I didn't even walk out of the arena; I just stood there, looking at Minato while the crowd was still yelling. I think Sakumo also knew it would be useless to tell me to go back and wait, so he simply waved a hand, and Minato quickly began walking towards me. Grinning, I glanced around, and I saw Kushina almost standing on the railing, waving both arms like she was about to jump down and referee the match herself. Which would have been a disaster. Luckily, Sayuri was next to her, one hand grabbing Kushina's sleeve, trying to keep her from jumping down, while the other was waving at me.
Naturally, Mom and Dad were both standing too, and I saw that Jiraiya-sensei was grinning like an idiot in the Hokage's booth. Of course, the Hokage sat beside him, his gaze locked onto us, making me quickly glance away just so I could look at Fugaku, still impassive at best, bored at worst.
"You look... excited!" I said, rolling my shoulders, feeling a starting ache from my match with Hiashi, as I turned towards Minato. There were dull spots in my chakra flow where the Gentle Fist had grazed me, but nothing critical or something that would stop me.
"Not as much as you," Minato answered.
"Liar."
"No." His smile softened. "I mean it... are you okay?"
I blinked and shrugged because that question was unfair. He wasn't supposed to be like that. This is the final match!
"Of course." I nodded seriously, "I made sure to keep myself up to par for what is expected of the final showdown. I hadn't revealed all my tricks either and, believe me... This will be our best sparring session yet.
His smile grew wider at once, and the crowd was still roaring, but for a second, I no longer heard them. Heh... To think I am here right now... We have been training together since the Academy. I knew how Minato moved, and he knew how I thought, so this match will be the hardest for me. I knew his favorite feints, his steps, his little shoulder shift before he accelerated to that ridiculous speed of his. In turn, he knew when I was about to turn a joke into a trap, when I was about to use fire as cover, or how my eye twitched when I was thinking of using genjutsu. Haaah... That was what made this dangerous.
"I'm not holding back," I said, exhaling loudly.
"I know."
"Don't you dare to hold back either!" I said, looking into his eyes, "I would be disappointed if you did."
"I won't." He nodded seriously, "I am not going to insult my brother."
"Hehehe..." My grin spread wide, and his smile grew as well while Sakumo looked between us, and for the first time all day, I saw something that looked like genuine caution in his eyes when I glanced at him.
"Rules remain the same," he said, realizing that there was not much to do now but start the match. "Victory by surrender, incapacitation, or referee decision. Lethal force is prohibited. Understood?" He asked, watching us nod. "Control your techniques. Both of you! This is the final match, not a battlefield."
As an answer, I took another, long and deep breath and let it out slowly... Then my Sharingan activated. Minato's eyes tracked the change, and his expression became focused as well, looking like how I remembered him from the show. Yeah... he was taking me seriously, which was already an achievement in itself. Maybe that's why I didn't even hear Sakumo say we could begin, and we just both vanished at the same time.
The first exchange happened so quickly that the crowd reacted a second too late. My fist met his forearm with a crack, while his knee rose toward my ribs. I twisted aside, bringing my elbow in high that he ducked under, and his palm changed direction toward my chest. I slapped it away and drove forward with my shoulder, but he had already stepped off-line, caught my sleeve, and tried to turn me into the dirt, using one of Kushina's grappling moves. Like he was the only one versed in Uzumaki styles! I let him pull, and the moment he sensed that, he released before I could counter. I knew he would feel it, so I kicked before he reset.
"Tsk!"
His hand caught my ankle, but I was already spinning my body mid-air as my other foot came up toward his jaw. He leaned back and released me, and I flipped once, landing in a crouch with my palm against the dirt. Of course, Minato was already moving, and I could barely, BARELY track him. I pushed chakra into my legs to keep up and met him halfway, grinning as the world narrowed into a pinpoint thanks to the speed we both were displaying. My Sharingan spun like crazy, working in overdrive to catch every twitch. Minato's left shoulder dipped. No, ignore it, that's fake. His right foot shifted inward. That is real... He wanted to cut behind me and strike me at my blind spot. Too bad for him, I didn't have to play fair.
