1.8 - Perigee
A/N: Meant to get this out on the 18th or 19th, but I got got by the 'Rona last Monday, and my ability to power through and write without distraction was cooked. Better late than never tho.
Naruto
Ignoring the extra spectator with the awesome hair, the third round started off similarly enough to the previous one with Yuuto and I charging at each other, both of us constantly attacking and counter-attacking, and neither being able to get a significant upper hand on the other. The more he acclimated to my movements and tricks though, the more those similarities quickly began disappearing.
After catching him with my unorthodox way of moving and use of the environment in the first round, catching him with my sheer agility and use of misdirection in the second, and my overall greater experience forcing him to either patch his openings or take hits he should have been able to avoid, he was hyper-alert and on the lookout for more of my bullshit. He started recognizing the bait I left for what it was when on the offensive, and I began getting fewer and fewer hits past his guard when he was on the defensive.
Even less so when it came to finding chances to trip him up. With him being so cautious of what I might pull out next, that lake of opportunity was drier than Suna.
Eventually, our dance of fists, kicks, and blunted blade came to an end when I misjudged how solid his footing really was.
While barely managing to lean away and backhand his blade to the side when he went for a heavy two-handed downward slash, I moved in close to make a counter attack, throwing a haymaker towards his chest. He took a page out of my book and pivoted on his lead foot, twisting to the side to lean out of the way of the hit with a bead of sweat dripping down his face. Given my own momentum, this had the side effect of bringing us too close for either of us to effectively follow up with an attack; he didn't have room to swing his sword with any real force because we were practically inches from each other, while my other hand didn't have the room to maneuver for a proper grapple, so all I could do was grab a handful of his jacket to prevent him escaping too far.
In the first place though, the haymaker itself was just a feint. My real counter attack was always going to be a grapple, I just needed to force him to move first, and whichever direction he chose would determine how I went about it.
With my fingers gripping his clothes and my forward momentum pulling me past his sidestep, I opened my fist and used our point of contact to turn my momentum into a centripetal force, swinging my open hand around to grab Yuuto's shoulder for a throw while he was off balance–
–or at least that's what I would have done, if it weren't for his front foot sliding across the grass and swiping my own feet out from under me. I hadn't even hit the ground before his blade smacked me in the side with a meaty thwack.
"Shi- oof!" My back hitting the ground forced a grunt out of me. "Owww…" I groaned with my eyes squinting shut to block out the light of the sun, which hung about halfway down the sky at this point. I laid there bonelessly for a moment to catch my breath and let the ache die down, letting my palms rest on the soft grass.
I felt a shadow move across my face a few seconds later, and opened my eyes to the sight of my opponent's face looking down at me from above, a slight grin on his face.
"Looks like it's my point this time, eh Uzumaki-kun?" Yuuto bantered teasingly as he crouched down. In a reversal of the previous round's ending, this time it was the other blond offering his right hand to help me up.
The bastard didn't even have the courtesy to look winded, his breathing coming completely naturally as if he'd just been standing there instead of in the middle of combat.
My fingers curled in the grass as I chuckled.
"Don't get ahead of yourself, Yuuto!" I said as I reached up and clasped his hand with my own. He swiftly pulled me up to a stand, some blades of grass I'd been gripping falling to the ground.
"You may have gotten me that time, but I'm still up two-one!" I said with a matching grin, placing my hands in my pockets as I took a few steps back for the next round. "I can do this all day."
Yuuto also stepped back, smiling indulgently. "Well then, I hope I can continue to meet your expectations." He then blinked as if just realizing something. "Oh, and please, feel free to call me by my given name," he said with a smaller, more genuine smile. "A friend of Koneko's is a friend of mine."
"Sure thing!" I pulled my hands out of my pocket and gave a single thumbs up. "But only if you call me Naruto."
His smile widened, eyes crinkling slightly. "Can do, Naruto-kun."
It was a little bit weird hearing a guy my age call me that, since the only people who usually did that were Hinata and my adult role models, but I ignored the feeling.
At least it wasn't like when that creepy freak Orochimaru did it.
'He seems to smile a lot,' I noticed. 'It's kinda like the thing that Kakashi-sensei does with his eye.'
For a guy with eighty percent of his face covered at all times, sensei was really good at conveying his expressions with the smallest shifts of his single visible eye. In a similar way, Kiba seemed to deliberately shift his smile and other expressions to perfectly match what he intended to show others when speaking, rather than let his expression shift in a more natural and gradual manner.
It was a surprisingly manipulative social trick for a guy as genuinely nice as he seemed to be, but it probably helped him keep up the 'princely' image of himself at school, if what Mitsuri had told me about his reputation was true.
A random thought crossed my mind and almost had me snorting. I imagined Kiba wearing a facemask and a forehead protector covering one eye just like Kakashi, walking through Kuoh academy while greeting the other students, and everyone just acting like it was normal.
I couldn't really picture Kakashi wearing anything other than his shinobi gear, but my time living here has made me appreciate just how odd some of us looked when dressed for battle back home.
Like those absolutely massive purple rope belts that Sasuke and that snake-bastard used to hold their clothes together. Now that I think about it, even that bone-bastard and those other Sound ninja had those same goofy ropes.
The weirdos.
I settled back into my stance as Kiba did the same, both of us looking to Koneko to call the start of the fourth round.
"Three." She began the countdown, and we gave each other our undivided attention waiting for the signal. "Two."
"One."
I didn't catch what came after one, I just saw her hand falling and shot towards my opponent.
Things stayed in Kiba's favor, and the fourth round ended similarly to the third, with me trying to exploit an opening with a counter attack but getting punished for it, eventually leading to my loss. I was forced to block what would have been a "lethal" hit with my arm, meaning I wasn't allowed to use any part of that arm below the spot it was hit for the rest of the round.
Being down a hand made it that much more difficult for me to pull out a win, whether it be through grappling or just straight up beating his ass.
In the first place, he was already a bit too fast and tough for the second option to be realistically viable. Despite his slim build, he barely flinched the few times I got solid hits on him anywhere other than his diaphragm or liver. He was much more durable than he seemed.
Even so, I did put up a good fight, almost disarming him when he lunged for a thrusting attack. I'd managed to position myself so that when I dodged, his sword went between my arm and body just under my armpit, and slid cleanly through the empty sleeve of my jacket. I then squeezed my arm around the covered blade, hugging it close to my body, and jerked to the side to try yanking it from his grip.
Unfortunately, that was when I discovered his grip's strength was much stronger than the power of his strikes would suggest, and all I did was make him stumble slightly. As he managed to pull away before I could adjust my strategy, I realized that unlike his movement speed and attack strength, his grip probably just wasn't something that ever crossed his mind when he lowered himself to a relatively-human level.
He was still holding back a lot more than I expected, then.
In the end he managed to get me with a stab in the side, the same one my disabled arm was on, when I wasn't fast enough to get back out of his range following the failed attempt to take away his blade, making the score 2-2.
Going into the fifth match, Kiba seemed to have settled on a strategy of staying on the defensive and making use of his superior reach, speed, and reaction times to focus on stopping my own assaults and counter-attacking.
This forced me to constantly be aggressive in an attempt to get into my preferred range, since otherwise his greater reach allowed him to casually take shots at me while staying at a safe enough distance. The issue was, not only did he have greater reach, speed, and durability than me, he also seemed to have a similar level of stamina, but his chosen tactic against me had him using much less of it than me, so I was growing tired much quicker than him.
Eventually, he countered my latest attempt to swipe his legs out from under him with a sweep of his own that overpowered my sluggish attempt, sending me to the grass and placing his sword at my neck.
We continued this cycle a few more times, each match ending with me on the ground in some way, getting up and resting for a few minutes with my hands in my pockets, and then proceeding to fight and lose again.
