodging and repairing was a second she wasn't spending on breaking through his defense.
She needed to end this.
She stopped running. Stopped dodging. Planted her feet in the center of the arena and let the sand constructs come.
A sand fist swung. Million intercepted it, four arms catching the construct and holding it long enough for Karura to think. A tendril whipped toward her legs. Reaper's blade slashed it apart from its slumped position against the wall, the dented scythe still sharp enough to cut sand.
Think. What do we know? The sphere regenerates from the arena's sand. It absorbs impacts. It heals cuts. It reforms whatever you strip away. Brute force won't work. Wind won't work. Blades won't work.
Her Byakugan, hidden behind the transformation, was active. She could see Toma inside the sphere, his chakra flowing into the sand. She could see the sphere's structure, the density, the grain patterns, the compressed layers.
Sand. It was still sand. Millions of individual grains.
Heat turns sand to glass. Glass doesn't regenerate. Glass doesn't listen to sand users. Hopefully…
She'd watched glassblowers in the market district her whole life. She knew what heat did to sand.
Her fingers moved. Moon shifted. The war fan tilted and Moon's free hand reached for the storage scrolls stored inside herself.
The first scroll unsealed. Oil. A dark, viscous liquid that sprayed across the sphere's surface in a wide arc, coating the compressed sand from top to base. The sand eye spun, tracking the spray, and inside the sphere Toma frowned. Oil? What was oil going to do?
The second scroll unsealed. Fire.
Moon's fan opened. Two circles. Two moons. The fire scroll's payload ignited in front of the fan and the two-moon swing caught it, a wave of wind-boosted flame that hit the oil-coated sphere and turned it into a bonfire.
The arena lit up.
The oil ignited across the entire surface at once, fierce and hot, tongues of flame climbing the sphere in sheets of orange and white. The sand eye dissolved as the heat reached it, the delicate structure collapsing into glass droplets that rained down the sphere's side. Toma lost his vision outside the shell.
Inside, the temperature climbed. Toma's palms, pressed against the sand, felt the heat spreading inward.
He pushed more chakra into the defense. Tried to shed the outer layer, slough off the burning surface and replace it with fresh sand from below. But the oil had soaked into the compressed grains and the fire followed it, and Million's wrappings were already stretching across the sphere's surface, anchoring the burning shell in place, preventing Toma from shedding what Karura needed to stay.
"She's cooking him alive! I didn't think you had it in you, Karura!" Mai shouted from the gallery.
"I'm not cooking him, I'm cooking the sand..." Karura muttered.
The sphere's surface changed. The color shifted from brown to dark brown to something darker still, and the texture went from granular to smooth. The flames burned hotter where the oil was thickest and the sand beneath stopped being sand. It darkened. Hardened. Crackled. Thin lines of amber and brown spread across the surface as the silicon dioxide rearranged itself under heat into something new.
Glass.
It spread in patches at first, islands of glossy dark material surrounded by still-burning oil and unconverted sand. Then the patches connected. The glass crept across the sphere's surface like frost forming on a window, each section fusing with the next, the entire shell transforming from a living, breathing, regenerating defense into a brittle prison.
Inside, Toma felt the change. His chakra pushed against the inner wall and the wall didn't respond. Sand moved when he told it to. Glass didn't. The connection between his chakra and the sphere's surface severed everywhere the glass had formed. He pushed harder. Nothing. The material under his palms wasn't his anymore.
He tried to break outward. Sand erupted from the sphere's interior, slamming against the glass shell from inside. The glass cracked in places where it was thin, spiderweb fractures running across the surface, but the shell held. It was brittle but it was continuous, a complete casing that trapped the sand inside as effectively as it trapped Toma.
"She turned his defense against him. The sphere can't regenerate if the surface isn't sand anymore." A chunin said from the gallery.
The fire died. The oil was spent. The sphere sat in the center of the arena, black and amber and glossy, cracked in places, smoking faintly, a massive glass egg with a boy trapped inside.
Karura positioned Million directly in front of the sphere, four arms coiled, grinning face aimed at the largest cluster of cracks.
She positioned Reaper behind the sphere, scythe blades locked rigid, aimed at the thinnest section of glass on the back side.
Moon raised the fan. One circle. One moon.
All three struck at the same time.
Reaper's rigid scythe hit the glass from behind. The blade punched through the thin section and the crack raced outward in every direction, a spiderweb that spread across the entire back half of the sphere in less than a second.
Moon's one-moon gust hit the front. The compressed wind slammed into the cracked glass shell and the fractures that Reaper had started connected with the fractures from Toma's internal pressure and the whole structure gave way.
The sphere shattered.
Glass and sand exploded outward in a spray of fragments and loose grains that cascaded across the arena floor. Chunks of dark amber glass spun through the air. Sand poured from the broken shell like water from a cracked bowl. Dust and debris filled the arena in a cloud that blinded everyone in the gallery for two seconds.
Million was already running.