I snapped my hand upward, throwing three shuriken at that moment, watching as he slipped between them. The wires attached to them got pulled taut, curving the blades back toward him from behind, as I copied Shikaku's move, but he jumped. Wanting to impale me with my own wired weapons? Not gonna happen, because I was there beneath him, jumping too. My fist came up wrapped in a thin burst of flame. Sensing the heat, without looking, Minato twisted himself mid-air, his sandal touching my wrist for half a heartbeat, using me as a platform to flip away. The fire did lick at his leg, but he pulled clear before it could do more than singe the edge of his sandals.
"Cheater!" I yelled, laughing, "I'm not a bouncing castle!"
"You are cheating! You used wires the same way as Shikaku!"
"And?! I have a Sharingan! It's my thing, copying!"
The crowd roared again, but not because of what we were saying, but because they finally caught up, as the previous exchange happened in only a few seconds.
By then, we clashed again.
This time, Minato came at me lower, sticking to the ground. He wasn't trying to overpower me; instead, his movements were erratic as he was trying to make me overread. He used ridiculously many small feints, mixed with new twitches he never showed before while we sparred. He knew exactly what Fugaku had been drilling into me, and he was trying to turn what my Sharingan was picking up into pure noise.
I will give it to him... It almost worked.
His fingers brushed my shoulder, and I barely rolled with the touch before he could turn it into a grab and strike. So, I answered by copying one of his own steps, using a sharp inward pivot, my left foot sliding across the dirt while my right shoulder began to drop, a grab-and-hold strike aimed at his ribs. If I land this... it will hurt. He knew it, because his eyes widened, just for a fraction.
The only reason I had to abort was that he formed three hand seals faster than most people could blink.
"Fūton: Spiral Shear!"
I could almost hear him form the words, reading the twitches around his mouth, while wind gathered around his right arm, shredding his clothes. My Sharingan quickly revealed that it wasn't a projectile, though. His jutsu was made of his chakra, forming a cutting layer wrapped around his limb like a rotating blade. Tsk... Hitting me with that would slice me up for good... So, I dropped backward just as his wind-covered hand passed over my face and cut several strands of hair free, leaving shallow cuts on my nose.
Ouch! That was rude... So, I answered with my own seals.
"Katon: Crimson Fan!"
Fire burst from my mouth, but not in a straight stream. As its name suggested, it fanned out over a large area. I wanted to make sure that even if he dodged, he would have to deal with a curtain of fire. So, of course, he cut through it. His jutsu split the flame, the wind-covered arms slicing a straight path down the middle. But I had expected that, and the divided flames did not stop spreading; instead, they began to envelop him, boxing him in as if I had dropped him into an oven. He jumped backward while his escape route was disappearing, spinning once, and the wind around his arm expanded in a sharp whistle that scattered the fire into embers before it could close above him.
Tsk... He slipped out in the end.
"That one is new," he said, landing, watching the fire close in as it reformed, incinerating the position he was at before.
"So is yours," I said while looking at him over the dying flames.
"I made it last month." He nodded, waving his hands to disperse it.
"I made mine up just now." I shrugged.
"Of course you did." He rolled his eyes, making me grin.
"Jealous?"
"Hmph!"
He lifted both hands at that... Ooops. He did not like that, and he was about to escalate things!
"Fūton: Gale Step Formation!"
Once again, I could read it from the way his muscles moved on his face, and then, as swirling winds surrounded him, he moved. The first step alone cracked the ground, and every movement he made created a kind of temporary vacuum... He was preparing to snuff out my flames, huh? Even as I covered myself in my flaming armor, I barely blocked the first strike, and when the second hit my guard, my flames were getting blown apart quite quickly. Tsk! Troublesome, as Shikaku would say. In the end, his third slipped through my defenses and caught my ribs. Without waiting for anything, he simply stomped, releasing a fiery explosion to use it to blow me back in a hurry, because he could do more damage.
