Until the other Kusa nin notices her and breaks off from his fight, slapping Omoi's sword swipe into Karui's path and buying himself enough time to put Samui between his bladed knuckles and the other shinobi's stream of fire.
...
I grip the railing so hard my knuckles turn white, and find myself half crouched to jump over the railing before I can even consider the consequences of interrupting a match between two foreign teams. But before I can, a pale hand attached to a pale arm with a white arm warmer clamps down over my own, trapping it to the metal bar. Sasuke doesn't say a word, just continues to look down at the fight.
I hear the sound of metal clashing against metal, and then a strangled scream, and whip back towards the fight. I see the Kusa shinobi with the bladed knuckles stumble back, clutching his right hand. Two shorn halves of the knuckles that had covered his right hand along with a few severed fingers lay on the ground a few feet away, and are incinerated a moment later by the stream of flames from the other Kusa shinobi.
Ouch. So much for a reattachment.
I find Samui several feet to the right of the fire stream, which the Kusa genin drops a moment later, panting in exhaustion. She's in a low crouch, tanto held in a light, one-handed grip. She must have pivoted as soon as she saw the close combat specialist coming at her and decided to take a stab at him rather than try and dodge both attacks.
"Impressive footwork," Hatake observes, confirming it for me. "And that sword is as sharp as I remember it being. Although…" I see it at the same time he does, and my heart sinks. "She looks a bit unsteady on that leg."
"She must have hurt it during the second task," Sakura murmurs.
"No, it was in the first."
"Oh really?" Hatake asks, sounding so unsurprised that you'd think he busted my partner's leg himself. "Do tell."
"She got hit by a spear coated in lightning chakra," I say, watching Samui beat a hasty retreat while Karui and Omoi take over, putting the shinobi with the bladed knuckles on a desperate defensive now that his combat abilities have been halved. "Went in one side and out the other. She could barely walk on her own before they healed up the muscle damage the lightning did." Sakura winces in sympathy.
"She must be in agony down there," she says, and I crack a grin.
"Yeah. Getting stabbed sucks."
Down in the arena, Samui's teammates run literal circles around the close combat specialist, hacking and slashing at him in a fluid synchrony that I almost can't believe given their usual behavior towards one another. The poor Kusa genin can barely keep the worst of the attacks off of him, and is forced to let a few superficial cuts to his limbs through.
They push him further back, towards the edge of the arena, and get him within a few yards of it when he redoubles his efforts, swinging at both Kenjutsu specialists with ferocious abandon. A last ditch attack.
He ducks underneath a sword swipe from Omoi, knocks Karui's to the side, and slams his shuriken gauntlet into Omoi's sword before the Kumo shinobi can bring it back around, sending his arms swinging to the side and leaving his chest wide open. The Kusa nin lunges forward without missing a single beat and swings at his heart.
"Cloud Style: Front Beheading!" Karui cries, and her katana blurs, severing the Kusa nin's other hand mere inches from impaling Omoi in the chest. The Kusa genin chokes back another scream, jerking away from Karui, but before he or his teammate or even the proctors can react, Omoi's voice cuts through the stadium.
"Cloud Style: Crescent Moon Beheading."
The Kumo shinobi swings his sword around, turning the Kusa nin's strike against his blade into momentum and spinning around in a half circle in the blink of an eye. He holds his tanto out wide, and it's suddenly stained with blood. A pair of dull thumps come a moment later, as the Kusa nin's head and body hit the ground, yards apart from one another.
I gape. "Holy shit."
Hatake smiles. "Just wait until they learn how to incorporate the other six."
On the other side of the arena, the winded ninjutsu specialist howls in outrage. "Rosanjin!" The Kusa genin, Seitaro, runs through a rapid sequence of hand seals, and the air in the stadium seems to get dryer as he gathers fire chakra. "You didn't have to kill him, you bastards! You didn't have to kill him! Fire Release: Great-"
Samui lands in front of him, tanto flashing out, and Seitaro shouts in pain, dropping his hand seals and clutching at his bleeding face. She slashes again, this time at his throat, just missing him as he staggers to the side. The Kusa nin tears his hand away and fumbles into his weapons pouch for a kunai, yanking it out just in time to deflect a slash from her tanto that shears off half the kunai in one blow.
