57. Neji vs Naruto II

Chapter 57: Neji vs. Naruto II

Neji moved before the smoke from the first clone had time to clear.

His feet found the packed earth without a sound, the balance of the Gentle Fist stance carrying him forward in a line so straight it looked drawn with a ruler. Naruto barely registered the blur of pale fabric before three of his clones were already gone, not exploded but simply erased, single strikes to the chest sending them back into smoke before they had finished raising their arms.

Naruto threw six more clones into Neji's path, spreading them wide to box him in from both flanks. Neji did not slow down. His palms opened and closed in short, economical arcs, each one aimed with the certainty of someone who had already seen where the strike needed to land. Two clones vanished from a single sweeping motion of his left hand. A third dissolved when his knuckles found the exact center of its chest. By the time Naruto understood what was happening, Neji was already through the crowd of doubles and standing in front of him.

The palm strike came fast and flat, aimed just beneath his collarbone.

Naruto felt it land, not as pain exactly but as absence, a small dead spot blooming beneath his skin where warmth used to be. His right arm went heavy immediately, as though someone had filled the muscle with wet sand.

“You can't win,” Neji said. His voice carried no anger, no satisfaction, nothing but flat certainty. “Sixty four of your three hundred and sixty one chakra points are already sealed. Your right side is nearly finished. In four more strikes you will not be able to lift your arm at all.”

Naruto rolled his shoulder, testing the dead weight of it, and grinned anyway. “Is that a promise?”

“It is a fact.”

Twenty clones exploded into existence around the arena floor, filling the space between Neji and the tree line with orange and black. They came from every angle at once, low and high, front and back, a wall of identical faces all wearing the same reckless grin.

Neji's stance shifted. His weight dropped into his hips, his arms rising until his palms faced outward in every direction, and for a moment he looked less like a boy and more like the center of a wheel.

“Rotation.”

Chakra tore free from every point on his body at once, a violent blue sphere expanding outward with a sound like tearing silk. The clones that had already committed to their attacks were caught mid stride, spun, and thrown clear before they even understood the shape of what had hit them. Two of them struck the arena wall hard enough to leave shallow craters in the packed dirt before dissolving. The rest popped in the open air, twenty puffs of white smoke drifting upward into the afternoon sun like the aftermath of a firework.

When the smoke cleared, Neji was standing exactly where he had started, breathing even, not a hair out of place.

Naruto was alone again in the space where his clones had been. The dead patch in his shoulder had spread down into his forearm.

“Your Byakugan,” Naruto said, flexing the fingers of his numb hand slowly, watching them respond a half second too late. “You already see where every one of my clones is.”

“Yes.” Neji's pale eyes narrowed a fraction, the only sign that the observation had landed somewhere it wasn't supposed to. “I am not wasting effort. There is a difference between restraint and weakness.”

“Funny,” Naruto said. “From where I'm standing it looks like the same thing.”

Neji did not answer that. Instead his hand dipped into the pouch strapped along his thigh, and three kunai left his fingers in a triangle spread, each one aimed for a different point on Naruto's chest so that no single dodge could avoid all three.

Naruto twisted sideways, felt the wind of the nearest blade pass close enough to catch a strand of his hair, and was already reaching for another string of hand seals when he realized Neji had not stayed still to watch the throw land.

Water surged upward from a shallow puddle near the base of a fractured stone pillar, coiling and thickening in the air until it took the shape of a long, sinuous whip gripped in Neji's outstretched hand.

“Water Style. Water Whip.”

The whip cracked forward, faster than water should have any right to move, and closed around Naruto's ankle before he finished planting his foot. It yanked. The ground rushed up to meet him, and his shoulder hit the packed dirt hard enough to send a jolt up through his numbed arm and into his jaw.

By the time Naruto blinked the dust out of his eyes, Neji was already above him, palm angled downward, and the strike landed square between his shoulder blades.

Another dead patch spread outward beneath his skin, this one settling somewhere behind his ribs, and his breath came shallower for a moment before evening back out.

Naruto rolled hard to the left, came up onto one knee, and spat dirt out of his mouth. “You throw kunai like you're bored of hitting me with your hands.”

“I am simply using every tool available.” Neji's kunai pouch was already open again. Three more blades left his hand, and this time they came low, aimed at Naruto's legs rather than his chest.

Naruto jumped the first two and twisted away from the third, but the moment his feet touched the ground again Neji was gone from where he had been standing. A kunai buried in the trunk of a nearby tree wobbled once, still humming from impact.

