Disclaimer: This fanfiction uses existing ideas, characters and or worlds, but is an independent work of art. I own nothing, hence the reason for publishing my writings here instead of in real books where I could make some money.
The massive gates of Konoha opened, slowly and fully, early in the morning.
Civilians and ninja alike crowded along the main street to witness as a veritable convoy of palanquins and shinobi guards came through and headed for the Arena.
It was truly an exciting day, one that happened twice a year over the Elemental Countries, though rarely the same place two times in a row … the Chuunin Selection Final Exam was upon them, and with the contestants this year, it promised to be quite a show.
Naruto had been up since early light, too excited about the Exam to sleep all through the night.
But, being of the energetic excitement, Naruto ran an extra round around Konoha to get rid of it. He managed to finish in time to see the approaching procession of nobles and important people on his way back to do his kata and a few cool-down stretches.
Still having plenty of time until he had to be there, Naruto methodically strapped his machete to his lower back, shoved the nunchaku into its thigh holster after an experimental twirl, and carefully slid the pointy middle prong of his Sai under the strap of his right-hand kunai holster, and fiddled to make the outer prongs slide over the strap.
Proudly straightening his forehead protector and brushing imaginary dust off his orange jacket, Naruto decided to strut around, clear his head and see where his feet took him before going to the Arena.
Though it wasn't noticed by looking at him, Naruto was anxious over a subject related to the finals … one of his clones had the day before overheard the Sandaime discuss him with Jiraiya. It would appear that the Hyuuga had not been without a reaction to his medical assistance to the current Clan Heiress – they had simply decided to wait until they would not be accused of interfering with an official event such as the Chuunin Selection Exams by depriving one of the contestants of training time.
They had demanded that after the Exams were over, Naruto be examined for any clue as to how he came to know of tenketsu not even the ANBU anatomy charts told of – he was to be questioned, his apartment was to be examined and should it become impossible to ask him questions, his body was to be taken apart to see what else he had been keeping secret.
Ranma knew that with the skill of the two persons holding the conversation, there were only two options for why they were allowed to listen in. The first and least likely was that they were so focused on their worries that they overlooked the eavesdropping clone. The second and most likely was that they had allowed him to hear, simply because they weren't supposed to directly notify him of it.
Properly warned or not, there wasn't any physical evidence of the additional personality in Naruto's head, and the only way anyone could find out without being told was if they could read minds, something only one clan could and they most likely dared not for fear of accidentally getting tangled with the Kyuubi.
Before he knew it, Naruto found himself facing three familiar poles, one of which he had once had the pleasure of being tied to for half a day before someone remembered that he was there – how they let someone as irresponsible as Kakashi take care of some children, he never knew.
Movement drew his attention, and Naruto saw the back of a familiar figure … Hyuuga Hinata. She had apparently not noticed him yet.
"Oy! Hinata-chan!" the blonde demon-container called out happily. "What are you doing here?"
The dark-haired girl jumped in surprise at being so unexpectedly addressed and half-hid behind the nearest post. "N-Naruto-kun?"
"Something wrong?" Naruto questioned curiously and came closer. "Do you have a fever? You're all red …"
"I- I'm fine, N-Naruto-kun," stammered Hinata, and pushed her index fingers together nervously. "Th-thank you f-f-for being c-concerned about m-me … Narut-kun. But sh-shouldn't you be at the Finals?"
"Bah, that's still a while away, plenty of time," Naruto laughed confidently. "I'm just taking a stroll, and somehow ended up here … this is where I became an official Genin, you know …"
"Oh, s-sorry f-for intruding," Hinata stuttered, clearly wishing she would have less attention on her.
"No problem," Naruto crowed.
A pregnant pause came into being between the two Genin.
"Neji is really strong, right?" Naruto asked in a strangely out of place seriousness.
"Y-yes," Hinata confirmed, reluctantly. "But you might be able to beat him, Naruto-kun!" she blurted so fast she didn't have time to stutter.
"Maybe," Naruto agreed, Ranma's assessment of the boy leaking through his confidence for a moment.
"I kn-know you have a good chance, Naruto-kun," Hinata affirmed and took a moment to get a better grip on herself before continuing. "When you cheered me on, I felt stronger … I started liking myself a little more. Not many noticed anything different, but I felt like I changed, just a little bit, all thanks to you, Naruto-kun."
"I do have a way of influencing people," grinned Naruto. While that may be true, not all changes were for the better, and he realised it. "But do you think I'm as strong as I pretend to be?"