The other issue I was having against him was that, as I had demonstrated in the first two rounds, both an experience advantage and unpredictability could overcome a difference in overall strength.
The keyword being could.
The first factor to take into account, was that for experience to trump ability, the difference between the two fighter's sheer power, skill, and speed had to be within a certain range, dependent on the stronger fighter's capability. Past a certain threshold, there was no amount of experience that could overcome a person able to move faster than you could blink.
Kiba was within this threshold for me, or at least, he was holding himself back enough to be within this threshold. I had a lot more experience fighting a bunch of different people and styles than he did, that was something really easy for me to figure out based on his struggle to effectively deal with new tricks the first time he'd seen them, and his relative straightforwardness. His move set was a bit too clean.
Once you get enough experience, you've probably seen so many things that even completely new tricks are similar enough to something you've dealt with in the past, that you can at least somewhat answer them, and sometimes even use them yourself if they fit your style.
But gaining experience was a two-way street, a double-edged sword. Just as you learned from fighting different opponents, opponents learned from fighting you.
Going back to how this was a problem for me, Kiba didn't need to have a lot of experience fighting different opponents to beat me, not when he was currently gaining all the relevant experience directly from fighting me multiple times in a row.
And with how quickly he caught on and adjusted to my style, I'd bet good money he would have been considered a 'genius' alongside Sasuke or Neji back in the Academy. All it took was a bit more than an hour of sparring with a ninja to properly recognize most of my dirty tricks before I could land them. He was practically half-way there to "looking underneath the underneath" even without actual ninja training.
But only half-way.
After my sixth loss in a row and the eighth match in total, I figured it was about time to make him understand the other half of the phrase, even if he'd never actually heard it before.
"It's starting to get a bit late, and you guys haven't even introduced me to your red-headed friend yet," I began from my spot sitting in the grass, mostly recovered from the previous round, "so how about we go for one more round before calling it for the day?" I planted my hands on the grass to push myself up.
"That's perfectly fine with me, Naruto-kun." Kiba agreed with a confident smile. He blinked a moment later, the expression dropping as if I'd said something in a foreign language, and looked at the two girls on the patio. "Wait, did Koneko-chan not introduce you to Rias yet?"
"Nope," I said. I committed the name to memory and made a point of deliberately throwing a grin Koneko's way while she was eying me getting up from my seat, and settled my hands in my pockets again.
She pretended she didn't hear or see us, immediately averting her eyes to look at something in the distance. Kiba audibly sighed in fond exasperation.
After a couple seconds, Koneko's golden eyes glanced back towards me to meet my gaze.
I tilted my head slightly, throwing a quick glance at Kiba before locking eyes with her again.
She rolled her eyes, nodded slightly, and mimed zipping her lips shut.
Kiba himself eyed the interaction in bemusement, glancing my way to try figuring out what was up, but not seeing anything out of the ordinary about my person.
Koneko caught on pretty early if I've been reading her right, but as far as Kiba was aware, nothing new had happened during this particular pre-match rest period aside from that little non-verbal exchange. The lack of any obvious tell had him suddenly suspicious and on guard though.
As he should be. The second factor, unpredictability…
As he settled into his stance, I stayed standing mostly-casually and took stock of myself, hands still resting in my pockets.
My muscles were starting to get sore in the way that would need an hour or two of rest to recover, rather than the few minutes I'd been getting away with until now, and my upper body was littered with small and large bruises, primarily on the arms. Those would heal by the time I got to bed tonight, but until then, they will continue aching. My school jacket was utterly wrinkled and lightly covered in grass and dirt stains, but other than needing a serious wash, the only direct hit it had taken hadn't damaged the actual threading of it, so I wouldn't need to stitch any holes closed as long as it didn't get any tears in this final round.
'Knowing my luck, it probably will,' I thought in resignation. 'Eh, at least I have a spare. If it happens, it happens. I probably need the practice to knock the rust off of my sewing skills anyway.'
My borrowed clothes on the other hand, would likely need some hefty scrubbing to remove all the greens and browns staining them.
Pushing that tangent out of my mind for now, I gave the only other boy out here my attention with a sly grin that was at odds with my current loss streak. It just seemed to put him even more on guard.
"I'm starting to get a bit exhausted. Getting through your defense and escaping the counter attack is tough work when I have to do it so many times, ya know?" I teased. "I think for this last round I'm gonna let you come to me. See how good you are on the attack. And who knows?" I said, pulling my hands out for an open-palmed shrug, "Maybe you rely too much on your speed, and I won't even need my hands to avoid you since I don't have to focus on finding openings anymore." I finished with a wide, taunting grin on my face, plopping them back in its pocket.
Kiba had eyed the gesture, his gaze flicking between my pockets and my hands. He focused on my noticeably dirtier left one on its descent into my shorts. A competitive smirk of his own slowly stretched across his face and he straightened out of his defensive posture.
"Hoh? I may not tend to act on it openly, but even I have my pride as a swordsman," Kiba stated seriously, dropping into a much more aggressive stance, his dominant side turned toward me and his sword held close to his body with the point aiming at my chest. "Well then; I guess I'll just have to show you my very best, if I want you to acknowledge my bladework on its own merits!" He declared with a fierce smile. "Koneko-chan, if you would?"
"Only if this really is the last one, and you buy me snacks later. I'm getting bored." Koneko pretended to want to hurry this along, despite her obvious interest in seeing how this particular match would play out.
The redhead– 'Rias,' I reminded myself– stifled a giggle behind her hand at the smaller girl's blatant attempt at extortion.
"Of course." Kiba agreed to her demand, not taking his eyes off of me.
Even with him knowing from the start that I was up to something and definitely trying to bait him, he was taking said bait hook, line, and sinker for the sake of his own enjoyment and pride.
He also definitely made the connection between my hand and my seemingly out-of-nowhere confidence.
Perfect.
I shifted slightly back and kept my weight evenly distributed on the balls of my feet as Koneko called out a countdown.
"Three."
The second factor to take into account when two different tiers of fighters clashed, was that the first factor only applied in a straight fight, where both combatants fought with conventional styles. Unpredictability acted as a multiplier for experience, and by definition didn't care about normal fighting conventions. There were no rules in a real fight that said you couldn't prepare a trap for your opponent ahead of time, just like using experience from past fights in current ones, and there was nothing saying you couldn't use tools gathered on the fly to your advantage either.
"Two."
The thing about being unpredictable, is that it's a matter of information control. Not just gathering or hiding information from your opponent, but also deciding what to give them in order to lead them towards certain conclusions. Sometimes, the best way to hide from someone what you're planning on doing…
"One."
… Is to let them figure out exactly what you're doing.
"Go."
Kiba's bent legs released their stored potential energy and he dashed at me pretty quickly. Unlike the previous rounds, he kept himself restrained to my level of speed and no faster.
I sidestepped to his dominant side as he began with a lunging stab, which transitioned into a backhanded horizontal slash that I backpedaled away from as he gave chase. His sword sliced through the air several times in quick succession, alternating between one and two-handed strikes at seemingly random intervals, forcing me to keep giving ground even as I ducked and weaved out of its path.
Whenever he went for a stab, I sidestepped to his dominant side, forcing him to adjust his footing or else let me get around his backside. When he slashed at my sides, I counterintuitively back-stepped diagonally in the direction the swing came from, simultaneously dodging the initial swing and giving myself more time to react to the follow-up from further away. When he attacked from above, or targeted my legs, I pivoted and twisted away from the blade, or jumped back out of range.
For what was actually closer to a minute but felt five times longer, his unrelenting attacks pushed me back and forth across the entire yard in a constant barrage of flourishing steel and trampled grass. And sure, it was an incredible show of skill and for a human teenager in this world to make me put in this much effort, noticeably better than what he'd shown me beforehand; It was just, without his speed backing him up, for all the intensity of his advance and the close calls where he almost got me…
… He still hadn't managed to land even a single scratch on me. I felt my anticipation and excitement slowly cooling down.
