Dead Set on Saving Face? Then Take Another Throw!

The Causality Law of "guaranteed to miss" displayed its most absurd side at that moment.

It avoided the target and actively sought out a living target.

Kakashi did not look down at his leg.

He did not even bend his knee.

But his hands, shoved into his pockets, were clenched tight.

The fabric was stretched taut, veins throbbing on the backs of his hands.

His ten fingers were locked together so hard that even his fingertips trembled.

Genius Kakashi Zetsu absolutely could not get hit by a dead-last student's stray throw on the first day of school.

If he cried out, the aloof persona he had worked so hard to maintain would be utterly ruined.

So he could only stare up at the sky and endure the piercing pain drilling through his calf.

The system notifications in Ye's mind were still frantically popping up.

[Guard-Break Points from Kakashi Hatake, +500!]

[Guard-Break Points from Kakashi Hatake, +444!]

A mass of bright red numbers piled up, thoroughly betraying the frenziedly roaring, collapsing heart hidden beneath the genius's dead-fish eyes.

Ye quietly watched the scene and confirmed one thing completely.

Kakashi Zetsu absolutely could never guess that the Kunai had been swapped.

Yet the system had credited the score to Uchiha Ye.

The Guard-Break Points had been deposited in full!

Not a single point was missing!

A huge, heartfelt smile spread across Ye's face, and the boulder in his heart finally dropped away.

The "anonymous blind test" mechanism worked perfectly!

That meant that as long as he initiated the chain of causality, it did not matter whether the victim knew the truth—the points would still be awarded.

In the future, he would not need to confront people head-on in public at all.

He only needed to find the right opportunity to dig traps, set snares, and kill with a borrowed knife.

He could watch others step into pits and lose their composure from the shadows, while he lounged behind the scenes and comfortably counted points.

Even the sky above Konoha seemed several shades brighter in Ye's eyes.

He looked at the carved faces on Hokage Rock in the distance and sneered inwardly.

The Uchiha Clan massacre?

Then they would see who wiped out whom when the time came.

The afternoon sunlight shone over the Training Ground, and everything looked peaceful and serene.

Except for the spiky-haired boy in the middle of the testing area, with a white mark on his forehead, who was kneeling on the ground and howling at the sky.

"Why did my Kunai go crooked—aaahhh!!!"

Obito wailed madly, unable to make sense of it no matter how hard he tried.

Obito did not know the answer.

But Ye did.

"Next, Uchiha Ye!"

the teacher shouted.

Ye touched the six genuine Kunai in his pocket that had originally belonged to Obito, feeling utterly delighted.

Chunin instructor Gang Ziyun took a deep breath and forcibly turned a page in the scorebook in his hand.

Earlier, Obito had refused to admit that he had missed the target, insisting at the top of his lungs that the wind had been too strong and blown his Kunai off course.

That excuse was too ridiculous for even a ghost to believe, and it had nearly given Gang Ziyun a heart attack.

He looked at the two holes beside Obito's name and forcibly swallowed down his internal frustration.

He vigorously rubbed his temples, calming his raging blood pressure.

It was fine.

There was still another Uchiha.

"Next, Uchiha Ye!"

Gang Ziyun called loudly.

As he called out that name, Gang Ziyun looked up, his gaze passing through the messy crowd of new students on the Training Ground.

A trace of complicated expectation still flashed through his eyes.

Although this kid's mental state on the first day of school had been spectacularly unhinged, and everything he had done was more outrageous than the last—

Bloodline was still bloodline.

Even if he acted like a patient who had escaped from a mental hospital in the classroom—

Once he picked up a Kunai and stood on the throwing line, the talent he had been born with would not lie.

In previous years, which Uchiha freshman had not opened the throwing test with a king bomb?

Although Obito had indeed been awful, Ye was a well-known genius of this year's Uchiha Clan.

If he could deliver a textbook-level throw, he could still pull up the class's lower limit a little.

The murmurs around the Training Ground instantly quieted.

Countless gazes swept in unison toward the back row.

Ye swaggered leisurely out of the crowd.

His right hand slipped into his pocket and touched the six genuine Kunai.

He casually drew out three, leaving the other three in his pocket.

Might Guy stood to the side, and the moment he saw Ye's careless demeanor, his thick brows shot up.

"Uchiha Ye! Ninja Tools are partners to whom a ninja entrusts his life! Such a frivolous attitude is a desecration of youth!"

Ye stopped walking. Without even lifting his eyelids, he glanced at Guy.

"When you go to the bathroom, if the zipper on that green bodysuit of yours gets stuck, would you call that an obstacle to youth too?"

Guy froze, suddenly imagining the scene of Zetsu's despair at being unable to take off his clothes and dying from holding it in. His face immediately turned green.

[Guard-Break Points from Might Guy, +222!]

Ye withdrew his gaze with satisfaction and sauntered onto the throwing line.

He did not nervously assume a standard stance like the other freshmen, nor did he pull some classic opening pose like Obito.

He merely lazily hooked a finger through the Kunai's ring, tossed it up, caught it, tossed it again, and caught it again.

The movements were casual, even a little punchable.

Yet no one on the Training Ground laughed.

Several girls in the front row unconsciously rose onto their toes, while Rin Nohara tilted her head slightly and looked over with curiosity.

Gang Ziyun stared fixedly at the Kunai in Ye's hand.

The metal flashed in the sunlight as it rose and fell in an unhurried rhythm.

When an expert made a move, you could tell whether they had the real thing.

Just from that casual tossing motion, he could tell the kid had an extremely precise grasp of the Kunai's center of gravity.

Gang Ziyun's breathing grew heavier.

Come on, make your teacher proud!

Yet Ye stood behind the white line without even glancing at the target twenty-five meters away.

His gaze passed over the crowd and locked firmly onto Kakashi at the far right.

Kakashi Hatake was currently enduring the most agonizing three minutes of his life, with Obito's Kunai still stuck in his left calf.

It hurt, but to avoid shattering his "number one genius" image, he took advantage of everyone watching Ye and bent down with extreme stealth.

His fingers secretly reached for the handle protruding from his left leg.

His dead-fish eyes narrowed as he calculated how to quickly pull out the Kunai and stop the bleeding.

The two girls secretly watching nearby looked utterly confused.

Was Kakashi... tying his shoe?

Seeing Kakashi's sneaky, embarrassed appearance—suffering terribly just to save face—Ye smiled.

That stray throw from Obito, a blind cat catching a dead mouse, had already yielded two 999s. What he held now was a genuine standard Kunai.

Good things came in pairs, understood?

Ye abruptly squared his body, not even bothering to wind up.

He raised his right hand and flicked his wrist twice in rapid succession.

"Whoosh! Whoosh!"

The first and second Kunai left his hand one after the other, carrying cold, piercing whistles through the air.

The technique was fast and vicious, and every gaze on the field instantly followed the afterimages as they flew.

But then, everyone's pupils contracted at once.

From the very first millisecond after leaving his hand, the trajectories of those two Kunai were wildly off course.

They were not flying toward Ye's assigned target number three at all.

"Thud!"

The first Kunai buried itself precisely in the dead center of the bullseye on Asuma Sarutobi's newly replaced target.

Asuma was crouched nearby, pulling out Obito's Kunai, when the dull impact exploded beside his ear and splinters sprayed across his face.

His scalp went numb, and he vaguely felt a warmth in his crotch.

He scrambled and rolled three meters away, then dropped onto the ground with a slap, his face deathly pale.