Please leave a comment or PM if you have any questions, suggestions, concerns, or just compliments. For the sake of this work, the elemental balance will go earth}lightning}water}fire}wind. Thanks to SmallFountainPen for betaing chapters 57-73. Thanks to SoaringJe for betaing beginning with chapter 116.

Sadao grimaced, eyes trained on the darts his opponent already had ready to go.

That… wasn't good.

Takashi was also one of the ones who had vied with Sadao for top spot in Academy sparring matches, and he wasn't the type to slouch—no doubt he'd gotten a whole lot better since.

And Sadao…

Well, he had fire.

He had knives.

Didn't have the sharingan, was past the age where developing the bloodline was at all likely.

(Didn't have training in it anyway, if by some minor miracle he happened to have a dormant sharingan awake during the match.)

He—

He had a lot of skills which simply weren't useful in this match; how to converse, how to move quietly, how to parse gossip, how to put people at ease…

He'd spent longer working with Sensei on how to identify suspicious people than he had poisons, and he was beginning to regret—

The first dart brushed so close to his cheek as he twisted that he could feel the wind being pushed around him.

Shit.

Okay, but the body movement lessons had been good for something—he'd caught Takashi's tensing just before his surprisingly quick aiming, had managed to get out of the way in time.

But that was defensive.

Sadao needed to be offensive.

Fire.

His hands formed the seals even as he dodged another dart, even as he ran into a more advantageous position, and then it was Takashi's turn to be defensive—

And Sadao's turn to start revealing his surprises.

There was a benefit to the teammates he had, and the biggest benefit—by far—was Ibiki's aunt.

She'd spent hours helping Ibiki practice creating sealing tags. Ibiki wasn't exactly as good at it as the fulltime sealers, but they had more practice, and Sadao didn't much mind that Ibiki couldn't make loads of different seals, because Ibiki could create storage seals, and those were priceless.

Sadao moved his hand to his hip, pressed chakra into the tag he'd wrapped into place there, and grabbed the thick armor as it came out.

It was a struggle to get it on—Takashi wasn't an idiot, and the second he dealt with Sadao's fire missiles he was throwing darts, trying to at minimum force Sadao to split attention, fail to get the armor on.

And the armor was hefty, a struggle to move in—and that was when Sadao actually had it on.

He wished he'd had the time to prepare for Takashi before the battle, but he hadn't known who he was going up against, and the armor was not worth it for most opponents.

But he'd known that going in.

He'd known that in his months of training.

And he'd practiced putting his armor on mid-battle.

As the final strap was pressed into place, Sadao could hear Takashi's swear—his armor covered his neck, torso, and about a quarter meter of his legs too. Takashi's darts had just significantly lost their effectiveness, and Sadao grinned as a dart thumped into his armor while Sadao was sending out another ninjutsu. And another. And another.

And now Takashi was on the backfoot—and all because of armor, something usually avoided by ninja, usually considered too much of a detriment to dexterity to even consider. But Sensei had made it clear that 'tradition' wasn't nearly a good enough reason to avoid something, and Takashi had learned well.

And now there were darts all over the place, and that was another tool in his toolbox.

And Sadao knew just how to use it.

Misaki would read for hours, spend any free time she had learning, and learning, and learning.

He might not have studied poison himself, or dart throwing, but that was fine. Misaki had given him another option: the projectile technique.

The projectile technique wasn't used in Konoha, at least not that Sadao knew, mostly only because there weren't many wind users in Fire and the technique was rather more niche than the power-focused wind techniques that the wind users Konoha did have tended to prefer.

This technique was specifically meant for when you had scattered projectiles, meant to be used midbattle and send all those projectiles with some amount of accuracy at a specific target.

It had been hell to learn, and Sensei had asked him a couple times if he really wanted to put in the effort, especially as he had no innate talent in wind jutsu—but the very second Misaki had brought him a passage describing it being used in an old Wind-Earth battle he'd been hooked.

He loved projectiles, loved weapons, and this—

At the very least, he'd joked, it would help him collect all his knives after training.

But really, honestly, he'd just wanted to use it in battle.

Wanted to use it after he and an opponent had already been at it, after they thought they knew everything he could throw at them—

Wanted to see the shock on their face.

This wasn't the perfect time he'd hoped for. It was early in the battle, so early he'd not even had the chance to throw his own knives, and he'd have to deal with Takashi adjusting in real time—

But oh, was it worth it.

He threw another fireball at Takashi, a few knives just to say he did, and then—while ducking out of the way of another flurry of darts, this time aimed at his head—completed the signs.

And Takashi's own darts were coming back at him, and Sadao's knives too, and Takashi—

There was no direction he could dodge.

That was a benefit to the relatively poor accuracy of the jutsu.

He didn't have armor, either, hadn't shown any seals at all, and Takashi was almost definitely fire-typed too.