We finally reached a lull in the combat as my back rapidly approached the hedge barrier, and I no longer had room to jump away from the oncoming swipe at my legs.
So instead of jumping back, I jumped over the swing and slammed my foot down on the blade as it passed below me, trying to plant it into the lawn as I landed.
Props to Kiba, even while restraining his speed, he moved fast enough to jump back right before that could happen, and so we stood there staring at each other as a breeze swept between us.
"So," I broke the silence, hands still in my pockets and breathing only slightly taxed. "What happened to 'showing me your very best'? Even without my hands, this is easier than before." I said, hiding my disappointment behind a taunting smirk. It wasn't the entire truth, but it was close enough. I was definitely overselling it a little.
While it was less physically demanding on my body, I had to give more special attention to being deliberate in how I dodged in order to consistently keep myself out of his range. Regardless, after him hyping himself up like that, I kinda expected more.
The swordsman chuckled like he knew something I didn't, not bothered at all for some reason.
"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. I wasn't giving it my all just yet," Kiba said slyly.
Oh?
"I just wanted to figure out your movement habits when you're committed to evading." He explained with a smirk. "I've experienced you on the aggressive, and probing for openings to counter me, so I wanted a fuller picture of how you fight for our final engagement." His smirk widened. "I think I've seen enough, so how about we begin for real now?"
This guy…
"Hahahahaha! You cheeky bastard, you stole my line!" I burst out laughing in relief, and a not-so-tiny amount of embarrassment. "Or maybe I'm the bastard here, looking down on you after I've been getting my ass handled for the past hour, haha!"
I spent all that time internally monologuing about information superiority, and here this green-as-grass high schooler was, taking an opportunity I unintentionally gave him to figure me out, while I was waiting for the right time to trigger the trap I'd set. Not only that, but he turned around my own bait on me, saying he wanted to see me in action in the one scenario he hadn't seen yet.
'I guess I've gotten complacent, after all my time in this world,' I thought mirthfully.
'... No, I shouldn't try to sugarcoat it.'
I'd gotten arrogant.
Oh sure, I could argue that I've stuck to minor tricks and grapples instead of my bread and butter in the name of fair competition; that if I had a blunted kunai we could both really go at it in the way I initially wanted, instead of playing around with this half-assed point-based competition we ended up on. I could argue that if it was actual sparring, I wouldn't have let him truly get one over me in just a single session.
It wasn't even hard to admit it to myself, because even at the absolute lowest I've been since I was a pre-teen, I still noticeably outperformed even the most dedicated adults in this world. Even in the earlier days at the Konoha Academy, I was able to casually sustain a run that would clock in as a record-breaking sprint here, and by the end near graduation I was able to shatter logs with my bare fists. Until I met Koneko, I hadn't truly considered anyone to be my peer, being the 'biggest fish' around in almost all physical categories to my knowledge.
'It's a good thing I got this wake-up call when I did.'
I hadn't even noticed my growing tendency to outright dismiss the threat fighters of this world could pose without their guns. If I hadn't met Koneko, and the first person I met from the so-called "Moonlit World" was more on the unfriendly side, I could have been in serious trouble if it came to blows!
"But yeah, you're right," I said with a grin as my laughter died down. My eyes met with his, and I'm certain he saw the same anticipation in me that I saw in him. "May the better fighter w-"
I twisted away as Kiba's sword lunged through the space I'd just occupied. "-oah!"
The handful of sod I flung at his face from my left pocket was similarly dodged with a pre-emptive tilt of his head, starting the moment my hand left my shorts.
The time for words was over it seemed.
Instead of transitioning into a slash that I would just sidestep again, he kept his momentum, and with just a minor adjustment turned his lunge into a shoulder tackle in an attempt to slam me into the hedge at my back. I didn't have the speed to fully escape it or the footing to challenge it, so I twisted with the hit and let it spin me around, my back being fully turned towards him for just a moment.
Knowing that I was planning something myself, Kiba had manipulated that little warm-up fight and what he'd learned of my dodging habits to put my back to the wall, and since the fight never technically ended when we stopped to talk, pulled a surprise attack to force me to dodge on instinct.
Given that my options were to either dodge to the side where his free hand was waiting, launch myself backwards into a bush where I'd be an easy target, or try to get around his backside where I'd have much more room to maneuver, there was only one actual option for me, which he anticipated and abused perfectly.
And if he had planned that far ahead, there was no way he wouldn't take advantage of being out of my sightline for that split second my back was turned. He'd been on the receiving end of that twice already to know just how dangerous that could be.
All of these things went through my head in that split second, condensed into the form of a single thought;
'Why the hell are the bishounen guys I fight always so damn talented?'
It was about time to unleash my own trap for him, anyway. He wasn't the only one who got a free action out of my back being turned. The only question remaining, as my twist started bringing him back into the edges of my vision… 'is he aiming high, or low?'
A flash of motion from below, coming from my right side.
'There!' He was dashing at me low to the ground, a backhanded slash flying for my legs.
I finished my spin by jumping backwards and over his blade, my body moving through the air parallel to the hedge as I saw his eyes narrowing in satisfied focus. He smoothly aborted the attack midway through, altering the motion and using his body's momentum pull his sword hand close to his chest in an instant, before rushing forward in a rising thrust. Time seemingly slowed down as my adrenaline pumped, and I tried to time it just right.
My feet just barely touched the ground.
My swinging hand released the payload I'd discretely refilled it with at his face again.
The tip of his training sword closed the distance to my center mass.
He turned his head and closed his leading eye in time, letting it smack ineffectively off of his cheek.
There was no time to dodge.
I winced, the sound of the composite material and bone smacking together.
Kiba's eye narrowed further, even as a grin stretched across his face.
His sword was passing between my body and my right arm, and I was pulling my sore left fist back to my side from between us.
I had continued the motion of my swing, punching the flat of his blade off course as it approached. He forced me to actively and directly defend myself with just his true opening move.
'My turn.'
I instantly clamped my right arm against my body to pin the blade between them, and jerked to the right with almost the entirety of my weight. Kiba was holding on tightly, but with his own right arm also being his sword arm, this left him at an awkward angle with little ability to leverage his free left hand to help.
Just to be sure, I slipped my own left hand in and out of my pocket for a third time and threw the contents at his face a moment later.
He flinched and sputtered as the small lump of grassy topsoil exploded all over his cheek again, but still held on to his sword while stumbling forward with a squint. I swung my now free hand down to clamp around his wrist and squeezed his tendons while doing another spin to the right. I pulled his wrist past me with the motion, the handle twisting out of his loosened grip as I threw him away from me by the arm.
He recovered almost immediately and turned to face me while quickly brushing the dirt off his face, but by that point I had gripped the handle of the sword myself, unsheathed it from its place under my armpit, and tossed it up on top of the tall hedge wall that was now to my left.
"Man, you really are super skilled," I complimented him with a grin. I pulled the fabric of my pocket out, to show its stained but otherwise empty state. "If I'd prepared any less than I did, you could have turned that around real quick."
He smiled angelically at me, the entire right side of his face marked with smears of brown.
"Has anyone ever told you that you are absolutely infuriating to fight against, Uzumaki-kun?"
I laughed at the switch back to using my last name. "Hey, don't blame me! It's your fault for pushing me this far, I need tricks like this just to keep up."
He let the cheery act drop in favor of a deadpan stare. "Of course. My mistake."
I glanced down at my shadow stretching across the grass in front of me. It was noticeably longer than it was when we first got out here.
"Let's wrap this up." I stated, to which he nodded in assent. "You're good with a sword in your hands, but let's see if you've been slacking with your fists!"
I held my left hand slightly in front of me, palm-forward, as I slid my right foot back and bent my knees.
Kiba smiled wryly.
