Given the possibility that I may not get the chance to update on Sunday, I'll write a chapter now. Your birthdays came early, and I'll ask you for advice as well: should the invasion of Konoha begin with the next chapter, or after the tournament is over?

Let's get this trainwreck moving.

"Okay, kids. You're here to put on a show, in addition to your bouts...so try and make it at least a little theatrical. Add drama, and insults, and whatever the hell else that might strike your fancy. And smile. It's a big day for all of you, isn't it?"

"Yes." Naruto nodded, though if you looked closely enough then you could see him smiling at Hayate with one of the wryest grins imaginable. "It's going to be great."

"That's the spirit, kid."

The irony, of course, was that Hayate was one of the Anbu under Kitsune's command...and the Naruto who stood at the arena's floor was only a clone. Kitsune stood with the various Kage and their escorts, his face impassive. The agreement had been to begin the invasion once the tournament was finished, but somehow he doubted that Orochimaru would stick to that plan; intuition, and the fact that the White Snake was incredibly infamous for his defection from Konoha, demanded that he be ready for anything to happen at any time.

"Care to place your bets on the winners?" Sarutobi asked, though it was clear that he was on edge. He had never felt particularly safe around Kitsune, and the fact that the man stood behind him simply made it worse.

"I choose Gaara." The Wind Shadow said immediately. His two guards, one of whom was obviously Orochimaru in disguise, agreed.

"Yamato." E stated calmly, in unison with Bee.

"Mangetami." Mei didn't hesitate to join the other Kage in supporting family members; Ao and Chojuro simply nodded their heads accordingly, afraid that speaking would make the Mizukage angry with them.

"Uchiha Sasuke." Raido, the second of the Hokage's bodyguards, declared.

In perfect synchronization, though it was absolutely unplanned, the remaining speakers dropped the final name. Yugito, the Hokage, and Kitsune spoke as one: "Uzumaki Naruto."

There were four people in particular that the viewers had come to see, and four specific matches as well: Uchiha Sasuke, and his fight against Hinata. Yotsuki Yamato and Terumi Mangetami, and their bout against one another as well as their fight against Sasuke if he defeated Hinata. Sabaku no Gaara and Uzumaki Naruto, and the battle that would come from them.

"What an interesting split we have!" The Hokage said. "Now, let's observe the matches."

"Round one, match one: Uzumaki Karin versus Sabaku no Kankuro!" Hayate shouted, magnifying his voice with chakra. "Begin!"

They started off with weapon volleys, with shuriken from Karin and string-guided senbon from Kankuro. From there, after dodging, they began the real battle; as the puppeteer sent the first of his creations at Karin, she gouged a seal into the ground with a kunai before running. She dodged the smoke bombs, leaping over a fan-blade that would have taken out her legs, and carved when she could.

"Not pulling any punches, even though I'm a girl?"

"Hell no!"

Kankuro unsealing a second puppet and controlling it...that was when the tides began to turn. Karin barely had the time to move around in the circle of the arena as he hounded her, but she eventually managed to complete an inner ring. The trouble would be in the overlapping, as she needed to put bigger lines into the earth than her position would allow. He made a tactical error in his guidance of Karasu, however; she dodged under the errant puppet before slapping an explosive seal onto its back. Five seconds later, and the wooden beast was eliminated.

After his second puppet was defeated in a similar manner, she decided that she'd had enough. Flinging herself to the wall, she prematurely activated the unfinished seal; anything and everything was possible, and there was no way to say that it wouldn't accidentally kill everyone who couldn't get away fast enough...though, thankfully, it didn't come to that. Lightning shot up from the ground, striking Kankuro and knocking him out in the process.

Uzumaki Karin had proven her worth. She would move on to the second round with nearly-full chakra reserves and very little fatigue, to face either Uchiha Sasuke or Hyuga Hinata.

"Round one, match two, you may begin!"

There was no movement from either of the contestants, though their eyes took on the traits unique to their Kekkai Genkai. Sharingan stared into Byakugan, cold smirks on both faces, and the tension could have been cut with a kunai; had the Uchiha clan still existed, the dead silence might have turned into a family-against-family battle to prove one's superiority over the other...but, as that wasn't the case, the bout between heirs would have to be a replacement.

