Chapter 47.3- Gamer of the Desert

He never learned the value of family as a child, so focused and used to working on his won. He’d been confused as to why they’d been upset at him for not telling them. Yes, there was nothing they could have done to help with the procedure, but there was still some peace of mind that would come from having it be known to her that her brother would inform her whenever that kind of thing had to happen. 
Terrible situation or not, the implanted Sharingan had been one hell of a boon for Gaara’s combat ability. She had no doubts that Gaara was one of the strongest people in the world even before getting the fancy new eye, but implanting it had taken his combat process to whole new levels. His growth was nothing short of explosive. She got the privilege of watching some of his kenjutsu lessons with the ANBU Commander, and the word ‘lesson’ seemed to fit the situation less and less with each passing day. At first, they had been evenly matched, with the ANBU Commander holding back by some fair margin. That margin had now more or less disappeared, and when they crossed blades, they did so as equals.

It was a bit scary to watch how he could easily match and nearly surpass someone who had spent their whole life training the craft just with a few more lessons with those fancy eyes. Watching Gaara had made her realise one key thing. Itachi Uchiha needed an award of some sort. The Uchiha clan wrote truly too dangerous to have been allowed to live. Even if just a mere 10% of their number showed as much skill with the Sharingan as Gaara did, then they’d be in for a world of hurt.

She watched as Gaara shuffled backwards, looking for all the world like he was dancing with his opponent to avoid the multitude of stabs that came from Shira’s movements as he wielded bone blades that stuck out from both his fists, elbows, and chest. Shira’s new kekkei genkai had also been another matter of contention. She couldn’t believe that Gaara had somehow figured out how to transplant kekkei genkai, and then used it on her classmate who had not a single drop of ninjutsu talent. For some reason, that lack of ninjutsu or genjutsu talent had no bearings on Shira’s ability to use the Dead bone pulse. He wielded the powerful kekkei genkai like he was born with it.

Being completely honest, Temari had never had much doubts about Shira being the strongest of them all but that gap had grown in just a few months since he got released from the hospital. She looked down at her hands, and the fans clutched in them. Kankuro was shaping up to being a legendary seal master of renown; Shira had a kekkei genkai that allowed him fight almost evenly with Gaara who had a sharingan. Both her teammates were leaving her behind, and it felt like there was nothing she could do about it. Sure, she had her fans. Yes, Gaara made them to be legendary weapons on par with the legendary blades of the Hidden Mist, but a weapon would only ever be as powerful as its wielder, and she was thoroughly lacking in that regards.

Her moments of reflecting prevented her from seeing the conclusion to the fight between them, but she heard the sound of bone breaking ver clearly. She looked up and found Gaara holding one of Shira’s bone blades to his neck with the latter on his back on the sandy floor.

“You held back” Her teammate grouched. Her brother merely smiled in return.

“Using genjutsu on you when you have such little resistance or even potential for resistance felt too much like cheating, so I had to do things the old fashioned way” He said while tossing the bone blade away before reaching down with his hand to help Shira to his own feet. Accepting the peace offering, Shira took the hand and was returned to his standing position almost immediately.

“That bone sure did heal quickly” Gaara mused idly.

“It was a clean fracture.” Shira said, hand on his chin. “You stamped on it at an angle to make sure that the break would be as clean as possible. The bone probably began melding pretty much immediately after I landed on the floor” he theorised.

“So, what do you think you did wrong?” Gaara asked, getting to her least favourite part of these sparring sessions.

Whenever Gaara beat them regardless of what restriction they placed on him, he’d add salt to the wound by insisting they went over their preferred strategies and the happenings of the fight immediately afterwards.

“I didn’t guard my feet well enough” Shira said, making Gaara chuckle.

“No. To this eye of mine, you were full of openings. If you’d guarded your feet, I’d have gone somewhere else instead. What you did wrong was the same thing you’ve done wrong in almost every practice session in the three months we’ve spent working together on getting your combat up to snuff. You’re reinventing your entire fighting style to take advantage of the dead bone pulse, and while I don’t condemn you for that, you also have to realise that you can’t use both fighting styles at the same time. You can’t fight in the way you did before getting the dead bone pulse. The differences caused by four protruding bones on each of your extremities means that you have to switch things up a bit…” She zoned out as Gaara got into more and more detail on taijutsu. Sure, she knew that hand to hand combat was a key skill for every shinobi to learn, but she’d never excelled at it. And she also couldn’t deny the truth. Taijutsu bored her. It had too much repetition, too much effort required for even the most minute improvements, and nowhere near the amount of flair that good ninjutsu could display.