"My teacher only made sure I knew the basics before he had me focus on the blade," he said as his hand rose into a passable boxers stance. "So don't don't hold this against me, but I'm not going to slow myself down this time."
"Don't worry then, I won't drag this out either," I said with a smirk, which slipped into a slight grimace. "I seriously need a shower right about now, this is the dirtiest I've gotten since I went to the hospital."
I shook my head to get back on track. I turned my hand and curled my fingers twice in a 'come here' gesture. "Come, show me what you've got."
He practically flew at me in an instant–
Thump
"-Agh!"
-before an impact sounded out and he sputtered, clutching his face and trying to wipe the dirt off.
"When did you even–?! kuh!"
He was cut off as my right arm– the one that just flung my first and final payload at him– connected across his chest in a lariat, sending him crashing down onto his back, flipped by his own momentum.
He wheezed as the breath was knocked out of him for the second time today.
"Kiba down, Uzumaki wins." Koneko called out. "Kiba with six to Uzumaki's three."
The redhead–
'Shit, what was her name again? Rin? Risa? No wait, it was something foreign sounding. I'll just call her Red for now.'
–began clapping loudly.
"Those were excellent matches, you two!" she called out.
I sent Red a grin and a thumbs up, before crouching down beside Kiba with my elbows resting on my knees.
"Uzumaki Naruto's First Rule of Combat: If you enter a fistfight with nothing on you but your fists, it's your fault if you lose when the other guy pulls a knife on you." I said cheerfully. "I don't have any other rules thought up right now, but the second would probably be 'never let a giant snake swallow you whole,' or something like that."
Kiba had one forearm held over his eyes to block out the sun as he caught his breath, but shifted it enough to shoot a baffled look my way.
"But hey, don't take my word for it, I'm just the guy who put you on the ground three times." My grin probably radiated enough smugness to drive a man to contemplate murder.
"As I said. Infuriating." He grumbled.
I laughed and held out my hand. "Want some help up?"
"I'd appreciate it, thank you." He accepted the offer with grace, and grasped my hand.
"Come on," I said with a grin, pulling him up with me into a standing position. "Let's go introduce me real quick and then hop in the showers."
He nodded and we turned to walk over to the girls.
I paused and looked over my shoulder for a moment.
"Oh, uh… should we grab your sword from the bushes real quick?"
Kiba just shook his head and chuckled like I'd said something funny.
"Don't worry, that issue is already handled." he said with a weirdly mysterious smile. "For now, let's go meet with the girls and get cleaned up." He turned and started walking towards the mansion.
What?
I looked back at the hedge, seeing no sign that anyone had snuck past me and climbed it in the past minute. No gaps in the leaves, snapped branches, anything like that.
And that was assuming I wouldn't have heard anything in the first place.
'Does he mean they have someone regularly check the yard for misplaced swords?' I thought incredulously, looking back towards the building. 'That would actually be insane. Easily doable for them, but still insane.'
Then I remembered something Koneko briefly mentioned about Devils; Namely, the fact that they have their own form of Summoning/Reverse-Summoning technique. One that, by the sound of it, was much more common among their kind and convenient to use than Summoning was for shinobi.
Suddenly what he said made a lot more sense
"Oh, I get it now," I reached a hand up to scratch the inside of my ear, before seeing the dirt on my fingers and deciding that wasn't a good idea. "You coulda just said you poofed it away with your devil powers, y'know."
For some reason, Kiba tripped.
"Six-four, point to Uzumaki." Koneko's deadpan voice rang out.
Red looked on in bemusement as I broke down laughing, turning and saying something to Koneko that I couldn't hear from here.
Kiba stood back up and acted like nothing happened.
"I'm quite sure I have no idea what you're talking about." He said, then continued walking.
I smiled as my laughter died down and I moved to catch up to him, lacing my fingers together behind my head.
Today has been fun.
While approaching the girls, I noticed that it wasn't just my imagination that Red had been eyeing me strangely at times. She currently had a friendly smile on her lips, but her eyes seemed a little distracted, almost like she was looking right past me.
I resisted the urge to look over my shoulder and instead pulled a hand from my head to wave.
Red beat me to it with a wave of her own.
"You must be the new friend Koneko-chan has mentioned," the busty redhead greeted with another smile, "You can call me Rias, I'm her club President and one of her friends." She tilted her head slightly with a wry smirk as she looked at me. "You may have heard my name passed around in school. I may have a bit of a reputation."
I wasn't quite sure what she meant by that, so I ignored it in favor of introducing myself as Kiba and I stopped in front of her and Koneko. I had to look up to meet her eyes.
Damnit! She's just as tall as Kiba!
"Heh, it's nice to meet another friend of Koneko-chan's!" 'I definitely won't forget your name this time, I swear!' "I'm Uzumaki Naruto, but you can call me Naruto if you want," I said with a grin. It turned sheepish a moment later. "And uh, I kinda don't really pay attention to people at school unless it's the teacher or someone's trying to talk to me, so I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about." I admitted. "Apparently Kiba's sort of a big deal or whatever, but I only heard of him when Koneko-chan mentioned him."
She blinked and looked at Koneko, seeming stumped, while Kiba chuckled awkwardly next to me.
Koneko nodded. "Uzumaki-kun wanted to ask the Kendo club to fight him, but he would have beat most of them easily."
Rias shook her head and her smile returned.
"Speaking of, that was an impressive showing." She nodded in Kiba's direction in acknowledgement. "Not a lot of people our age can force Yuuto-kun to actually try, let alone beat him when he is. You must have worked really hard to get to the level you are now."
"Ah, yeah," I smiled awkwardly, internally cringing at the irony of her saying that about my current state. "I have a lot of experience fighting guys way more naturally talented than me, and he'd have fit right in with them, so I guess you could say that I've picked up a couple tricks over the years to even the playing field and then some."
Her smile turned coy. "Oh? You wouldn't happen to have any more up your sleeve, ones that you haven't shown us, would you?"
I shook my head childishly. "Nuh-uh, not telling!" I stopped and smirked, looking up into her eyes.
"I'd have to be a pretty crappy ninja to just give away all my secrets, ya'know?"
She blinked.
"Oh, right. That makes sense," she agreed.
Her eyes widened suddenly and her mouth opened–
–just for Koneko's hand to reach up and cover it, blocking whatever Rias was trying to say. The crimson haired girl didn't seem to even notice her words getting muffled, clasping her hands together in front of her chest excitedly as she kept trying to speak.
"You two stink and I'm hungry." The snow-haired girl said blandly, arm stretched comically high above her to reach her taller friend's face. "Go take your showers already."
I looked at the short girl with raised eyebrows, getting her to look my way. "Didn't you just eat like a whole plate of cookies not even an hour ago?" I asked incredulously.
"It was two plates, and those were snacks. I want actual food." She said it as if it were obvious and made perfect sense.
"Huh. I can't help but wonder where it all goes," I mused while smirking down at her "petite" (flat) form. 'Since it's obvious none of it goes to your chest' is what I thought, but I wisely kept it to myself. Even I know when to stop poking a sleeping tiger.
…Uh-oh. Her eyes narrowed.
Did she read my mind or somethi-?
"Are you sure you don't want any help?" Kiba asked with some concern, looking over his shoulder at me as we walked down the hallway.
I chuckled weakly, limping along after him on our way to the showers, my shin aching.
"Don't worry about it," I waved him off. "Sometimes a guy just has to deal with the consequences of his actions. Even when those actions themselves are avoided, the initial intent can be enough to invite reprisal."
He looked even more confused now, but shrugged helplessly and just kept walking.
Koneko sure can throw a helluva mean kick.
A/N: In other news, only one more chapter to go for this arc (Spoiler: It's full of yapping. Characterization, amiright?), with an interlude following it up to show some stuff going on in the background. Then it's finally on to the next arc, which will be the start of 'canon' as far as DxD's timeline is concerned.