"You cannot defeat my eyes." They said in unison, though Sasuke's deeper voice was much harsher than Hinata's formerly timid one. "They see everything."

"The might of the Hyuga has always been unsurpassed in Konoha. It's time that the...remaining...Uchiha learns this fact."

"Then tell me, Hinata, what do you know of the dead and the dying? I have studied the mysteries of life and oblivion, I have died and returned. Do you fear the blood that allows me to find victory?"

Sasuke slid a kunai across his palm, and the blood rose up at his command. "I am a Dead Man, and this is my power."

The blood let out a crack as it whipped towards Hinata's face, and solidified around the hand that rose to block it. With a sharp tug, her body was launched to the ground behind Sasuke in a semicircle; hand signs were formed in rapid succession, and a barrage of flames barreled down on the Hyuga heiress. While her escape was far from guaranteed, under normal circumstances, she managed to have something that would allow her to get away. The Kaiten she performed was enough for Sasuke to pull away his blood, and the flames were destroyed from the vacuum that was the Hyuga's rotation.

She charged, striking one tenketsu after another, and Sasuke didn't even bother with trying to stop her until she was done; that was when he launched her skyward, with a chakra-powered uppercut kick to the gut. Wasting no time in turning his blood to wings, he rose after her so that he could smash her back down into the earth for his victory.

Uchiha Sasuke had shown his might and his power, and would fight Karin in the first match of the second round of the tournament.

"Sakura..." Naruto's clone whispered to her as she got up, preparing to enter the arena for her own battle, "throw the match. Something bad is going to happen, and you'll need to be at your full strength to deal with it; Yamato already knows, but the people still want him to win."

"...fine. But you owe me."

"Oh, I don't doubt that I'll manage to repay you." His red eyes, and cruel grin, said more about his attitude than his words ever would. "In one way or another."

She ended up losing, after a few minor attacks, and the man they called the Robin was able to advance.

"Match four, Inuzuka Kiba versus Terumi Mangetami, begin!"

Kiba wasted no time, though it wouldn't save him. He'd have to fight hard from the start in order to advance, and even then he knew that he would lose to Yamato; the black-skinned man had barely used up any chakra.

"Gatsuuga!" He roared, launching himself forward with Akamaru. They spun like drills, incredibly quick and simultaneously difficult to dodge; were it not for Mangetami's war-hardened reflexes, she might have been caught. As it stood, however, she was someone who'd been fighting against Chunin and Jonin from the time she was ten.

"Yoton: Tsuhana."

A lotus appeared on the ground, formed of lava, and it shot upwards as Kiba rushed into it. While he was moving too quickly for it to do any true damage to him, it hardened while he and Akamaru were both passing through it; they were stuck, forced to forfeit, and Mangetami would move on to fight Yamato.

Aburame Shino defeated his opponent with a great deal of difficulty, given that she was a practiced user of the wind and its powers, but his triumph was great nonetheless. Gaara's opponent had not shown up, nor had he been seen in more than two weeks, so the Ichibi Jinchuriki was moved to the second round immediately. Temari and Shikamaru had their classic battle, of brains against brains and wind against shadows, with Shikamaru opting to give up instead of winning; he could feel that something was wrong, which was no doubt helped by the observation that Naruto was a clone, and needed to be ready for it...so he allowed Temari to advance.

All of this left only one match in the first round: Akimichi Chouji versus the one and only Uzumaki Naruto.

"Match eight, begin!"

They stood still for a few seconds as Naruto spoke.

"Please give up, Choji. We both know that you can't win, so why would you fight?"

"Because I can! To prove to myself, and my family, and everyone else, that I'm not just some big-boned baby that's only good for eating and drinking people out of house and home! Because no matter what, no matter how small a chance it is, there's still the possibility that I can win!"

"...no. There's not. But I'll humor you anyway, for the sake of our friendship. It's your move, Choji, so make it before I take it."