Her other gripe with it was that she was shit at it, but that was neither here nor there. Gaara was calling her attention.

“What I did wrong is obvious, I kept meeting your eye.” She said, hoping with all her heart for him to just nod and move on after her admission of fault.

“Wrong. Funny enough, what I used against you today was a trick I saw Itachi Uchiha use on the five-tail Jinchuriki back in Iwa. You see, Han is- or was- an experienced shinobi. He’d definitely fought more than a few Uchiha in his lifetime. He knew not to meet the Clankiller’s yes, and yet he did precisely that. It’s confused me for a while but now I have a theory. Right before their eyes met, the Uchiha blasted the Jinchuriki with a fireball jutsu that the hardy jinchuriki walked right through. It confused me. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that the Gobi Jinchuriki would be highly resistant to fire release. Itachi clearly didn’t have enough chakra to just waste it on futile efforts. So now I have a theory on how he did what he did and why. The fireball jutsu was both a distraction, a taunt, and a hook. He expected Han to walk through it. He anticipated it, in fact. That’s why the fireball was laced with a genjutsu. Not anything ambitious. Just a minor genjutsu that made the Gobi jinchuriki meet his opponent’s eyes for a split second. It was enough to end the fight there...”

“That’s what you did to me” She cut in, interrupting the tangent that Gaara had begun to go on after realising just exactly what he was getting at.

“Precisely. Unlike Itachi, I have the reserves to just spread my chakra all about my surroundings. And the best part is that since all you were looking for was sharingan genjutsu, then you paid little attention to your chakra network when our eyes did not meet. Once I could get you to meet my eyes, however, there was little you could do about that on your own. Sharingan genjutsu is an effective, insidious thing. I don’t even have to put in much effort to force you into a mental sleep. Or force you to replay a moment ad infinitum until you either realised, collapsed from mental strain, or got rescued by someone else.” He said, rubbing a hand over the eye lid that now covered that red eye of his. When he opened the eye again, it took a phenomenal application of mental will to resist flinching at the sight. Yet, Gaara still noticed if the way his gaze on her softened was any indication.

“What else did you do wrong?” He asked her, changing the topic and moving on.

Temari sat still on the ground as she reviewed the fight mentally. Trying to figure out where she could have acted differently or where she could have been more effective with her actions.

“I can’t find anything else” She said to him, expecting some form of criticism or condemnation from daring to suggest that she’d only made a single mistake. Instead, his smile widened and he looked upon her with such fondness and affection that she felt her cheeks light up in a bright red. This was the first time he was looking at her like that, and he walked forwards to plop a hand down on her shoulder.

“Neither can I. You fulfilled your role with perfection. There’s not much more that you could have done with the arsenal at your disposal. That does mean that we need to work to widen said arsenal, but that’s neither here nor there. You were amazing today, almost the polar opposite of our brother who’s trying his hardest to blend in with the sand” He said, turning his attention from her to Kankuro seamlessly.

“Your head wasn’t in it today….”

XXXXX- NEJI OF THE BYAKUGAN

“West, three hundred metres” He said, identifying their quarry with ease. There was nothing that could hide from these eyes of his, and after Danzo-sama took him under his wing, that statement had become more and more true with time as his range expanded nearly constantly.

“On it” His partner said, moving in a blur of speed that would have made Rock Lee envious. He cleared his mind of thoughts of his previous team. Danzo-sama would not be pleased with thoughts like that popping up while they were on a mission. Especially one of this level of importance.

He tracked his partner as the younger boy ran through the trees while leaving almost no sign of his presence of passing. When he finally arrived right above their targets, he executed his movements with a fluidity that would have made Neji’s previous self jealous. He jumped right at one of them with a kunai clutched in his right hand. His other hand reached into the shrunken pouch at his waist and tossed five of the throwing stars at the other.

The tossed stars moved in such a way that it was nearly impossible for the Kusagakure Chunin to dodge them without abandoning his previous position and retreating. That retreat put him in no position to help his partner as he clashed with the Uchiha prodigy in a dance of furious taijutsu. Sasuke Uchiha picked apart the Kusa chunin, making the man look like an academy student. Flashing red eyes tracked every movement as he kept his opponent on the back foot. Neji turned his attention away from that fight, the conclusion already decided by destiny, and sought out the last target. The third scout had taken a less direct route back to his home village, hoping that would hide him from the Byakugan. What utter foolishness. Neji decided on a path for interception and moved.

In a matter of minutes, he’d caught up to the man. “Eight Trigrams: Vacuum Palm” He whispered, executing the jutsu seamlessly. The man, mid jump, slumped down to the ground dead as the attack tore through his heart.

A/N; Yeah, yeah, yeah