The arena smelled like warm stone and money.
It was that weird, specific stadium scent—sun-baked seats, fried skewers, perfume drifting down from the VIP box, and a thousand throats ready to scream like they were personally invested in children getting concussed for national pride.
Naruto stood at the gate, rolling his shoulders like he could shake the nerves out through his fingertips.
Across from him, Neji Hyūga waited in the center of the ring with his hands folded, chin slightly dipped—calm in that way that wasn't peace. It was decision.
Like he'd already decided how this ended, and the rest was just the ceremony of reality catching up.
Genma's voice carried cleanly.
"Uzumaki Naruto… Hyūga Neji… prepare."
Naruto lifted a hand, flashed the loudest grin he owned, and yelled before Genma even finished.
"HEY! NEJI! TRY NOT TO CRY WHEN I WIN, OKAY?!"
Somewhere in the stands, Kiba bark-laughed like a menace. Ino groaned like she wanted to crawl out of her own skin. Shikamaru's sigh could've been used as wind release.
Neji didn't blink.
He didn't even look insulted.
He looked… bored.
That was almost worse.
Naruto's grin stayed up, because he'd learned something important over the last month:
If he let the fear show, it would eat him alive.
So he weaponized his mouth instead.
Neji's pale eyes slid over him like Naruto was a math problem. "Noise doesn't change outcomes."
Naruto's brows jumped. "OHHH, big words. You practice those in the mirror?"
Neji's mouth barely moved. "I practiced reality."
Genma's hand snapped down.
"Begin!"
Naruto moved first—because if he waited, he'd think.
He lunged in and threw a punch meant to be a statement.
Neji turned slightly, like he was stepping around a puddle.
Naruto's fist cut air. Neji's fingers—two of them, gentle as someone fixing your collar—tapped Naruto's shoulder.
It didn't hurt.
Not at first.
Then Naruto's arm went numb like it belonged to someone else.
He blinked hard. "—Huh?"
Neji's voice stayed even, almost instructional. "Tenketso."
Naruto tried to swing again. His elbow didn't cooperate. It wasn't weak. It was… disconnected.
He retreated, teeth bared in a smile that didn't feel like his. "Okay. Fine. That's— that's weird."
Neji walked forward. Not rushed. Not excited. Like a man approaching an inevitable appointment.
Naruto threw a kunai. Neji turned his wrist, the blade flashed, and the kunai changed its mind midair and clattered away—deflected with a motion too small to be fair.
Naruto hissed through his teeth. "Kakashi-sensei, is that legal?!"
Kakashi's single visible eye didn't leave Neji. "Unfortunately."
Naruto's mouth went dry. He forced his hands to form the seal.
"Shadow Clone Jutsu!"
Smoke erupted, and suddenly the arena was full of Narutos—twenty, thirty—each one yelling something slightly different.
"GET HIM!"
"YOU'RE DEAD!"
"DON'T TOUCH ME, YOU WEIRDO!"
Neji exhaled like he'd been waiting for the punchline.
Then he moved.
He didn't run. He didn't leap. He slid through them, hands a blur of small impacts—tap tap tap—each one breaking a clone like it was made of paper.
Naruto's clones swung, kicked, dogpiled.
Neji's fingers didn't care.
One clone went for his back.
Neji turned his palm and—
"Kaiten."
Chakra flared around him in a spinning dome, clean and precise. The clones hit it like bugs on glass and popped into smoke in a chain reaction.
Naruto—real Naruto—caught himself on the arena wall, breathing hard.
His arm still tingled wrong.
His stomach sank.
He'd watched Lee move. He'd watched Sasuke move. He'd watched Gaara exist. But this wasn't speed. This wasn't strength.
This was… denial.
Neji's whole fighting style was saying, no.
No to your punches. No to your chakra. No to your hope.
Neji's eyes met his again, and it was like staring into a clean winter sky that didn't care if you froze.
"Do you understand now?" Neji asked.
Naruto spat dust. "Yeah. I understand you're annoying."
Neji's voice sharpened by half a degree. "You cannot win."
Naruto pushed off the wall, tried to shake life back into his arm, and lunged anyway.
This time he got closer.
Neji stepped in and Naruto saw it—saw the opening—his fist was right there—
Neji's fingers flickered.
Naruto's chest seized like an invisible hook snagged his ribs. Not pain—something worse.
A stop.
His legs buckled. The air vanished from his lungs. His vision narrowed.
He hit the dirt on one knee.
Then two.
He tried to draw chakra and felt… nothing. Like reaching for a light switch and finding the wall wasn't there.
