The Sarutobi was looking at her directly in the eye, unafraid of her gaze.
That was interesting.
Told her a lot.
Mainly, that he'd found she couldn't mindwalk or anything of the sort and had therefore assumed she'd inherited none of the Yamanaka bloodline at all.
More fool him.
It did mean her strategy had to be readjusted somewhat, but that was no great hardship—the ability to keep him constantly off-balance, always needing to double-check his foot placement, was recompense enough.
She started with seals, throwing them at him rapid-fire—she used a modified paper shuriken design, aiming for accuracy and distance more than precision—and putting up a genjutsu to make it seem like there were twice as many seals flying.
Sarutobi leapt back, clearly more than aware of the dangers of fuinjutsu, then began batting them out of the air with shuriken.
While his accuracy was disturbing—he'd already figured out the fakes and dismissed the genjutsu—the technique wasted his throwing weapons; he'd likely have resorted to lightning if it weren't for the whip Sakura had at the ready.
Never mind; time for part two.
Sakura's hand—the one hidden by a newly constructed genjutsu, because for all that he could easily dismiss them it still took time, recognition—quickly formed the requisite jutsu and the ground began to slowly creep, going in a wide, slow circle.
From their position on the ground neither Sakura nor Sarutobi could actually see the ground moving, but Sakura—who was still standing still, Sarutobi having only managed to throw a handful of easily combatted fire jutsu her way (a smart idea, if she hadn't specifically used waxed paper to write her seals)—could feel the ground moving, the subtle shift. Sarutobi, who stayed on the move, now throwing larger jutsu her way and combining the hand signs with the shuriken in an astonishing display of training, could not.
He could feel his feet becoming less sure, his body needing a second or two to rebalance after every step, but he couldn't pinpoint why.
The fire jutsu—which were a significant enough danger to Sakura herself that she'd been forced to begin moving too, for all that she'd trained on this unstable ground—began to slow in frequency as Sarutobi tried repeatedly to dismiss the genjutsu that must be affecting his balance; a good idea, but wrong.
It was time for the next step.
Her Yamanaka strain was not a genjutsu; was not a jutsu at all, actually—didn't benefit from hand signs like so many of the other Yamanaka strains did, barely even took any chakra to activate. Sakura's variation of the bloodline may have been considered one of the weakest in the Yamanaka—that no one outside their village would ever meet their eyes in combat certainly helped with that—but it was also the kind of bloodline that was always worth doing, if you could.
Sarutobi, about to unleash what looked to be some sort of massive earth jutsu, stumbled during the last hand sign, the building chakra form suddenly petering out.
Sakura grinned, shifting to her second pocket of exploding tags. Now that he'd gotten used to the size of her small bombs, it was time to see how he'd deal with the large ones.
Sarutobi had, at least, figured out now that something was wrong with the ground. His chakra wrestled control of it back to him, created giant walls of earth that he quickly wet with water to deal with the now continuous spray of exploding seals.
He was still meeting her eyes, still didn't think she had a bloodline.
Sakura gave him a second or two of unaffected balance, just to get him confident, then started pulling at his mind again.
The massive mud earth wall that had begun to push at her hesitated, shifting at the last second to stop an exploding tag as Sarutobi barely managed to leap out of the way he'd almost entirely misjudged the distance of.
Again, he tried to dismiss the genjutsu, over and over again as Sakrua kept moving to keep her eyes on him without putting herself anywhere near the mud creation.
There was no genjutsu.
He turned to the earth again, strengthening his jutsu, but she wasn't controlling his balance from there either.
And then another tag—this one wrapped around a small rock, to suddenly increase the accuracy and precision—hit way too close to him, and Sarutobi was throwing on armor made of mud.
That had to be exhaustive, or else he would have done it earlier.
She'd been winning since the beginning, him constantly on the backfoot since his first (still uncorrected) error, but now she was certainly nearing time for the finish.
She stopped aiming around him, started aiming at him, dozens of little balls wrapped with explosive tags headed right toward him.
At which point it became clear why Sarutobi hadn't put up the armor earlier.
It might've done a wonderful job protecting him from each blast, to the point that despite their proximity Sakura didn't think there was any danger, but he was seemingly unable to move, or cast new jutsu, while encased.
And the explosive tags might not be harming him, but they were harming the armor, requiring Sarutobi to spend constant chakra forming and reforming his mud armor.
Sakura sensed him, was disappointed to find he may very well last another couple of minutes—each battle couldn't last more than fifteen, and she wasn't certain how long it had been already—and decided to see how he'd react to an unusually long pause between explosive seals.
