The Sharingan's power was indisputable, but it lacked the Byakugan's wide-area vision. So any moment now, he'd have to break cover.
Hinata flung two more kunai rigged with explosive tags, but her fingers paused mid-throw. The reason was simple: she was down to her last four kunai. Still, she could see clearly enough—after her relentless bombardment, Sasuke was in rough shape. The forest's density had actually worked against his Sharingan, so the trap-laying strategy that was supposed to catch Hinata off guard had instead cost him dearly.
By rights, Sasuke should have conceded at this point. But his opponent was a Hyuga, and he was an Uchiha. That residual ancestral pride kept the boy gritting his teeth and holding on, because he knew he still had a few slim chances left.
Ninja tools were finite. Their weight, if carried in excess, would compromise a shinobi's agility. So apart from someone like Tenten—who lugged around weapon scrolls like some kind of walking armory—every other ninja had a hard cap on how much they could carry.
Hinata had only the single small tool pouch at the small of her back. Standard capacity: ten kunai and ten shuriken. But since Hinata wasn't particularly skilled with shuriken technique, she'd forgone them entirely in favor of a full twenty kunai. Explosive tags without a kunai to carry them were nearly useless at range. By Sasuke's count, Hinata had already burned through sixteen kunai in her non-stop barrage, which meant she had roughly four left.
"Now!!"
Seizing on a pause in Hinata's attack, Sasuke maximized his chakra output in a single explosive burst. Lightning-natured chakra flowed through his Sacred Fist Gauntlets and converted into crackling electricity that arced across his body. With it came a rush of stimulation—muscles firing as though electrified. This was a secret Sasuke had discovered shortly after receiving the gauntlets: lightning chakra could grant him dramatically increased speed. And now was the moment to prove it.
Both arms crossed, he drew four shuriken from each thigh holster in a single fluid motion. One spinning pivot, and all eight shuriken screamed out of the tree line in expertly varied arcs, homing in on Hinata's position.
"What?!"
Hinata was genuinely caught off guard. To prevent Sasuke from tracking her, she'd changed position after every throw—but he'd somehow factored in even her movement intervals and pinpointed exactly where she'd end up.
The eight lightning-wreathed shuriken carved shrieking trails through the air. Sasuke's shuriken technique outclassed Hinata's completely: each of the eight flew at a different arc and a subtly different rotational speed, guaranteeing unpredictable course corrections. And if even one of those lightning-charged shuriken so much as grazed her, the resulting paralysis would hand Sasuke all the time he needed for a follow-up.
Impressive! Worthy of Uchiha Sasuke! But—!
Hinata's lips twisted into a fierce grin. She abandoned any thought of dodging or blocking. Sasuke's shuriken had been timed precisely; full evasion was already off the table. And with no way to predict their mid-flight adjustments, there was only one option.
"HAH!!"
With a sharp kiai, Hinata drove her right palm edge-first into the ground like a blade. A burst of flame-driven force ripped upward, wrenching a massive curtain of earth and stone from the ground. The wall of debris wasn't remotely as solid as a proper Earth Release defense, but as a shield against conventional shuriken it was more than enough. All eight shuriken—despite their clever trajectories—slammed into that dense barrier of dirt and gravel and were deflected without exception. Technique meant reduced killing power, and against brute-force obstruction, finesse lost.
But that didn't mean Hinata could relax.
"Fūma Shuriken!!"
Sasuke's strained roar was followed by a massive whoosh from directly ahead. A giant shuriken with a wingspan nearly half Hinata's height came screaming toward her. There was no question—her hastily raised dust-wall couldn't stop something that size.
So he predicted I'd defend in place and sent this heavy hitter to break through. Clever.
In an instant, Hinata understood—her defensive choice had been too predictable. In their last fight, she hadn't bothered defending against Sasuke's shuriken either, and he'd clearly filed that lesson away.
From that perspective alone, Sasuke's combat instincts were genuinely remarkable. Among Academy students his age, the ability to absorb a tactical lesson that quickly and apply it in the field was exceedingly rare.
But anyone with half a brain would know that a single Fūma Shuriken wasn't going to take Hinata down. Which meant he had to have a follow-up planned around however she chose to respond.
The massive shuriken was flying horizontally, low to the ground. To dodge, she'd have to either jump or sidestep—either way creating an opening. And with his two-tomoe Sharingan active, Sasuke's predictive read on her movements wouldn't miss.
The second option was to hold her ground and tank it. But deflecting something this large would cost Hinata significantly more energy and might even leave her guard broken, giving Sasuke an even easier follow-up.
That left only one option.
"Yami Barai."
Hinata spoke the words coolly. Fire erupted along her left forearm, and with one fluid sweep of her hand, a violent streak of flame—like a ground-hugging serpent of fire—shot forward to meet the incoming Fūma Shuriken. Under normal circumstances, fire had no physical substance, but driven by chakra and raw kinetic force, it struck with the impact of a solid projectile. The collision erupted into a thunderous blast that shredded the Fūma Shuriken into scattered fragments.
But then Hinata felt something deeply wrong.
In her field of vision, Sasuke hadn't pressed his attack. Instead, he stood stock-still, staring at her movements with laser focus. The two black tomoe in those crimson eyes spun at an eerie, accelerating pace.
Don't tell me this brat—!
The Sharingan's most broken ability slammed back into her consciousness, and a chill ran down Hinata's spine. As if to confirm her worst suspicion, Sasuke appeared before her wearing a triumphant smile. The dark-haired boy raised his right hand, mimicking her exact motion from moments ago, and swung. A crackling arc of electricity—shaped precisely like a Yami Barai—burst from his palm and skimmed along the ground straight toward her.