Neji's voice floated down like a verdict. "Your chakra network is closed."
Naruto's hands trembled against the ground. He could hear the crowd, distant and confused, like they were watching a play that stopped being fun.
"You… you cheated," Naruto rasped.
Neji crouched, close enough that Naruto could see the faint veins at Neji's temples, the calm violence of it. "There is no cheating. Only ability. Only birth."
Naruto forced a laugh. It came out rough. "Oh, is this the part where you tell me I was born wrong?"
Neji's gaze didn't flinch. "You were born as you are. That is your limit."
Naruto's teeth clenched so hard his jaw ached.
He thought of the villagers' eyes.
He thought of teachers who looked past him.
He thought of the way the whole world felt like a room full of adults who'd decided he was a problem, not a person.
Neji's hand hovered near Naruto's shoulder again—two fingers poised.
A final tap. A final dismissal.
Something in Naruto's stomach turned, not into fear, but into rage so hot it tasted like metal.
He couldn't pull his chakra up.
So something else answered.
It came like a surge under his skin—heavy and feral—an ugly warmth flooding the places Neji had shut down.
Naruto's breath hitched.
His eyes widened.
He could feel it—that other chakra—like a second heartbeat that did not give a single damn about polite systems.
Neji's eyes narrowed for the first time. "…"
Naruto's lips peeled back.
"Hey," he said, voice low, the grin gone sharp. "You ever hear the thing about… hard work beating genius?"
Neji's expression returned to cool contempt. "Spare me slogans."
Naruto pushed up off the ground.
It wasn't graceful. It wasn't heroic.
But it was movement.
Neji stepped back half a pace—so small the crowd wouldn't notice, but Naruto did.
And Naruto loved it.
He launched forward again, reckless, almost clumsy—using the brute force of that hot chakra to shove his body into motion.
Neji met him and tapped his arm again—
Naruto didn't care.
The numbness tried to bloom and got smothered by that other warmth like a wildfire eating snow.
Naruto threw a punch that missed by a mile.
Neji's palm struck his chest.
Naruto flew.
He hit the ground hard enough to rattle his teeth. Dirt got in his mouth. His ribs screamed.
For a second, the world went gray.
He heard someone in the crowd shout his name—high and strained.
He heard another voice—calm, irritated—like it was grading him out loud.
"You're wasting it, kid."
Naruto's fingers dug into the dirt.
He wasn't sure if the voice was real or just the echo of being yelled at for a month straight.
He didn't care.
He dragged himself up.
Neji watched him like an entomologist watching a bug refuse to die.
"You continue," Neji said quietly, "because you don't understand."
Naruto wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Blood streaked his knuckles.
"No," Naruto said, breath shaking. "I keep going because I do understand."
Neji's brow twitched.
Naruto pointed at him, arm heavy and trembling, finger accusing like a weapon. "You're not fighting me. You're fighting… the idea that things can change."
Neji's lips pressed thin. "Change does not exist. The path is set from birth."
Naruto's laugh this time was harsh and bright. "Then why are you so mad about it?"
The words landed. Neji's eyes flashed.
Naruto kept going, because once the dam broke, it all came out.
"You talk like you love destiny," Naruto shouted, voice cracking, "but you look like someone chained you to it and told you it was a gift!"
Neji's jaw tightened. "Enough."
Naruto stepped forward anyway. "I don't care what you think I can't do. I've been hearing that my whole life. I've been hearing 'you can't' since before I could walk straight!"
Neji's gaze sharpened. "You're different."
Naruto's grin came back—wild and stubborn and a little bit insane. "Yeah! I know!"
The crowd roared at that, some laughing, some cheering, like they loved the show again.
Naruto's eyes flicked up to the Hyūga seats—just for a second—because he'd noticed something during all this.
Hinata.
Pale and small in the stands, bandaged, sitting like she was trying to take up no space.
Watching him with a weak, shaky kind of hope.
Naruto looked away fast, because that hope was a knife: sweet and terrifying.
Neji followed the direction of Naruto's glance like he couldn't help it.
His expression didn't change, but something in his posture tightened—like an old bruise.
Naruto saw it.
And Naruto went feral with purpose.
He threw another burst of clones—not as many this time, because he could feel his body burning the fuel too fast.
Neji moved in, dispatching them again with clean taps—
Naruto darted left.
Neji pivoted.
Naruto darted right—
Neji followed.
Naruto dropped low and—
Vanished.
The ground in front of Neji collapsed slightly, a puff of dust rising.