"I don't think you pretend to be strong," Hinata protested meekly, but with a hint of something else. "Even when you fail and fall, you have the strength to get back up. You're not perfect, true, but I think you're a very strong person, Naruto-kun."
Ranma's smirk could almost be felt by Naruto as Hinata realised what she had said and blushed again, pulling a little more behind the wooden pole.
"Thanks, Hinata-chan," Naruto boasted, spirits soaring higher than moments before when he had felt some doubt about whether all his training would be enough. "I was a little depressed just then, but now I feel great! You know what, I-"
'Lover-boy, we'll be late if we don't hurry up,' Ranma interrupted, knowingly cutting off a description of the teenage girl that might have hurt her feelings.
"-Er … I like you!" Naruto finished hurriedly, having forgotten the gist of how he thought about her before, but remembering the end of the sentence anyway – and it was better to deliver the summary of his forgotten statement than nothing at all. "Gotta go or I'll be late!"
As Naruto ran away, he didn't see the red blush bright enough to be mistaken for a sunset, decorating the face of his conversational partner.
At the Arena, the audience crowded into the numerous seats in the stands were getting antsy.
Two of the contestants had not shown up, yet.
Naruto was to fight Neji at the beginning, so there was still plenty of time for them to show up … although, for some reason, the match-ups had changed some from what they had been shown after the preliminaries. The guy dressed like a mummy in winter was completely removed from the list, and Naruto idly wondered if this was a result of being late, and why they hadn't taken Sasuke's name off if that was the case. Ranma reasoned that something must have happened to prevent the Sound-nin from competing, and with enough warning for the judge to be notified and given enough time to scratch him off the list.
"You guys are the stars," declared the proctor, a new one for some reason, and turned away from the seven present ninja to chew on his toothpick. "Stop looking around and face the customers."
'Be careful with what you use against Neji,' Ranma cautioned. 'People are already suspicious about our sudden leap in skill, anything Ebisu and Jiraiya can't claim they taught us would only add to it and might lead to a lynching because some dumb idiots think our skill is because of the big fluffy animal in our stomach.'
'I know,' Naruto groaned, accidentally letting a little sound escape, which he quickly disguised as a result of stretching a little.
"Thank you, everyone, for coming to the Hidden Leaf Chuunin Selection Exam!" the old but strong voice of the Sandaime Hokage rang out across the Arena. "We will now start the Main Tournament matches. Between the eight participants that made it through the preliminaries … please stay and watch to the end!"
"What will happen if Sasuke doesn't make it in time?" Naruto asked the judge only loud enough to be heard by the toothpick-chewing man.
The man looked back at him lazily. "If he doesn't make it here by the time of his match, he'll receive a default loss."
'This doesn't feel right, Sasuke would have been here even if he had to pull himself by his fingers,' Naruto thought, troubled by his rival's tardiness.
"Okay, listen closely," called out the decidedly healthier judge than the last. "The arena might be different, but the same rules as the preliminaries apply. There are no rules. You will fight until death, surrender or until I decide one of you can't continue. You will cease any attacks if I call an end to the match, is that understood? Good. First match, Uzumaki Naruto and Hyuuga Neji, you stay while the rest of you go to the waiting room."
As Naruto waited for the match to start, he caught a glimpse of someone getting knocked down among the audience. Hinata and Kiba were there, and Hinata was frowning at the person on her right, who was frantically trying to straighten out his nose. Kiba was clearly shocked, and Akamaru didn't seem to know what to do with himself.
'I wonder who hit that guy, and why …' Naruto mused.
'I might venture a guess, but don't want to reveal it to you yet,' Ranma commented smugly. 'Focus on our opponent rather than the stands.'
"Do you have something to say?" Neji asked confidently.
"As a matter of fact, I do," Naruto blurted before Ranma could restrain him. "You needlessly injured and hurt Hinata-chan, your cousin, and I'll repay you what she couldn't ... with interests."
"You seem anxious to fight, so let's just BEGIN!" declared the judge, and retreated to a safe distance from most jutsu.
"I'll enjoy making you face up to reality," announced Neji as he slid into a lazy stance with his left hand leading towards Naruto.
Normally, when an experienced fighter goes against a Hyuuga, they realise that fighting up close is tantamount to suicide, and choose to fight at a distance in the hopes that something gets through.
Naruto had Ranma, who would be able to direct him towards undoing a lot of the damage done by closing the tenketsu – but that was one of the main points of the training Naruto had been made to go through, so he would have the skills to evade most of the damage on his own, and get in a few retaliatory strikes while he was at it.
