Naruto: God of Shinobi

Chapter 56: Neji vs. Naruto

Hayate's hand came down like something final.

"Begin."

Neji moved first, the way water moves when you tip the glass, no hesitation in it, no wasted motion. His arms opened, palms forward, fingers pressed together into that shape every branch and main house child learned before they learned to read. The Byakugan bloomed in his eyes, veins spidering out from the corners like cracks in porcelain, and he fixed that gaze on Naruto with the patience of someone who had already won.

Naruto didn't move. His hands stayed in his pockets. His face gave nothing away, the kind of stillness that unsettled people more than a sneer ever could.

"Aren't you going to attack?" Neji's voice came out flat, almost bored.

"Don’t rush me, I am thinking." Naruto answered.

"This is a battle, what are you about?" Neji demanded.

"About how fast you are." Naruto tilted his head, slow, considering, like he was turning Neji over in his hands to check the weight of him. "I have heard the stories. About the Hyuga prodigy. The genius who never loses. Figured I'd see it for myself before I ruin it."

Something tightened at the corner of Neji's eyes. "You'll see it. Soon enough."

Naruto smiled, and it wasn't warm, wasn't meant to be, just a narrow curl at the edge of his mouth, the smile of a man enjoying a problem more than he was worried about it.

"Looking forward to it."

Three shadow clones burst into being around him in soft claps of smoke, spreading wide, coming at Neji from three separate angles, fast, coordinated, the kind of formation a genin shouldn't have been able to hold together on instinct.

Neji didn't chase them. He let them come.

The first clone swung for the ribs. Neji turned his hip out of the way without seeming to try, and his palm found the clone's chest before the punch finished traveling. Smoke.

The second clone dropped low for the knee. Neji's forearm caught the kick dead, and his other hand was already moving, already striking the shoulder. Smoke.

The third came down from above, elbow first. Neji's palm rose to meet it like he'd known exactly where it would land, because he had. Smoke.

Naruto watched the three plumes drift and thin. His expression didn't change.

"Good," he said, almost to himself. "This won’t be a disappointment."

Five more clones this time, spread wider, hitting from different heights and different speeds, some throwing punches, some going low, one flinging a kunai that never got close.

Neji moved through all of it like it was choreography he'd rehearsed a thousand times, which, in a way, he had. His hands blurred. Every palm strike landed exactly where a palm strike needed to land. Every clone popped and vanished.

The crowd had gone quiet, the good kind of quiet, the kind that comes right before people start shouting. Nobody had seen anything move like that. Not fast so much as certain, like he already knew where the fight was going to end and was just walking everyone else there.

Naruto wasn't frustrated. He was cataloguing.

"Interesting," he said. "Those eye of yours. Sees everything. Seemingly everything...."

Neji's jaw shifted, just barely. "You're quite observant."

"Well I try to be."

Ten clones now, ringing him in a full circle, closing from every direction at once. Neji's hands moved faster, found their chakra points with the same terrible precision, and the ring collapsed into smoke almost before it finished forming.

But Naruto caught it. A half-second of drag in the last strike. Nothing anyone else would've clocked. Neji wasn't using everything he had. He was rationing.

"I see you’re still holding back," Naruto said. "Huh."

"I'm not holding back." Neji's voice didn't rise. "I'm not wasting effort I don't need to spend."

"Same thing, where I'm concerned."

Fifteen clones, and this time the hesitation was longer, a whole fraction of a second where Neji's breath caught before the strike landed. Small. Real.

Naruto's smile came back, thinner this time, sharper.

‘Got you. Now to confirm it,’ Naruto thought in his mind.

He stepped back out of the wreckage of smoke, raised two fingers to his lips like the barrel of something small, and his other hand climbed into a seal nobody in the stands recognized.

"Ninja Art. Hidden Mist Jutsu."

It didn't roll in. It rose, straight up out of the ground like the earth had exhaled, thick and white and total, swallowing the arena floor in seconds. The crowd lost the fighters entirely. Somewhere in the dignitary box, robes shifted as people leaned forward, straining for shapes that weren't there.

The Byakugan didn't care about mist. Neji saw Naruto's silhouette clean through it, saw the clones stacking up around him, twelve this time, closing in from twelve directions.

His stance widened. "Eight Trigrams. Sixteen Palms."

The strikes came in a blur too fast for the eye, sixteen points closed in the space it took to breathe, and clones burst apart one after another, gone before they'd finished forming a threat. But the mist held, and Naruto's chakra was everywhere in it, smeared thin, impossible to pin.

