Free for All

We didn't have to wait long for the other genin to get there. Kankuro and Temari rolled in as well, both with serious expressions. Each team was off with their teammates eying up the competition with glances. Temari and Kankuro were doing the same with a hint of nervousness behind all their seriousness.

"You know anything about these other genin Gaara," asked Kankuro while looking at Kohara's team. I admired that Kankuro was trying to get a layout of who he would be fighting to get the position.

"The team your looking at is pretty good as far as I can tell. I don't know about that Mizuni girl over there but Kohara and that angry-looking guy have potential. Specifically Kohara, that guy may be a waste since he's got a temper. You don't have to worry about them though since I'm gonna wipe the floor with all of you." Kankuro and Temari frowned at me when I said that last bit. They weren't liking their chances of beating all these genin and me.

"Aren't you a little overconfident Gaara? You don't know the true extent of their abilities either and swinging a sword at it won't fix all your problems," jabbed Temari. I glared at her for saying I was just swinging a sword around. I may not be a master at it but I would get better with the sword.

"Alright everyone it is time for the fight to begin. Would everyone spread out in the arena please?" Baki yelled orders to us as well as the other genin to get us into position. I got put in the corner of the arena with a boy I didn't know on one side and Kohara on the other. Baki walked me to my position but then stopped and glanced around before turning back at me.

"That boy over there to your right is someone to look out for. His name is Hirosano Utari, he is unmatched in the blade by any genin. Do not try and duel him with your katana Gaara." With that Baki left me with a lot on my mind. I looked over at Hirosano again to give him more than a glance over. He was pretty tall for a genin, wore a long katana on his back, and had sandy brown hair. His expression was dark and without emotion. He definitely seemed like one to watch out for during the fight. Baki was probably right, I would just use my sand or iron sand against him instead of my katana. All the jonin including Baki now gathered at the upper balcony to watch us. I readied myself with a plan of attack already forming in my mind.

"This looks interesting you should kill them all in one go with that Sand Waterfall thing that you used." Why did Shukaku have to pop up right when I needed to focus?

"Do you mean Sand Waterfall Imperial Funeral? I can't use that since I don't want to kill anyone and the whole building would collapse if I used it in here. Did you also forget that Jutsu almost killed me?" Shukaku seemed a little upset that I wouldn't be slaughtering all my opponents but tough luck. I wouldn't need Shukaku for this fight, I could win on my own.

"Your no fun human," crumbled Shukaku. He then went back to sleeping or doing whatever he does when he didn't want to talk.

"Alright everyone on the count of three you may go," said Baki from above. Everyone around me began to ready their weapons. Kankuro had Crow in front of him ready to pounce on someone. Temari had gotten her iron fan out and Kohara had her cloth going around her arms. I looked over to find Hirosano had unsheathed his sword and was looking directly at me. I guess he would be my first opponent in the free for all.

"One, two, three, begin!"

I launched sand wipes straight for Hirosano as he sprinted straight at me. Hirosano's sword lit up suddenly with electricity and he used it to destroy my sand whips. He was using lightning style just like Sasuke did with his sword but it definitely wasn't as potent. It was only a light cover over the sword but still gave it enough power to cut through my weak sand whips. I brought up four walls of sand around Hirosano and sent them flying at him to trap and then crush Hirosano. The genin didn't waver though and advanced straight toward the wall that was between me and him. Hirosano obviously was closing the distance between us to use his sword or close range Jutsu. How would he stop the tall sand wall though?