Rushing in, making most of the ninja presently in the stands groaned at his fatal mistake, Naruto launched a series of punches and kicks, most of which were blocked.
The counter strike was swift, all anyone could see was a blur as Neji struck Naruto's now guarding forearms.
Despite how he was supposed to be unable to use his arms, Naruto lowered them and grinned.
Silence stretched between the two teens, and without taking his eyes off Neji, Naruto unzipped his jacket, and tossed it into a tree.
Underneath, a thick, black vest was seen, one that some recognised immediately as a weighted vest. On his forearms were more weights, and as shown by lifting the leg of his pants, he had them there as well.
The weights on Naruto's forearms were covered in finger-wide dents, but the skin underneath was completely unharmed, proven by removing the weights and tossing them under the same tree as the jacket. Either Neji had overlooked the extra padding in looking for the tenketsu, or he had miscalculated the thickness when attacking, but neither mattered, as the Hyuuga prodigy had been made to look a fool by the "dead-last" of that year's graduating class.
Over the last days of his training, Naruto had increased the weight for his training. He now carried a total of four hundred pounds with him, and he hardly felt it any more, which made it very strange to move once the weights were removed, making a nice depression in the dirt under the tree where they were thrown.
"Should we try again?" Naruto asked mockingly, and formed the hand seal his friends came to expect of him. "Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!"
A dozen solid clones sprang into existence, and rushed Neji while the real one remained out of reach.
Neji saw this action, and through the hail of shuriken and kunai, and the storm of sai and machete, he could see no other escape than the one he took.
"Kaiten!" a spinning dome of chakra burst into being, throwing away the projectile weapons, and sweeping the attacking clones off their feet several metres from where they had been, and promptly disappeared in small puffs of smoke.
'Hmm … chakra forced out in all directions from all over the body, while spinning around, thus creating a shield that doesn't just stop, but also deflects attacks to such a degree that the attacks hurt the attacker,' Ranma analysed. 'Shouldn't be too difficult to copy … actually, this thing is ideal for those with lots of chakra, imagination and little pin-point control …'
"Impressive," Naruto complimented as the glowing dome dissipated, being reabsorbed into its caster. Still, being confident based on Ranma's assessment, he couldn't help but going a little bit further to provoke a reaction out of his opponent. "I bet I could learn that inside a day."
Achieving a deepened frown was more than enough of a victory for Naruto as he smirked fearlessly. Getting a warning from Ranma about Neji preparing for action, the blonde pulled out the one weapon he had not used yet … his nunchaku.
"You're within my field of divination," Neji announced, and snorted at the choice of weapons before exploding into action. "Hakke Rokujūyon Sho!"
The extra second of preparation Naruto was given before the attack was enough time to get the weapon moving, and by an application of the limited Kachuu Tenshin Amaguriken Ranma had been teaching him, was able to deflect the attacks on most of his vital points, though some of the less important tenketsu were closed.
Once the attack was over, Neji cradled his hands, which had surprisingly only gotten heavily bruised instead of broken by the metal weapon containing a lead core. Even with the padding around it, they should have done extensive damage.
Naruto had fallen as a result of the furious attack, but slowly climbed back to his feet.
Already, a gentle pressure of ki was manipulating the closed tenketsu to reopen within Naruto's body, and the nunchaku was secured in his hand.
Though he could hardly move his arms or legs, Naruto struggled against his recovering body's desire to drop to the ground again, just to rub it in the Hyuuga prodigy's face that he had endured one of the Hyuuga clan's most infamous attacks, said to render any victim completely useless or dead.
"That the best you got?" Naruto taunted, though the slight breathlessness stole away a great deal of the effect.
"No," Neji countered. "Even with the few tenketsu I closed, you can't form chakra to fight me. You should surrender now, while you're still capable of walking out on your own."
"Not gonna happen," Naruto returned. Already, he could feel his mobility returning. "You're still going to pay for what you did to Hinata-chan."
"Proctor," Neji called. "You should end the match now, because I intend on killing him if we continue."
"You talk too much!" Naruto roared, feeling immensely insulted at the insinuation that he couldn't defend himself. "Bakusei Tenketsu!"
Dirt bulged upwards towards Neji, before erupting into a spray of dust, dirt and rock, hiding the dark-haired boy from sight.
Ignoring Ranma's protests, Naruto copied the moves Ranma had noted down from Neji's last attack, using his limited Kachuu Tenshin Amaguriken and his nunchaku to attack Neji.