The crowd gasped.
Neji's eyes narrowed. "Underground…"
He spun, chakra flaring again—Kaiten—aimed at empty air.
Naruto was under the arena, lungs full of dirt, nails scraping stone.
He couldn't see. He didn't need to.
He could feel the vibration of Neji's footfalls through the soil—each step a clean stamp of certainty.
Naruto swallowed grit and kept digging.
His arms screamed.
His chest burned.
But he'd grown up clawing for scraps of attention. Digging didn't scare him.
He moved beneath Neji like a mole powered by spite.
He shot up—
Right under Neji's blind spot.
Naruto's fist surged upward like a cannon.
Neji's eyes widened—just enough.
Naruto's knuckles connected with Neji's jaw.
The impact cracked through the arena.
Neji flew.
Not far—Neji recovered midair better than most people could recover on the ground—but he still hit the dirt and slid, feet gouging lines into the arena floor.
Silence hit for one heartbeat.
Then the stadium exploded.
Naruto stood there, chest heaving, dirt in his hair, blood on his lips, grin splitting his face.
"HA!" he screamed. "WHAT WAS THAT ABOUT DESTINY?!"
Neji rose slowly.
There was a bruise blooming along his jaw.
His eyes were colder now. "You got… lucky."
Naruto's grin sharpened. "No."
He pointed again—shaking, but firm.
"I got up."
Neji moved.
Fast.
Not the clean slow walk anymore. He darted in, hands a blur, palms striking—tenketsu, tenketsu, tenketsu—trying to shut Naruto down all over again, trying to slam the door shut before the wind could get in.
Naruto took it.
He ate the hits like they were insults. His body jerked, stumbled, but he stayed upright.
That other chakra surged again, hotter—thicker, like orange-red oil poured into his veins.
Naruto's vision flickered.
For a second, he swore he saw Neji's hands leave afterimages, pale and ghostly.
Neji's voice hissed, low. "You are forcing what does not belong to you."
Naruto's throat tightened.
He didn't have the words for it.
He just knew that "what belonged" had never helped him.
So he grabbed the thing that didn't belong and used it anyway.
Naruto feinted left.
Neji countered—
Naruto ducked under and stepped in.
Neji's palm snapped toward Naruto's chest—
Naruto twisted.
And with the twist, the chakra surged, involuntary, like a beast snarling awake.
Neji's eyes widened again, and Naruto felt it—the moment Neji reacted not to Naruto's body, but to the thing inside him.
Naruto's fist came up.
Not an uppercut like before.
A short, brutal punch—right into Neji's centerline, the kind of hit Naruto had learned from being thrown around: keep it simple, keep it mean.
Neji's breath exploded out of him.
His body folded.
He hit the dirt hard enough to puff dust.
Genma's eyes were sharp, calculating. He glanced at Neji, then Naruto, then the med-nin stationed at the edge.
Naruto stood there, shaking.
Neji tried to rise.
His arms moved like his body didn't want to obey him.
He got one knee under him—
And then Naruto's fist hovered over him again, trembling, ready—
Genma snapped in between them.
"That's enough," Genma said. "Winner… Uzumaki Naruto!"
The stadium went insane.
Naruto blinked like he didn't understand the words.
Then his face crumpled for half a second—shock, relief, something like grief—and he threw both hands up and screamed like he could tear the sky open.
"I DID IT! I DID IT! HEY! DID YOU SEE THAT?!"
He spun toward the stands like he was looking for one specific pair of eyes.
He found them.
Sylvie.
And even from across the arena, Naruto saw the way she'd gone still—like she was holding herself together by force of will.
He grinned at her anyway, because he couldn't stop.
He needed someone to see him.
Someone who would believe it counted.
The moment Naruto's chakra changed, my stomach dropped.
Not because I'd never felt it before—I had. I'd felt it in training, in little bursts, when he was pushed too hard and tried to bite back at the world.
But this was a stadium.
This was thousands of people.
This was eyes on him.
And Neji was peeling him open like he was a diagram.
Naruto's normal chakra tasted like loud sunlight—hot gold, bright orange, sugary chaos. Messy, human.
The other stuff—
It wasn't red to me. Not exactly.
It was burnt orange and rust, like blood left too long on metal. Like a citrus peel pressed into an open wound.
It leaked around his skin in little angry tongues, flickering whenever Neji struck him.
I pressed my fingertips into my palm so hard my nails hurt. I forced my senses down, tried to keep the color-reading from turning into a migraine.
It didn't listen.