~,,––,,^^-
Naruto
Ignoring the extra spectator with the awesome hair, the third round started off similarly enough to the previous one with Yuuto and I charging at each other, both of us constantly attacking and counter-attacking, and neither being able to get a significant upper hand on the other. The more he acclimated to my movements and tricks though, the more those similarities quickly began disappearing.
After catching him with my unorthodox way of moving and use of the environment in the first round, catching him with my sheer agility and use of misdirection in the second, and my overall greater experience forcing him to either patch his openings or take hits he should have been able to avoid, he was hyper-alert and on the lookout for more of my bullshit. He started recognizing the bait I left for what it was when on the offensive, and I began getting fewer and fewer hits past his guard when he was on the defensive.
Even less so when it came to finding chances to trip him up. With him being so cautious of what I might pull out next, that lake of opportunity was drier than Suna.
Eventually, our dance of fists, kicks, and blunted blade came to an end when I misjudged how solid his footing really was.
While barely managing to lean away and backhand his blade to the side when he went for a heavy two-handed downward slash, I moved in close to make a counter attack, throwing a haymaker towards his chest. He took a page out of my book and pivoted on his lead foot, twisting to the side to lean out of the way of the hit with a bead of sweat dripping down his face. Given my own momentum, this had the side effect of bringing us too close for either of us to effectively follow up with an attack; he didn't have room to swing his sword with any real force because we were practically inches from each other, while my other hand didn't have the room to maneuver for a proper grapple, so all I could do was grab a handful of his jacket to prevent him escaping too far.
In the first place though, the haymaker itself was just a feint. My real counter attack was always going to be a grapple, I just needed to force him to move first, and whichever direction he chose would determine how I went about it.
With my fingers gripping his clothes and my forward momentum pulling me past his sidestep, I opened my fist and used our point of contact to turn my momentum into a centripetal force, swinging my open hand around to grab Yuuto's shoulder for a throw while he was off balance–
–or at least that's what I would have done, if it weren't for his front foot sliding across the grass and swiping my own feet out from under me. I hadn't even hit the ground before his blade smacked me in the side with a meaty thwack.
"Shi- oof!" My back hitting the ground forced a grunt out of me. "Owww…" I groaned with my eyes squinting shut to block out the light of the sun, which hung about halfway down the sky at this point. I laid there bonelessly for a moment to catch my breath and let the ache die down, letting my palms rest on the soft grass.
I felt a shadow move across my face a few seconds later, and opened my eyes to the sight of my opponent's face looking down at me from above, a slight grin on his face.
"Looks like it's my point this time, eh Uzumaki-kun?" Yuuto bantered teasingly as he crouched down. In a reversal of the previous round's ending, this time it was the other blond offering his right hand to help me up.
The bastard didn't even have the courtesy to look winded, his breathing coming completely naturally as if he'd just been standing there instead of in the middle of combat.
My fingers curled in the grass as I chuckled.
"Don't get ahead of yourself, Yuuto!" I said as I reached up and clasped his hand with my own. He swiftly pulled me up to a stand, some blades of grass I'd been gripping falling to the ground.
"You may have gotten me that time, but I'm still up two-one!" I said with a matching grin, placing my hands in my pockets as I took a few steps back for the next round. "I can do this all day."
Yuuto also stepped back, smiling indulgently. "Well then, I hope I can continue to meet your expectations." He then blinked as if just realizing something. "Oh, and please, feel free to call me by my given name," he said with a smaller, more genuine smile. "A friend of Koneko's is a friend of mine."
"Sure thing!" I pulled my hands out of my pocket and gave a single thumbs up. "But only if you call me Naruto."
His smile widened, eyes crinkling slightly. "Can do, Naruto-kun."
It was a little bit weird hearing a guy my age call me that, since the only people who usually did that were Hinata and my adult role models, but I ignored the feeling.
At least it wasn't like when that creepy freak Orochimaru did it.
'He seems to smile a lot,' I noticed. 'It's kinda like the thing that Kakashi-sensei does with his eye.'
For a guy with eighty percent of his face covered at all times, sensei was really good at conveying his expressions with the smallest shifts of his single visible eye. In a similar way, Kiba seemed to deliberately shift his smile and other expressions to perfectly match what he intended to show others when speaking, rather than let his expression shift in a more natural and gradual manner.
It was a surprisingly manipulative social trick for a guy as genuinely nice as he seemed to be, but it probably helped him keep up the 'princely' image of himself at school, if what Mitsuri had told me about his reputation was true.
A random thought crossed my mind and almost had me snorting. I imagined Kiba wearing a facemask and a forehead protector covering one eye just like Kakashi, walking through Kuoh academy while greeting the other students, and everyone just acting like it was normal.
I couldn't really picture Kakashi wearing anything other than his shinobi gear, but my time living here has made me appreciate just how odd some of us looked when dressed for battle back home.
Like those absolutely massive purple rope belts that Sasuke and that snake-bastard used to hold their clothes together. Now that I think about it, even that bone-bastard and those other Sound ninja had those same goofy ropes.
The weirdos.
I settled back into my stance as Kiba did the same, both of us looking to Koneko to call the start of the fourth round.
"Three." She began the countdown, and we gave each other our undivided attention waiting for the signal. "Two."
"One."
I didn't catch what came after one, I just saw her hand falling and shot towards my opponent.
Things stayed in Kiba's favor, and the fourth round ended similarly to the third, with me trying to exploit an opening with a counter attack but getting punished for it, eventually leading to my loss. I was forced to block what would have been a "lethal" hit with my arm, meaning I wasn't allowed to use any part of that arm below the spot it was hit for the rest of the round.
Being down a hand made it that much more difficult for me to pull out a win, whether it be through grappling or just straight up beating his ass.
In the first place, he was already a bit too fast and tough for the second option to be realistically viable. Despite his slim build, he barely flinched the few times I got solid hits on him anywhere other than his diaphragm or liver. He was much more durable than he seemed.
Even so, I did put up a good fight, almost disarming him when he lunged for a thrusting attack. I'd managed to position myself so that when I dodged, his sword went between my arm and body just under my armpit, and slid cleanly through the empty sleeve of my jacket. I then squeezed my arm around the covered blade, hugging it close to my body, and jerked to the side to try yanking it from his grip.
Unfortunately, that was when I discovered his grip's strength was much stronger than the power of his strikes would suggest, and all I did was make him stumble slightly. As he managed to pull away before I could adjust my strategy, I realized that unlike his movement speed and attack strength, his grip probably just wasn't something that ever crossed his mind when he lowered himself to a relatively-human level.
He was still holding back a lot more than I expected, then.
In the end he managed to get me with a stab in the side, the same one my disabled arm was on, when I wasn't fast enough to get back out of his range following the failed attempt to take away his blade, making the score 2-2.
Going into the fifth match, Kiba seemed to have settled on a strategy of staying on the defensive and making use of his superior reach, speed, and reaction times to focus on stopping my own assaults and counter-attacking.
This forced me to constantly be aggressive in an attempt to get into my preferred range, since otherwise his greater reach allowed him to casually take shots at me while staying at a safe enough distance. The issue was, not only did he have greater reach, speed, and durability than me, he also seemed to have a similar level of stamina, but his chosen tactic against me had him using much less of it than me, so I was growing tired much quicker than him.
Eventually, he countered my latest attempt to swipe his legs out from under him with a sweep of his own that overpowered my sluggish attempt, sending me to the grass and placing his sword at my neck.
We continued this cycle a few more times, each match ending with me on the ground in some way, getting up and resting for a few minutes with my hands in my pockets, and then proceeding to fight and lose again.
The other issue I was having against him was that, as I had demonstrated in the first two rounds, both an experience advantage and unpredictability could overcome a difference in overall strength.
The keyword being could.