Neji saw an attack coming after getting an eye-full of dust, but was far from prepared to be faced with a rough, bastardised version of the Hyuuga Clan's prized jutsu, and so only managed to block half of the strikes, the rest dealt blunt force damage to his body, resulting in two closed tenketsu in the right arm, a broken left clavicle, a cracked lower right rib and a ruptured spleen.
Even in his pain, Neji tried to get back up, but fell down.
Naruto had not gotten away from his attack without injury … several muscles had torn, but by the time he stopped, most of them had healed in such a way to allow repeated performance of those moves with better ease.
The proctor declared Naruto the winner after a quick examination, and Neji was hurried off by a team of medic-nin to patch him up before the injuries became too dangerous to handle.
Ignoring the outraged, fearful or awed looks he was sent, Naruto gathered up his things and strutted through the door leading to the waiting room for the contestants, a room that happened to have one wall less than normal, as it was facing the arena and was only guarded by a rail, allowing the waiting contestants to witness the match going on below.
Sure, there was excitement, as the one least likely to win had proven to be better than assumed, but the surprise of seeing someone other than a Hyuuga pulling off that dreaded technique kept those in the know about the complexity of it silent.
Even in the waiting room, Naruto confidently marched up to the railing, ignoring the shocked looks his fellow Konoha Genin sent him. It didn't matter, though, because he had avenged Hinata for the humiliation and injuries she suffered, as he had promised.
'That was very stupid,' Ranma chided. 'They already suspected something wasn't right, and you just had to go ahead and remove all doubt even against my protests! We're lucky we haven't been arrested by ANBU yet! As a matter of fact, I'm sure the moment the exam is over, they'll be crawling out of the woodwork to get us!'
Naruto ignored the rant beyond this point, and watched the proctor.
Sasuke had yet to show up, and a great deal of the crowd was getting antsy.
Had this been any other contestant, the match would have been declared an automatic disqualification for the missing party, but not for Uchiha Sasuke … it didn't really surprise Naruto when after a few minutes of waiting, a declaration of postponing Sasuke's fight against Gaara was made.
Naruto still found it annoying, and looked around what he could see of the stands.
Hinata was easy to pick out … sitting next to a boy with a puppy on his head and with a guy covering his nose on the other side. Standing next to Kiba was a boy in green, eagerly demonstrating to the two teens how much he had healed … Rock Lee.
Behind the boy stood Maito Gai, the leader of Team Gai, which included Lee, Neji and Ten Ten … and he was looking directly into the waiting room, and there was no doubt about whom he was looking at, even more than a hundred metres away. Gai was examining Naruto, looking at him in a new light after having witnessed or heard about the fight.
Lee suddenly struck a good-guy pose, and proclaimed loud enough to be heard over the hundreds of men and women talking about the turn of events; "AND IF I CAN'T DO THAT, I'LL CARRY MORE WEIGHT AND RUN FIVE HUNDRED LAPS AROUND KONOHA ON MY HANDS!"
"LEE!"
"GAI-SENSEI!"
"And now, the next match is between Aburame Shino and Kankuro!" the proctor continued from his announcement about Sasuke, having been forced to wait until the din died down, which Lee and Gai's interplay had served to do. "Come down!"
"… I forfeit," Kankuro announced without even leaving the waiting room. This also served to create a bit of a stir. It was very rare for a Chuunin-hopeful to surrender at such a time and place … at this point, most of the hopefuls were so keyed up that they jumped in without consideration for strategy or thought of their own mortality.
If someone didn't feel confident about their ability, they normally had the good sense to give up before the final match, so the match-ups could be modified accordingly.
The blonde Sand kunoichi snorted and whipped out her fan, creating a gust of wind, which she gently floated down into the Arena on with her open fan beneath her.
Naruto, recalling that Shikamaru was supposed to fight her, decided to encourage the seemingly uncertain boy in whatever decision he made with a friendly pat on the back.
Unfortunately, the added weight on his arm and his forgetting to compensate for it made him shove the Nara boy over the railing. Ranma could have warned Naruto of the impending mistake, but he was a mite annoyed at the boy for ignoring his protests while fighting Neji, and decided it would be good for the blonde to see what his rash decisions could lead to … though he hadn't meant for Shikamaru to fall over the side and four metres down to the ground.
"Sorry!" Naruto called after the still form of Shikamaru lying on his back on the ground.
Temari, the kunoichi that was ready to fight, did not like the slacking her opponent was affording himself, and made her displeasure clear by slashing her fan at him, creating a veritable explosion of air and dust where Shikamaru had been reclining.
