[ SHOHEI NARA ]
I leaned back against the rough bark of the central training post, letting out a long, exaggerated sigh that carried across the quiet clearing. Through the half-lidded slits of my eyes, I watched my three newly assigned Genin—Jinichi, Aoi, and Kisuke—scatter into the dense foliage of the surrounding forest. The noon deadline was ticking, and they had taken my advice to hide.
I'll give them credit where it's due; for fresh academy graduates, they managed to do the bare minimum quite well. They masked their footsteps, kept their breathing shallow, and broke line of sight efficiently. To the untrained eye, the forest was completely empty.
But that was the inherent flaw in the standard academy curriculum. It taught children how to hide from normal eyes and ears, not from a seasoned shinobi's sixth sense. When you're up against a Jonin—someone who survived the bloodbaths of the Third Shinobi War and possessed honed chakra sensing—simply crouching behind a bush is about as effective as closing your eyes and hoping the monster ignores you.
lazily getting on my feet. I began my assault.
"Go flush them out, Kuro," I murmured. The darkness at my feet bubbled and rose, forming the hulking, armoured shape of my crystal-plated shadow-bear. The massive beast grunted, its heavy paws silently churning the dirt as it bounded into the treeline, zeroing in on the most prominent chakra signature.
Through my sensory link with Kuro, I felt the beast corner its prey in seconds. Jinichi. The boy was crouched low behind a thick, decaying log. Kuro didn't hesitate, rearing up and bringing a massive, crystal-armoured paw down with bone-crushing force.
The impact cratered the earth, snapping the log in half—but instead of the sickening crunch of bone, the forest echoed with a loud
[ *POOF* ]
Smoke plumed through the trees. A clone. I chuckled softly, scratching the stubble on my chin. So, the kid wasn't entirely brain-dead. He had left a decoy to gauge my summons's speed, strength, and tracking capabilities.
I augmented my senses, trying to pinpoint the real Jinichi's location. There was nothing in the immediate canopy, and nothing in the surrounding brush. It was as if his chakra signature had simply vanished into the earth itself.
Before I could ponder the boy's disappearing act, the wind shifted slightly. A sharp whistle cut through the air. I didn't even bother taking my hands out of the pockets of my jacket. I merely tilted my head a fraction to the left.
A shuriken buried itself deep into the training post right where my temple had been a microsecond prior. Then came a dozen more, a rapid-fire barrage raining down from the high branches above.
I stepped lazily through the storm of steel. A step back, a slight pivot, a slow dip of the shoulder. The shuriken clattered harmlessly against the dirt and wood around me. It was textbook, aggressive, and entirely predictable.
"Haaah!" A battle cry echoed from above as Aoi dropped from the canopy. She had a kunai drawn in a reverse grip, her green eyes alight with a fierce, reckless determination as she abandoned her ranged assault to engage me in close-quarters combat.
I let out a disappointed sigh, my posture slouching further. Was this really the best the girl had to offer? A screaming, frontal assault against a Jonin without any setup or diversion? If this was the real Aoi, she was letting her temper completely dictate her tactics.
I didn't even brace for the impact. With a flick of my wrist, I recalled Kuro. The shadow-bear manifested instantly from the darkness pooling at my feet, rearing up on its hind legs to intercept the falling Genin like a massive, armored wall.
Kuro's heavy claw swatted Aoi out of the air before she could even bring her kunai down. But the moment the heavy crystal plates made contact with her ribs, she didn't scream or shatter bones—she burst into a thick cloud of white smoke.
Another clone. But as the smoke cleared, my half-lidded eyes widened a fraction. Hanging suspended in the air where the clone had just been was a tightly bound sphere of paper. It was a ball of explosive tags, and the seals were already glowing bright red.
I grinned, genuinely amused.
"Not bad, kid," I whispered.
The tags ignited with a blinding flash. Kuro roared, slamming its massive, armoured bulk over me, curling into a protective dome of shadowy crystal. The explosion ripped through the clearing, scorching the earth and sending a shockwave of intense heat washing over my summons armoured back.
The smoke was thick, choking the clearing in a grey, acrid haze. Most Genin would wait for the dust to settle to see if their trap worked. But through the roar of the lingering flames, I caught the faint, metallic hum of ninja wire pulled taut.
A single, needle-thin senbon shot out from a cluster of bushes to my far right. It wasn't aiming for my vitals. It was aiming precisely for the two silver bells tied to my waist. Kisuke was playing the sniper, using the explosion to mask his theft.
I swayed my hips back, letting the senbon graze the fabric of my vest, missing the bells by a millimeter. In the same fluid, uninterrupted motion, I snapped a kunai from my holster and hurled it blindly into the smoke, tracking the exact trajectory of the wire. A sharp gasp from the bushes confirmed the kunai had pinned Kisuke's sleeve to a tree trunk, neutralizing his position.
They were sequencing their attacks. A clone to test the waters, a bomb to blind me, and a sniper to steal the prize. It was a solid, logical plan.
'Hmm... but I Wonder…where could he be?'
!!!