The puppet sprinted through the explosion, through the flying glass and the pouring sand and the dust cloud, four arms open, grin leading, moving on a straight line toward the center of the collapsing sphere where Karura's hidden eyes could see Toma sitting in the wreckage, hands still raised, eyes wide, completely exposed.
Million's four arms closed around him.
Two arms around his torso. Two around his legs. The puppet lifted him off the ground like a parent scooping up a child, his body pinned against the wooden chest, his arms trapped against his sides, his face six inches from Million's carved grin.
Toma dangled.
The dust settled. The arena floor was covered in dark glass shards and loose sand. Moon stood with its fan lowered. Reaper stood with its scythes retracted. And in the center of it all, Million held the jinchuriki of Sunagakure in the air with four arms and a smile.
Toma looked at the grin. At the two dot eyes and the curved line mouth. At the wooden face that was closer to him than any person had voluntarily been in years.
He couldn't move. He couldn't form seals. He couldn't call sand because the sand around him was scattered and the glass was useless to him. He was caught. Completely, thoroughly, gently caught.
He started laughing.
A sound that surprised his teammates and his sensei because none of them had ever heard Toma laugh before. It was warm and relieved and a little bit broken, the laugh of a boy who had just been picked up and held for the first time in his life, even if the thing holding him was made of wood.
"I surrender," he said while laughing. "I surrender, Karura-san."
"Winner: Karura!" Chiasa called.
Million set him down gently. Four arms releasing, the puppet stepping back, its grin still aimed at Toma as if it was happy about the outcome. It gave him a thumbs up. Toma's feet touched the sand and his legs wobbled but he stayed upright as he gave a slight bow to the puppet. He brushed glass dust from his hair and looked at Karura across the ruined arena floor.
She was standing where she'd been standing the entire fight. She hadn't moved once since she planted her feet. Her scarf was pulled up. Her indigo eyes were bright above the fabric.
"That was amazing. You took me seriously. Thank you." Toma said with genuine warmth.
Karura pulled her scarf down. She was smiling.
"You were incredible, Toma-san. That sphere was the hardest defense I've ever faced. I had to think really hard to find an answer to deal with it."
"I know. I watched you think. Through my sand eye." He rubbed the back of his head. "When I saw the oil, I didn't understand. When I saw the fire, I thought you were just trying to burn through. When the glass started forming..." He looked at the shards scattered across the floor. "I've never seen anyone turn my sand against me before. Not even my sensei..."
"Heheheh..." Karura embarrassedly rubbed the back of her head. "I just had to try something."
"I've never fought outside of the desert... It is difficult to work with limited materials. Maybe I could've given you a harder challenge if we were in the desert." Toma mentioned.
"You could carry something filled with sand. Like a scroll full of sand. Or you could work a bit more on your shinobi skills. Taijutsu, Genjutsu, or Bukijutsu..." She didn't wanna sound mean but he kind of just stood there and threw sand at her the whole time.
Toma had a somber smile on his face as he shook his head. "Shinobi skills, huh... I might just do that." Toma didn't have the heart to tell her he didn't have the opportunity to learn those skills. He didn't go to the academy.
As the container for the tailed beast, most of his childhood was learning to master his demon's strength and preventing it from consuming him and everyone in the village. Everything else was pointless as a jinchuriki, at least, according to the Kazekage...
"Maybe we can spar together sometime! I can help if you want."
"That sounds like it would be a dream come true." Toma still had a sad smile on his face. He doubted the Kazekage would allow something like that. "See you around, Karura. It was my greatest pleasure to meet you and learn that you were better than how I pictured you." He began walking away.
Karura's face turned beet red. What the freak was this guy saying?! That's so embarrassing, what the hell?! And he's saying that stuff so casually and in front of everyone! Did he want her to die out of embarrassment! You can't go around complimenting and being so nice to people! And she was the one saying that!
[Tenfold has activated!]
[You have gained tenfold fighting experience!]
Ten different versions of her fighting ten different versions of Toma filled her mind and body. Different fights but same outcome. If she fought Toma again, she would be able to put him down in half the time. Hopefully, she would be fighting alongside him rather than against him in the future.
"I know for a fact, I would've lost against him." Jomae exhaled from the gallery. "With just Million alone, I doubt I could've gotten through that. And I don't know any fire style jutsu."
"She's not Lady Chiyo's student for no reason." Nagi agreed.
Rasa was gripping the railing. His knuckles were white. His jaw was clenched so hard the muscles in his cheeks stood out.
Everyone in the gallery was saying her name like it was the only word they knew. He looked at the glass shards on the arena floor. At the dark, glittering fragments that had been sand thirty seconds ago.
Tch, like defeating a useless excuse for a shinobi like that is much of an accomplishment. Rasa turned away from the two smiling shinobi still chatting to each other feeling incredibly irritated and not knowing exactly why.
The arena floor was a mess. Cracked stone, scattered sand, dark glass shards glittering in the lamplight. Chunin maintenance workers began filing in to repair the surface before the next match.