Substitution.

Neji appeared behind him with no more sound than a held breath being released, and his palm found the space just above Naruto's kidney before Naruto had even finished turning his head.

Naruto's knees buckled. He went down hard onto his side, and this time when he tried to push himself back up his right arm would not answer at all, hanging useless from a shoulder that no longer felt like it belonged to him.

Neji stood over him, Byakugan veins still pulsing faintly at his temples, watching the way Naruto's chest rose and fell with the particular unevenness of a body running out of working channels.

“You are defeated,” he said. There was no cruelty in it. It was simply a fact, delivered the way a person might report the time.

Naruto lay in the dirt for a long moment, chest heaving, and did not try to get up again right away.

“You know,” Neji said, looking down at him without any particular hurry, “there is something almost funny about this.”

Naruto said nothing, just watched him through narrowed eyes.

“The son of the Fourth Hokage. Everyone in this village whispers that you are meant for something catastrophic, that destiny has already written your name somewhere disastrous. The way they talk about you, I expected something different from you. Their hatred.” Neji crouched slightly, bringing his voice down though it lost none of its coldness. “And here you are. On the ground. Beaten by a member of the branch family. A second class Hyuga, by the reckoning of my own relatives.”

“You actually believe that?” Naruto's voice came out rough, but there was no fear in it, only a kind of disbelieving anger. “That destiny crap?”

“Believe it?” For the first time something moved behind Neji's flat expression, something old and worn smooth from repetition. “I have lived inside it since before I could walk.”

He straightened up fully, and when he spoke again his voice had taken on the cadence of something rehearsed, a story told so many times to himself that the words no longer needed thought behind them.

“I was born the eldest son of Hizashi Hyuga, twin brother to the current clan head. In our family, that meant I was born into the branch house before I had taken my first breath. My purpose was decided before I existed. I was to protect and serve the main family. That is the entire shape of what a branch Hyuga is allowed to become.”

Naruto pushed himself up onto one elbow, the movement slow and unsteady, but he did not look away.

“Three years ago, a delegation came from the Hidden Cloud under the banner of peace talks. On the final night, one of their shinobi attempted to steal my father's twin brother’s daughter, the weakling that is Hinata, Hoping to study the secrets of the Byakugan through here eyes. Her father intervened and killed the shinobi. The Hidden Cloud demanded payback. That the man who killed their shinobi also be killed or else there would be war again. So you may be asking, if the head is sitting up there, and there was no war, how was peace achieved. Simple really, since they were twins, my father was the one to take the head’s place and thus the peace between our villages preserved.”

His jaw tightened, almost imperceptibly.

“My father died in my uncle's place. Not because he chose it in any way that mattered, but because the seal on his forehead made the choice for him the moment the main house decided it was necessary. He gave his life so that Hinata Hyuga, a girl barely old enough to understand what had happened, could keep her father.”

Naruto's eyes had gone hard, fixed entirely on Neji's face now.

“That is what it means to be born into the branch house. We exist to be spent. There is no version of my life where that was ever going to be different, no matter how hard I trained, no matter how far beyond the main house's own children I surpassed them. That is destiny, Naruto. It does not care what you want. It only cares what you were born as.”

Naruto was quiet for a moment, and when he finally spoke his voice was low and even. “That's stupid.”

Neji's eyes cut toward him sharply. “What did you say?”

“You heard me. That's stupid.” Naruto got his good arm underneath himself and forced his body upright, swaying but staying on his feet through sheer refusal to stay down. “You're standing here telling me your dad's death was written in stone before he was even born, like you had no say in any of it, like none of it could have gone any different way. That's not destiny. That's just you deciding it's easier to believe there was never a choice than to be angry that somebody made one for you.”

“You don't understand a single thing about what you're speaking of.”

“Then make me understand it.”

For a long moment Neji only looked at him. Then, slowly, deliberately, his fingers rose to the edge of his forehead protector and worked the knot loose. The metal plate slid free, and beneath it, dark against pale skin, sat a seal shaped like a stylized X wrapped inside a curling square, its lines a shade of green so deep it looked almost black in the afternoon light.

“This is the Caged Bird Seal,” Neji said. “Every branch member of the Hyuga clan wears one. It is placed on us in early childhood, before we are old enough to refuse. With a single hand sign, any member of the main house can activate it. It can be used to kill us instantly, or worse, to make the final moments of our life a kind of agony no other technique I have ever heard of can match. It also ensures that after death, our eyes cannot be removed and studied, so that even in dying we cannot betray the secrets of a bloodline we were never permitted to fully use for ourselves.”