He snarls, anger overpowering the pain of his cuts, and rails against the slim kunoichi. She catches his wild stab on the flat edge of her blade, but the force of it causes her wounded leg to buckle underneath her. She gasps in pain and turns her fall into a hasty backwards somersault, narrowly avoiding the follow up stab.
Then she slides back to her feet, somehow moving with the fluidity of a snake despite only having one leg to lean on, twisting around Seitaro's next desperate strike and cutting deep into his chest. He grunts, slashing at her eyes, and she flows underneath that and severs the nerves in his wrist. Both arms now as useless as his teammate's, he heaves another shout and tries to headbutt the Kumo nin.
He freezes halfway, neck pressed up against the sharp edge of Samui's tanto.
"No, we didn't." Her arm tenses, pulling the sword sharply across the Kusa nin's throat-
And the Konoha proctor appears beside her in a cloud of chakra smoke, one hand clasped on her arm, the other pinching the flat edge of the blade between two fingers. "He's done," he says, and after a beat she nods, stepping back and sheathing her tanto.
It takes me until the match has been called and the Kumo team is already halfway back up the stairs before I find my voice again. "She just tried to kill that guy. For no reason at all." No way. I must have been seeing things. That proctor must have overreacted. There's no way.
"Kumo shinobi are incapable of showing anyone mercy but themselves," Neji says. "Anyone and everyone is a potential enemy that they'd be better off without." Nobody disagrees with him.
"Hey asshole," I growl. "They're not all like that."
"Really?" He raises an eyebrow at me. "How many shinobi did that partner of yours spare in the first task?"
I open my mouth to retort, and then close it. Each of the fights we went through in the forest play through my head one at a time. The first, two teams who Samui killed and dumped in the river. The second, where she got sucker punched by before she could engage. The third, where she killed as many Iwa nin as she could get her blade on. And the final fight, where she killed a few Iwa nin providing a distraction for Sakura and Sasuke.
Those were all understandable, though. She was outnumbered in both of the fights where she made kills, so it wasn't like she could waste time pulling punches. The only reason I got by without offing the first few shinobi I fought is because my fighting style revolves around blunt force Taijutsu, not Kenjutsu. And it's not like I can hold anything against her for not killing shinobi from her own village just to buy my teammates some time. I'd have done the same thing in her sandals.
And yet, as I watch the blood seep out of the thin cut in Seitaro's throat, I can't help but wonder.
"Well," Hatake says, while the proctors whisk the two Kusa genin away to the infirmary. "If nothing else, I'd say to watch your hands if you go up against those three in the finals."
I miss most of the next fight, and the fight after that one as well, too busy thinking about the nature of Kumo shinobi and wondering how Samui is doing. She walked- limped- down back down the hallway her team first came out of as soon as her match ended, off to the infirmary to get some more attention I'm guessing. I hope she didn't screw it up too bad. We've still got the finals left to go.
In the end the Iwa pair wins the eighth match, beating down their opponents from Kiri with ease, and the team from Ame does the same in the ninth match. The tenth match is closer, but not all that interesting to watch. Between a team from two minor villages, it takes about ten minutes for the kunoichi and shinobi with some indiscernible squiggles on their headbands to defeat the two shinobi with crescent moons on theirs.
And then finally, gloriously, when the arena is empty again the samurai assistant clears his throat and reads off the first team for the eleventh match.
"Team 7 of Konoha, consisting of Haruno Sakura, Uchiha Sasuke, and Uzumaki Naruto."
I grin. "Hell yes." I push off the railing, bouncing on the balls of my feet in anticipation. Time to earn that spot in the finals.
Sasuke grunts. "Took them long enough."
...
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