Here's the new chapter. Time for the final match.


They were here. They had made it all the way to the final round. This was fucking awesome.

He heard Shikamaru sigh and ask, "Oi Naruto, what are you so excited about ?"

That question didn't make sense to him, so he angrily retorted, "What the hell you lazy bastard. We made it to the finals. How is that not something to be excited about ?"

Shikamaru just shook his head, and said "And now we're up against fucking Gaara, who's a complete beast. Did you even see what he did to Team 7 ? I have half a mind to just resign right at the beginning."

Before he could fire a retort at his teammate, they heard the sound of someone approaching and turned their heads in that direction. It was Team 10 coming towards them, with Shino in front. Hinata and Sasuke followed along. Sasuke didn't look very happy, though he supposed that guy rarely was, and barely showed it when he was. Hinata seemed happy, but also strangely flustered.

Shino started speaking, and said "I have a proposal for your team."

Shikamaru interrupted here, and said "Yes."

Shino just blinked twice and said, "I'm sorry ?"

Shikamaru just sighed and answered "You were going to suggest a team up. I agree. I would have come to you guys about it when it seemed like the right moment, but I guess your team is more willing to do that then I expected."

He looked back and forth between Shikamaru and Shino. Wait a minute. The gears turned in his head as he realized why Sasuke looked a little miffed. He interrupted Shikamaru who was going to continue and yelled, "Hey, we don't need to team up with these guys. We'll need to beat them eventually anyway. Why bother with something like that ?"

Shikamaru looked annoyed, but calmly answered with "Did you hear what I said about Gaara ? His two teammates aren't exactly weak either. Once that team is down, it'll come down to Konoha teams to win, which will reflect nicely on our village. After that we can just go at it like we normally would."

He was still annoyed, so he started muttering and grumbling about how stupid this was, but Ino shot him a sharp glare which made him stop.

Shino nodded in agreement and said "Shall we come up with the battle plan then ?"


The plan was simple. He and Naruto would take on Gaara as the main attackers on each team and would try to buy as much time as possible, while the other 4 took out Temari and Kankuro. After that, it was just a matter of catching him once with Ino's jutsu, who could then force him to resign.

He drew Gaara's attention with a series of powerful frontal attacks at a high speed, which were all barely blocked by the sand, but Naruto had taken advantage of the distraction to attack from the side. Naruto had brought that terrifying red aura he'd seen a couple matches ago, with which Naruto was slightly faster than him. Naruto managed to speed past Gaara's defense thanks to his distraction, and knocked Gaara back with a powerful punch, this separating Temari and Kankuro from Gaara. Naruto then created a couple of clones to hold back Temari and Kankuro. They were easily destroyed by a swing of Temari's fan, but they bought enough time for Shino to block the path with his kikaichu. All right. That had worked well enough. Now it was time to focus on Gaara.

From what he'd seen, the only way to stop Gaara was to prevent him from pulling out any big attacks like the one used against Fu. Naruto was fast enough to keep Gaara's attention, but couldn't hurt Gaara significantly. All Gaara needed to do was stop Naruto for sometime. His role was to prevent even that by happening by throwing out strong attacks every time that happened.

Naruto struck Gaara, but it turned out to be a sand clone. The sand turned to a hand which grabbed onto Naruto's leg. He quickly launched a massive fireball at Gaara, which was blocked, but it bought time for Naruto to get free. Sheesh, this was going to be difficult.


He hoped Naruto and Sasuke were fine. They would probably be able to finish up here soon enough. He and Ino were taking on Temari, while Shino and Hinata handled Kankuro.

Temari taunted them by saying "I guess Konoha shinobi really are weak. Needing to team up against a single team is so pathetic."