That cheating son of a—! This cheating copycat!!
Stone-faced, Hinata lashed out with another Yami Barai of her own. The fire and lightning collided head-on midway between them and detonated into a shower of brilliant electric sparks before vanishing.
This, without question, had been Sasuke's true objective all along.
The Yami Barai was one of Hinata's closely guarded techniques—she'd had no intention of teaching it to either Sasuke or Naruto. Naruto had only acquired his Sonic Boom through sheer dumb luck and some covert help from White Hinata, stumbling upon the nearly incinerated manual pages by pure chance.
Sasuke, however, had opted for something far more ruthless: using his Kekkei Genkai to rip the technique directly from Hinata herself.
The Yami Barai wasn't ninjutsu per se, but executing it still required precise chakra coordination—the body mechanics of the strike and the flow patterns through the meridians all had to be painstakingly developed through practice. Strictly speaking, it was closer to a chakra-augmented taijutsu technique.
Even Hinata had invested considerable effort before her Yami Barai reached a combat-ready level. But Sasuke, armed with the Sharingan's copying ability, had instantly pierced through the motion mechanics and chakra pathways Hinata used when executing the technique—and learned the move on the spot.
Just like in the original story, where Sasuke needed only half a month to replicate the speed technique Rock Lee had spent nearly a year developing.
"Honestly... people don't hate the Uchiha for nothing."
Lowering her stance, Hinata's lips curled with a cold smirk—though her eyes held something closer to violent admiration. "Not bad. That's more like it. Compared to Naruto's blind luck, you're the one I find more impressive."
"Hmph. You gave me a scare, though—you're tougher than last time."
His prize technique secured, Sasuke allowed himself a proud, satisfied grin. "I may have lost to you before, but I'm an Uchiha. I'll never match you at making money, but as a shinobi, I will catch up to you—and surpass you."
"Is that so?"
Hinata's pupils contracted. Her right hand snapped forward, firing another Yami Barai at Sasuke. Without even watching it land, both hands blurred in rapid succession—one, two, three, four, five—a volley of Yami Barai streaking out in rapid fire.
"It's useless! In front of these eyes, every attack you throw is as clear as a reflection in a mirror!"
Sasuke declared it with pride, and as if to prove the point, he matched her barrage swing for swing. Apart from the lightning replacing fire, every motion was a carbon copy.
Flame and electricity detonated like fireworks across the space between them, blast after rolling blast. Then, abruptly, Sasuke stopped mid-swing. His expression froze. A flicker of pain crossed his face.
"What's happening? My hands..."
He looked down in disbelief. Both hands had gone limp, as if short-circuited—completely unresponsive.
"So you've noticed. Converting large amounts of lightning-natured chakra in rapid succession and channeling it all through your hands—I'd imagine your body's experiencing that for the first time?"
Hinata raised her own perfectly functional hands with a smile that didn't reach her eyes, her pale gaze dripping mockery. "How long do you think it took me to master the Yami Barai? And my fighting style means I'm constantly flooding my hands with fire-natured chakra. But you? Apart from Chidori, when have you ever pushed anything stronger than baseline lightning chakra through your hands?"
The truth was simple. Sasuke had indeed copied the Yami Barai on sight, but he'd overlooked one critical factor: his body's physical adaptation to the technique.
Put plainly, an experienced bodybuilder could perform the same exercise hundreds of times without injury. A novice, even one who knew exactly how to do the movement and had the raw strength for it, might still pull a muscle or wrench a ligament after a dozen reps.
Hinata's combat style leaned heavily into taijutsu, so she'd long since acclimated to channeling massive amounts of fire-natured chakra through her hands. Her Yami Barai practice had been sustained and intensive. From muscle to meridian, her body was fully conditioned for the technique—she could rattle off a dozen or more in a row without issue.
But Sasuke's strengths lay in ninja tools and ninjutsu. Taijutsu was an occasional supplement at best. Even Chidori was a last-resort finishing move he used sparingly.
Under those conditions, neither his hand muscles nor his chakra pathways were accustomed to handling such concentrated, sustained chakra flow. Drunk on the thrill of successfully copying the Yami Barai, he'd fired off a rapid-fire volley, and the result was exactly what you'd expect: his muscles and meridians, overwhelmed by the sudden spike in strain, locked up with fatigue and numbness.
Think of it this way: the same ammunition, loaded into a properly rated barrel, could fire a dozen rounds without a hitch. Load it into a shoddy barrel, and the first shot might blow the chamber apart.
Sasuke's hands were, at this moment, a blown chamber.
"Damn it... how..."
Shame and fury nearly choked the breath out of him. Then a shadow flickered across his vision. Hinata, wearing that unsettling smile, had closed the distance in an instant.
"If you had to cross-dress, what style would you pick?"
The question came in a deceptively gentle tone—accompanied by a brutally sharp elbow strike. The pale-eyed girl, grinning with sadistic relish, drove her elbow into Sasuke's solar plexus. The crushing impact knocked the wind out of him instantly. The Uchiha boy's mouth gaped open in a silent scream, and before he could even crumple, Hinata clasped both hands together like a sledgehammer and slammed them into his spine, pile-driving him face-first into the earth like a cannonball punched into clay.
Darkness—tinged with vertigo and numbness—swallowed Sasuke's vision whole, and his consciousness emptied out to nothing.
Standing over the dark-haired boy now embedded in the ground with eyes rolled back, the pale-eyed girl straightened up and spat.
"Hmph. Disgusting."