[ *BOOM* ]
The ground beneath my feet suddenly began to tremble violently. I looked down, expecting an Earth Release technique. Instead, the very dirt seemed to peel away, revealing a shimmering, dark grey substance that had been packed just beneath the topsoil.
Metal dust. The dark, abrasive iron dust violently erupted upward like a geyser. It swirled around me, forming a thick, choking veil that completely obscured my vision and scrambled my chakra sensing with its dense, chaotic magnetic signature.
My jaw actually dropped.
'Metal Release? Magnet Release?'
I racked my brain, flipping through my memory of the files the Hokage had given me on Team 13. There was absolutely nothing in Jinichi Wataru's academy records about him possessing a Kekkei Genkai, let alone one this incredibly versatile.
The swirling cloud of iron sand shifted, hardening instantly into half a dozen razor-sharp, spear-like constructs. Without warning, they launched at me from all directions within the dust cloud.
Kuro shattered two of them with a sweeping backhand, and I deflected the rest with precise, chakra-enhanced palm strikes. The metal was incredibly dense, packing a serious kinetic punch that forced me to take a step back.
As I shattered the final spear, it didn't crumble back into dust. Instead, it puffed into a cloud of smoke. The boy had used a Transformation Jutsu to hide among his own projectiles!
Jinichi materialized mid-air, right in my blind spot, riding the momentum of the spear's trajectory. As he fell toward me, the metal dust in the air rapidly condensed around his right arm, moulding and sharpening until it formed a massive, wicked-looking scimitar.
He swung the heavy blade directly at my neck with a roar of exertion. It wasn't a feint. He was genuinely trying to take my head off, following my instructions to fight with the intent to kill.
I didn't have time to analyze it further; pure survival instinct took over. I dropped to one knee, feeling the rush of wind and the cold bite of the metal blade shave a few hairs off the top of my head as it cleaved the empty air where my throat had been.
Missing the lethal strike didn't deter him. Instead of trying to recover his balance, Jinichi leaned heavily into the momentum of the heavy metal blade. He channeled chakra to his core and spun.
A vortex of wind and razor-sharp metal dust roared to life around him.
The kata he's using is….
"Spinjutsu" I said with a large grin on my face.
A localized tornado, a grinding, tearing cyclone of force. It was raw but seems to be slightly more refined than what how it was described in the reports.
'Honestly the sheer output was absolutely staggering.'
"Alright, enough playing around" I muttered. I surged chakra into my arms, flooding my muscles and skin with a dense layer of blue energy to augment my durability. I stepped directly into the storm, raising my forearms to catch the spinning assault.
The impact sounded like grinding gears. The metal scythe sparked violently against my chakra-enhanced arms. He was spinning with everything he had, trying to break my guard through sheer centrifugal force.
I weathered the storm for a few seconds before finding the rhythm of his rotation. I stepped inside his guard, slipping past the heavy blade, and drove a rigid, chakra-laced open palm squarely into his gut.
Jinichi's eyes went wide as the air was violently ejected from his lungs. The vortex collapsed instantly. Before he even hit the ground, Kuro was there, slamming a massive paw onto the boy's chest, pinning him immovably to the dirt.
The clearing fell silent, save for Jinichi's ragged gasping. I stood up straight, rolling my shoulders. I looked down at my hands. The heavy leather and metal plating of my standard-issue gloves were scorched, marred by deep friction burns from his spinning technique.
A genuine smirk tugged at the corner of my mouth. A Genin had actually managed to damage a Jonin's gear. I looked down at the boy, expecting to see the crushing weight of defeat on his face.
Instead, Jinichi was smiling. He was gasping for air, pinned under hundreds of pounds of crystal shadow, but he was grinning like a feral cat.
!!!!
I felt a sudden, crushing grip around my ankles. I looked down. The residual metal dust he had hidden underground hadn't just been for the initial smokescreen. It had slithered over the earth, wrapping tightly around my legs and hardening into solid iron shackles.
"Now!" Jinichi roared, his voice cracking but filled with triumph.
The treeline erupted. Aoi and Kisuke burst from their respective hiding spots, moving in perfect, desperate synchronicity. Aoi came from the left with her kunai drawn, while Kisuke dropped from the right, diving directly for the silver bells at my waist.
"HAHAHAHA! Well done!" I threw my head back and laughed—a genuine, loud, chest-deep sound of pure amusement. I had suspected their sequential attack plan was a front. I knew one of them would eventually offer themselves up as a sacrifice to pin me down. To see them actually execute it? I was thoroughly impressed.
But I couldn't let them have it that easily. My hands blurred, weaving a single hand sign faster than they could track.
Two plumes of white smoke erupted on either side of me. Before Aoi or Kisuke could even register the shift, my shadow clones had them. One clone caught Aoi by the wrist, driving her face-first into the dirt, while the other caught Kisuke mid-dive, slamming him onto his back.
The three of them lay pinned to the training ground, breathless and defeated. I looked down at my three battered Genin, the iron shackles still gripped firmly around my ankles, and my grin widened. The bell test was over.
"Hmph...well done you three, you passed." I say with a small smile.