"My turn!" I yelled back, ignoring the sting in my side, as if I had run a marathon and was struggling for air at the end of it.
I launched forward, using smaller fiery explosions under my feet to propel me forward. My acceleration became violent, and at the last step I jumped, fire bursting under my heel, and spun above him as I exhaled. Dozens of tiny fire droplets fell from above like rain, each one no bigger than a fingernail, but hot enough to burn through armor and reach the skin. Doing another set of seals, he let loose his own attack as wind rose around him in a dome. The droplets hit it and scattered, some blown aside, some extinguished, some redirected away from him.
By the time I landed on the other side of him, he was already there, and our fists met. Wind against fire, resulting in a massive explosion, sending us apart as the shock ran up both of our arms, hurting both of us. The crowd was screaming now, but it sounded far away, so far in fact, I barely registered it. As we exchanged moves again, it was like fighting a mirror... And then, suddenly, I caught his sleeve with two fingers, just as his eyes met mine.
Genjutsu!
I didn't even hesitate and made the arena dissolve around him. I created a red sky overhead, endless reflections pulling at his senses as the ground turned into a mismatch of mud and water. His solution was to completely shut his eyes, and I saw as his ears and nose were covered by his chakra...
"What—?!"
His fist came toward my face while I was yelling out, and I ducked just in time, the strike passing over my hair, ruffling it. He followed me blindly, actually fighting me... blinded. Clever bastard! I noticed how his wind chakra spread outward from his body, using it to sense my movement and react to every disturbance my body created. He was tracking me through wind!
"You developed sonar?!" I snorted, and I wasn't surprised he could pick up on what I was saying, without having to worry about my voice and a secondary genjutsu.
"Not exactly," he answered in the middle of an attack. "And... What is sonar?"
"That's what you are using is absolutely sonar!" I groaned.
"I don't know what that means."
"Don't lie!" I said with apparent frustration.
However, his blind fighting wasn't perfect, far from it. It couldn't catch every feint, and I soon flipped the table on him, forcing Minato to only dodge, defend, and try to escape. This method was only good at fighting against genjutsu or someone who was below our level. Against me, he was now feeling the pressure. Thinking he was about to open his eyes and give up on maintaining it, I tried another flicker of illusion through sound, snapping my fingers.
When it failed to get the results I wanted, I fired two flame arcs from my hands. He heard the ignition, felt the heat, and expertly moved between them, just as I wanted, as I was waiting for him there, landing a smack in his stomach, sending him rolling away, his eyes finally snapping open.
"That makes it square between us now," I began speaking, but broke off because by the time he was back up, his chakra condensed inward, spiraling around his body in a way I knew too well. "Shit! When?!"
Damn Hiraishin! Sending out my sense, I caught the marks already, probably even placed there while we were fighting, or even laid down while battling the others, preparing for the final. The fact was that by the time I reacted, Minato disappeared. Naturally, the crowd didn't understand, but by then he appeared behind my left shoulder, already mid-strike.
"Hmph!"
With a snort, my body folded through space with a gut-dropping sensation, and I appeared beside the same mark a fraction after him, now standing right behind him! I saw how his eyes widened as he reacted, pulling a kunai, turning towards me, clashing with mine. The sound cracked across the arena like thunder, and for a moment, I knew that there was utter silence around the arena. We didn't even separate, only looking into each other's eyes, pushing the two kunai at each other, testing which of us had more physical strength at the moment.
"What was that?!"
"He vanished!"
"No, both of them did!"
"That's—"
"Impossible!"
"The Second Hokage's—"
"Hiraishin no Jutsu?!"
I heard the shouts coming from all directions, how people stood from their seats, how everyone leaned forward. I think I even sensed how Jiraiya-sensei actually stood up in the Hokage's booth. I could almost see how his both hands were on the railing, face somewhere between horror, pride, and oh-fuck-I'm-going-to-get-blamed-for-this. Finally, Minato and I broke apart, settling into a brief pause.
"You followed me," he said, pouting.
