One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things ~ Henry Miller
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"Okay," Asuma-sensei said, lighting a cigarette. A curl of smoke drifted gently into the air. Kurenai-sensei was waiting further out, with Shikamaru and Shino who technically hadn't been invited but had shown up to watch their teams anyway. "Go."
He dropped his hand.
For a fraction of a second, none of us moved, poised tense in a moment of potential.
Then Sasuke brought his hands together and breathed fire.
It sizzled the air in front of us, blocked sight, caused my shadow to extend backwards away from it. But it was a distraction, not an attack. I stood my ground, used a kunai to deflect the shuriken that burst out of it, jigged my shadow back and past Ino and Chouji to create a line of defense.
Hinata burst forward, through the fire, hand extended and glowing with Jyuuken, aiming for Chouji. But I'd sensed her coming, was ready for it, and she had to backtrack rapidly to avoid being caught as my shadow pulled away from Chouji towards her.
I forced her back even further with a kunai-exploding tag combo into the ground in front of her, then had to twist and avoid Sasuke when he popped out of the ground beneath my feet.
"Not fair, that's my move," I said, rolling across the ground.
"Everything is fair," Sasuke retorted.
Then Chouji's enlarged hand smashed down where he was standing and he had to make a hasty dodge to avoid being paste.
I smirked.
Then raced through hand seals, lashed a hand out to my left and caught Kiba with a lightning jutsu where he and Akamaru were trying to corner Ino. They hadn't gone Man-Beast Clone yet, but the fight had barely started.
Ino took advantage of his stagger, stretched her palms forward and used a pulse of chakra. "Summoning: Hidden Tongue Hands!"
Chameleon tongues, I discovered, were really damn fast. A pair of them unfolded from the sleeves of her purple jacket, uncurling into the air and wrapping around their target. It was a technique that gave me a moment's pause and I wondered if the idea had come from Orochimaru's memories – but combat wasn't the time or place for those questions and it didn't matter anyway.
Kiba pivoted, struggling against the bindings but getting enough momentum to generate a Tunneling Fang and wrench himself free.
It was clear already that when it came down to firepower Team Kurenai clearly outranked us with heavy hitters. We had to even the playing field.
I leapt upwards, taking the disadvantage of making myself a target, and pulled out a scroll.
Then I unsealed it and dropped a pillar of rock on them.
"What the fuck?" Sasuke yelped, diving for safety.
It wasn't huge compared to the others I'd sealed. Maybe two meters diameter. The height of a tree. It didn't extend across the length of the training field, and the spectators stood no chance of being hit, but it made a nice distraction.
It plummeted down. I hadn't sealed movement with it, but it was a huge, heavy chunk of rock released in mid-air. It fell. Hit the ground and skidded, ripping up the grass.
Team Kurenai regrouped, leapt over it or onto it. Sasuke was smart enough – knew me well enough - to check it carefully first, which meant he noticed the explosive seals on the underside before I set them off.
Dirt went everywhere. But in this group, limited visibility really only hampered a few. It wasn't a viable tactic to gain an upper hand.
I pulled out a brace of kunai, wrapped flash tags around the handle, calculated the angles of the shadows and scattered them around the field.
If I can just pin them…
But I couldn't follow through because Chouji was having problems with Hinata – taijutsu verses a Hyuuga was no good and once she started shutting down his chakra system, he couldn't even use his jutsu.
"Earth Style; Earth Style Wall!" I raced through the hand seals and lifted up the earth beneath her feet.
She pirouetted off, barely disturbed, but Ino followed up with kunai and ninja wire, trying to drive her back even further.
But two of them tied up fighting Hinata meant there were still three enemies moving freely on the field – Sasuke, Kiba and Akamaru.
Outnumbered and outgunned.
I launched out another lightning jutsu, dropped my resistance seal and boosted as much chakra into speed as I could.
It still wasn't enough to take Sasuke by surprise. He saw me coming, retreated out of shadow possession range, and breathed fire to prevent me from following.
I dropped underground, popping up beneath Kiba and pulling him knee deep in the dirt. But Ino wasn't in position to take advantage of it, in a deadlock with Hinata and Chouji was –
An enlarged hand smashed into me.