"Eight Trigrams. Thirty-Two Palms."

More smoke. More silence.

When the mist thinned enough to see through, Neji was standing dead center, untouched, dispersing clouds drifting past his shoulders like he'd stepped out of a bath. Not a scratch.

The crowd broke. Cheering, whistling, someone screaming his name from the upper tier, all of it crashing down at once, because they'd just watched a boy see through smoke like it wasn't there.

Naruto walked out of what was left of it, hands back in his pockets, face still doing nothing.

"Well," he said. "That didn't work."

"You used a Hidden Mist Jutsu." Neji's eyes had narrowed to slits. "Where'd you learn it."

"A powerful ninja by the name of Zabusa." Naruto answered.

"The S-Class rogue Ninja? When did you meet him?" Neji asked.

"It doesn’t matter. Since the technique worked on the Sharingan I had to try it against the Byakugan. Seems like you are different from the Sharingan."

Naruto did the cross fingers hand seal.

Two clones flanked him. Naruto pulled a single shuriken from his pouch, plain, nothing special, and Neji's eye tracked the faint thread of chakra in it out of habit more than concern.

Naruto threw it.

Neji was already shifting his weight to slip past it when Naruto's hands blurred through seals.

"Shadow Shuriken Jutsu!"

One became two. Two became four, then eight, then sixteen, then the whole sky in front of Neji filled with a storm of spinning steel, twenty four blades where a second ago there'd been one.

Neji's eyes widened, just for a heartbeat, and then the ground under his feet shifted, went soft, started pulling him down. One of the clones had both palms flat against the dirt.

"Earth Style. Great Mud River."

His footing went to soup. Balance gone. No dodge left in his legs.

He jumped instead, wrenching himself out of the mud with pure force and will, clearing the storm of shuriken by inches, air under him, safe.

Then he saw the fire ball.

It came from the second clone, a roaring ball of it, already too close to outrun in the air where he had nothing to push off of. He twisted, tried, couldn't.

It caught him full in the chest.

The blast threw him backward through the treeline at the arena's edge, wood splitting, branches cracking off one after another as his body carved a path through them before it hit dirt and rolled to a stop in a scatter of leaves.

The crowd came apart. Cheering, screaming, feet stamping on wood risers until the whole structure seemed to shake with it.

He'd landed one. On the Hyuga prodigy. Something that wasn't supposed to be possible had just happened in front of everyone.

Sakura was on her feet, hands cupped around her mouth. "Naruto! That was amazing!"

Guy and Tenten sat very still. Neither said anything. Whatever they'd expected walking in, this wasn't it.

Up in the dignitary box, Hiashi Hyuga's face hadn't moved at all, carved and cold, while beside him Hanabi's eyes had gone round as coins.

Neji rose out of the broken trees slow, deliberate, clothes torn at the shoulder, a bruise already purpling along his jaw, hair singed at one edge. He looked at Naruto across the distance between them, and his voice, when it came, was flat as ever.

"Impressive."

Naruto's smile didn't waver. "I try."

Neji closed the gap before Naruto's next breath finished, palm already extended, aimed square for the chest.

Naruto dodged. Almost made it.

The palm caught his shoulder, and the chakra went through him like cold water, and his whole arm went dead in an instant, numb from collarbone to fingertip.

He stepped back, and still nothing showed on his face.

"Interesting. Gentle Fist." He flexed the dead hand out of some old habit and got nothing back. "Noted."

Neji didn't answer that. He attacked again.

Two clones stepped in front of him. He put them down without slowing, one palm to the chest, one to the shoulder, gone and gone, and by the time the second cloud of smoke cleared the real Naruto had already substituted out, a split log lying where he used to be standing.

Neji spun, Byakugan finding him instantly at his back.

The palm landed there too. Legs went numb next.

"Eight Trigrams. Thirty-Two Palms."

The strikes came faster than counting, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty two, each one finding its point with a precision that felt less like fighting and more like arithmetic, and Naruto went down under the weight of it, face pressed into the dirt, body a dead thing he no longer had a say over.

The crowd had gone quiet again, that particular quiet that comes from watching something get taken apart cleanly.

Neji stood over him. "You fought well." Not warmth in it, just fact. "But you can't win this. I'm the prodigy of the Hyuga. I've spent my whole life training for exactly this."

Naruto laughed. Small. Almost nothing.

"Prodigy." He said it like he was tasting it. "That's what they call you right?"

"Yes."

"Huh, well it means shit to me!!"

