The day of the semifinal arrived.
Earlier that morning, Uchiha Ryota had demolished his opponent, a tool-specialist whose name totally escaped Iruka. Some older guy with glasses and a rocking beard.
Too bad, that beard rocked so hard, he should have won just on the basis of the beard. It was just wrong that the Uchiha had seared it off with a fireball.
Afterwards, it was his turn.
"So. You going to open with the usual, 'I'm superior, I'm Hyuuga, I'm badass, more badass than anyone else could ever be, etc. etc.' and so forth?"
She shook her head.
Actually, she'd changed a lot since that day four years before. She was taller, her hair was chopped short like a boy's, and rather than the robes, wore a simple white t-shirt and snug jeans and white sneakers trimmed in blue. She looked softer too, not a stick with muscle like a boy, more womanly. Curvy.
And she did not hide the caged-bird-seal.
"I've gotten over being in the branch family," she sighed. "Lots of us never do. I'm... sorry about when you were young. That main family brat would activate the seal for any excuse."
"It's cool, it's cool. I know. What happened to the brat?"
She smiled viciously.
"He got dropped into the Branch Family. He failed his diplomatic training. His parents couldn't save him anymore, too many failures, too many offenses. Now he's learning about the other side."
Huh. What a world.
"Hitomi, right? You got cuter."
"You too."
The crowd above them was growing restless. They wanted some fighting. Or at least the pre-fight trash-talking.
"I guess we should start."
Hitomi sighed again.
"They'll hit me with the seal if I just concede. So I'll fight as hard as I can."
"It's all good," he grinned at her. Was she blushing?
Then her eyes popped wider and crazy-like and the pulsing veins showed up around them on her cheeks and brow, and she slid into her stance, palms open, one low, one high, feet a little more than shoulder width apart.
Man, why did she have to turn out nice?
She might kill him if he held back, but it was just tough for him to resolve the need to use deadly force against a cute girl who didn't want to hurt him either. He'd go for option two. Bro hated the idea. It was a gamble, one they were not absolutely sure would work. And unnecessary - he could simply overpower her if he was not worried about humiliating her.
It was odd to still be finding out new things about Bro. He was against unnecessarily revealing the Fist... but once he decided that its use was warranted, he tossed restraint out the window.
"I was going to do this for real, but you're too nice. Imitation Art of Dragon's Breathing: Art of the Lungfish Gasping!"
Iruka dropped into a crouch, knees bent to ninety degrees, fists at his waist, and belted out a big yell. Energy burst into life around him, a dense light that was almost blindingly intense to his Hyuuga opponent, and any Hyuuga watching.
"Wh... what is that? It's not chakra!"
His muscles bulged and his shirt split open, ripping down the seams as his chest and arms seemed to get a third again larger. Then there was a blur, an explosion of movement...
From somewhere above them, Iruka heard his bro clap a hand to his face in frustration.
Iruka's image steadied. His whole upper body seemed to be covered with veins that popped out full of blood, on his pecs, on his biceps and triceps and the backs of his forearms and up his neck and on his face. And on his chest, round scar marks in the configuration of the constellation of the Great Bear stood out like a fiery beacon.
Hitomi blinked once, twice. She had to ask it.
"Is that... is that magic marker?"
"It's the pulsing blood of furious rage!"
Yes, he had magic-markered the veins and the scars of the Big Dipper onto himself in a stunning display of speed and precision!
"...Uh. Ok. So, we're still fighting then?"
"Yes! Disdain it at your peril, Hyuuga! Now you face the most dangerous of opponents, one who can kill with a touch just like you!"
"...You're mocking me."
He stage-whispered to her, "No, not you. Just your clan."
Iruka could see them up there, those stiff asshats in their fancy robes quietly fuming in their seats while the rest of the audience around their section chuckling and laughing, jeering, cheering. The air in the arena thrummed with it.
"Um. Right. You're in my... uh. Field of Divination. Right."
She looked like she was expecting him to poof away into the remnants of a clone or with a kawarimi with each touch, but he just grinned and took it.
Above them, there were gasps.
Her feet slid from stance to stance, a solid base that helped her absorb the momentum of her high-speed arm motions. Strike after strike hit home. Just the lightest of touches, but with focused energy behind them. Some Hyuuga struck with added force, but that was foolish - it wasn't impact that delivered damage with the Jyuuken, so why waste the energy when speed was more important? It was executed perfectly, with tremendous speed and precision as the tenketsu were attacked in the distinct pattern refined by generations of Jyuuken masters. It was only when the last hits were landing that she noticed it. Something was wrong. This did not feel right at all. The points had not responded the way they were supposed to.
Afterwards, Hitomi backed away warily. He was still standing.
Conversationally, Iruka said, "There are many more points than the rudimentary understanding taught by your masters. I may look like a joke, but I know them all."