As the dust settled, Shikamaru was found above the blast zone, standing casually on a pair of kunai he had stabbed into the wall.
Ranma was working overtime registering the attacks and moves the pair of fighters used as Shikamaru went from a very long streak of dodging and evading to attacking. Most of those wind attacks would require a fan of some sort to copy, but that was what a combination of clones and transformation was for. The only reason he had Naruto get real weapons instead of transforming some clones into them, was that unlike clones, real weapons could take some punishment before breaking apart, leaving a more reliable tool than one that would break apart into smoke after one good hit.
When Shikamaru surrendered after having been on the verge of victory, Ranma remarked that there was little doubt the boy would get promoted, even if he didn't win … the mark of a good leader is to know when to give up and save the lives of his team mates or members.
It showed good planning and environment awareness when Shikamaru used the gopher-sized tunnel Naruto had created with his Bakusai Tenketsu to sneak in his shadow through the large opening and out the finger-thick hole behind Temari.
As Ranma was explaining this to Naruto, Sasuke and Kakashi arrived in the middle of the Arena, in a swirl of green leaves. Ranma got a good look on how the technique was supposed to look on arrival, but advised against trying it until they had a look at the beginning, because a lot could change between point A and B.
Not many moments later, after the proctor had confirmed to the pair that Sasuke's fight had been postponed, and that they were right on time, Ranma got to see the departure end of the technique, and confirmed that there were inconsistencies between the start and finish … inconsistencies that he saw no need for, and would try to clean up before he was prepared to allow Naruto to learn it.
Naruto's behaviour had set them back a little in trust, and Ranma would need a lot of convincing to teach him much else, especially the "sealed" techniques, until the blonde boy could show some responsibility in the use of his knowledge.
Kakashi's departure was less spectacular than his arrival, but that could be because there was less mass to transport.
The fight between Sasuke and Gaara was an interesting sight to behold … the last Konoha Uchiha had improved a great deal in terms of strength and speed, something that could not be as easily copied instantly like Lee's fighting style … but he was still not at Lee's level and after a few series of attacks started panting like a dog and sweating like a pig.
What Ranma found impressive was when the raven-haired boy ran up a wall, lit his right hand with lightning and ran back down, digging a trench where the hand nearly made contact … with some improvements and restrictions on chakra put into it, that technique could be at least half decent, in his opinion.
As Sasuke's lightning-covered hand dug into the thick sand cocoon Gaara had surrounded himself in, Ranma detected two things, both disconcerting.
The first thing was that Gaara, for a brief moment, became feral and leaked killer intent enough to freeze those with a weak will.
The second was that Naruto started to suddenly feel tired, when moments earlier, he had been so full of energy that he was practically bouncing in place.
As Naruto looked around, he confirmed that he wasn't the only one getting tired, which set off red flags with Ranma, and made Naruto form the ram seal to dispel the illusion forced upon them. "Kai!"
Almost as soon as the illusion had been neutralised in Naruto's system, an explosion rang out from the edge of Konoha.
All of these variables could only lead to one possible conclusion … Konoha was under attack.
Author's Notes: I'm actually very irate at the moment. Not long after posting the previous chapter, I had finished the outlines for the Epilogue of TBP, the next chapter for CoP and was beginning the next one for this story, when the power went out. Okay, no problem, I turned the computer back on when the power returned and was about to continue my writing when I discovered a problem … nothing had been saved, even though I repeatedly did so – in fact, I make it a point to save after the end of each sentence or if I look away from the screen for a little while. As it turns out, there was a problem with something called the PRO11.MSI, which was needed to "convert" the files into text … without it, the additional files I had saved the text on would only show a blank page. I went about fixing the problem, and when I did … once again it showed me a blank page instead of the text I had spent days writing (combined, over ten pages of text) and was actually satisfied with how turned out. Thus the reason I am irate. I had to rewrite everything from scratch when I didn't remember half of what I'd written!
I know I'm a bastard (not literally, as I was planned, conceived and born within wedlock of several years) for leaving such a cliff-hanger, but as my writing style has a way of evening things out to a more balanced feel, I need to do things like this to increase the drama
Yes, you read correctly. Hinata decked a Chuunin for badmouthing Naruto … in canon, she just looks at them angrily, but with the changes from canon, I decided to have her react a little more actively.
Some may have noticed that Naruto used the Bakusai Tenketsu without Ranma having gotten that far in his training … this is a hint about their merging into one being having begun. The version used was different from the canon Ranma version, but there has to be some way of manipulating where the explosion takes place, even if canon never got around to showing examples of it(that I remember).