"I told you I could use your marks." I grinned, twirling the kunai in my hands, "I may have trouble putting down my own... but if I focus, I sense all of yours."
"I still thought you needed a bit more preparation..."
"I don't."
He threw three kunai at me the next moment, and my eyes tracked every one, feeling the marks on them. Each one landed in a different point around the arena, and I sensed them flare at the same time as Minato vanished. Naturally, I moved too. He appeared at the right mark, while I appeared at the front one. Hah... Wrong guess. I also knew that he threw another kunai just before teleporting. I sensed the fresh mark as it spun through the air, and I jumped to it before it landed, as it was still mid-air.
The world twisted as I appeared above him, falling with a flame-coated heel. I guessed right. He prepared a secondary mark to where he was about to appear, in case I also used that one. If that happened, He could have instantly teleported again and attacked. And now... his smarts were used against him, hah! Haaah... Why do I even celebrate? Of course, he vanished before it hit, and my kick struck dirt, nothing else. While the ground burst apart below me, I felt a mark ignite at the other end of the arena, in a kunai embedded into the wall.
Of course, I was already following him, and we both appeared there, so close that our shoulders slammed together mid-air, and we tumbled down the wall, landing in separate crouches. Naturally, the crowd was losing its collective mind, and so was I, because this was insane. What if we reappeared inside each other? Will that make us die, or will we be Siamese twins from then on? Ew. I guess, somewhere, Tobirama Senju was either proud or rolling in his grave hard enough to power the village for the decades to come.
Too bad Orochimaru wasn't interested in him... I could have given him a heart attack if Tobirama's corpse began rotating on his secret laboratory's desk.
I couldn't think much of it, though, because Minato moved again, and this time he chained it, flashing between marks. The arena became a web of yellow flashes thanks to his hair, and I added a tinge of red through my eyes, because I chased him through all of it. Every mark he made became mine the moment I sensed it... But, finally, he managed to get behind me one moment and drove a fully completed Rasengan toward my back.
I twisted through space to the mark at the furthest wall, barely avoiding it while the air where I had stood screamed as the Rasengan tore through empty space. Tsk! Shit... I landed badly as my knee hit dirt in my hasty escape, and Minato exploited the fact at once, as he appeared in front of me without hesitation. I crossed my arms as his kick landed, and the blow launched me backward. I rolled hard to disperse the momentum, but still spat blood, and came up laughing from it.
"Okay," I coughed. "That one hurt."
"You're bleeding..." He muttered, a bit concerned, but I just waved a hand.
"You will too."
He barely dodged as I sent the kunai through the technique this time. However, despite dodging, it still sliced a line on his side, as I drew blood just the same. Using that brief moment to ascertain my status... It wasn't in a good place. I could feel the strain in my bones, and my eyes burned. My head throbbed from tracking too many marks, going through too much movement, too much space folding and unfolding around me, making me want to vomit. But, at least, Minato was breathing harder too.
I can't stretch this out any longer... he has more in him than I... I will have to end this with a bang, and force him to use up the remainder of his chakra. I knew that Sakumo looked like he was debating whether to stop the match before we accidentally hurt each other, but by then, I lifted my hand and flames gathered in there... and I saw that Minato lifted his, too, just the same.
The Rasengan formed in his palm, brighter and more stable than any version ever before. It was like... a brilliant blue gem, rich with all of his chakra while my own burned red-gold, like a sun. We simply looked at each other, clearly determined to test which of ours was the stronger one. I felt how Sakumo moved and even that Hiruzen stood up. Maybe even Fugaku's Sharingan activated in the stands, but too late.
Minato and I moved at the same time. We crossed the distance in one burst, appearing at the same mark, at the same, opposing distance, clashing as his Rasengan met my Super Nova.
I couldn't see what happened next, because the explosion swallowed everything. I, for one, had no idea what I was feeling. It didn't hurt at all; it wasn't even hot, stinging, or... anything. I was just gone. Then, there was a flicker in the blinding whiteness, and I knew that the barrier around the arena had flared to life, catching the blast before it reached the stands. Then, with a loud snap, something yanked me away, and I hit the ground once, bounced, rolled again, and slammed into something hard enough to make the world go red for a moment.