He lazily pressed a handful of points along his own chest and abdomen, and a dozen more on each arm, and a couple on his head, while she stepped further back, obviously confused and more than a little afraid as her all-seeing eyes saw less and less of his chakra network, which seemed to overflow with energy that looked so much... richer than normal chakra.
Partly, it was for show. In actuality, he was pushing his own Tsubo to undo the minimal damage she had managed to do to his inner coils.
"The Jyuuken is a pale imitation of the Fist of the..." Eurgh... it was just impossible to trash talk with the stupid name of the Fist! Who the hell would be afraid of the Fist of the Big Dipper? Yuck! He'd use its improper name, which sounded much cooler... "a pale imitation of the Fist of the North Star!" He bellowed that last bit out proudly.
Again, he thought he heard bro smack himself in the face in irritation.
Sorry bro, Iruka thought. At least if anyone tried to search for the ancient secrets because of this fight, they'd get confused, possibly researching an entirely different Art from Hokuto Shinken.
When he had done that little trick with the magic markers, he had sealed off the opening points himself, without impeding the flows of the deeper coils within, through which poured a torrent of Touki. The movements were also supposed to distract her from noticing the change in appearance as he had closed off the points. Without them to push through, most of her chakra just flared off into the air, unable to penetrate the Touki infusing his flesh.
He roared dramatically for the audience and looked up, relishing the look of alarm on the faces of the Hyuuga elders in the audience. They did not understand exactly what he had done, but their worst suspicions were confirmed. The Fist completely neutralized the one thing they were good at. He had defeated one of their very best offensive moves, and certainly the best move that a chuunin level Hyuuga could possibly know.
They still had other fancy moves, but their other best move at this level was defensive, and if she demonstrated it, he'd beat that too. Unlikely though, usually that was only taught to Main House Hyuuga.
The audience was deathly quiet now. They did not understand fully either, but they knew enough about the reputation of the Hyuuga to know that the half-naked muscle man in the fighting pit should not have been able to just shrug off that attack, with a smile and a cheeky wave.
"Hitomi, you better show that you're more than just a Hyuuga. Because if that's all you are, you lost before the fight even started," he said to her quietly.
So she pulled a kunai with each fist, rushed ahead at an angle, circling him, and started firing off shuriken and throwing daggers. Her eyes returned to normal.
Good. If she dropped the Jyuuken... he would stop using the Fist. That greatly increased the odds that he would not have to put the serious hurting on her.
Iruka batted away the projectiles with his bare hands, barely having to shift his feet. They both knew this fight was over. Without the Jyuuken, everything Hitomi could do was a lesser version of what Anko had attempted to do to him.
But he wanted her to show her spirit. For her own sake.
The Hyuuga would play off this loss as though it was just because she was a lowly branch member, but the true power movers of Konoha would know the truth. The Hyuuga's reputation had already taken a tremendous hit today, no matter how they tried to spin these events. And though no one would be able to recreate his techniques, the mere knowledge that it was possible to completely nullify the Jyuuken would cause others to experiment and try to develop other ways to beat it too. The Hyuuga were lucky that the political situation had been too tense for other Hidden Villages to have participated in this chuunin exam... or the failure of their famed fighting techniques would spread beyond Konoha's walls.
Hitomi did not want to prolong this. He sensed that. She was charging in, gambling it all on possibly getting a lucky knockout blow through. Because that was her best hope.
Iruka had to smile. Another Hyuuga would have just accepted the loss as destiny and given up, but she was gambling it all on a high risk move, and that made her worth respecting.
He was glad that he could hold the Fist back. He would defeat her cleanly, reserving the indignity inflicted by his new finishing move for his next opponent. Uchiha always deserved it, those stuck-up bastards.
Ten feet away. Five feet away and for a heartbeat, Hitomi paused, before her speed kicked up another notch. With every taijutsu move requiring the use of chakra, Hyuuga developed great stamina, capacity and control. Forsaking the apparently ineffective Jyuuken style for now, Hitomi could put all that energy into her muscles, boosting her speed and strength to levels few chuunin could manage.
A long, looping right hook whipped in towards Iruka's eye. His forearm flickered up and absorbed the impact, her fist just bouncing off the dense muscle over the bones.
She faked a leg kick towards the inside of Iruka's right leg, pumped her feet harder, kicking up dust with the increase in speed, trying to spin around him to deliver a knee at his ribs from behind.
He read it, turned and slid his left foot back to keep his base. With an open-handed palm to the hip from which she'd extended her knee-strike, he knocked her off-balance, and then she was hopping and skidding back as she desperately parried and blocked his simple, straightforward combinations of jabs, uppercuts and hooks. His greater reach was forcing her back and soon, she would run out of room to retreat.
