Chapter 75

"So, Kabuto, how about afterwards we get some soba or some ramen. I'm in the mood for noodles." I grinned and started stretching my arms.

Kabuto glared at me, giving his best disgusted look. "No."

"Come on, man. Loosen up. We're friends, aren't we?"

"No," he repeated.

"Then why did you give me that Sharingan? I thought that's what friends do. They give each other eyeballs."

"Stop talking."

Everyone in the audience was intensely interested in our conversation.

"So who are you working for these days? Orochimaru? Akatsuki? I always wondered whether they have decent health care plans."

"Shut up, you imbecile!"

"Hey, Kabuto, level with me. Are you interested in girls yet? Have you seen that girl from Suna? Isn't she crazy hot?" I intentionally didn't look at Temari lest I be frozen in stone from her glare. "No? Do you prefer guys then? As much as Sakura will argue otherwise, Sasuke is still single. You still have a shot, you know."

"I'll kill you!" he screamed in fury as he charged toward me. His hands were already covered in a film of deadly chakra ready to slice into me.

"Bring it on." I rose into the air, suspended on reinforced chakra strings in a technique vaguely inspired by Doctor Octavius. In each of my hands, balls of flaming chakra spun into being.

"HOLD IT!" shouted Jiraiya's deep voice. Both Kabuto and I whipped our heads toward the angry Sannin standing among the audience. "Damn brats. You, four-eyes," he said, pointing to Kabuto, "wait until the match starts." And then he spoke to me, "And you, Haru, your parents would be ashamed to see you acting this way."

"And I'm supposed to care why?" I'd rather fight an enraged and sloppy Kabuto than a calm and collected Kabuto.

Jiraiya continued with absolute seriousness in his voice, "Also, the use of Senjutsu chakra is against the rules of the exam. It's too dangerous for genins to try to use Senjutsu or for genins to fight against it."

"Wait, are you talking about me?"

"Yes, now hurry up and pull the natural energy from your chakra so Hayate can start he match," Jiraiya ordered.

I threw away my twin flaming Rasengans, making a pair of moderately sized craters nearby, before I started the process of splitting my chakra into its component parts and filtering out the natural energy. "This sucks."

"Are you saying that Haru is a sage? A genuine sage?" Kabuto asked, pointing at me rudely with disbelief in his voice.

"I don't know if Sage is the right word for Haru. More like ambitious dumbass," Jiraiya yelled back.

"I'm still here, you know." It took much less time to dissipate natural energy than to collect it. "I just like to think of myself as self-motivated."

I could only hear Jiraiya mutter something about "motivated my ass."

Eventually I took my place across from the medical-nin. Kabuto looked composed and ready. I pulled a katana from the spine of my coat.

"Maybe, in another universe, we could have been friends," I offered.

"I'd never be friends with someone as insufferable as you," Kabuto said with a sneer.

Hayate signaled with his hand, "Begin!"

Both Kabuto and I leapt back from each other, creating a safe distance to evaluate each other. I held my sword at the ready, unsure whether I could hold off Kabuto's chakra scalpels. A few weeks of instruction under Kakashi had helped but I was still a beginner.

I immediately cast a genjutsu, making Kabuto think he had spontaneously combusted.

"You should know better. Half of Konoha knows how to protect themselves from genjutsu, thanks to you. It's interesting that your preferred illusion involves the horrific immolation of your opponent. I wonder what that means?"

All it meant was that I wasn't feeling very creative at the moment.

I summoned a Rasengan in my right hand and threw it at Kabuto. As I expected, he dodged it easily but he was almost caught off guard when I tugged on a chakra string, pulling the Rasengan back like a yoyo. He lithely weaved around each pass of the Rasengan with ease.

"I have yet to be impressed," he spoke.

I threw my katana into the air and used a chakra string to suspend it in the air, ready to strike when Kabuto's guard was down. Now free, I made another Rasengan in my left hand and sent it at Kabuto. He seemed hard pressed to dodge both of them as they followed like the fists of an angry god.

