A New Friend & A Race

Kiba Inuzuka, a classmate who sparred with the previous Tatsuya quite often.

He was a kid with short brown hair, slitted brown eyes and two red fang tattoos on his cheeks.

He could be said to be one of my rivals, the other being Sasuke Uchiha, not that he'd acknowledge it of course.

Jogging through the meadow with his small, white ninja dog Akamaru he appeared in front of me breathing heavily and covered in sweat.

"So what do you think? Wanna fight? This time won't end in a draw." He huffed and puffed like he was chasing after three little piggies.

"Sure, but not here though. Want to meet in the academy training ground?" I offered.

My predecessor was quite evenly matched with Kiba in their fights, if they could even be called that.

Their matches always turned into wild brawls where they both would end up on the ground, grappling and beating the snot out of each other before they would be separated by their supervising teacher and have their match declared as a draw.

"Nah let's do it at my place, I've got a private training ground." Kiba said as soon as he caught his breath.

"I don't mind but who would be the referee?" I asked him since we'd only ever fought under supervision.

"Akamaru will, won't you boy?"

"Woof!" the puppy acknowledged.

Now I wasn't the most enthusiastic about having a dog break up our fight if we got carried away, especially if I would be the one losing.

"In that case we're not doing any grappling, let's just spar on our feet." I told him to which he accepted, probably realising his partner isn't exactly the most suited to being a referee.

"Let's race there, loser has to do both of our homework!" He shouted as he had already begun running.

"Hey that's not fair, you got a head start!" I yelled as I chased after him.

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Chasing after Kiba, I had to duck under many tree branches as we made our way through the forest adjacent to the meadow.

Sprinting after him, I manoeuvred my way over exposed tree roots and around potholes that probably once were home to the rabbits we saw earlier on in the meadow.

Being careful was for the best since Kiba had almost fallen into an especially large pothole which gave me the opportunity to catch up to him, now we were neck and neck in our little race.

We both tried to sabotage each other as we were careful to properly navigate our terrain, not wanting to slow down one bit for fear the other would overtake us.

Pushes, shoves, throwing rocks, pretending that the Third Hokage was behind us. We used every trick in the book to try to make the other lose speed.

At last, we left the forest far behind and only had a single obstacle in our way, a wall.

Whilst Kiba tried to run around the wall and take the normal path to his clan's training ground I elected to do something rather risky.

I climbed the wall using my chakra on my hands and feet to stick to it, vaulting over and rolling forwards to kill my momentum before running ahead on the path spotting a surprised Kiba behind me by a few metres.

Now, this probably wasn't the smartest move since I had only just practised wall walking, and wouldn't be able to come up with an excuse for how I learned it, but to anyone watching, it must have looked like I was climbing using the cracks between the bricks as finger holds.

And so I ran like hell, ignoring Kiba's claims of flying turtles and Akamaru needing to do his taxes.

In front of the Inuzuka compound, just as I was about to win the race I was stopped by the door guards, only for them to notice I was with Kiba and wave me in.

_____

"That's not fair, you weren't supposed to climb the wall." Kiba grumbled at me as he entered the Inuzuka clan compound.

"You could have done it too, you just chose not to. Wasn't exactly nice when you pushed me into a tree was it?" I rebutted. Now you might think that it's beneath me to argue with a child when I am mentally an adult but I would beg to differ, children are annoying and should be bullied at any given chance.

Such is my sacred duty.

"Ugh, fine let's just go to the training ground." He grumbled as we walked through his garden.

As we reached the middle of the garden I saw a few dogs passed out on the ground next to a tall red flower that was shaped like a sunflower with a few petals ripped off.

"Hey Kiba, what's that?" I asked him. I hope that's not a poisonous plant but what I'm seeing isn't doing that theory any favours.

"Ugh, Kota led her pups to eat the dog nip again, damn druggy." He complained.

Dog nip, so these dogs aren't dead, just high… Nice to know.

"Should we help them? Or get a vet to check them out at least?" I asked him out of concern for the puppies.

"Nah, they do this all the time, if anything it helps them build up a resistance to weak poisons for when they become someone's ninken once they grow up." Kiba replied to me.

It made sense since there was no way the people in charge of a ninja clan would just leave a poisonous plant or drug lying about that could actually cause harm to anyone.

Especially the Inuzuka clan which care for their dogs like family.

Moving onwards, we left that strange sight behind and entered the training ground.

The training ground was a large grassy meadow with a few raised circular stone platforms that were meant for sparring on, on the side of each of these platforms were round targets for throwing weapon training, wooden posts wrapped in rope for taijutsu training and racks of different sized swords for kenjutsu training.

We both made our way to either side of one of the stone platforms that would be used as our arena and made the seal of confrontation as we stared each other down.

Akamaru ran over to the middle of the arena and counted down.

"Woof, woof, woof, WOOF!"

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(A/N: Next chapter will be their spar)