They ignored the obvious bait, and continued attacking. Ino was scampering around, throwing shuriken, kunai, smoke bombs, explosive tags, and setting up flashbomb traps in a seemingly haphazard manner while he slowly used his shadow possession jutsu to maneuver Temari to the best location. Temari herself seemed clever, being capable of determining the exact capabilities and details of his jutsu. Such an opponent required the right bait. He signalled for Ino to release the parachute trap, which he then used to extend the distance of his jutsu. Temari realized it in time, and managed to avoid it, but it was enough to move her to the intended location. Ino triggered the explosive tags near that location, while he threw a flashbomb to extend his shadow's length. Temari barely avoided this by blowing the explosion as well as the flashbomb away, and rode her fan to run away from his jutsu. Not bad, but she'd already fallen for the plan. Ino used her mind body switch jutsu, which resulted in the subtle illusion used to shift her location in Temari's mind from her real location being dropped.

It had taken a while, since shifting it by too much would enable Temari to figure out Ino's actual location. He'd had to keep Temari's focus away from Ino in order to pull this off. But eventually, they managed to shift it by just enough that Temari didn't dodge Ino's jutsu fully and was trapped. A yell of "I resign" came out from Temari, and so the match was over.

He looked over to the other side. It seemed like Shino and Hinata were done as well.


She hoped Naruto and Sasuke were fine. Gaara's chakra was scary, and she certainly didn't want anything like what happened to Kiba to happen to them.

Right now she was going up against one of Kankuro's puppets, the one he called Kuroari. From what she could see with her Byakugan, it was hollow inside, with a barrel shape that she guessed was for capture. So she focused on avoiding the traps on Kuroari while warning Shino of any traps on Karasu.

Shino by this point had managed to discreetly swap away with an Insect Clone and was trying to sneak around to get close to Kankuro. She decided to help out by shaking the puppet she was facing off and heading straight for Kankuro, who saw her coming, and started shifting Karasu towards her to pull of a pincer attack. This let Shino close in and aim a punch at Kankuro, while also discreetly throwing a couple of insects. Kankuro barely dodged the blow, and scrambled away. Karasu had been moving towards her, but it was intercepted by Shino's insect clone, which upon being stabbed by a hidden blade, promptly dissipated into insects and jammed the puppet up.

Kankuro realized this, and disassembled it apart, and attacked Shino with the individual pieces. The head was moving towards Shino, and upon seeing it with her Byakugan she realized what was going to happen, and subsequently warned Shino about the poisonous gas about to be released, which let him dodge it well enough. Kankuro who'd hidden himself was incapacitated soon after by the kikaichu, which had tracked down Kankuro through the scent of the female kikaichu Shino had placed earlier with his missed punch.

Shikamaru and Ino showed up soon after, and together they started heading towards the fight against Gaara. They noticed an enormous wave of sand in the air that was about to crashed down and blanched. Oh no. She hoped Naruto and Sasuke were able to survive that because there was nothing she could do just then.


5 minutes ago

He had now managed to realize why Gaara had unnerved him so much. He'd thought it was because of the faint bloodlust Gaara gave or the ruthless way he fought but that wasn't it. He was irritated because Gaara reminded him of himself.

He was currently slamming his fists against Gaara, still empowered by the power of the Nine-Tails. Gaara's defense was still going strong. He heard Gaara yell out in irritation, and suddenly, a giant arm erupted out of Gaara's body and slammed him away dozens of meters. Sasuke caught his body to help break his fall, but both of them still felt it.

He then heard Gaara yell "You insects dare irritate me. I will end this right now and prove my strength. I alone am strong enough to beat insects like you, and I don't need the teamwork or 'bonds' you weaklings desperately rely on. The only one I need is myself!", with a vicious sneer. Despite the terrifying delivery, he couldn't help laughing. "Don't need bonds ? Who do you think you're fooling you lonely bastard. You're more desperate for something like that than anyone else here."

That ticked Gaara off, who was probably snarling behind that sand mask. "That's not true!", which he gave a calm reply of "Don't lie to me. I know what you feel, because I can feel it."

Gaara, twitched for a moment, but calmed down, and in a cold voice said "All right then. Show me the strength that your so called bonds have given you." With that, Gaara spread his legs apart,swept his arms to the side, and then raised them high up. The ground suddenly burst open, with tons of sand rising up, even more than had been summoned in the fight against Fu. Holy shit. He tried running away, but the giant sand wave was too large and too wide. He noticed Sasuke come to him and grab his arm, but before he could say anything he felt the sand slam into his back, hit his head on the ground, and blacked out.