The first factor to take into account, was that for experience to trump ability, the difference between the two fighter's sheer power, skill, and speed had to be within a certain range, dependent on the stronger fighter's capability. Past a certain threshold, there was no amount of experience that could overcome a person able to move faster than you could blink.
Kiba was within this threshold for me, or at least, he was holding himself back enough to be within this threshold. I had a lot more experience fighting a bunch of different people and styles than he did, that was something really easy for me to figure out based on his struggle to effectively deal with new tricks the first time he'd seen them, and his relative straightforwardness. His move set was a bit too clean.
Once you get enough experience, you've probably seen so many things that even completely new tricks are similar enough to something you've dealt with in the past, that you can at least somewhat answer them, and sometimes even use them yourself if they fit your style.
But gaining experience was a two-way street, a double-edged sword. Just as you learned from fighting different opponents, opponents learned from fighting you.
Going back to how this was a problem for me, Kiba didn't need to have a lot of experience fighting different opponents to beat me, not when he was currently gaining all the relevant experience directly from fighting me multiple times in a row.
And with how quickly he caught on and adjusted to my style, I'd bet good money he would have been considered a 'genius' alongside Sasuke or Neji back in the Academy. All it took was a bit more than an hour of sparring with a ninja to properly recognize most of my dirty tricks before I could land them. He was practically half-way there to "looking underneath the underneath" even without actual ninja training.
But only half-way.
After my sixth loss in a row and the eighth match in total, I figured it was about time to make him understand the other half of the phrase, even if he'd never actually heard it before.
"It's starting to get a bit late, and you guys haven't even introduced me to your red-headed friend yet," I began from my spot sitting in the grass, mostly recovered from the previous round, "so how about we go for one more round before calling it for the day?" I planted my hands on the grass to push myself up.
"That's perfectly fine with me, Naruto-kun." Kiba agreed with a confident smile. He blinked a moment later, the expression dropping as if I'd said something in a foreign language, and looked at the two girls on the patio. "Wait, did Koneko-chan not introduce you to Rias yet?"
"Nope," I said. I committed the name to memory and made a point of deliberately throwing a grin Koneko's way while she was eying me getting up from my seat, and settled my hands in my pockets again.
She pretended she didn't hear or see us, immediately averting her eyes to look at something in the distance. Kiba audibly sighed in fond exasperation.
After a couple seconds, Koneko's golden eyes glanced back towards me to meet my gaze.
I tilted my head slightly, throwing a quick glance at Kiba before locking eyes with her again.
She rolled her eyes, nodded slightly, and mimed zipping her lips shut.
Kiba himself eyed the interaction in bemusement, glancing my way to try figuring out what was up, but not seeing anything out of the ordinary about my person.
Koneko caught on pretty early if I've been reading her right, but as far as Kiba was aware, nothing new had happened during this particular pre-match rest period aside from that little non-verbal exchange. The lack of any obvious tell had him suddenly suspicious and on guard though.
As he should be. The second factor, unpredictability…
As he settled into his stance, I stayed standing mostly-casually and took stock of myself, hands still resting in my pockets.
My muscles were starting to get sore in the way that would need an hour or two of rest to recover, rather than the few minutes I'd been getting away with until now, and my upper body was littered with small and large bruises, primarily on the arms. Those would heal by the time I got to bed tonight, but until then, they will continue aching. My school jacket was utterly wrinkled and lightly covered in grass and dirt stains, but other than needing a serious wash, the only direct hit it had taken hadn't damaged the actual threading of it, so I wouldn't need to stitch any holes closed as long as it didn't get any tears in this final round.
'Knowing my luck, it probably will,' I thought in resignation. 'Eh, at least I have a spare. If it happens, it happens. I probably need the practice to knock the rust off of my sewing skills anyway.'
My borrowed clothes on the other hand, would likely need some hefty scrubbing to remove all the greens and browns staining them.
Pushing that tangent out of my mind for now, I gave the only other boy out here my attention with a sly grin that was at odds with my current loss streak. It just seemed to put him even more on guard.
"I'm starting to get a bit exhausted. Getting through your defense and escaping the counter attack is tough work when I have to do it so many times, ya know?" I teased. "I think for this last round I'm gonna let you come to me. See how good you are on the attack. And who knows?" I said, pulling my hands out for an open-palmed shrug, "Maybe you rely too much on your speed, and I won't even need my hands to avoid you since I don't have to focus on finding openings anymore." I finished with a wide, taunting grin on my face, plopping them back in its pocket.
Kiba had eyed the gesture, his gaze flicking between my pockets and my hands. He focused on my noticeably dirtier left one on its descent into my shorts. A competitive smirk of his own slowly stretched across his face and he straightened out of his defensive posture.
"Hoh? I may not tend to act on it openly, but even I have my pride as a swordsman," Kiba stated seriously, dropping into a much more aggressive stance, his dominant side turned toward me and his sword held close to his body with the point aiming at my chest. "Well then; I guess I'll just have to show you my very best, if I want you to acknowledge my bladework on its own merits!" He declared with a fierce smile. "Koneko-chan, if you would?"
"Only if this really is the last one, and you buy me snacks later. I'm getting bored." Koneko pretended to want to hurry this along, despite her obvious interest in seeing how this particular match would play out.
The redhead– 'Rias,' I reminded myself– stifled a giggle behind her hand at the smaller girl's blatant attempt at extortion.
"Of course." Kiba agreed to her demand, not taking his eyes off of me.
Even with him knowing from the start that I was up to something and definitely trying to bait him, he was taking said bait hook, line, and sinker for the sake of his own enjoyment and pride.
He also definitely made the connection between my hand and my seemingly out-of-nowhere confidence.
Perfect.
I shifted slightly back and kept my weight evenly distributed on the balls of my feet as Koneko called out a countdown.
"Three."
The second factor to take into account when two different tiers of fighters clashed, was that the first factor only applied in a straight fight, where both combatants fought with conventional styles. Unpredictability acted as a multiplier for experience, and by definition didn't care about normal fighting conventions. There were no rules in a real fight that said you couldn't prepare a trap for your opponent ahead of time, just like using experience from past fights in current ones, and there was nothing saying you couldn't use tools gathered on the fly to your advantage either.
"Two."
The thing about being unpredictable, is that it's a matter of information control. Not just gathering or hiding information from your opponent, but also deciding what to give them in order to lead them towards certain conclusions. Sometimes, the best way to hide from someone what you're planning on doing…
"One."
… Is to let them figure out exactly what you're doing.
"Go."
Kiba's bent legs released their stored potential energy and he dashed at me pretty quickly. Unlike the previous rounds, he kept himself restrained to my level of speed and no faster.
I sidestepped to his dominant side as he began with a lunging stab, which transitioned into a backhanded horizontal slash that I backpedaled away from as he gave chase. His sword sliced through the air several times in quick succession, alternating between one and two-handed strikes at seemingly random intervals, forcing me to keep giving ground even as I ducked and weaved out of its path.
Whenever he went for a stab, I sidestepped to his dominant side, forcing him to adjust his footing or else let me get around his backside. When he slashed at my sides, I counterintuitively back-stepped diagonally in the direction the swing came from, simultaneously dodging the initial swing and giving myself more time to react to the follow-up from further away. When he attacked from above, or targeted my legs, I pivoted and twisted away from the blade, or jumped back out of range.
For what was actually closer to a minute but felt five times longer, his unrelenting attacks pushed me back and forth across the entire yard in a constant barrage of flourishing steel and trampled grass. And sure, it was an incredible show of skill and for a human teenager in this world to make me put in this much effort, noticeably better than what he'd shown me beforehand; It was just, without his speed backing him up, for all the intensity of his advance and the close calls where he almost got me…
… He still hadn't managed to land even a single scratch on me. I felt my anticipation and excitement slowly cooling down.