The large boy moved his hands in synchronization with one another, transforming his already-large bulk into a rotund sphere of monstrous size. He began to rotate, spinning faster and faster as he continued, and Naruto just stood there while he did. In a few seconds, as he reached maximum velocity, he sent himself out as a gigantic wrecking ball. His intention was to smash Naruto flat for his victory, to crush him and assert his place in the upper tier of fighters. "I'm gonna win!"

"I'm sorry, Choji." Naruto sighed, looking down. "You're going to lose." His hands moved faster than anyone could track, save for three people in the audience and Kitsune, and he was shot into the sky with a mere second to spare before he would have been flattened...but Choji wasn't done yet. He shrank, walked out, and shot a suddenly-engorged fist out in an attempt to obliterate his opponent.

"If you and Hinata can change yourselves, then so can I! I know that I can win this, even if it's just by luck, but a win is still a win!"

"No, Choji. No. You really, sincerely, can't win. You're a kind boy. A sweet boy. You're, fundamentally, a nice person...and that's not what it takes to make it in this world of ninja. You have to be cold. You have to be ruthless. You need to be someone like me, someone who was born and molded and created for battle. You have to sacrifice and forsake the ones you call your friends, cut all attachments, and defeat the demons that lie within...or, of course, you can learn to live with them and make them your friends. To win against me, you will need to know the things I know and do the things that I have done. To lose your parents before you knew them, and siblings that might have been, and to know that your power isn't really your own...but then there's the light in the darkness, the brothers and sisters that are mine without a sharing of blood between us. And while I have found those lights in the shadow, you're only beginning to see the shadow that's in the light. You. Cannot. Win."

The fist was dodged midair, with an outpouring of so much chakra that it was visible to the naked eyes of even those people who weren't trained to sense it; it was red and malignant, sickly and vile, and not a single one of the people who knew of Uzumaki Naruto and his "secret" were at all surprised to know that his chakra was the shade of flame and rage. He was, after all, the bane of Konoha's existence.

"When you have died at the hands of those you look up to, and are reborn with only the thought of vengeance on your mind, come talk to me. Then, and only then, will I call you my brother and my equal. Until then, however, please don't delude yourself with the thought that you can win against me. It's naive, disturbing, and really quite insulting."

It was with great effort that Naruto landed; not so much the landing itself, of course, but the fact that he landed with any sort of stability. He held to the ground, and he performed his signature technique in front of the masses: the Taju Kage Bunshin, the art of the Multiple Shadow Clones, was unleashed. Each of them grabbed a kunai from the pouch on their legs, beginning to complete the sealwork that Karin had started; while he was far from a master, or even an adept, he knew enough to turn an entrapment seal into an explosive one with a few lines and scratches at certain points...so long as there was a containment ring around the area, which would prevent the explosion from consuming the whole arena.

The blows came too fast to be registered with any sort of sense; one second Naruto was across the arena, marking lines into the ground, and the next his clones were hitting him with all the force of Iwagakure's famous catapults. He was being herded from all sides, he knew, but there wasn't anything that he could do to stop it. He was being herded into the pit left behind by Mangetami's plume of lava, and couldn't avoid falling into it...so when he did, and the clones piled on top of him, there was nothing to do but wait it out and hope that he didn't die.

"And so did the Sage of Crystal declare, as he split the beast into nine separate pieces: 'May you find peace within destruction, and hope amid despair.'"

The explosion rocked the foundation of the stadium, though it wasn't particularly powerful, and a cannon of smoke and sound rose up into the sky. Akimichi Choji was knocked out, defeated, and all of Naruto's clones had been vaporized in the blast; they had shielded the larger fighter, ensuring that he wasn't killed, and none but Naruto himself would ever know the truth of it...but that was part of the fun, wasn't it? Knowing that you were powerful enough to do something, and then not doing it?

In any case, he had advanced. As the Kazekage's knuckles whitened while he gripped his chair's armrests, and Kitsune smiled beneath his black mask of death, one thing was certain: if Orochimaru made his move now, instead of waiting as the plan dictated, then the White Snake would pay with his life at the hands of the Dark Lord.

Believe it.