For a while, I saw and heard nothing, but then came the pain and with it, the color and sounds. Ugh... This will hurt tomorrow, too... I could now somewhat hear the shouting, then the screaming, maybe Sakumo's voice. Or Kushina? Sayuri? Damn, it was so weird.
Blinking my eyes, I finally saw the ruined arena that was now prompting a very nice, very spiraling, deep crater in the middle, the inside of it still on fire. Daaamn. We did that? No wonder everything hurt now... Ugh. My arms were burned when I looked down, and I could tell that my left cheek was cut open at least a dozen times. Blood ran from my nose, and something in my side felt like it had shifted from left to right and that it shouldn't be there... Ugh. I even felt that my Sharingan was going on and off, trying to keep me conscious. Across the crater, Minato was pushing himself up just then. He looked just as bad as I felt... His sleeve was gone, while one side of his face was scraped raw, blood dripping from his chin, and his breathing was rough.
But he stood.
Of course he stood... Haah... So, I forced myself up too while my knees nearly betrayed me. Nope. Stand ya bastard! Not happening. I'm not falling down, nor am I content with a draw... I either lose fair and square, getting knocked out, or I win. No other alternatives! The dust cleared enough for the crowd to see us by then. Yet, before we could do anything, Sakumo stood between us, and his sword was drawn halfway, while his eyes moved from me to Minato.
"Enough," he said firmly, but neither of us answered. "Enough!" he repeated, sharper this time, his chakra visibly flaring up.
"Um," I swallowed some blood and smiled with bloody teeth and gums, "Not yet."
"One..." Minato wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, just as strained, "One more."
"..." Sakumo's jaw tightened, shaking his head, "You two are nearly spent."
"Exactly," I said.
"That's... Why..." Minato nodded, "One more."
For a second, I thought Sakumo would refuse, but to my surprise, Hiruzen's voice came from above, calm but... stern.
"Sakumo."
The White Fang looked toward the Hokage at once, and as I also turned my head. I could tell that Hiruzen did not smile when he was looking at the two of us. But... he nodded once. Just then, Sakumo exhaled through his nose and stepped back, making me grin again.
"One final exchange," he said. "If I judge either of you incapable of continuing, I will end it."
"Please do," Minato said, holding back a cough.
"Very fair," I agreed, and I rolled my neck, which made me nearly fall over, then pretended I had meant to sway like that.
I could feel the final jutsu forming in everyone's imagination. Another Rasengan? Another Super Nova? Fire armor? Wind blades? Hiraishin?
As for us, we both knew what had to be done. I could see it in his eyes. When he asked for one more, I perfectly knew what he meant. And I agreed. Hell, it was my idea in the first place! How could I say no to that offer?! So, I turned off my Sharingan to make this fair.
"On three." He said, while I nodded, both of us smiling, putting our hands to the side, like two samurai waiting for a final pull of their swords, clashing in the middle.
"One." I counted, and the arena was dead silent by then.
"Two," he repeated, and just then, Kushina's voice cut through the silence.
"ARE YOU TWO SERIOUS, DATTEBANE?!"
Without much of a surprise, Sayuri screamed right after her.
"RENJI, I SWEAR—!"
"THREE!" we both yelled, and we threw it out.
My hand was flat... Minato's hand was a fist.
For one heartbeat, nobody moved, just staring, dumbfounded. Then I looked down, then at him, then I grinned so hard my face hurt worse than the burns.
"I win."
Minato stared at our hands just the same, then closed his eyes, before beginning to laugh as best as he could, turning into a coughing fit.
Heh... After all... Paper beats rock.
"YOU IDIOTS! YOU ABSOLUTE IDIOTS, DATTEBANE!"
I didn't hear more, though... because when I started laughing too, it short-circuited something, and everything went black, and I fell over.
At least I can sleep now... Haaah. I hope by the time I wake up, I'm healed.