The answer was that he would drop the armor, ready for an all-out offensive.
Sarutobi had clearly gone into this battle intending to exhaust her fuinjutsu and then stall her out with his significantly larger reserves, but in addition to missing her bloodline Sarutobi had also apparently not considered just how many exploding tags Sakura had access to; just about everyone in her department had gifted her a handful of seals to use for the Exam, and most of the younger ones had no other battlefield seals to offer but exploding tags.
She suspected Sarutobi had taken the pause to mean she'd run out, or was about to, and had quickly jumped to what was, without a doubt, the most powerful jutsu in his arsenal—definitely not one he'd intended on using against her, his first opponent.
There was no way she could dodge in time.
None of the jutsu she knew could stop it.
Sakura wasn't worried.
Sarutobi had become panicked, become instinctive.
He'd forgotten about her whip.
As the truly massive ball of lightning arced toward her, Sakura's whip shot out, the tiny fuinjutsu lettering on the very tip calling for the lightning, and then shot down, straight to the Sarutobi.
It had been quite a lot of lightning.
It all followed the call of her lightning rod, racing up one side of the whip, hitting the rubber grip, then racing down the other—and then finding a human target.
The fuinjutsu seals, tiny etching up and down the rope, glowed faintly as she let the tip fall to the ground.
Sarutobi didn't so much as twitch.
The referee counted to five slowly, deliberately.
The match was over.
The medics raced out, Sakura moving to join them—she watched as they lifted him into the stretcher.
He was alive, which was good; had realized he couldn't dodge anymore than she'd been able to, that his best defenses would take too long to bring up, and so he'd relied on the mud already on and around him and suffused chakra throughout his body, fortifying it against the inevitable burns.
There were burns—his jutsu had been massive—but they were nowhere near as bad as they could have been.
There was no way he was competing in any more battles today, however.
In truth, only about a third of all forty competitors were likely to make it to all three of their battles; the day was even scheduled so that if more did the planned event would have to run late.
Sakura bowed to the man, made the seal of reconciliation.
He did the hand symbol back, unable to move otherwise.
"Good luck." He croaked. "Make it good; might still get promoted that way."
"I promise."
.
The Sarutobi's lightning jutsu had been great enough to completely fry Sakura's whip and much of the fuinjutsu was now illegible, but she'd seen that as a possibility when she and her nephew had completed the reworked design—Rento had paid for an additional two whips to be on the safe side, and then spent several evenings etching the seals, and then had the audacity to absolutely refuse any payment.
Now she released the second from a seal on the inside of her coat, checking it over meticulously as she waited in the soundproofed room.
It would be some time yet before she'd battle again—even with every battle limited to fifteen minutes, twenty if you included the break to clean and repair the field, even just the first set of battles took most of the day; almost seven hours until the round two battlers were randomly paired and the next battles began. (Of course, most battles didn't actually last the full fifteen minutes—hers certainly hadn't—but enough did that it was very rare indeed to be more than an hour or so ahead of schedule.)
The second round almost always contained significantly fewer combatants—based on previous years' numbers, about twenty people would make it to battle set two (thus making just over three hours of combat), and, at best, six people would be well enough to battle set three (only an hour, and despite the early start to the day almost always held in the dark.)
Few people ever died in the battles, being smart enough to do what her previous opponent did if put in that situation, but even if you didn't die it was very easy to become hurt enough not to continue.
Sakura took a nap.
She woke up, stretched.
She ate the snack she'd prepared—not a large one, fighting on a full stomach was a terrible idea, but enough to keep her energy up.
She stretched again, double checked her equipment.
Ran possible scenarios in her head until they began to freak her out, then pivoted to considering Minato's proposal for a network of fuinjutsu-enforced underground corridors throughout the city (the Inuzuka in charge loved the idea—it would, if nothing else, further increase the 'size' of the city—but the fuinjutsu promised to be painfully difficult to get working, so it was not, at the moment, being prioritized.)
She'd just moved on to considering how to order the truly enormous number of requests for Uchiha Shuji's improved computer when the light turned green.
Shit.
The woman across from Sakura was completely, utterly normal.
She wore the standard TJ uniform.
Her hair was pulled back into a wrapped braid.
She looked steady, calm.
Uninjured.
Shit.
There were forty people in this year's competition.
Sakura's entry, considering that it was necessary for the promotion she'd already gotten, was already known.
There was no requirement for anyone to actively disclose if they were participating, however, and the only other competitor who definitely knew you were was your first-round opponent—who often hid which name they got, to give their opponent a better chance of going further (thereby bolstering their own promotion chances) should they lose.
