Naruto : Wind of Catastrophe

Since your means of augmentation is external and wind-based, you'll need to dodge a katon jutsu with a greater breadth that you would other attacks. This sort of split second reaction requires a familiarity with the Dancing Fist that can not be obtained with a crutch."

I stare.

"... Oh."

...

He snorts and walks out of my sight, and I painstakingly force myself up into a sitting position. I take a look over on the other side of the clearing, and feel a little vindicated when I spot Sasuke struggling to keep pace with Lee and his ungodly speed. He looks like he's doing magnitudes better than when Lee smacked him down in the old man's office when they first fought, at least.

A flash of pink catches my eye, up in the trees, and a moment later Sasuke allows one of Lee's punches to nail him square in the face. I wince, watching him turn the force of the blow into a backflip. Even though he did it on purpose, I could still hear it from all the way over here. Lee darts after him, only to slam into a shining red barrier. He stumbles back, dazed, and the sizzling hiss of live explosive tags drifts across the clearing.

I watch him hit the barrier, a dome of shining red chakra, hard enough to break every bone in my body. I hear more than see it crack, but it holds. He hits it again, and it holds. All of a sudden he bends down, fiddling with something at his feet. I watch him in disbelief, wondering what he could possibly doing.

The explosive tags go off.

I flinch, immediately looking back at Neji to see his reaction. He continues to move through his kata, unperturbed. What the...

I turn back and see the bright red barrier fall away, shattered beyond repair. Dust floats over the clearing, obscuring my view of everything on Sasuke and Sakura's side. Grunting in annoyance, I hold a hand out, miraculously left unpoked by Neji's barrage, and push. It isn't much, but the cloud begins to clear a little faster with a breeze to help it along. The dust finally settles, and my eyes go wide. No way.

Lee is standing a few yards outside of the crater where Sakura's tags went off, hunched over and holding what look like weights in his hands. His leotard is in tatters, which are thankfully still covering his youth, and his bowl cut has been singed beyond repair.

Even still, it looks like he managed to escape the barrier jutsu without destroying it completely, allowing it to absorb most of the blast for him. I watch him strap the weights back on, pat out his hair, then straighten up with a flourish and blur towards Sasuke again.

"Wow."

"Do you begin to see the gap in your strength and ours?" Neji asks, transitioning fluidly into another round of his kata. I scoff.

"Whatever, Hyuuga. Give us a year and we'll be twice as good as you."

"More talk," he says dismissively. Fucking Hyuuga.

Rather than get into another argument with the infuriating genin, though, I decide to do something constructive while my poor tenketsu recover. I rifle through my pants pocket, procuring a bright orange water balloon, and stick a finger in it. Might as well work on my shape transformation while I'm here. Hell, maybe my reduced chakra flow will even make it easier.

I tie it off a moment later and form my little chakra ball inside of it, then start compressing it. It takes approximately no time at all to realize that, if anything, Neji and his stupid Gentle Fist made compressing my chakra harder.

It feels sluggish running down my arm, and the happy, weightless feeling that I usually get when I channel my chakra now feels like the pins and needles that you get when you try to walk after your foot falls asleep. Soon enough little bulges peppar the surface of the balloon's surface, and I let the ball of chakra dissipate.

I form another ball, Neji transitions into a new string of his kata, and chaos continues to rein on the other side of the clearing.

I make it to three minutes and not much higher, even as my tenketsu begin to relax and my chakra flows freely. The longest I've ever gone was four minutes, and that particular session ended with a migraine that not even Ichiraku's could heal. No matter what I try the wind always finds some hole in my grip on it, some crack to bleed through. And even if I were to somehow keep it contained for five minutes, I'd be devoting literally all of my concentration to it. Not exactly useful for a combat situation.

I toss my tenth popped balloon aside, sighing in disgust. I glance over to Sasuke and Sakura's side of the clearing, and find them both collapsed on the ground while Lee rants about something or the other above them. Looks like we're done for the day, then. I turn, shifting a tingling leg underneath me to stand up, when something hits me.

"Hey Neji," I say. He doesn't pause in his kata, or acknowledge me at all, but I continue anyway. "You're a Hyuuga, yeah? You know the Heavenly Rotation thing, right?" That gets his attention. He pauses in his kata, looking at me as curiously as his pure white eyes will allow.

"It's the Revolving Heaven," he corrects me. He cocks his head. "Who told you about it?" There's not nearly as much righteous Hyuuga fury in his voice than I'd have expected.