"Lighting Scythe," shouted Hirosano as he weaved a few hand signs. His blade then flared to life with much stronger electricity than before. He swung the blade in the air in front of him several times. Scythes of electricity jump from the blade and raced toward the wall of sand. What an interesting Jutsu, it was very similar to Temari's wind Wind Scythe Jutsu. The Lightning Scythes slammed into the sand wall and momentarily made it falter before it reformed. That was just enough time for nimble Hirosano to lunge through the opening he had made. Once through the sand wall, he continued running towards me. This guy sure was swift and persistent in his charge. Hirosano definitely didn't hesitate like many genin due to the shock of real battle. He had easily found a way to get through my sand wall, only losing a few seconds in his progress to me. I would have to up the difficulty then. I raised up sand around me and then sent sand shurikens straight for Hirosano. He didn't even flinch at them, using his sword to deflect or destroy them. Baki had been right about this guy I would need to keep him at a distance. I decided to use bigger projectiles that would pack more of a punch. Summoning forth my iron sand, I formed several spears and needles with it. At this point, Hirosano was getting dangerously close and needed to be stopped. I started sending the iron sand spears and needles in groups so I wouldn't waste them all in one attack. It finally seemed that I had countered Hirosano because he stopped dead in his tracks from my attack. He tried to stop the iron sand-like with the sand shuriken but these were tougher. He couldn't break them as easily and was soon covered with cuts. Several puncture wounds covered him because he couldn't stop the iron sand needles. None of them were lethal but I imagined they hurt quite a lot. Hirosano gasped and fell to his knees still clutching his katana. I thought I had him beat when but then he stumbled up. Hirosano then started forming shaky hand signs which was not a good indication of giving up.

"Divine Lighting Wave."

Hirosano muttered these words and then sliced his sword down to the ground. It was very similar to the Lighting Scythes he had done before with electricity leaping off the blade. Except for this time, it wasn't some little scythe it was a massive wall of electricity. It was thick and I could tell it was very fast just from glancing. I took all of my iron sand, chakra-infused sand, and sand from the arena floor and put it in a dome around me. The iron sand was the innermost layer then the chakra-infused sand was the middle layer. The last outer layer was still building itself when the wave made contact. My sand shell was rocked and began to crumble. I felt the lighting get through all the way to the iron sand before it fizzled out. I let the shield fall and saw the mass destruction it had wrought. Some of my iron sand had been hit by the lighting wave but for the most part, it was okay.

"That was a close one human, you should have ended that other human's life quicker. It would have saved you a hassle," said Shukaku.

"I already said I'm not killing anyone," I told him angrily. Why couldn't he get the message?

Hirosano was face down on the ground with his sword still in his hand. That powerful lighting style Jutsu had most likely eaten up all of his remaining chakra. He was out for the count it seemed. I formed a sand platform around him and lifted him up to the balcony where the jonin were standing. Medical ninja rushed over and startled healing him. I didn't want Hirosano in the way, he had fought a good battle. Suddenly, my sand shield raised to cover my right side. I felt something heavy make contact with the shield and bounce off. I lowered the shield and found a grinning Mizuni. She had a long chain with a big metal ball attached to the end of it. That ball must have been what hit my sand shield but how had she gotten so much power behind it? Mizuni didn't exactly look very powerful but I guess that was all a ruse.

"Gaara, what do you say we have a duel? Rasho really wanted to duel you but looks like I got to your first," Mizuni said with a scary smile. She was starting to look a little deranged which scared me. Mizuni swung the ball and chain with lightning speed. The ball was sent flying insanely fast at my face. I formed the sand from the floor into an arm and caught the ball. I yanked on it and sent Mizuni flying towards me. I thought I had her beat with that but I saw her grin widen even more. Mizuni twisted her body and altered her path to being straight at me. My sand didn't even have time to react as her feet slammed into my chest. I fell to the ground in pain and went to get up but was met with a kick. I stumbled backward from the blow and blindly lashed out with my sand. I heard one of the whips make contact and then a loud grunt. I forced myself up to see Mizuni was standing twenty feet away on the ground. She wasn't moving and for a moment I felt my heart stop. This went on for a few seconds before she lurched back up into a crawling position. My heart went back to pumping and I started walking toward Mizuni. It was a crafty little trick she had played on me I'll give her that. I brought my sand up around her until she was totally encased by it. She feebly struggled and then gave up, realizing it was hopeless.

"You're quite strong Gaara I wish I could say our fight was close but it really wasn't. You're on a whole other level compared to me," said Mizuni with a sick giggle. A chill went down my spine as I listened to her. This girl was on a whole other level of creepy compared to me, she had me beat there. I lifted her up and dropped her on the balcony just as I had Hirosano. The medical ninja went straight to work on Mizuni just as they had before with Hirosano. I looked and found most of the genin had been eliminated. Hirosano's teammates had been wiped out so it was now just my team and Kohara's team minus Mizuni. Kankuro was fighting with Rasho with his Crow puppet. The puppet was different though because it had two tubes with nozzles coming from his back and facing forward. One seemed to spray water while the other spewed fire. Rasho was almost completed engulfed in flames from head to toe. Rasho's gimmick was fire style then which was ironic considering his temper.