I tumbled into Kiba, who grabbed me. It took a few seconds to use Shadow Possession and make him let go and then Akamaru was there, teeth bared.
I used a replacement jutsu to get clear across the field and drop down behind Chouji. That hadn't been a miss or a mistake. I'd been hit with friendly fire. Sasuke's chakra was burning like an ember with in him. Genjutsu then, of some sort. Sasuke didn't often use genjutsu, but it was foolishness to forget that when he did – he was good at it.
Grudgingly, I was impressed. But not happy.
I jumped on Chouji's back, clamped my hands down on his shoulders and pumped a burst of chakra into his system.
The genjutsu he was under shattered and broke.
"Shadow Sight!" I commanded, pulling my chakra across his eyes in a band of shadow. That would at least stop Sasuke trying again. It was harder to hold it on someone else, it probably wouldn't last long, but it would do for now.
I leapt off.
Kiba had pulled himself free with Akamaru's help but Sasuke was busy fighting off Hinata. Ino was standing behind her, hands set in a squared seal I didn't recognize, but clearly responsible for the role reversal.
But she was totally exposed.
I crossed the space in a body flicker, sweeping into a crouch beside her, hands already folded into a seal. My shadow flicked out around us, a circular wall of defense.
I saw Kiba recognize the threat, try to abort the attack he was already running. His feet slid over the ground, chakra ripping it up and scratching for purchase.
Then I set off the flare tag waiting patiently behind us, and my shadow flared out, stretching long over the training field.
"Shadow Possession Complete," I said heavily.
"Okay," Asuma-sensei interrupted. "That's enough."
It wasn't that we'd won. That was barely a pause in a real fight. Shadow Possession was good but it wasn't a complete victory. Sasuke alone knew more than a few ways to keep the fight going from there.
"That was something," Asuma-sensei said dryly. He regarded the training field with a bland, unimpressed face.
"Something," Ino mimicked, pushing her sweaty hair out of her face.
"He's not wrong," I agreed, tiredly. I dropped down to sit on a less-dirty patch of grass. "We don't train together enough. I had no idea that you'd managed those summoning jutsu."
"It's new," Ino said with a shrug.
Which explained it, but didn't excuse it. Because I'd thought that I knew how Ino fought, what jutsu she could use and how she would act… and I'd been wrong.
"We kept waiting for you to give us a plan of attack like Shikamaru would," she offered after a brief second, referring to herself and Chouji. "The three of us weren't coordinated."
"The plan was 'attack'," I retorted. But I thought I could see her point. We – Team 7 – didn't often lay out complicated plans and strategies, but Kakashi-sensei had put us through enough rigorous team building exercises that we knew how the rest would react to something. And that just got factored into our own individual plans automatically, so that the three of us could operate independently together in the same fight.
Team 10 was different. Team 10 had formations.
"Yeah," Ino said dryly. "I get that."
Asuma-sensei coughed, like he was trying not to laugh.
"Same with us," Sasuke drawled. "We weren't coordinated."
"Sounds like you know where you went wrong then," Asuma-sensei said. "That makes things easier."
"We'll work on it," Kurenai-sensei agreed, moving closer now that the fighting was over. Beside her, Shino was inscrutable, but Shikamaru at least looked satisfactorily surprised.
Hah, I thought with relish, didn't think I could do that, did you?
This hadn't been full out, no holds barred, fighting but it was probably more than he'd seen me actually do before. We generally only trained with clan jutsu together and the few missions we'd done together hadn't been exceptional. We'd split up to face the Sound Four, and Gelel had ended badly.
The two teams split up, but we only really went to opposite ends of the training field, so it wasn't like we were trying to stay secret from each other. Asuma-sensei drilled me in a few of Team 10's common formations, and we got to try and apply some of them to a target.
It was unusual for me to be the one calling the shots – usually I just followed Naruto (if he jumped the gun) or Sasuke's lead for it – but I tried. It only took us a couple of hours before we were improvising off each other.
Then we had Round Two.
"I can't believe you invented an anti-Sharingan jutsu," Sasuke grumbled at me, after we were all finished.
"It's not an anti-" I started to protest and trailed off.
Oh.