"I'm helping, uh, a friend," I say, catching myself just in time from mentioning Hinata's name. Neji doesn't seem to care about me knowing, but who knows what he's actually feeling behind those eyes. "They're a Hyuuga too, and they're trying to learn it, but they're having trouble."

"And?"

"Well, could you show me how you do it?" I narrow my eyes. "You do know how to do it, right?"

Rather than respond with something scathing like I'm expecting, instead he goes completely still. He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and then pivots on his foot.

It's so much different than what Hinata has shown me that I don't even recognize it at first.

When Hinata performs the Revolving Heaven, it sort of starts off like a cocoon of chakra wrapping around her body. Then as she spins faster and faster it expands, forming a rough dome shape. It keeps on expanding the faster she spins, and inevitably begins to lose its shape and implodes.

Neji doesn't even spin a couple times to get his momentum going before he starts the jutsu. As soon as he pivots chakra explodes out of his body, skipping the cocoon phase entirely and instead forming a perfect dome of chakra around him. It hums like Hinata's, but it's twice as loud, and sounds twice as dangerous. And as I watch it continue to go round and round, I realize that it isn't expanding like Hinata's either. It's not changing shape at all.

After about half a minute of spinning the jutsu finally breaks down, but from the casual way Neji is standing when it dissipates I get the feeling it's because he decided to cancel it rather than lost control. I look down at his feet, and notice that the ground is entirely unmarred, where Hinata's attempts always leave it scarred around her feet.

"... That was awesome."

He hums, and goes back to his kata.

"So, uh. How did you do that?"

He sighs, spinning around ducking low. "What are the results of your 'friend''s attempts?"

"Well, theirs doesn't usually start out as a perfect dome like yours. It sort of wraps around their body and expands as they spin. Then instead of stabilizing like yours, it keeps going until it collapses in on itself. And..." I scratch my nose, thinking of any other info that might be of use. "Oh! When they do it it's not as controlled as yours. It rustles branches and kicks up dirt and stuff."

He sneers, pivoting on his foot. "What they are doing is not the Revolving Heaven. It is little more than a cheap imitation, nothing more."

I glare at his dancing form. "Yeah, whatever. So how do they fix it?" He finishes his kata in a crouch, and stands up. He stares off into space for a minute- or maybe he's looking me in the eyes, you can never tell- before shrugging, apparently having come to a decision.

"They are not channeling their chakra as they should, first of all," he says. "There is more to the Revolving Heaven than ejecting chakra through all of your tenketsu. You must do so in a shape that allows for a stable half sphere to form."

"I thought you couldn't control your chakra once it left your body?" I point out in confusion. My understanding of regular chakra theory is admittedly pretty terrible, seeing as my chakra has different rules, but I can remember Iruka making that one point crystal clear. Once your chakra leaves your tenketsu, it's gone. No takebacks.

"You can not control your chakra once it has left your body, but you can eject it however you want," he says. "If you don't do it this way then the sphere can't take shape, and the Revolving Heaven becomes unstable. Your 'friend' has been imitating the appearance of one with their physical spinning, not any control over their chakra."

actually makes sense. "What about the collateral damage?" I ask, waving a hand at the ground. He shrugs again.

"That is a matter of speed and motion."

"... Yeah?" I prod when he doesn't say anything past that. He sighs.

"Think of the Revolving Heaven as a ball of wind chakra," he says, the condescension in his voice thick. "Just like the wind, you can not simply contain it so nothing leaks out. The wind is ever moving.

You must instead give it a direction to move. The faster it moves in this direction, the tighter and more controlled it becomes. But you must have control over the current, because if you don't bits of it will leak out." He spins his finger in a little circle for emphasis. "Was that simple enough for you?"

I stare at him, open-mouthed.

"What?"

I nearly tear a hole in my pants looking for a fresh balloon, and pop my first two trying to fill them up in my excitement. Finally I get one a little bigger than my fest clenched in my hands, and after a few calming breaths, slowly, slowly, channel chakra into it. The surface ripples, and I begin to spin the chakra around in a circle. The surface continues to ripple, but I pay it no mind, focusing on spinning the chakra faster and faster, mentally whirling a finger around like Neji had done.

And then, all of a sudden, the balloon's surface goes still. I hardly dare breathe, spinning it faster and faster until I can hear it humming from inside the balloon. I let it run at that speed, listening to it hum as the minutes tick away in my head. One, two, three, four. Come on, come on.

Two ninety-six, two ninety-seven, two ninety-eight, two ninety-nine...

I stare down at the balloon in shock. Not a ripple. I did it. I actually did it.

The wind is ever moving.

"Neji, you're a genius."

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