Somewhere above them in the dignitary box, Hiashi Hyuga's expression did not change, but his eyes had fixed on the mark on his nephew's forehead with the stillness of a man watching something he could not undo.

The crowd had gone quiet in the way crowds do when they sense they have stumbled into something they were not meant to see, murmurs rising and falling in confused, uncertain waves.

Naruto stared at the seal. Something in his face had shifted from anger into something colder and more focused.

“They put that on you,” he said. It wasn't a question.

“Yes.”

“And you just accepted it. Your whole life.”

“I told you. I had no choice. I got it before I could even speak, before I even knew what a choice was, before I even knew who I was.”

“I see…” Naruto said, rubbing his own stomach. Something similar happened to him. Naruto's voice did not rise, but it carried across the arena floor with a weight that made even Neji go still for a fraction of a second. “The more I learn about this place, the more I grow sick of it. All of this… this is all so damn wrong it angers me so much. First about me, then my parents, my father, Rin, the Uchiha massacre. This place sickens me.”

Something flickered across Neji's face, gone almost before it arrived. He did not answer. Instead he reached up and refastened his headband, hiding the mark once more beneath cloth and metal, his movements sharp with something that was not quite anger and not quite shame.

“I have no interest in your sympathy,” he said. “What I told you is the truth of this world, whether you accept it or not. Now. Allow me to show you what that truth actually looks like when it is written on a battlefield instead of spoken in words.”

Neji's stance shifted again, feet sliding into place with the precision of something drilled ten thousand times, arms rising until his palms faced outward on every side of his body, fingers spread and trembling faintly with contained chakra.

“You are within range of my divination,” he said. “Eight Trigrams.”

Naruto stood his ground, swaying slightly on legs that had gone half numb, and said nothing.

Neji's hands blurred.

Two strikes landed first, one to the chest and one just below it, each one finding its mark with a precision that looked less like combat and more like calligraphy, a signature written directly onto Naruto's chakra network. The next instant there were four, then eight, his palms moving faster than the eye could properly separate one strike from the next, each impact accompanied by a small, sharp sound like a stone dropped onto packed earth.

Up in the stands, an old man in a chunin flak jacket leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “That's the real Eight Trigrams line. He isn't stopping at Sixty Four.”

Sixteen palms became thirty two. Thirty two became sixty four, Neji's entire body now a blur of white sleeves and flashing palms, his footwork keeping him rooted directly in front of Naruto without ever seeming to plant his feet for more than a fraction of a second at a time.

“Sixty four is where most branch house Hyuga stop for their entire lives,” someone else murmured, further up in the crowd, the words spreading outward the way rumors do in a packed arena, passed from mouth to mouth faster than any single person could confirm them. “My cousin trained under the clan for six years and never got past it.”

One hundred and twenty eight struck in a single continuous motion, Neji's arms a pale blur, and for a heartbeat the sound of impact came so close together it resembled a drumroll rather than individual strikes.

“That's a jonin technique.” A woman near the front of the stands had risen halfway out of her seat, hand pressed to her mouth. “I've seen Hyuga jonin who spent their whole careers and topped out right there, at one hundred twenty eight. That's supposed to be the ceiling for anyone outside the main house.”

Naruto's body jerked with each strike, his limbs answering slower and slower, his shadow clones long since gone, and still Neji did not stop.

One hundred and twenty eight became one hundred and sixty. One hundred and sixty became two hundred, the count rising in a way that no one in the stands had a name for anymore, the murmuring around the arena swelling into something closer to disbelief.

“Two hundred and fifty six,” Guy said quietly from where he stood near the railing, and though his voice was calm his eyes had gone wide. “I have heard that number spoken of in this clan's history exactly twice in my life. Both times it was in reference to men who have been dead for over a hundred years.”

Tenten, beside him, did not take her eyes off the arena floor. “You're saying no one alive has ever actually done that.”

“I am saying that if he finishes it,” Guy answered, “every Hyuga in this stadium is about to watch their own clan's history rewrite itself in front of them.”

Two hundred and fifty six.

The final strike landed square in the center of Naruto's chest, and the sound of it seemed to hang in the air a half second longer than it should have, as though even the arena itself understood what it had just witnessed.

Neji stepped back, lowering his arms slowly, his chest rising and falling hard from the effort of a technique that had not, until this exact moment, ever been completed outside the oldest recorded generations of his own bloodline.