We finally reached a lull in the combat as my back rapidly approached the hedge barrier, and I no longer had room to jump away from the oncoming swipe at my legs.
So instead of jumping back, I jumped over the swing and slammed my foot down on the blade as it passed below me, trying to plant it into the lawn as I landed.
Props to Kiba, even while restraining his speed, he moved fast enough to jump back right before that could happen, and so we stood there staring at each other as a breeze swept between us.
"So," I broke the silence, hands still in my pockets and breathing only slightly taxed. "What happened to 'showing me your very best'? Even without my hands, this is easier than before." I said, hiding my disappointment behind a taunting smirk. It wasn't the entire truth, but it was close enough. I was definitely overselling it a little.
While it was less physically demanding on my body, I had to give more special attention to being deliberate in how I dodged in order to consistently keep myself out of his range. Regardless, after him hyping himself up like that, I kinda expected more.
The swordsman chuckled like he knew something I didn't, not bothered at all for some reason.
"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. I wasn't giving it my all just yet," Kiba said slyly.
Oh?
"I just wanted to figure out your movement habits when you're committed to evading." He explained with a smirk. "I've experienced you on the aggressive, and probing for openings to counter me, so I wanted a fuller picture of how you fight for our final engagement." His smirk widened. "I think I've seen enough, so how about we begin for real now?"
This guy…
"Hahahahaha! You cheeky bastard, you stole my line!" I burst out laughing in relief, and a not-so-tiny amount of embarrassment. "Or maybe I'm the bastard here, looking down on you after I've been getting my ass handled for the past hour, haha!"
I spent all that time internally monologuing about information superiority, and here this green-as-grass high schooler was, taking an opportunity I unintentionally gave him to figure me out, while I was waiting for the right time to trigger the trap I'd set. Not only that, but he turned around my own bait on me, saying he wanted to see me in action in the one scenario he hadn't seen yet.
'I guess I've gotten complacent, after all my time in this world,' I thought mirthfully.
'... No, I shouldn't try to sugarcoat it.'
I'd gotten arrogant.
Oh sure, I could argue that I've stuck to minor tricks and grapples instead of my bread and butter in the name of fair competition; that if I had a blunted kunai we could both really go at it in the way I initially wanted, instead of playing around with this half-assed point-based competition we ended up on. I could argue that if it was actual sparring, I wouldn't have let him truly get one over me in just a single session.
It wasn't even hard to admit it to myself, because even at the absolute lowest I've been since I was a pre-teen, I still noticeably outperformed even the most dedicated adults in this world. Even in the earlier days at the Konoha Academy, I was able to casually sustain a run that would clock in as a record-breaking sprint here, and by the end near graduation I was able to shatter logs with my bare fists. Until I met Koneko, I hadn't truly considered anyone to be my peer, being the 'biggest fish' around in almost all physical categories to my knowledge.
'It's a good thing I got this wake-up call when I did.'
I hadn't even noticed my growing tendency to outright dismiss the threat fighters of this world could pose without their guns. If I hadn't met Koneko, and the first person I met from the so-called "Moonlit World" was more on the unfriendly side, I could have been in serious trouble if it came to blows!
"But yeah, you're right," I said with a grin as my laughter died down. My eyes met with his, and I'm certain he saw the same anticipation in me that I saw in him. "May the better fighter w-"
I twisted away as Kiba's sword lunged through the space I'd just occupied. "-oah!"
The handful of sod I flung at his face from my left pocket was similarly dodged with a pre-emptive tilt of his head, starting the moment my hand left my shorts.
The time for words was over it seemed.
Instead of transitioning into a slash that I would just sidestep again, he kept his momentum, and with just a minor adjustment turned his lunge into a shoulder tackle in an attempt to slam me into the hedge at my back. I didn't have the speed to fully escape it or the footing to challenge it, so I twisted with the hit and let it spin me around, my back being fully turned towards him for just a moment.
Knowing that I was planning something myself, Kiba had manipulated that little warm-up fight and what he'd learned of my dodging habits to put my back to the wall, and since the fight never technically ended when we stopped to talk, pulled a surprise attack to force me to dodge on instinct.
Given that my options were to either dodge to the side where his free hand was waiting, launch myself backwards into a bush where I'd be an easy target, or try to get around his backside where I'd have much more room to maneuver, there was only one actual option for me, which he anticipated and abused perfectly.
And if he had planned that far ahead, there was no way he wouldn't take advantage of being out of my sightline for that split second my back was turned. He'd been on the receiving end of that twice already to know just how dangerous that could be.
All of these things went through my head in that split second, condensed into the form of a single thought;
'Why the hell are the bishounen guys I fight always so damn talented?'
It was about time to unleash my own trap for him, anyway. He wasn't the only one who got a free action out of my back being turned. The only question remaining, as my twist started bringing him back into the edges of my vision… 'is he aiming high, or low?'
A flash of motion from below, coming from my right side.
'There!' He was dashing at me low to the ground, a backhanded slash flying for my legs.
I finished my spin by jumping backwards and over his blade, my body moving through the air parallel to the hedge as I saw his eyes narrowing in satisfied focus. He smoothly aborted the attack midway through, altering the motion and using his body's momentum pull his sword hand close to his chest in an instant, before rushing forward in a rising thrust. Time seemingly slowed down as my adrenaline pumped, and I tried to time it just right.
My feet just barely touched the ground.
My swinging hand released the payload I'd discretely refilled it with at his face again.
The tip of his training sword closed the distance to my center mass.
He turned his head and closed his leading eye in time, letting it smack ineffectively off of his cheek.
There was no time to dodge.
I winced, the sound of the composite material and bone smacking together.
Kiba's eye narrowed further, even as a grin stretched across his face.
His sword was passing between my body and my right arm, and I was pulling my sore left fist back to my side from between us.
I had continued the motion of my swing, punching the flat of his blade off course as it approached. He forced me to actively and directly defend myself with just his true opening move.
'My turn.'
I instantly clamped my right arm against my body to pin the blade between them, and jerked to the right with almost the entirety of my weight. Kiba was holding on tightly, but with his own right arm also being his sword arm, this left him at an awkward angle with little ability to leverage his free left hand to help.
Just to be sure, I slipped my own left hand in and out of my pocket for a third time and threw the contents at his face a moment later.
He flinched and sputtered as the small lump of grassy topsoil exploded all over his cheek again, but still held on to his sword while stumbling forward with a squint. I swung my now free hand down to clamp around his wrist and squeezed his tendons while doing another spin to the right. I pulled his wrist past me with the motion, the handle twisting out of his loosened grip as I threw him away from me by the arm.
He recovered almost immediately and turned to face me while quickly brushing the dirt off his face, but by that point I had gripped the handle of the sword myself, unsheathed it from its place under my armpit, and tossed it up on top of the tall hedge wall that was now to my left.
"Man, you really are super skilled," I complimented him with a grin. I pulled the fabric of my pocket out, to show its stained but otherwise empty state. "If I'd prepared any less than I did, you could have turned that around real quick."
He smiled angelically at me, the entire right side of his face marked with smears of brown.
"Has anyone ever told you that you are absolutely infuriating to fight against, Uzumaki-kun?"
I laughed at the switch back to using my last name. "Hey, don't blame me! It's your fault for pushing me this far, I need tricks like this just to keep up."
He let the cheery act drop in favor of a deadpan stare. "Of course. My mistake."
I glanced down at my shadow stretching across the grass in front of me. It was noticeably longer than it was when we first got out here.
"Let's wrap this up." I stated, to which he nodded in assent. "You're good with a sword in your hands, but let's see if you've been slacking with your fists!"
I held my left hand slightly in front of me, palm-forward, as I slid my right foot back and bent my knees.
Kiba smiled wryly.
"My teacher only made sure I knew the basics before he had me focus on the blade," he said as his hand rose into a passable boxers stance. "So don't don't hold this against me, but I'm not going to slow myself down this time."
