More students had been sent to the infirmary in the last four months of the Academy than in the previous two years combined. That particular realisation was immediately followed by another: metal, despite being blunted, was very much still metal. We only sparred three times a week, but I had to fight multiple people per session rather than just one—and that was ignoring the addition of the “everything goes” rule.

Because spars weren't limited to just taijutsu anymore.

With the inclusion of jutsu and weapons, what was once a challenging but relatively harmless activity became an easy way to rack up injuries. I’d only fractured a few fingers since the start of the year but my classmates weren’t so lucky. It was bad enough that I’d started taping up my hands. It wouldn’t do much in the way of defence, but it helped prevent annoying injuries that would take days to heal.

Well, days for me and weeks for everyone else. I found it irritating to do at times and ran out of tape more often than I liked, but it was better than opening calluses and getting them infected—I’d found that one out the hard way.

The damned cold made all the above ten times worse. Winter had come, bringing seeping wetness and a constant, biting cold. Being struck by blunted metal hurt enough without it, but with the added chill, it was as bad as taking mallets to the fingers—at least the warm-ups Iruka put us through made the pain easier to shrug off.

We stood in an awkward huddle on the track field at the end of one such warm-up. I flexed my taped fingers from within the safety of my pockets as we waited for the first pair to be called up.

“Naruto and Tomio. The spar ends when one of you can’t go on any longer—or when I call it.” Iruka huffed a frosty breath into the air and stared pointedly at Tomio before looking at me. “Understand?”

“Yes, sensei,” we replied in unison.

I slipped my hand into the pouch holstered to my right thigh and easily slipped my fingers around a worn leather hilt. Iruka gestured to the open ground to his left and we took our positions. It wasn’t much of a surprise that the Academy ditched the concept of a ring after the second year. They were used mostly to train our situational awareness—and weapons did the job just fine.

We’d also grown reliant on the idea of a “ring-out” signalling the end of a fight—me included. Now, we fought with the threat of actual bladed weapons and walked out with more than just bumps and bruises.

Standing face-to-face with my opponent, I purged all other thoughts from my mind and looked him over for any openings to exploit. Tomio, like many of the kids in my class, returned for the third year with a renewed desire to beat me. The new sparring conditions put a sizeable question mark next to my name—after all, I'd only beaten everyone black and blue when the spars were strictly traditional shinobi kumite.

Or so they said—not that I was particularly upset. If it meant that they’d try harder in class and live past the average shinobi life expectancy of nineteen, then I was all for it.

The spar began without Iruka having to say a word.

Tomio formed the Confrontation Seal and hurled three shuriken in a wide arc. I was already moving by the time he pulled his arm back to throw and moved in to close the distance, launching a kunai straight towards him. He brandished a kunai to deflect mine, the momentary distraction giving me just enough time to dig my hand into the pouch at my back and slip three shuriken between my fingers.

He planted his feet and held his kunai forward, ready to deflect them, but I wasn’t done. I blitzed through several hand seals whilst the shuriken cut through the air and the weapons multiplied. Three shuriken blurred into six, before doubling just as quickly until a little over a dozen metal stars buzzed angrily towards him.

The Shuriken Clone Jutsu was a far cry from Lord Third’s Shuriken Shadow Clone Jutsu. While it multiplied the shuriken thrown, the copies were intangible, and didn't require much chakra compared to creating a clone of myself because of how small the shuriken were. That made it perfect for misdirection—which was exactly what I needed at the moment.

Tomio gritted his teeth as he watched the incoming salvo. Realising he couldn’t tell which ones were real and which ones weren’t, he leapt away, though not before a moment’s hesitation—and that moment cost him. The vast majority of the shuriken that he dodged were illusory clones, leaving the original three to slam into him.

They wouldn't draw blood but with the average weight of each shuriken being about fifty grams of pure steel, it still hurt like a bitch. He rolled to his feet and looked back to see his kunai on the ground; too far for him to reclaim before I reached him.

Pulling another kunai from a second holster strapped to my left thigh, I sprinted towards Tomio, intent on ending the spar within the next few moves. He winced, falling into a low stance, but with no weapon to defend himself with, the fight was as good as over. Curling my wrist inwards, I readied myself to throw the kunai before I saw something that made me stop.

The little bastard had managed to get his hands on smoke bombs and I felt a flash of envy as thick as the cloud of smoke in front of me.

Tomio was one of the few students in my class besides the clan kids with shinobi parents, a fact he liked to brag about. It came with benefits that made sparring him an irritating ordeal—in all of my spars since the Academy started back up a few months ago, nobody had pulled out smoke bombs.

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My envious musing was cut short when a hail of shuriken pierced the smoke cloud. There were enough that I didn’t feel confident enough to dodge them all, so I jumped instead. It didn’t give me much of a view into the smoke cloud—despite it already dissipating—and the kunai I’d lobbed into it hadn’t seemed to strike anything.

I touched down in front of the sea of scattered shuriken, keeping my eyes on the cloud in front of me. After a few moments of silence, I realised one thing very quickly: Tomio wasn’t in the smoke cloud. Goosebumps raced along the back of my neck. I dropped onto my back and watched him swing his kunai right where my head had previously been.

The lack of a target to stop him sent him stumbling and I watched him try to regain his balance for a few precious moments. While he struggled to stay on his feet, I spent those moments gathering my focus. Moulding chakra without hand seals was difficult, but not impossible—especially since chakra control was my forté.