Some of the darts were headed straight towards his legs, others his torso, his head—

There wasn't anywhere he could go.

And Sadao still expected him to do something.

Of course he expected something—most people learned at least one earth jutsu just to use as a defense, and that was just one option—

He was already sending more fire, moving to try to get as far from the last place Takashi had seen him as possible—

But it wasn't necessary.

Takashi dropped, covering as much of his head as he could with his arms, and as a few darts thumped into his body (very few, actually, most didn't have the point at the right angle) he screamed his surrender. "Sensei has my antidote!" He shouted.

And Sadao watched as Takashi didn't move.

Oh.

Shit.

Paralytics.

That… that would have been rough.

Sadao should probably have been playing more defensively; he'd had no idea it was that close.

Wow.

He'd—

He'd won.

Oh, wow, he'd won!

.

They'd reached the quarter finals.

Sixteen competitors left.

And Sadao was still in the running.

It sounded bad, so bad, but Ibiki really hadn't expected his teammate to make it that far. They'd spent some time up on Kumo's border, fighting, but most of the time they hadn't been doing anything combative at all—they'd been talking with people, talking to people, treating people, campaigning for Konoha's reputation…

Just, generally, not fighting.

And they had fought, yeah, but—not nearly as much as a combat-focused team, the kind which spent their time hunting down bandit camps and focusing on, like, killing and stuff.

But Sadao had just managed to keep hanging on, keep surviving even as the field dwindled, and dwindled, and dwindled.

Asuma had gone out the round before, round four; he'd gone up against the only remaining minor nation opponent, a ninjutsu specialist from the Land of Cedar.

Now there were only four Konoha-nin left, the Cedar-nin, a Iwa-nin, and two Suna-nin.

That's it.

Three rounds to go.

Seven matches.

Ibiki whooped with joy as Sadao's name was announced—first to compete—and then his heart plummeted as the opponent's name went up:

Himitsu Chikara.

The Cedar-nin who had just beat Asuma.

"Well, that's… not great," Uncle Shin said.

Ibiki glared at him, but couldn't disagree.

Chikara knew all sorts of ninjutsu. Sadao did too—a benefit of being an Uchiha—but because he didn't have the sharingan he'd mostly focused on fire-jutsu, because he'd found them easiest to learn.

Chikara—

Well, Ibiki was sure he did have some sort of elemental preference, but he had no idea what it was—the Cedar-nin had used absolutely every element in his past matches, seemingly only choosing based on which jutsu would be best without any regard to ease of use at all.

It was infuriating.

Super cool, but infuriating.

And Ibiki was only watching every Konoha-nin who went up against Chikara fail; he was sure it sucked a whole lot more to be in the battle firsthand.

As Sadao came out Ibiki noted the stiffness in his shoulders—he was just as upset at the matchup as Ibiki was.

"He could still win," Ibiki said. He just wished he felt more confident about the possibility.

"He could," Uncle Juro agreed. His voice didn't bother to hide his doubt, though.

"It's so unfair that Cedar is so good," Ibiki said.

Uncle Shin snorted. "They're our allies, you know."

"Yeah, but right now they're not my ally." Below the two opponents bowed, barely hesitated before flying at each other.

"Fair enough."

"Why are they so good at ninjutsu?" Because while the other two had been beaten, by a Kumo-nin and Konoha-nin respectively, they'd also had an insane repertoire.

"There was a now-extinct clan that used to protect Sugi Village. They collected ninjutsu and created a lot of the jutsu-instruction books that are still used today. When the hidden village system was set up, they refused to join any of them. Kumo ended up killing off the main family, and then Konoha drove Kumo off during the first war, cementing an alliance between Cedar and Fire, and specifically between Konoha and the remaining branch families who wanted to remain independent. Nice people, actually."

Ibiki squinted. "They can be nice tomorrow." Below, Sadao's skills were being stretched to their limits. Chikara wasn't doing great himself, the long days of fighting clearly taking their toll, but he still had an uncountable number of attacks in his back pocket, while Ibiki knew for a fact that Sadao was running out of options.

"Even if Sadao doesn't make it through there will be another three Konoha-nin, including another Uchiha," Uncle Shin pointed out.

"And I'll support them," Ibiki said. "Tomorrow." He winced as a particularly violent earth-jutsu struck Sadao in his side.

"Sadao needs to pull something out, fast, or this is already over," Uncle Juro murmured.

Ibiki grit his teeth.

He knew Sadao didn't have anything else.

On the other side of the arena he could see Misaki, looking much like himself. They met each other's eyes.

They looked away.

They looked down, at the dirt, at the competitors, at Sadao's now inevitable defeat.

It took, in the end, a minute and a half.

Ibiki watched as Sadao was carried away on a stretcher, his shoulders slumped.

"He made it really far," Uncle Juro offered up. "It was a good showing."

"I really hoped one of us would still be competing when Sensei came back," Ibiki said.

Neither of his uncles replied.