Neji's eyes narrowed further. "What's shit about it."

Naruto pushed himself up off the ground, arms shaking with the effort, legs barely answering him at all, and somehow he kept coming up anyway.

"Your eye." A breath. "Sees everything. Chakra points, the flow, all of it. Sees the blind spot too, probably." Another breath, steadier now. "But it doesn't see everything."

Neji went still.

“Did you think the clones were all just for show you idiot?” Naruto asked. “I have been trying to pinpoint that little blindspot because no matter how perfect your vision, it is not a total 360 degrees is it?”

Naruto moved, body still half dead, legs dragging more than stepping, but moving, because he'd trained for this exact moment, practiced falling apart and getting up anyway until it stopped meaning anything.

Neji's palm found his chest again, closed him down further, and Naruto laughed once more, quieter this time, colder.

"Nice try."

Naruto's arm came up and a kunai left his hand, aimed for the one spot behind Neji's neck the Byakugan couldn't quite hold in its sight.

Neji saw it coming anyway, tracked the whole arc of it, and let go.

Chakra tore out of every point on his body at once, a burst that hit the air like something breaking, and he spun, faster and faster, until the spin itself became a wall, a perfect sphere of turning force with nothing in it a blade could find purchase on.

"Eight Trigrams: ROTATION!!"

The kunai hit the rotation and came apart in the wrong direction, flung backward so hard it buried itself to the hilt in the arena wall.

Naruto took the backlash full in the chest and went flying, slammed into the trunk of a tree still standing at the field's edge, wood groaning and splitting under the impact before he slid down into a heap at its roots.

The crowd erupted again, louder this time, feet on wood, voices layering over each other until the sound was just one long roar with no edges to it.

"The rotation," somebody shouted from the upper tier. "He used the rotation!"

"A boy from the branch family," another voice, disbelieving. "He learned the main house technique on his own."

"That's not talent. That's a monster."

Guy and Tenten hadn't moved through any of it, faces unreadable, watching the boy they'd trained beside stand in the center of all that noise like it belonged to him.

Up above, Hiashi's expression stayed carved from the same stone it always was. Hanabi's hands were pressed flat to the rail, knuckles pale.

Neji stood where the spin had left him, arms still extended, breathing even, the picture of a technique executed exactly as it was meant to be.

Naruto climbed back up the tree trunk he'd been thrown into, using it for balance he didn't quite have yet, ribs aching, back screaming at him, and still he came up anyway.

He looked across the distance at Neji, and something in his face had shifted, gone colder, sharper, more amused than it had any right to be.

"Well." A breath. "Isn't that interesting."

"What's interesting about it." Neji's eyes had narrowed to something close to suspicion.

"I figured you'd be weak." Naruto rolled one shoulder, testing it. "Careless of me."

Neji's expression didn't crack. "You thought I was weak."

"I thought you were overrated. I thought 'prodigy' was just a word people liked saying about you. Just like Sasuke, a title handed to a competent child." A small, cold smile. "A prodigy is suppose to be a once in a generation ninja, an absolute genius of a ninja. You are not that, I know of a true prodigy, he is my sensei after all. Kakashi Hatake, a jonin at age 12. You are not him Neji but I was still wrong, apparently. You may not be on his level of prodigy but you certainly are one."

Something almost like satisfaction moved through Naruto's face, gone as fast as it came.

"Now I'm gonna make you regret ever looking down on me."

"What are you talking about." A flicker of real confusion under the calm now.

"I'm gonna show you the true power of what a prodigy is."

Neji's whole body went rigid. "How can you be a prodigy?"

"No." A beat. "But I know somebody who does."

He wasn't thinking of Hinata standing somewhere in that crowd, wasn't thinking of any Hyuga at all. He was thinking of himself, of every night spent turning a stranger's clan technique over in his hands until it made sense, of every hour he'd spent preparing for a match most people assumed he'd lose in the first minute.

Neji was the prodigy. Everyone in that arena had decided that a long time ago.

But Naruto was the one who'd actually done the work. Not to say Neji hadn’t worked hard. Naruto had simply worked harder, he was smarter.

"Come on," he said, straightening the rest of the way up, weight settling back into legs that were finally starting to answer him again. "Show me what you've got."

Neji looked at him a long moment, something unreadable moving behind those pale, veined eyes, and then his hands came up, arms opening, palms forward, fingers together.

"Very well."

He settled into the stance, and this time there was nothing casual left in it at all.

----

Next Time: The True Heir of the Hyuga Clan --- Neji vs. Naruto, Part II