"Better, but still not what I was expecting. Show me the skills that made a fool of Kakashi of the Sharingan and defeated the Demon Zabuza. Everyone speaks so highly of you. I'm just not sure that you deserve all the praise," he commented as he backpedaled around the arena, leaving a trail of small craters in his wake.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Kabuto."

"Sure you don't. But this is getting wearisome." The medic-nin stopped circling the arena and rushed at me, ready to slice my organs with his chakra scalpels.

I drew a kunai in each hand and steeled myself for a taijutsu fight.

Kabuto was faster than me. The only thing that kept me on an even footing with him was the bowling ball sized orbs of spinning chakra that orbited my body, forcing Kabuto to back off before he could penetrate my defenses. I blocked the edge of his hands with the edge of my kunai, knowing that if he got one solid hit on me, it would change the fight in his favor.

He jumped over my leg sweep and received a face full of Rasengan. "Fuck yeah," I thought to myself as he tumbled away. Despite a bleeding head injury, he managed to use the momentum of the roll to bring himself to a stop on his feet.

Neither of us spoke, concentrating fully on the other's actions and formulating counter-attacks. I barraged him with a handful of kunai from my storage seals while trying to limit his movements with my Rasengans. Likewise, Kabuto flung the occasional senbon doubtlessly coated with unpleasant poisons. The stalemate continued for at least half a minute before I found an opening and brought my katana down from the sky through Kabuto's torso. He staggered a few steps and dropped to a kneel.

I let go of my techniques and waited quietly to see whether Hayate would declare the match over.

Despite the sword sticking out of his stomach, Kabuto smiled. "Very interesting fighting style," he said as he pulled out my katana and gripped it as to wield it himself. Blue chakra glowed around the stomach wound and the skin seemed to seal itself, leaving only dark blood stains on his shirt. He gave the sword a test swing and spoke, "Quality craftsmanship. A shame it amounted to nothing more than a fancy kunai."

He rushed at me, obviously trained in kenjutsu. I didn't have enough time to make another Rasengan. Instead, I threw a smoke pellet to the ground, creating a cloud of smoke to obscure my Kage Bunshin. Unfortunately, Kabuto must have had some way of sensing chakra because he managed to hit all 3 of my clones and myself with senbon. I pulled out the senbon in my right arm, futilely hoping that the growing numbness in my arm wouldn't spread to the rest of my body because Kabuto definitely wouldn't give me enough time to coax out the poison with medical techniques.

I felt some resentment when Kabuto pointed my own katana at me and asked, "Do you have any more petty tricks up your sleeves?"

"Just massive fireballs." I summoned the largest Rasenfireball I could in my left hand and threw it at my opponent.

"Only a fool tries the same thing over and over again and expects the outcome to be any different," Kabuto remarked, preparing to dodge the obvious projectile.

Before the fireball reached Kabuto, I directed the mass of chakra into the ground, causing it to destabilize and explode into a mass of rubble and cinders and smoke. Using the distraction, I slammed my left hand into the ground and summoned as many crows I could with my remaining chakra.

Kabuto was completely enclosed in a cloud of dust and feathers as the crows went to work pecking at his eyes and marking his position for me. I raised my left arm and released the storage seal on the Kubikiribocho, shooting it out of my sleeve at insane speed into the center of the cloud.

I muttered to myself, "That's why I used a bigger sword this time."

The birds all flew away simultaneously, disappearing with another rain of feathers.

"Did I win?" I asked aloud as the dust settled. The arena was littered with craters and rubble and black feathers. In the middle was Kabuto's body, cleaved in half at the waist. The Kubikiribocho was embedded in the ground several meters away, pristine despite a trail of splattered blood leading to Kabuto's corpse.

I fell to my knees, half from shock and half from exhaustion. "Goddammit."

I suddenly felt very tired due to using up all my chakra so I decided that I would deal with the repercussions of ruining the timeline after a short nap. I vaguely heard some yelling but I ignored it in favor of passing out on the floor, figuring they'd get around to fixing my arm eventually while I was unconscious.

"On the bright side, at least I won..."