Naruto's body folded and hit the ground, limp, blood at the corner of his mouth, eyes open but unfocused.

The arena did not erupt immediately. For a long, strange moment it simply sat in silence, thousands of people trying to process what they had just watched. Then the sound broke all at once, a wave of noise crashing down from every tier of the stadium, shouting and applause and disbelief tangled together into something almost deafening.

Neji turned his back on the body and lifted one hand toward the crowd, chest still heaving, the ghost of something like satisfaction on his face for the first time since the match began.

In the dignitary box, Hiashi Hyuga sat perfectly still, watching his nephew, a boy from the branch house that his own clan had spent generations telling was lesser, standing in the center of the arena having just completed a technique that Hiashi himself, main house heir and clan head, had never once managed to finish in his own lifetime.

Beside him, Hanabi's small hands were gripping the edge of her seat. “He's the strongest,” she said, barely above a whisper. “The strongest this clan has produced in longer than anyone can remember. And he's from the branch family.”

Hiashi said nothing.

“Father.” Hanabi turned to look at him, something uncertain crossing her young face. “What he said. About Uncle Hizashi. About why he died. Was that true?”

For a long moment Hiashi did not answer, his eyes still fixed on the still form lying in the dirt below.

“Yes,” he said finally. “It was.”

Hanabi went quiet, absorbing that, and after a moment she asked the question that seemed to matter to her more than any of it. “Is he stronger than sister Hinata?”

Hiashi's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly, and he found that for the second time in as many minutes, he did not have an answer he was willing to give his youngest daughter.

Hayate stepped down onto the arena floor, moving toward Neji with the slow, measured steps of a proctor about to close out a match that everyone in the stadium already considered decided. He raised one hand, glancing once toward the still body on the ground, then toward Neji.

“Winner…”

“I wouldn't call it yet, if I were you.”

The voice came from the tree line at the edge of the arena, calm and unhurried, cutting through the last of the crowd's noise so cleanly that thousands of conversations died at once.

Naruto walked out from between the trees.

His clothes were clean. His face carried no bruising, no blood, no sign at all of having absorbed two hundred and fifty six precise strikes to his chakra network. He moved like a boy who had simply been standing there the entire time, waiting for something interesting enough to draw him back into the light.

Neji's head snapped toward him, and for the first time since the match had begun, something other than calm control crossed his face.

“What is this?”

Naruto's gaze drifted past him, toward the crumpled body still lying motionless on the arena floor. As Neji turned to follow his eyes, the body dissolved into a thin curl of white smoke, and where it had been there was nothing at all.

“A shadow clone,” Neji said slowly, the pieces settling into place behind his pale eyes even as his voice stayed carefully even. “You were never actually here.”

“Not for most of it, no.” Naruto crossed the arena floor at an easy walk, hands loose at his sides, his eyes never leaving Neji's face. “I figured a guy who trained as hard as you probably had something saved up that he hadn't shown anybody yet. Didn't seem smart to find that out with my actual body on the line.”

He stopped a few paces away, close enough now that Neji could see there was no exhaustion in him at all, no trace of the hundreds of strikes his clone had just absorbed.

“So I let a clone hold your attention while I watched from over there the whole time.” Naruto tilted his head slightly toward the tree line. “Two hundred and fifty six palms. I mean that. I wasn't expecting you to actually pull that off. Not gonna lie, for a second there I thought maybe I'd misjudged how far you'd go to prove a point.”

Neji said nothing. His hands had curled slightly at his sides, the only outward sign of the calculation running behind his eyes.

“You've got my respect for that,” Naruto continued, and there was no mockery in it, only a plain, unshaken honesty. “Genuinely. That's not something I say a lot.”

He rolled his shoulders once, loosening muscles that had done nothing but stand and watch for the last several minutes, and the easy warmth drained slowly out of his expression, replaced by something sharper.

“But I think it's about time I showed you why I'm not planning on losing here today. Not to you. Not to anybody in this whole exam.”

“Your father's name does not change the outcome of this match,” Neji said, his voice regaining its flat control even as his stance shifted, weight settling low again, Byakugan veins pulsing back to full readiness along his temples. “You are still a genin standing in front of a technique that has not been matched in this clan for over a century. Whatever legacy you believe you are entitled to changes nothing about what you actually are.”

Naruto's smile came back, narrow now, and colder than anything he had shown all match.

“We'll see about that.”

----

Next Time: Legacy of the Yellow Flash of the Leaf - Neji vs. Naruto III