"We were hoping you would finish up with Mizuni so we could fight you," said a voice to my left. I turned and found the unexpected in front of me. Kohara and Temari stood next to each other, their weapons at the ready. Why weren't they fighting each other? Then it hit me that maybe they had gotten smart and decided to team up against me. Even though it was a free for all there weren't any rules other than don't kill your opponents. There wasn't anything saying your couldn't team up just that only one person would become the representative. Kohara and Temari must have realized that alone they wouldn't stand a chance against me, hence why they now were teamed up.

"I expected nothing less from you two but I have to say I didn't know that you were friends. I guess I don't know everything," I said to them as I got my iron sand gathered around me.

"You don't stand a chance Gaara," said Kohara as she let her cloth fly towards me. I sliced it in half by making a sharp edge with the iron sand. A wind-style attack came from Temari on my left which I blocked by raising sand from the floor. I barely managed to use the iron sand to stop another cloth attack from Kohara and stop yet another wind-style attack from Temari. I juggled between defending against both of their attacks with my sand shield picking up anything I couldn't get. They didn't allow for a moment of peace between their assaults. As frustrating as this was I was actually kind of proud that they had come up with such a successful tactic. All they had to do was keep me from attacking them and eventually I would run out of chakra. They both ran the same risk of course of running out of chakra using their basic but effective attacks. I wasn't so easy to beat though and they had underestimated my abilities. I took all of my sand and created the same shell around me that I had for Hirosano's last-ditch lightning-style attack. Inside the darkness of the shell, I could feel and hear the girls concentrating their attacks on a single point to try and breakthrough. Another good idea that was totally futile against my impenetrable sand. They wouldn't even make it to my final iron sand layer without killing themselves from chakra deprivation. I covered my right eye and then activated my Desert Eye Jutsu to see on the outside of my shell. After a few seconds, my optic nerve connected and I saw Kohara and Temari laying into my shell with a vengeance. Now that I could see I activated my Restless Desert Hands on the whole arena. I wanted to wrap this whole fight up and I liked using my Restless Desert Hands Jutsu. Kohara did exactly what she had done during our last fight and leaped up to the balcony. Temari leaped into the air and glided on her iron fan blade to stay out of reach. Kankuro and Rasho were not as smart though and were both being sucked down into the floor by the Jutsu. Rasho flared even brighter with fired completely blocking out his body to make him look like an enormous fireball. My sand surprisingly did start to melt into glass. I hadn't thought Rasho was capable of such intense heat at his current level. Everyone seemed to have a trick up their sleeve in this battle it seemed. Rasho swiftly turned my hands around him to melting glass and began to slowly wade through it to the broken glass to my shell. I guess I had lit his short fuse and now nothing was going to stop him from trying to take me down. I stopped my Restless Desert Hands except for Kankuro who was completely immobilized by it. The Jutsu had taken him off guard and he wasn't able to use the water nozzle on Crow to get him free. Now I only had three opponents left to face which was decent odds. Rasho was now free to attack my shell without the Restless desert Hands in his way so he quickly closed the distance between us. He then began hammering away with his fists, delivering blows with surprising power. My weak outer layer was simply not strong enough to resist such heat and started to crumble. Annoyed at his progress I shifted sand underneath him to form a large hole but kept the sand he was standing on solid. Just as Rasho managed to get through the first layer of the shell I took away the sand below him that I had kept hard for him to stand on. Rasho plunged into the shallow hole in the ground until he hit the sandstone at the bottom. It was only about ten feet deep since there wasn't a bottomless reserve of sand in the arena but it was enough to trap Rasho and his fire. Rasho immediately tried to climb out of the hole but I stopped him dead in his tracks by moving all the sand back. The sand slammed into Rasho and then swallowed him up into the ground. I didn't leave him down there too long, just long enough for his flames to be extinguished from lack of oxygen. I then yanked his unconscious body back to the surface back up to the surface. I tossed him up to the balcony and the medical ninja caught him. I caught a few scowls for not lifting him gently up there like I had the others but I didn't care. Turning my floating eye back to Kohara and Temari, I found that Temari was back to working on the sand shell. I looked all around yet I couldn't find Kohara anywhere which worried me. She was pretty smart and had fought me before so she knew how I fought. Had she already thought of a weak point in my shell defense? There weren't any weaknesses that I could think of but perhaps she had thought of one since our last battle. My shell shook a little bit and a looked back at Temari to find that she had tried to use paper bombs to break my shell. I thought it was odd though that the explosions and the shaking of the ground didn't completely match up with each other. Suddenly the ground shook even more and made me accidentally stop by Desert Eye Jutsu. The ground that I had been standing on burst open and Kohara shot out from it. Kohara must have been using her Spinning Cloth Cutter Jutsu to drill under the shell. She was the reason that the shaking didn't match up with the paper bombs, most of the shaking had been the vibrations of her drilling. She immediately went to wrap me up with her cloth but I drew my katana and sliced the cloth before it got to me. The shell was not big enough for the both of us to effectively attack each other so it was a bit chaotic. Kohara repeatedly tried to get her cloth to latch onto some part of my body but I sliced them apart before they could. I then used the iron sand from the inner layer to grab Kohara and trap her before she could get lucky enough for her cloth to hit me.

