The commotion caused by Nawaki's match hadn't spread very far before the Anbu stationed near the arena suppressed it.
Among those spreading word of Nawaki's record, some really were villagers who felt warmly toward him, but most had ulterior motives. They were enemy-nation shinobi who had infiltrated Konoha before the battles to cause trouble.
The matches inside the arena continued. Touma and Shibi barely knew the next four fifth-year graduates. None of them belonged to Team Ise; they were either classmates of Kato Haruna-sensei in Class B or Kobayashi Kaito-sensei in Class C!
The ninth competitor was Hizashi, the younger brother of the Hyuga clan heir, who had just won his match with ease.
His fight wasn't anything special either. He performed a complete set of the Eight Trigrams Sixteen Palms and easily won the match.
The truth was, the Genin randomly matched against Hizashi was really no good. He looked no different from the cannon-fodder Genin who had just come out of the Genin Training Camp, like Kenta and the others.
His fighting style was disorganized, and he didn't have a trump card of his own. There was no suspense at all in his match against Hizashi. The fact that he'd managed to hold out until his chakra ran dry meant he had a strong will, at least.
The match had left the spectators outside the arena a little impatient. They got up one after another to stretch their limbs, ready to watch the next fight.
The next competitor was a classmate of Touma and Shibi's, someone they knew very well: Kurama Mion.
Seeing her surname, many people realized that the young girl was a prodigy from the Kurama Clan, renowned for its genjutsu.
The Kekkei Genkai passed down by the Kurama Clan could easily rob a target of their five senses through genjutsu and control their nervous responses.
Once they had completed the nature transformation for Yin Release Chakra, members of the Kurama Clan could even use the so-called "ultimate genjutsu," Genjutsu: True Reality.
This technique truly reflected the prophecy left behind by the progenitor of the Shinobi World, the Sage of Six Paths: "Yin and Yang give form to what has no form, and breathe life into what has form." These words directly revealed the function and essence of Yin-Yang Release.
Unfortunately, although those words had been passed down throughout the Shinobi World for so long, only a handful of people had managed to glean even a little understanding from them.
As a talented young member of the Kurama Clan who hadn't developed the clan's hereditary disease, Mion had naturally awakened the Kekkei Genkai known as "Five Senses Control."
However, her innate ability to control other people's five senses hadn't made her life any easier. Instead, it left her immersed at all times in the emotions spilling out from those around her.
To fight off those foreign emotions, Mion had no choice but to amplify and strengthen one of her own emotions to counter them.
The emotion she chose was sadness, so everyone could see her red-rimmed eyes from afar.
Clearly, to prepare for the battle ahead, Mion had decided to have a good, loud cry and drive away all the foreign emotions first.
Otherwise, if those emotions ran wild during the fight, her genjutsu could easily spiral out of control.
Mion wasn't afraid of being struck by the backlash from her own genjutsu. She was afraid that, once out of control, it might affect reality and accidentally kill her opponent.
This was a graduation exam. If a candidate died from the effects of genjutsu, there was no guarantee Konoha Hospital would be able to save them!
Touma knew her because she was good friends with Mebuki Kazamatsuri. Another close friend of theirs was Tsume Inuzuka of the Inuzuka Clan, the mother of Kiba Inuzuka, one of the Konoha 12 during the era of Shippuden.
The three of them were practically inseparable, as if they'd grown up together. In their third year, they'd even started a small club at school called the "Kunoichi Mutual Aid Group."
The club hadn't been created to organize promotional activities. It was meant to offer kunoichi an interest group where they could learn other skills alongside their schoolwork.
Mebuki, who was good at cooking, taught the kunoichi how to bake;
Mion, who was skilled in the tea ceremony, taught them how to prepare powdered tea;
and Tsume, who was good at raising Ninja Dogs, taught them how to prepare feed for ninja beasts!
The teachers were happy to see the club thrive. After all, many kunoichi might only work as shinobi for a few years after graduation before getting married and raising a family.
Without a skill of their own, even if they married into a non-shinobi family, they might struggle to cover their living expenses and eventually see their marriage fall apart.
To some extent, the club gave kunoichi a second chance to choose their own paths. With a skill in hand, they didn't have to face a life where they could see the end of the road from the start.
After all, not every shinobi had the talent to advance all the way to Special Jōnin or Elite Jōnin. People whose abilities limited how far they could go as shinobi, men and women alike, badly needed that second chance!
Mion's opponent wasn't nearly as weak as the previous four. Touma even knew the shinobi!
His name was Mitarashi Mochi. Last year, when Touma and the others were still in fourth grade, Mochi had just graduated from sixth grade.
His name said it all: "Mochi" meant rice cake, and one famous traditional Japanese dessert was red bean soup with rice cakes. The transliteration of "red bean paste" was "anko."
In other words, this senior, who looked considerably older than his years, was most likely the older brother of Mitarashi Anko from the era of Shippuden.
For now, though, the senior was only thirteen. It would probably be quite some time before his little sister, who also loved sweets, was born.
The Mitarashi Clan didn't have much of a reputation in the village, but they'd been fairly well known during the Warring States period.
Their clan had a special genjutsu that they used on themselves. By repeatedly purifying their minds with it, they could greatly strengthen their resistance to genjutsu.
It was said that when Senju Hashirama was young, his father, Senju Butsuma, had sent him to the Mitarashi Clan to strengthen his resistance to genjutsu, and had spent a great deal of resources to do so.
Later, Hashirama had repeatedly gained the upper hand in his battles with Uchiha Madara thanks to that remarkable resistance to genjutsu!
Of course, the Mitarashi Clan's true secret art was a sensory technique based on powerful mental energy. Touma really didn't know exactly what it did.
Even when Shibi asked his clan's elders, he got no definite answer. All he learned was that the Mitarashi Clan's sensory technique worked somewhat like the Sharingan's ability to see through an opponent's moves.
Although this keen perception didn't let them copy a target's taijutsu and ninjutsu exactly, it was enough for Mitarashi shinobi to spot flaws in an opponent's techniques and seize on their openings.
For that reason, Mitarashi shinobi often used thin, hard-to-see ninja tools like senbon for long-range attacks.
Worst of all, the Mitarashi Clan's senbon-throwing technique was incredibly gentle. They could slip a senbon into a target's body and seal their pressure points without the target even noticing.
As a result, many members of the Mitarashi Clan were skilled assassins, and the names of most of their strongest members were on the Anbu recruitment list!
Overall, Senior Mitarashi Mochi's methods were a very bad matchup for little crybaby Mion.
Looking at Mion's tightly furrowed brows, Touma couldn't help worrying. He wondered whether the little crybaby had managed to gather enough information about her opponent before the match.
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