When he came to, he found himself lying down, with Sasuke sitting next to him while wincing in pain. Hinata was healing Sasuke, and the others were standing around him, seemingly discussing the next steps.

Shikamaru noticed him first, and said, "Oh, you're awake ? That's great." He looked at Sasuke and asked, "What happened ?" Sasuke replied "I managed to get us underground with the jutsu I copied before, though we still ended up getting hit pretty bad. Though you seem better off than I am. Some ridiculous healing ability you have there."

He nodded as he slowly stood up, still feeling some pain in his body. He looked at Shikamaru and asked, "So what's the plan ?"

Shikamaru replied, "We're working on it. You two are injured and tired, but so is Gaara. In fact, he looks about ready to drop. Looks like that last move of his really drained him of a lot of his energy. I doubt he can move around much. Which is why he's shelled himself up in that sand sphere of his. All we need to do is break that open, then we can have Ino possess him and make him resign. Your new jutsu should be enough for that, if you still have the energy for it."

He nodded and said, "Yeah, I can probably use it only once given how tired I am."


The fight was easy enough. Gaara was ridiculously strong, but not strong enough to take on all 6 of them. They focused on creating a distraction for Naruto to land an attack. Naruto was standing to the side with a couple of shadow clones. Shino was using his insects to test Gaara's defense for any small openings while creating insect clones of everyone to distract and irritate Gaara, who was trying to attack with small moves that could still knock them out one by one. Hinata was trying to use gentle fist to break open the sphere, and that worked to some extent, but Gaara started forming spikes to stop that. Shikamaru was relating instructions to everyone while Ino was standing ready to use her jutsu. He himself was knocking away the sand whenever it creeped close to anyone. They didn't have to keep this up for long, as within a couple of seconds Naruto was able to use his jutsu, which took the form of a spiralling ball of chakra. He activated his Sharingan for a moment, and he had to admit, it was an impressive amount of chakra. Naruto slammed it into the sphere, smashing straight through the spikes that popped up with a yell of "Rasengan!". Naruto kept going, slamming it into Gaara hard enough to knock him back a distance, causing the shield sphere to come down, enabling Ino to use her jutsu and end this fight. Now it was down to 2 teams. Naruto bounced up and down in happiness and asked Shikamaru, "So what now ?"

Shikamaru sighed and said "Honestly, we were thinking about just calling it a draw. I'm out of chakra. Shino got some poison in and is also tired. Hinata isn't particularly eager to fight now and is also tired. Ino is tired and wouldn't be useful against Sasuke, who's the only one left on the other team. And you two are also tired and drained of chakra."

Naruto looked ready to speak, but he spoke first, and said "Naruto doesn't look ready to give up, and neither am I. Why don't the two of us finish this." Naruto got excited at that and said "Yeah what he said."

Shikamaru just shook his head and said "Whatever. Just relax a little. Don't need to take it too far." All of them started walking towards the proctor, though Ino muttered "Boys" while shaking her head as she left.

He and Naruto then turned and looked at each other. They didn't have to say a word, and started engaging in a taijutsu battle. They were generally evenly matched, though he used his Sharingan sparingly to read ahead and get a couple of solid hits in. Naruto noticed that, and created a couple of Shadow clones in response. He again used his Sharingan, managing to take out one clone while kicking Naruto hard on the chin. That seemed to finish the fight, but the other clone was still around and smacked on the chin with a powerful uppercut, and he blacked out, though he felt like he saw Naruto's body falling down at the same time.


A/N

Hope you enjoyed that. This is the longest chapter yet. I thought about splitting it up, but it flows better like this. The result was a draw. Also, just a sidenote, but right now it's around the time of the Sasuke Retrieval arc in this fic. That arc itself isn't happening. That's why you have Naruto being capable of using Rasengan, Kiba uses the moves he shows in that arc, and Gaara uses some moves he used against Kimmimaro in the manga.