Sakura had certainly told no one who her round-one opponent had been.
And now the woman in front of her—no obvious clan markings, no obvious specialties, no obvious injuries—was her opponent, and her opponent had literal months to prepare for Sakura as an opponent.
Well, she would've recognized if the woman was Ino-Shika-Cho, so that was out.
No nin-ken, either, or the distinictive Hyuuga eyes.
The other clans, though?
Still on the table.
Shit.
The gong rang, and Sakura wasted no time in pivoting to her default plan.
In seconds the entire playing field was awash with her poisoned smog, everything gray and muddy and tricky.
Sakura finished strapping her mask to her face, jumping vertically onto the rounded wall as she did—no need to give a possible earth user her location.
A blaze of fire sparked, burning the gas near the woman, but it wasn't the most flammable of Sakura's concoctions—the effect spread no further.
Senbon, next, Sakura thought.
Prove she was a Yamanaka.
The poisoned gas—most ninja carried around masks nowadays. Not to be relied on.
Harder to get around a paralytic that was literally stabbed into you, though.
Another blast of fire, this one even larger, and Sakura grit her teeth.
Her smog might not have been designed to be flammable, but the fire was doing an excellent job burning it quickly regardless—she had mere seconds until the whole arena was cleared.
Sakura threw another smoke bomb, then readied a fire shield to catch and absorb the inevitable next bout of flames.
When it came, it was huge—Sakura was sure several onlookers had to have gotten singed, but that was what you signed up for.
The shield did its job, but the smog didn't look like it going to work—the woman had some sort of mask on, now, and she smiled unnervingly at Sakura, daring her to throw another.
Sakura did, and—gambling that the woman had shown no earth jutsu skill yet—leapt to the ground once more.
She wasn't good enough to perform a burial jutsu, although that skill would have been perfectly timed, but she was still a chakra sensor.
She let go of another battery of senbon in the woman's direction, then threw up her fire shield just in time once more.
This time she caught sight of the woman's eyes, already on her.
And the shuriken headed her direction.
Sakura dodged most, deflecting the two she couldn't with shuriken, and decided to gamble that her opponent was a sensor.
A very, very ninjutsu-heavy sensor.
Shit.
Sakura ran through her options in her head, throwing out a sealing jutsu filled with water as she did. The water gushed out—it was enough to fill the arena with about half an inch of water, factoring in what would be absorbed by the ground.
Sakura's boots—with their massive rubber soles—would be fine for her next gameplan.
The opponent's sandals wouldn't.
Of course, Sakura's gameplan was also obvious.
Shuriken came flying out, backed by another blast of superheated flame, and as Sakura combatted the approaching dangers the chakra behind it did something weird.
The woman had disappeared.
Huh.
Chakra cloaking, then.
Sakura grimaced; she hadn't practiced nearly enough against people who were able to do that.
Still.
A cloaked person still existed, still had a body.
Sakura made a quick hand sign and one of her easiest lightning jutsu sparked to life. It was weak, it barely hurt when hit—but it also jumped, jolted, spread. She aimed into her whip, which took up the charge eagerly, and then began cracking it in every direction—the sparks roamed, lasting far longer than most lightning jutsu, as the chakra inherent within it kept it alive, moving, trying to get to as many places as possible.
There.
Her opponent, now spotted—close, far too close, did she have some sort of touch-specific bloodline—darted out of the way as Sakura sent a series of poisoned darts her way.
And then—
Sakura knew she was too close.
How many ninjutsu specialists focused on genjutsu?
She broke it off, of course, had control again, but—
But her opponent had darted in the opposite direction, had used her proximity to weave a particularly deceptive genjutsu, and now Sakura could hear something whirring, and she was running out of chakra but she had a earth jutsu going up to protect her –
The whirring coalesced—a fire jutsu, clearly, two small flames whizzing around each other fast enough to actually make noise as it—
She darted out of the way—
It followed—
Shit—
Could track her—
Her opponent was standing still now, concentrating fiercely—
Sakura whipped senbon—
One hit, but her opponent didn't need to move—
The flames were quicker than Sakura—
It slammed into her back, blasting through her last-minute fire shield and piercing past far too much of her chakra-hardened skin.
The pain was—
"Down!" Sakura shouted.
Her opponent was still standing. Had she strengthened her position by sending chakra through her legs? That was smart.
"I cede!" Sakura shouted.
The pain was only getting worse.
The medics came out, realized her opponent couldn't move.
Another team came out.
Sakura was shot up with something—the medics hovered over her talking organ repair—and then she was out.