"Good thinking Kohara, even I didn't consider that the ground under my shell could be a weakness." Kohara immediately smiled at my remark which was then followed by a blush as her bad social skills caught up with her.

"Thanks, it took me a while to think of a way to beat your shell. I'm just glad that everything is going according to plan." According to the plan? What could she mean by that? I didn't have time to think about it because an explosion from behind sent me flying forward into the other side of my shell. I felt my shield completely crumble and iron sand crash down to cover me. My ears rang from the explosion and I blindly began to crawl. A wind-style attack hit me and sent me flying through the air and then into a wall. I felt the taste of blood in my mouth and opened my eyes to see what was going on. I saw what looked like a blurry image of Temari helping Kohara get up. Something was definitely wrong with my body, it hurt like crazy. I attempted to stand up but stumbled back down because my legs weren't able to support me. Temari must have used every single paper bomb she had and Kohara's to blow apart my shell. Kohara had simply been a distraction so I wouldn't notice and stop Temari from using so many paper bombs. I would have died if not for the iron sand, I was really wishing this wasn't the one time they overestimated my sand shield. My ears finally stopped ringing and I heard running from in front of me. I glanced up to see Temari and Kohara with worried expressions. I could imagine that I didn't look too good after getting blown up so they most likely had realized they had miscalculated my sand shield's strength. Anger that wasn't mine flowed over me out of nowhere and I felt my right arm move without me wanting it to move. Sand with blue marks on it began covering my right arm until it undeniably looked like Shukaku's. Before I could ask what he was doing, the arm extended at a shockingly fast pace and slammed into Kohara and Temari. It pushed them all the way across the area until they crashed into the wall with a puff of dust. The arm then held them there so they couldn't move or escape its grasp. My vision in my right eye then flickered for a moment before coming back in ultra focus, making me feel as if I had been semi-blind before. I looked to the ground and saw my katana and glanced at the blade to see my reflection. What I saw made my blood run cold. The right side of my face had been partially transformed into Shukaku, a black tanuki eye forming where my eye used to be. That explained the change of vision but I was panicking at the realization that Shukaku had some control right now over my body.

"What are you doing Shukaku? I didn't say you could take over," I weakly told him with fear in my voice.

"Be quiet, those two almost killed us so now I'm going to handle this fight. You'd lose if I wasn't feeling so generous right now so sit back and let me take them down."

"Stop this right now they are my friends Shukaku." I receive no response from Shukaku but I did feel my right arm begin to move again. It stopped pressing Kohara and Temari against the wall and then yanked them back towards me. Shukaku then dropped them on the ground before raising his hand to flatten them.

"Stop this Shukaku please," I screamed at him inside my head. It was no use though, the arm swiftly fell and raced to crush both Temari and Kohara.