Well. How about that. And I would bet that Shikamaru had picked up on it, too hadn't he? 'Good defense against visual genjutsu'. I'd really understated that one, hadn't I?
"At least it will be helpful," I said, a little wearily.
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The week passed in mostly the same fashion, with team training taking up most of our time. At home, dad was putting a lot of effort into helping me with the shadow split. There were no recorded techniques in any of the clan archives – unsurprising – but the base reason behind it was not unknown.
Granted, a lot of the information seemed to come from hospital reports from people that hadn't coped with it. If that didn't tell me I was walking a thin line, nothing would.
The strangest part was trying to control where I split. I could make it even or uneven, put more of myself into one part or the other, but it was hard to control what parts.
Because I couldn't tell.
It wasn't until the jutsu was active that it became obvious.
It wasn't, specifically, memories or knowledge or techniques although that was part of it. I'd had the unnerving discovery, that if I made the Split too strong, my own shadow techniques became very weak – sometimes I couldn't even manage them at all.
"The problem with spiritual jutsu is that the requirements are vague," Dad said, moving a shoji piece on the board.
I considered. Picked up a piece, changed my mind and put it back down. I could see my Shadow Split out the corner of my eye, running through a Shadow Stitching routine that Dad had suggested. It was … odd to see.
I've lost something, Ino had told me, and I don't know what.
I could understand that feeling.
I lost the game. It wasn't surprising. But dad frowned faintly at the board.
Once I cancelled the technique, I could see why.
"Reckless," I said, touching a fingertip to a piece in a terrible position. It wasn't the only one. All over the board I could see it, touches of strategies that I disagreed with.
"Very," he agree, soberly. "And you didn't even notice."
I hadn't. I could see it now, see it easily, and it was worrying. I wasn't making decisions to the best of my ability when I was using that technique, because I didn't have access to my full self.
I ran a hand over my face and sighed. "That's a problem."
"I wouldn't recommend using it," Dad said quietly. "But that's a decision you'll have to make in the field, based on the information you have at the time. Just be careful not to leave your common sense behind."
He ruffled my hair. The words might have been a joke, but the meaning behind them was pretty serious.
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We left the village at midday. It wasn't exactly a subtle thing; there were a lot of us, for one thing, and Tsunade gave a speech and we basically had an entire procession walking out the gates.
There was a strangely amped atmosphere jittering through the group of us. Tension, but of a mingled excitement and anticipation, rather than fear.
We weren't all travelling as a big group – we sort of spread out like a string. Team Kurenai ended up at the leading edge, with Team Asuma and Team Gai trailing after. Tsunade was somewhere in the middle of the pack – either to keep an eye on everyone or in order to be rapidly deployed in any direction in case of disaster.
"It is most exciting for us all to be participating in the Exams once more!" Lee enthused, very loudly. "I wish to face you in the tournament, Neji! Then we may settle, once and for all, which of us is the better fighter!"
Neji didn't sigh, but it looked like a masterful restraint. "We fight all the time, Lee."
"Yeah," Kiba said, calling back over his shoulder. "It's not like we have that many secret techniques to surprise each other with this time!"
"It could be more fun that way," I suggested, though quietly and to Ino beside me. They could probably hear me, but I wasn't shouting. "I mean, we are supposed to be showing off here."
The slow, devious smirk curled at her lips. "Oh yes," Ino agreed. "If I fight you, you better let me use my summons."
I laughed. "It's a deal."
"I'll let you use them," Chouji agreed, too. "But you have to let me use my Bullet Tank."
We argued back and forth. Kiba wanted to use his Double-Headed Wolf form, though he did agree not to actually use the Fang Wolf Fang against anything that might, yknow, die because of it. Since I'd seen what that had done to Kidomaru, I was in full support.
And a bit of clever wrangling from Hinata got an agreement that Dynamic Marking probably wasn't the kind of impressive jutsu people wanted to see. Nicely done.
Lee, unsurprisingly, immediately swore he would go all the way to five gates. That also got argued down rapidly.
Asuma-sensei chuckled, though it sounded admiring. I took that to mean that the sensei wouldn't protest our match rigging. "Oh, they were right. You are going to be trouble."