…Well it wasn’t exactly my forté because that would imply it came easy, but rather, something I put an ungodly amount of practice into. I didn’t have the best chakra control, but nobody in my class trained it as hard as I did.

I mixed my chakra and directed it from the centre of my body to my palms. I leaned back onto my neck and shoulders, propping my hands underneath me as support, and kicked out, planting my feet squarely in Tomio’s chest. The blow’s force travelled up my body via the soles of my feet—and I only remained stable thanks to a nifty skill I called chakra adhesion.

I wasn’t the one to name it and it wasn’t a secret skill or anything. I’d just found more ways to use the principles taught in the tree-climbing and water-walking exercises to make up for my lacking jutsu repertoire.

Tomio let out a choking gasp and curled over. I heard him slam into the ground as I extended my legs. Despite being winded, Tomio rolled over from his back and was struggling to stand. After a nod in silent appreciation of his grit, I kicked his feet out from under him.

He yelped as I caught him by the scruff of his shirt to stop his fall, laying cold steel over his throat.

“Y-You,” he coughed, taking fast, shallow breaths.

I tightened my hold over his shirt as he thrashed in my grip and shrugged at Iruka. After making it clear he'd lost, I put him down. He landed roughly and scrambled to his feet, looking ready to go again.

“That’s enough,” said Iruka. “Naruto wins.”

“What?” Tomio snapped. “I had him!”

Iruka frowned. “Enough. Don’t make me force you to clean the homeroom for a week again, Tomio. If I say you lost, then you lost.”

The kid bowed his head and clenched his fists tight.

Iruka smiled kindly. “...That said, your strategy was sound and almost worked. Using the Transformation Jutsu to hide amongst the shuriken was a good idea—as was using a smoke bomb. Trap-making and the like aren’t until next terms so it’s good that you’re reading ahead.”

I shot Iruka a sceptical look while I picked up my scattered weapons but didn’t voice my suspicions aloud. Tomio was too hot-headed to sit down and make traps, so his parents either bought or made those smoke bombs for him.

“Right, next up is…” He looked through his notebook. “Ah, here. Shikamaru and Yumi.”

That was enough of a command to join that class as we’d get so Tomio gathered the rest of his shuriken and left the field first. His friends met him halfway, walking on either side of him and shooting me nasty glares.

“He’s not that great anymore now that sparring isn’t taijutsu only,” one said. “You almost got him at the end there.”

The other nodded in agreement, her pigtails bouncing earnestly. “He’s right. Naruto’s not invincible. He’s lost to Hinata, Kiba, Sasuke—heck, Shikamaru too! If he’s losing to that lazybones Nara, you’ll get him soon.”

They offered him more platitudes that he shrugged off and vanished into the crowd. The girl had spoken with just enough certainty to irritate me—even though the hypocrisy in her statement was as clear as day. Everyone I’d lost to were clan kids who had jutsu outside of the Academy curriculum to fall back on.

Clan kids who, to my amusement, had wiped the floor with all of them just as I had. I also loved the part where she failed to mention I’d beaten each of the people she’d mentioned almost as many times as they’d got one over me—hell, maybe even more.

Shaking my head wryly, I raised a hand to my friends as they walked Shikamaru to the ring and came to a stop in front of me.

“That double-legged kick was amazing,” said Choji, turning to Shikamaru. “D’you know how much ab strength you need to pull off something like that?”

Shikamaru snorted. “Enough to be a drag.”

“Do a lot of double-legged kicks in your spare time, do you?” I asked jokingly.

He smirked. “Nah, my Shadow Bind Jutsu is enough.”

“It’s really not.”

“I’ll show you,” he smiled and went to stand opposite his opponent.

I tuned into Hinata and Choji’s conversation as we returned—half-listening to it as I waited for my annoyance with Shikamaru to run its course.

“Technically,” Hinata was saying, “It wasn’t all ab strength.”

Choji tilted his head. “It wasn’t?”

“There was also some chakra involved,” she replied. “He stuck himself to the ground using his palms.”

He asked her something else that I tried to pay attention to, but just couldn’t. Instead, I chose to turn my focus on the ongoing spar. It was frustrating to watch, and not because Shikamaru was losing—he wasn’t.

His fights usually went one of two ways: either he beat his opponent in under a minute with the Shadow Bind Jutsu, or he gave up. The latter only ever occurred when the odds were stacked against him, and given the current weather and the time of day we sparred, the odds were practically always in his favour.

A few minutes later, he walked back to us with a pep in his step and I couldn’t help but think back to what Tomio’s friend had said. Of all the names she mentioned, Shikamaru’s annoyed me the most. She implied that he’d somehow made up for the deficiencies in his taijutsu. I knew he hadn’t, but it didn’t matter to the rest of the class.

Most of all, it didn’t matter to Shikamaru, something he’d made abundantly clear these last few months. He joined me under the shade of a tree, more smug than a rooster in a henhouse.

“So, what did I tell you?” he grinned.

I knew everything I needed to know from the look on his face: taking it further with him would go absolutely nowhere. Knowing that, however, didn’t stop me from clenching my jaw as I watched the next sparring match.

Those shadows arcing across the track field were the only reason Shikamaru was winning and one of these days, I’d prove that to him.