"Don't worry then, I won't drag this out either," I said with a smirk, which slipped into a slight grimace. "I seriously need a shower right about now, this is the dirtiest I've gotten since I went to the hospital."
I shook my head to get back on track. I turned my hand and curled my fingers twice in a 'come here' gesture. "Come, show me what you've got."
He practically flew at me in an instant–
Thump
"-Agh!"
-before an impact sounded out and he sputtered, clutching his face and trying to wipe the dirt off.
"When did you even–?! kuh!"
He was cut off as my right arm– the one that just flung my first and final payload at him– connected across his chest in a lariat, sending him crashing down onto his back, flipped by his own momentum.
He wheezed as the breath was knocked out of him for the second time today.
"Kiba down, Uzumaki wins." Koneko called out. "Kiba with six to Uzumaki's three."
The redhead–
'Shit, what was her name again? Rin? Risa? No wait, it was something foreign sounding. I'll just call her Red for now.'
–began clapping loudly.
"Those were excellent matches, you two!" she called out.
I sent Red a grin and a thumbs up, before crouching down beside Kiba with my elbows resting on my knees.
"Uzumaki Naruto's First Rule of Combat: If you enter a fistfight with nothing on you but your fists, it's your fault if you lose when the other guy pulls a knife on you." I said cheerfully. "I don't have any other rules thought up right now, but the second would probably be 'never let a giant snake swallow you whole,' or something like that."
Kiba had one forearm held over his eyes to block out the sun as he caught his breath, but shifted it enough to shoot a baffled look my way.
"But hey, don't take my word for it, I'm just the guy who put you on the ground three times." My grin probably radiated enough smugness to drive a man to contemplate murder.
"As I said. Infuriating." He grumbled.
I laughed and held out my hand. "Want some help up?"
"I'd appreciate it, thank you." He accepted the offer with grace, and grasped my hand.
"Come on," I said with a grin, pulling him up with me into a standing position. "Let's go introduce me real quick and then hop in the showers."
He nodded and we turned to walk over to the girls.
I paused and looked over my shoulder for a moment.
"Oh, uh… should we grab your sword from the bushes real quick?"
Kiba just shook his head and chuckled like I'd said something funny.
"Don't worry, that issue is already handled." he said with a weirdly mysterious smile. "For now, let's go meet with the girls and get cleaned up." He turned and started walking towards the mansion.
What?
I looked back at the hedge, seeing no sign that anyone had snuck past me and climbed it in the past minute. No gaps in the leaves, snapped branches, anything like that.
And that was assuming I wouldn't have heard anything in the first place.
'Does he mean they have someone regularly check the yard for misplaced swords?' I thought incredulously, looking back towards the building. 'That would actually be insane. Easily doable for them, but still insane.'
Then I remembered something Koneko briefly mentioned about Devils; Namely, the fact that they have their own form of Summoning/Reverse-Summoning technique. One that, by the sound of it, was much more common among their kind and convenient to use than Summoning was for shinobi.
Suddenly what he said made a lot more sense
"Oh, I get it now," I reached a hand up to scratch the inside of my ear, before seeing the dirt on my fingers and deciding that wasn't a good idea. "You coulda just said you poofed it away with your devil powers, y'know."
For some reason, Kiba tripped.
"Six-four, point to Uzumaki." Koneko's deadpan voice rang out.
Red looked on in bemusement as I broke down laughing, turning and saying something to Koneko that I couldn't hear from here.
Kiba stood back up and acted like nothing happened.
"I'm quite sure I have no idea what you're talking about." He said, then continued walking.
I smiled as my laughter died down and I moved to catch up to him, lacing my fingers together behind my head.
Today has been fun.
While approaching the girls, I noticed that it wasn't just my imagination that Red had been eyeing me strangely at times. She currently had a friendly smile on her lips, but her eyes seemed a little distracted, almost like she was looking right past me.
I resisted the urge to look over my shoulder and instead pulled a hand from my head to wave.
Red beat me to it with a wave of her own.
"You must be the new friend Koneko-chan has mentioned," the busty redhead greeted with another smile, "You can call me Rias, I'm her club President and one of her friends." She tilted her head slightly with a wry smirk as she looked at me. "You may have heard my name passed around in school. I may have a bit of a reputation."
I wasn't quite sure what she meant by that, so I ignored it in favor of introducing myself as Kiba and I stopped in front of her and Koneko. I had to look up to meet her eyes.
Damnit! She's just as tall as Kiba!
"Heh, it's nice to meet another friend of Koneko-chan's!" 'I definitely won't forget your name this time, I swear!' "I'm Uzumaki Naruto, but you can call me Naruto if you want," I said with a grin. It turned sheepish a moment later. "And uh, I kinda don't really pay attention to people at school unless it's the teacher or someone's trying to talk to me, so I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about." I admitted. "Apparently Kiba's sort of a big deal or whatever, but I only heard of him when Koneko-chan mentioned him."
She blinked and looked at Koneko, seeming stumped, while Kiba chuckled awkwardly next to me.
Koneko nodded. "Uzumaki-kun wanted to ask the Kendo club to fight him, but he would have beat most of them easily."
Rias shook her head and her smile returned.
"Speaking of, that was an impressive showing." She nodded in Kiba's direction in acknowledgement. "Not a lot of people our age can force Yuuto-kun to actually try, let alone beat him when he is. You must have worked really hard to get to the level you are now."
"Ah, yeah," I smiled awkwardly, internally cringing at the irony of her saying that about my current state. "I have a lot of experience fighting guys way more naturally talented than me, and he'd have fit right in with them, so I guess you could say that I've picked up a couple tricks over the years to even the playing field and then some."
Her smile turned coy. "Oh? You wouldn't happen to have any more up your sleeve, ones that you haven't shown us, would you?"
I shook my head childishly. "Nuh-uh, not telling!" I stopped and smirked, looking up into her eyes.
"I'd have to be a pretty crappy ninja to just give away all my secrets, ya'know?"
She blinked.
"Oh, right. That makes sense," she agreed.
Her eyes widened suddenly and her mouth opened–
–just for Koneko's hand to reach up and cover it, blocking whatever Rias was trying to say. The crimson haired girl didn't seem to even notice her words getting muffled, clasping her hands together in front of her chest excitedly as she kept trying to speak.
"You two stink and I'm hungry." The snow-haired girl said blandly, arm stretched comically high above her to reach her taller friend's face. "Go take your showers already."
I looked at the short girl with raised eyebrows, getting her to look my way. "Didn't you just eat like a whole plate of cookies not even an hour ago?" I asked incredulously.
"It was two plates, and those were snacks. I want actual food." She said it as if it were obvious and made perfect sense.
"Huh. I can't help but wonder where it all goes," I mused while smirking down at her "petite" (flat) form. 'Since it's obvious none of it goes to your chest' is what I thought, but I wisely kept it to myself. Even I know when to stop poking a sleeping tiger.
…Uh-oh. Her eyes narrowed.
Did she read my mind or somethi-?
"Are you sure you don't want any help?" Kiba asked with some concern, looking over his shoulder at me as we walked down the hallway.
I chuckled weakly, limping along after him on our way to the showers, my shin aching.
"Don't worry about it," I waved him off. "Sometimes a guy just has to deal with the consequences of his actions. Even when those actions themselves are avoided, the initial intent can be enough to invite reprisal."
He looked even more confused now, but shrugged helplessly and just kept walking.
Koneko sure can throw a helluva mean kick.
~,,––,,^^-
A/N: In other news, only one more chapter to go for this arc (Spoiler: It's full of yapping. Characterization, amiright?), with an interlude following it up to show some stuff going on in the background. Then it's finally on to the next arc, which will be the start of 'canon' as far as DxD's timeline is concerned.