The speed was impressive. But despite putting all her chakra into boosting her body, it was still less muscle performance than Anko had demonstrated. In addition, her lean arms did not have the meat on them needed to just absorb the punishment from his fists, no matter how much chakra she tried to force into them. The heavy blows jarred her to her bones - even when she blocked his punches, she felt the force of them traveling up her arms and into her spine. The extensor muscles on the posterior surface of her forearms were getting pummeled. Her arms would be totally black and blue after this.
The accumulating damage dropped her hand speed further.
She was good even without the Jyuuken and left no openings in her defenses, but Iruka was overpowering her, and made his own openings.
He hammered a knife-hand through a weakened block towards her belly, and smiled as it simply passed through. A simple clone combined with a substitution, but executed so quickly, just in that space between his hand pushing past her arms and the time his fingers would have hit her solar plexus, and with the barest minimum chakra expended so she could keep the rest going to speed.
With a side-step, he avoided double knife thrusts at his kidneys from behind. She recovered quickly, crouching down to duck under a side-kick that would have broken her jaw.
Then he was raining kicks at her head and torso and legs, kicks so fast she could only see the very beginning as he shifted his feet before thundering them in. She had needed to reactivate the Byakugan just to be able to see the kicks well enough to dodge and weave around them, and tried repeatedly to catch his legs with her kunai as he kicked at her, but she had absorbed just too much punishment and the drain of her doujutsu was cutting her speed even more. She dared not try to block one of those big, black boots with an arm - he would break her bones for sure with power like that.
Finally, she thought he over-committed to a roundhouse kick for her head, and stabbed both blades into the extended knee... only to see them pass through.
She spun, her turn to try to keep him off her back, but she was too tired, too drained, too bruised.
"Sorry, Hitomi-chan," he whispered as he put his hands on her. A little bit of chakra to stick them right onto her back through her shirt, and with a shift of his rippling torso and shoulders, he stepped forward into her weight and lifted her completely off her feet and up over his head so quickly she was disoriented as the ground fell away from her.
Hitomi was brought down, chest first, with irresistible force and dizzying speed, onto Iruka's knee. It struck her right in the middle of the sternum, the strongest point... because Iruka didn't want to drive shards of her ribs into her lungs by slamming her side onto his knee, and he didn't want to break her back by driving her spine onto his knee.
Her chest was compressed so much she blacked out instantly, and as he released her, she flopped limply on the ground at his feet, limbs twitching, still trying to carry out the last commands sent out through the nerves.
"Good job, Hyuuga Hitomi," Iruka said, smiling as he pulled the kunai out of his leg. She had kept fighting even as he'd delivered the finishing blow. A few inches to one side and she would have cut a major blood vessel... Or gotten him in the crotch.
Okay, no dating this girl. Too bad.
"Examiner, this fight is done."
He bent low over her while the medics were still approaching. A few pokes of Tsubo to restart her breathing, and she was okay. Good. He had held back from full force at the last moment. A little bit more and he might have stopped her heart.
Now, quickly, he undid the effects of his fake Dragon's Breathing on himself.
He felt kind of drained now. Not just physically... He just did not feel the way he had expected to. They were cheering up there, cheering for him. People he only knew as acquaintances, people he did not know at all, people who had thought a non-Clan kid who was way too old would never make it as a ninja.
His blood was trickling down his leg.
As he stepped back, medics attended to Hitomi, giving her a cursory examination as they loaded her onto a stretcher. There was a bit of blood coming from her nose. Her clothes were soaked with sweat - she had given it her all, pushing her flesh beyond what it was accustomed to.
Yeesh, getting permission to use the Fist and not even hitting her with it. He looked up and the Hokage was making his speeches about the qualities of chuunin, yada yada, and about how the finalists would have a day to recover before the last duel. Well, he was a little tired. His anti-Jyuuken move took a lot out of the body. But it wasn't enough.
Onizuka Iruka yelled up at the Hokage, a booming voice enhanced by a simple technique that amplified the vibrations of his vocal cords, "Hey, Boss! I'm still good to go. I don't think the audience wants to wait a whole other day, am I right?"
The cheers and roars buoyed him up. Part of him felt like he could fly.
But part of him just felt tired. He was hoping to feel different after this fight, to somehow... feel something special. And it wasn't. It was just like Bro had said. Hokuto Shinken put him at another level... He had not felt real satisfaction from fighting since he had passed beyond the basics of Raging Demon and became the heir to the divine assassin's Art.
The truth was it was a let-down. There had to be more.
"Hokage-sama, if the other finalist agrees, I'm willing to fight him right now!"
It wasn't all brave lunacy, which is what he was sure bro was muttering to himself up there. Iruka did not want to give the Uchiha time to analyze whatever he had learned from watching him with the Sharingan during his fight with Hitomi.
Iruka knew Ryota would accept. The Uchiha were congenitally incapable of humility. His pride would not allow him to refuse Iruka's challenge, especially not since he had time to rest while Iruka was fighting.