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[GUtW]—❈—54:: Sixteen Down: Sixteen To Go [II]
🕑 Added 2023-09-09 08:34:32 +0000 UTC…Kaoru says the words that seals the match: “I surrender.”
And just like that, Kurotsuchi becomes the first, and likely only person in the tournament to win a fight before it even begins.
—❈—
The names for the next match come up:
Dosu Kinuta (Sound) vs. Kankuro (Sand)
“Kick his ass, Dosu,” Naruto cheers as the contestants exit.
The blonde gets more than one strange look for his actions, not least of all from the Sound-nin he’s cheering.
“Why are you cheering him on?” Sakura asks, staring at Naruto like she usually does (i.e. like he’s an idiot). “He’s from a different village. You’ll probably have to fight him if he advances further.”
“Well, I might have to fight you too, but that doesn’t mean I’m not gonna cheer for you,” Naruto says.
“That’s different, “ Sakura says. “I’m your teammate. Whatever happens in this exam, we’re going to still be working together. He is a random guy you barely even know.”
I ignore the ensuing bickering and focus back on what’s relevant.
Down at the arena, Dosu and Kankuro present themselves, waiting for the gong.
Activating my sharingan, I peer down at the fighters and, at my first sight of Kankuro, or rather his puppet, I have to resist the by now familiar urge to look away in discomfort.
With my normal eyes, it’s unnoticeable, but with the perfect vision of the sharingan, I see Kankuro’s puppet for what it is; an eerily life-like effigy of a human pretending eerily well to be that human, and it is a sight that always leaves me with an uncomfortably strong feeling of the uncanny valley.
Caleb’s memories seem to almost shudder, pulling likenesses between the feeling Kankuro’s puppet evokes in me to the feelings several “horror” media from Caleb’s home world had evoked in the boy himself.
I resist the urge to roll my eyes. I will never understand why people feel the need to indulge in ‘horror’ for entertainment.
“That’s his puppet, right?” Sakura asks me.
I nod.
“I don’t know why he bothered,” Naruto says. “I mean, everyone’s gotta know by now that that’s not his real body, right?”
Yes, they should. After all, we’ve all seen him fight once, and even for those contestants who couldn’t figure it out themselves, that’s what jōnin-sensei are for.
It is simply another way The Chūnin Exams scales in difficulty going forward; with every battle, you reveal more of your tricks, so that by the end, you’re fighting someone who knows all of what you can do, and has had quite a bit of time to come up with counters to them.
On the flip side, it does leave you knowing your opponent’s tricks in return.
“Well, maybe he still has a card to play,” Sakura says.
“Meh,” Naruto dismisses. “It doesn’t matter what he does, Dosu’s gonna kick his ass.”
“Again, you know you’re not friends with this Dosu person, right?” Sakura asks, but Naruto simply sticks his tongue out at her.
The gong rings, and, unlike in his last fight, Kankuro acts instantly, floating up into the air and charges at his opponent.
Dosu meets him.
It becomes immediately clear to me what Dosu’s plan is; get past Kankuro’s puppet and attack his sealed body directly. Only, Kankuro sees it too, and the Sand-nin isn’t giving Dosu the room to manage it.
Raining down kicks, kunai strikes, and even shooting what I’m fairly certain are poison tipped darts from his joints, Kankuro gives up all pretense of being a normal boy and does everything in his power to put Dosu down.
But Dosu won’t go down. Between his speed, his sound-based ninjutsu, and his sheer skill, Dosu isn’t just matching Kankuro, he’s beating him.
Slowly and steadily, Kankuro’s puppet is being broken down, and with every passing second, it’s becoming clearer that, unless Kankuro has a pretty good trick up his sleeve, he’s not winning this.
Ordinarily, since Kankuro can essentially fly, an ideal strategy for him would have been to draw back and attack from a distance.
Unfortunately, he has to keep Dosu from reaching his body, and unless Kankuro can pull a Naruto and endlessly spam powerful jutsu at Dosu, the only way he can appreciably slow down the Sound-nin is physically.
While Dosu may be the superior fighter of the two though, I have to applaud Kankuro’s remarkable skill with the chakra strings.
Or should I say chakra string, seeing as the Sand-nin is technically controlling his puppet with only one.
That singular chakra string runs into a facsimile of a spine in the puppet, and from there it splits and spreads through it, controlling every of it’s actions much like a nervous system.
It is strangely beautiful and endlessly complicated, and the amount of skill required to have that much control over that many moving parts beggars the imagination.
Regardless of Kankuro’s skill with the chakra strings however, his defeat is inevitable, and eventually, it arrives.
Dosu blasts the puppet so hard, that it’s bottom half shatters, then he jumps and kicks what’s left into the dirt.
He stares down at the broken remains of the puppet; a head, a torso, and a left arm.
“I win,” Dosu says.
The wrecked, fake skin of Kankuro’s puppet’s face stretches in a macabre grin.
“N-no, you-you d-don’t,” he says in a stuttering voice.
Dosu frowns, and then the sealed package that I’d always thought was Kankuro’s body this entire time (because what else could it be?) opens, and a giant centipede with a red, metal carapace and scythes for legs crawls out.
“What the fuck is that?” Sakura asks.
