The kunoichi throws her hands forward and a flurry of lightning leaps out of the dragon hand seal she's still holding.
It crackles through the air and sinks into the water serpent, becoming a spot of bright light beneath the surface that branches out, spreading until the entire serpent is shining and crackling with lightning energy. Then the serpent dives at the sand siblings.
...
It all happens in the span of a couple seconds, forcing cat boy to yank back on his puppet before it can reach the Kiri nin scrambling back to his feet. Temari likewise steps back, looking up at the joint ninjutsu with a startled expression. The storm dragon crosses the arena in a flash, crashing down on the Kazekage's children in a tidal wave of fury.
Gaara steps in front of his siblings and raises an open-palmed hand to the storm construct. It hits a moment later, and they're swallowed up.
"What a fucking move," I breathe, watching a couple teams on the other side of the ring jerk back as the jutsu washes over the top of the arena. "They didn't even have a chance."
"Keep watching." Is all Hatake says. I roll my eyes.
"Like they could have done anything. That had to be at least a B-rank, if not a…" The jutsu settles, and my voice dies in my throat.
Where the sand siblings had been standing moments before, there's a great dome. It sits untouched by the vicious joint ninjutsu, sloughing electrified water off in sheet. And as the artificial lighting from the ceiling shines down on it, the remains of the storm serpent set it to glittering.
"Is that gold?" Stunned murmurs and exclamations spring up from all around the stadium, everyone's attention glued to the bizarre construct. Gai leans forward, hands gripping the railing, and he's smiling even less now.
"The Yondaime Kazekage's fabled bloodline," he says. "The Magnet Release."
"He really is his father's son, then," Hatake muses.
"You mean that's not a jutsu? He can just block huge attacks like that dragon at will?" I ask incredulously, watching as the dome begins to crumble into dust, revealing the Kazekage's children.
"It wasn't a jutsu," Sasuke confirms. His Sharingan is active and spinning. "I was copying the storm dragon when he did it. There weren't any hand seals involved. All he did was saturate that dust with his chakra and it moved."
"That's how the Magnet Release works," Hatake says, nodding. "His chakra is magnetically charged, so he can use it to manipulate that gold dust just like his father. It's a very potent bloodline."
Down below the dome collapses, the gold dust having reduced itself to a writhing pool around Gaara's feet, and his siblings jump right back into the fight. Cat boy pursues the shinobi that rushed in at the start of the fight via his puppet, forcing him to retreat and abandon his kusarigama. Temari, meanwhile, is swinging her fan nonstop at the two that hung back to make the storm dragon, scattering them with her gales.
Neji grunts. "They exhausted themselves with that attack. What a bunch of losers."
"It made sense for them to do it," Sakura disagrees. "There aren't a lot of genin that could block an attack like that, and the size of the arena made it impossible for them to dodge. If it weren't for his bloodline they'd have been taken out in one move."
"That's something you need to account for as a chunin, unfortunately," Hatake says. "There's too much variety in the world to bank on a one hit kill and wear yourself out like that. Techniques like that should be a last resort unless you know for a fact they'll hit."
The Kiri nin scramble around the arena, struggling to take back the momentum that they'd lost after the first minute of the fight and failing miserably.
Temari isn't letting up with her assault a single bit, and from my vantage point above I can see that her 'random' attacks are herding her two opponents back towards Gaara. Cat boy, too, is relentless with his puppet, unleashing one hellish salvo after another of throwing weapons and poison gasses at the kusarigama-wielding shinobi every time he tries to recover his weapon.
Gaara himself isn't doing anything. He's just standing in the middle of the arena with his arms crossed over his chest, gold dust whipping around him, daring one of the opposing genin to attack him.
All of a sudden cat boy twists his fingers, sending a round of shuriken screaming at his target. The Kiri nin tenses, leaning to the right, only for Temari to let fly another gale at the fleeing kunoichi on his right side. With the right side closed off and the shuriken a few feet away, he dodges to the left.
Right into a grasping tendril of gold dust.
