[GUtW]—❈—58:: Sixteen Down: Sixteen To Go [VI]

Once again, Temari fights after Naruto, and once again, her performance is overshadowed by the blonde’s.

Only this time, it’s worse.

After the spectacular display of will and hardheadedness put on by Naruto and Karui in their match, there is simply little that Temari can do to not appear like a less entertaining copy of the blonde.

Consequently, when, during her match, she repeats what is obviously her favoured tactic and blows away her opponent with one swing of her giant fan, the cheers are perfunctory at best.

Naruto had done it cooler, after all.

Worst of all is that I can see clear as day on Temari’s face that she knew this would happen; she would step into the arena, get a decisive win, and people would only think to themselves about how the blonde Leaf idiot did it better.

And Temari is obviously not happy about that.

“You know,” I say to Naruto, who’s busy booing Temari, upset that her opponent, a Leaf-nin, lost, “if you’re ever matched up against her, she’s going to be coming at you with a lot of bad blood.”

“Huh?” the blonde asks, turning to me with brows furrowed in confusion. “Who’s coming at me with bad blood?”

A cocked head and a wondrous stare from me are Naruto’s only reply.

“How can you be so clueless?” Sakura asks, her expression mirroring mine.

“Huh? What are you talking about? How am I clueless? What did I do?”

With a sigh and a repressed desire to massage the bridge of my nose, I rise and begin to make my way out of the loge.

My match is next.

Seeing me leaving, my opponent, Mika Kimura, the last Leaf-nin in the exam besides my teammates and I, gets up to follow.

“Good luck, Sasuke,” Sakura says, waving.

Sage, this girl.

The chūnin manning the elevator down to the arena is the same as last time, and when she sees me, she smiles; “Hiya, Magic Hands.”

I blink at her, the strange nickname bringing me up short.

“Oh? Haven’t heard your fancy sobriquets yet?” the chūnin asks, mischief dancing in her eyes.

Wait. “Sobriquets?” I ask. “There’s more than one?”

“Oh, many,” the chūnin says, taking too much joy in this. “Magic Hands, Jutsu Canceller, some are even calling you The Lightning Wrangler.”

“Those are all terrible,” I say honestly.

Well, maybe not all of them; I’m rather partial to “Lightning Wrangler”.

“That they are,” the chūnin says in agreement, shepherding Mika and I into the elevator and stepping in after us. “But one of them is gonna stick after this fight for sure.”

Mika, speaking for the first time, eyes the higher ranking Leaf-nin with some irritation. “You talk like his victory is a forgone conclusion,” she says.

The chūnin stares back at Mika silently, her expression doing all the talking for her.

After a few seconds, Mika tsks and looks away.

Yeah, we all know how this match is going to end.

The rest of the short journey to the arena is in silence. At least until the chūnin sends us off with a “Good luck, you two.”

Mika and I practically ignore her, heading out onto the arena to take our places a dozen meters apart.

The announcer does his usual introductions, ending with a diligent reminder to the audience of my promise in my last match to not utilize genjutsu for as long as I last in the tournament.

“Will you really stand by that?” Mika asks, eyeing me thoughtfully. “The genjutsu handicap you gave yourself?”

I shrug casually. “I said I would,” I reply, then, after a moment, ask in return a question I already know the answer to; “You’re not going to use ninjutsu against me, are you?”

It's Mika’s turn for a casual shrug. “What would be the point?” she asks.

Despite myself, a little smile graces my lips. “You really believe you can beat me with taijutsu alone?” I ask.

Mika takes a combat stance. “Won’t know until I try.”

My smiles grows, and my sharingan swirl into existence.

I match Mika’s stance. “Try,” I say.

The gong rings.

My fight with Mika lasts twenty seconds, and were it not for my sharingan it would have ended in my defeat.

See, Mika is fourteen years old, and at our age range, that simple two year age gap means a lot. So much, in fact, that it takes every bit of my near prodigy levels of talent in the ninja arts to overcome it, and match her physically.

But match her I did. And with the ability to perfectly predict everything she did, well, Mika just didn’t stand a chance.

I danced around her, being everywhere she wasn’t and striking everywhere it would be hardest for her to defend.

Steadily, methodically, precisely I broke her down, until, fifteen seconds into the fight, her body was simply too damaged to carry on.

Mika bore the pain well; the physical as well as the emotional.

I saw it in her eyes though, both the pain and the wish that there was a way she could beat me. The fervent longing that there was something, anything, she could do that would matter. That would change reality.

But there wasn’t.

So she said the words. “I surrender.”

When I head for the elevator to return to the loge, the chūnin says as I walk past her; “Guess it’s ‘The Dismantler’ then.”

I pause. “What?”

“Your nickname,” she says. “It’s one of the less popular ones, but with how you just handled Mika, something tells me it’s about to become more popular.”

Restraining a sigh, I enter the elevator, ignoring the chūnin (whose name I still don’t know) and the mirth dancing in her eyes.

—❈—

A/N: thanks for reading. Love ya!

Oh, by the way, Patreon now allows me to take yearly memberships. Here's to hoping that it's a sign that y'all and I will be together for many years to come.