Because the arena was a soup of chakra.
Adrenaline, excitement, fear, pride. The VIP box above was a different flavor entirely—controlled, lacquered, political.
And over all of it—
There was a pressure, faint and cold, like a fingertip against the inside of my skull.
Not words. Not a voice.
Just… attention.
It spiked when Naruto's chakra spiked.
Like something in me tilted its head.
Look at that, it seemed to say without saying it.
God-beast.
I swallowed bile and dragged my gaze back to the fight, because if I looked inward too long I'd start shaking.
Neji's chakra was brutal in a way that made my teeth ache.
Not "evil."
Just… iron.
Cold stone. White light. The sensation of a cage door closing.
When he shut Naruto's tenketsu, I felt it like a sudden dead spot in the air—like someone snuffed a candle with wet fingers.
And then Naruto stood up anyway.
I hated him for it.
I loved him for it.
My heart kept doing this stupid, traitorous thing where it jumped every time he got hit, like it thought it could cushion the blow from a distance.
I saw Hinata up in her box, bandaged and pale.
Her chakra looked like soft lavender trying to hold its shape in a storm.
She smiled—small, shaky, brave.
And I thought, with this sharp, ugly affection: You're too gentle for this world.
Naruto dug underground and popped up like a feral mole, and the crowd went insane.
When his fist connected with Neji's jaw, I flinched so hard my glasses slid down my nose.
The burnt-orange chakra surged again—bigger—hotter.
The pressure in my skull tightened.
My vision fuzzed at the edges like static.
I forced myself to breathe through it.
In. Out.
Down the colors.
Down the headache.
Naruto won.
He won.
And I didn't feel relief first.
I felt terror.
Because I'd tasted the other chakra in him, and I'd tasted the way something inside me noticed it.
And I didn't know what either of those things meant yet.
Naruto's legs almost gave out when he turned away from the stands.
He tried to walk like he wasn't shaking.
He tried to grin like his ribs didn't feel like they'd been rearranged by a polite psychopath.
He made it about three steps before the med-nin were there, hands on his shoulders, guiding him toward the edge.
"Hold still," one of them snapped.
"I'm fine!" Naruto protested automatically.
"Sit," the med-nin said with the kind of voice that made even jōnin sit.
Naruto sat.
He stared back at the arena, at Neji.
Neji was still on the ground.
Not sprawled like a loser.
Kneeling.
Breathing like he'd been running for his life.
It wasn't pain. Naruto knew pain. Pain was loud.
This was… quiet.
Neji's eyes were fixed on nothing for a second, like the world had glitched and he was waiting for it to correct.
A Hyūga adult—Hiashi, Naruto realized dimly, because he'd heard the name enough—was in the VIP box, face carved into stone.
Hinata sat near him like a ghost.
Neji's gaze flicked up there for the briefest moment.
Naruto expected contempt.
Expected that cold little smile.
Instead, Neji's face tightened like he'd bitten something sour.
He looked away fast.
Like it was an insult to be caught… thinking.
Naruto watched him, confused.
He didn't feel victorious in that moment.
He felt like he'd thrown a rock through a window and was waiting to see what kind of room he'd just exposed.
By the time I got down to the arena edge, my hands were already in "med mode."
Not because I was calm.
Because if I wasn't useful, I'd fall apart.
Mogusa—one of the nurses I recognized from the station—was already moving along the line of injured genin like she'd been born with a clipboard in her hand.
"Vitals on Hyūga Hinata were stable earlier," she muttered to herself as she wrote, then glanced up at me. "Sylvie. Don't get in the way."
"I won't," I said, and meant it.
Neji was still on his knees, chest rising and falling too fast.
A med-nin approached him with a diagnostic palm.
Neji didn't flinch away.
That alone was strange.
His chakra—when I let myself taste it—wasn't the same perfect iron bar it had been before.
There was a hairline crack in it.
Like a steel cable with one snapped thread.
Less stone.
More… air.
Raw.
Winded.
Human.
I swallowed, throat tight, and kept my senses low so I didn't get sick.
Neji's eyes cut sideways and landed on me—brief, clinical.
Then past me, toward Naruto sitting with the med-nin, talking too loud like volume could keep fear away.
Neji's jaw worked.
And then he looked away again.
But he didn't look away like he was dismissing Naruto.
He looked away like Naruto had done something unforgivable.
Not violence.
Not humiliation.
Something worse:
Change.
I stepped back, because this wasn't my moment.
Naruto had punched fate in the face.
Now the blood had to decide where to go.