He cries out as it wraps tight around his right leg. Gaara raises a clenched fist, and the tendril lifts him up into the air. The Kazekage's son swings his arm around, and the gold dust slams the Kiri nin into the wall of the arena hard enough to crack the stone.
"Kokei!" The other shinobi shouts, lunging for his teammate. He doesn't even make it ten feet before Temari slams him into the wall with a wave of her fan, and Gaara's dust pulls Kokei free from the wall by the leg. The kunoichi leaps at Temari, two kunai flickering with lightning chakra clenched in each hand.
The Suna kunoichi snaps her fan shut and deflects the kunai off its surface with ease. Then she spins around, widening her stance and hitting the other girl in the side with her closed fan so hard I can hear her hip shatter from up here. The force of the blow lifts her off her feet, and her agonized wail fills the stadium right up until she hits the arena wall headfirst. She falls to the ground in a limp heap.
"Son of a bitch!" The last Kiri nin howls, stumbling to his feet. He looks over at Gaara, who seems determined to make as many imprints of Kokei's body into the stone walls of the arena as possible. He shakes his head, muttering something to himself, and makes a break for his kusarigama.
Cat boy's puppet moves to intercept him, but this time instead of dodging his raises an arm up to protect his neck and face, and takes the round of senbu that's launched at him. He bends down and scoops the chain-sickle up, spinning around and sending the weighted end flying at Temari's head. She jerks back and the chain wraps around her fan instead.
The Kiri nin hollers a war cry and sprints toward her, sickle poised to strike. Temari ducks under the first swing, seemingly unwilling to give up her fan, and he kicks her in the gut. She slides back, grunting in pain, and he swings down at her neck.
A strand of gold dust wraps around his wrist, stopping his sickle inches from her skin.
He curses, pulling a kunai from his weapons pouch with his other hand and severing the strand. But by then his right leg has been wrapped up, too, and when he cuts that strand his left foot is stuck to the ground by a hardened shell of gold. More and more of the dust begins to circle him until his only free arm is the one holding the sickle. He continues to hack desperately at it, spewing a constant stream of curses as he does so, but after a few seconds his movements start to get sluggish, his swings slowing down until his right arm is enveloped by gold dust as well.
"What the… hell?" He chokes. Cat boy strolls across the arena up to him, twitching his fingers and wrapping his puppet back up in its bandages. He bends down and scoops it up, securing it on his back, and smirks at the entrapped shinobi.
"Everything in Crow's arsenal is coated with a fast acting poison designed to paralyze." He plucks out one of the senbon peeking through the dust and rolls it between his fingers. "The second you let him hit you, you lost."
The Kiri nin in bares his teeth, redoubling his efforts, but the dust doesn't budge. Cat boy gives him a mock salute, and before he can curse him out he's jerked up into the air. Gaara watches him with impassive eyes as he floats over, Kokei's unconscious body lying at his feet, and lowers him to eye level.
"You fought hard," He says, his voice low, cold, and ringing with judgement. "But it was not enough. You stood no chance against Suna's strength." He raises a hand in front of the Kiri nin's face, palm out. "Sleep."
He closes his fist, and the gold dust covers his head. The trapped shinobi thrases, a muffled scream breaking through the cocoon of dust, but as the seconds tick by his efforts grow weaker and weaker. When he stops moving at all the Suna proctor appears by Gaara's side in a Body Flicker, placing a hand on his shoulder.
"He's done, Gaara-sama," she says respectfully. Gaara nods and drops his arm, letting the unconscious Kiri shinobi drop to the floor while his dust funnels into the gourd on his back. The rest of the proctors drop down and begin inspecting the other two Kiri nin, and after a few moments the proctors from Kumo, Iwa, and Kiri pick the three of them up and Body Flicker away.
The Konoha proctor raises an arm and points at Gaara. "Winner of the first match between Team 23 of Kiri and Team 1 of Suna- Team 1." The sand siblings share a smirk, and a round of applause goes up from the other Suna nin around the stadium.
Hatake chuckles, breaking the silence that had fallen over our little group. "Yeah, definitely his father's son." I watch him walk back up the steps with his siblings. He's not even winded.
I look forward to crushing you in the exams.
"Well damn."
...
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