Neji was a child of the branch family. Though he and Hiashi had mended the rift between main and branch, he still wasn't the clan head.
Some things, he simply didn't know.
He didn't even understand why all this was happening to him now.
Mangetsu pressed a hand to his chest, waiting for the paralysis from the Lightning Release tag to fade.
"From the moment you made those craters with Water Style: Great Waterfall Technique, I was lining this up," Neji said. It matched his nature: in a fight, every move stayed inside his plan.
The deepest art of Eight Trigrams Palms is to lock onto the enemy's weak point and strike for the kill when the moment opens.
He could see ahead, so every blow he'd thrown had been a setup for the one he wanted in the future—stacking certainties to make "inevitable" real.
He'd kept Mangetsu unaware, step after step, even when he appeared to be caught. The wounds he took were real—but he used the Pure Eye to accelerate his healing, then swapped himself with a piece of wood at a speed no human eye could catch.
It only looked like a simple Substitution.
Why not just start with a Substitution? Because when a clone or substitute takes a hit, there's a subtle signature. Spectators might miss it. Mangetsu wouldn't. Neji had seen that future: if he relied on Substitution at the outset, the final strike would be perfectly avoided.
His eyes showed him every branch at the same time point—then shifted again every passing minute. His task was to force the branch he wanted—until it happened.
He did.
When he first opened the power, he couldn't reach this far.
He was stronger now.
No one expected it: the "legend too strong to measure," the Mangetsu whose ceiling was "unknown," undone like this. After all the dazzling exchanges, he was felled by… a kunai to the heart?
The irony bit deep: a Ghost Lantern, immune to all physical strikes—brought down by a physical strike. The one second only to Gengetsu among his clan. A star among the young generation…
Defeated by the simplest attack. Mangetsu tried to liquefy and mend, but the Lightning Release paralysis kept the wound from sealing.
Blood welled, unstoppable.
Then people noticed something strange about Neji's follow-up. This wasn't a normal attack. A thin ring of blue chakra circled the wound—time held relative-still at the edge of that cut.
Inside that ring, the injury replayed: opening, bleeding, opening, bleeding—over and over. From the outside, it looked like the wound simply could not heal.
Across the arena, Suigetsu was finally brought down by the combined efforts of Shikamaru, Choji, Ino, and a barely-standing Shino. The disguised Cloud shinobi fell to Kiba and Lee, though both were battered so badly they could no longer rise.
Then Kaede stepped onto the field.
With a squad of medical-nin, he had the injured lifted onto stretchers and carried out.
Neji dropped to one knee. The blue bled from his eyes back to hollow white. His chakra was almost gone. The instant he saw Kaede, it felt like finding a pillar to lean on.
(End of Chapter)
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