12: Top of the Class

The first two years in the Ninja Academy had flown by just like that. It was now already Konoha Year 56.

……

“Shin Takami. Perfect score.”

Shin walked off the field under a scatter of envious stares.

Four shurikens sat in a clean row on the training post. Neat, precise, exactly as drilled.

“Figured you’d throw four this time.” Kiba’s voice found him the moment he rejoined the group.

Shin smiled faintly. Those four are a month of work. A month of getting up before sunrise and throwing until my arm hurt. Of course they look different from before.

Shino watched him return with a quiet, puzzled look. Something about the throw had been off. Not wrong — different.

“Next — Sasuke Uchiha.”

Iruka always called Sasuke right after Shin. Shin had started to think the man did it on purpose.

Sasuke stepped forward without ceremony. One hand in his pocket. The other held four shurikens pinched between his fingers, easy as holding a pen. He stood still, raised his arm, and flicked his wrist.

Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

“Sasuke Uchiha. Perfect score.”

Sasuke tucked his free hand back into his pocket and walked back.

Behind him, a chorus of screams.

“Oh my god—”

“He’s so cool—”

Shin watched him go. “No matter how many times I see it,” he said quietly, “his form never stops being impressive.”

“Ugh.” Kiba folded his arms. “Show-off. Always has to make it look like nothing.” He turned to Shin. “When are you going to beat him? Give that guy some competition.”

Shin raised an eyebrow. “Why don’t you beat him yourself?”

“…” Kiba looked away.

Shin went back to replaying the throw in his mind. There was something in the grip — not the standard pinch on the ring or along the edge — something in the way Sasuke’s wrist rotated just before release. It wasn’t a technique the Academy taught. Shin had been imitating it for weeks now.

Without the right foundation, he wasn’t getting there on feel alone.

Still a long way to go, he told himself, and raised another shuriken.

---

Dawn.

Shin stepped out of his house into the quiet cool of early morning. The streets near his block were half-empty — a few neighbors heading to work, a vendor unlocking his stall. People who recognized him smiled as he passed.

“Up early again, Shin. You’ve got more energy than I do.”

“Keep at it. You’ll be a great shinobi.”

He smiled back at each of them without breaking stride, moving through Konoha’s western streets toward the tree line.

---

Thwack.

The shuriken bit into the bark a good half-meter from the notch he’d carved.

Shin exhaled. Walked over. Pulled it free.

Again.

He returned to his mark and ran through the motion in his memory — Sasuke’s arm angle, the hinge of the elbow, the small rotation at the last instant. He matched every detail he could recall.

He threw.

Thwack.

Same result. The shuriken curved wide.

The tree was only about twelve meters away. Using a large arcing throw to hit it with a shuriken was much harder than at the standard testing distance.

At Academy testing distances you could get away with force and a flat trajectory. Real combat was different — obstacles, angles, corners. You needed the curve.

Sasuke had the curve.

How?

Shin had been asking himself that for weeks. Sasuke made it look effortless. One motion, clean and unhurried, like he wasn’t really thinking about it at all.

Because he isn’t, Shin thought. It’s muscle memory. He grew up with this.

Even if Shin could replicate the wrist motion, he was building from imitation without any foundation to build on. He’d hit the target eventually, maybe — but it would always cost him more effort than it should, and in a real fight, effort was a liability.

He let out a slow breath, cleared his head, and raised the shuriken again.

“Hey.”

A voice.

“What’s that awkward form supposed to be?”

Shin spun around.

He hadn’t heard a sound. Not a footstep, not a rustle. But there, perched in the fork of a tree maybe ten paces behind him, sat a young man — twenty, maybe — watching him with calm, faintly amused eyes. Black hair with a slight curl. Features almost too pretty, softened further by a pair of long, upturned eyes that gave his face a quiet, magnetic quality.

On the sleeve of his black shirt: a fan.

Uchiha.

That’s why the form looked familiar.

“Were you copying someone?” the man asked, a small smile at the corner of his mouth. As he spoke, he reached into — somewhere — and produced a single shuriken, balanced in his fingers without looking at it. Sitting in the branch, he raised his arm in a loose, one-handed arc.

And threw.

Thwack.

The shuriken hit Shin’s carved notch dead center.

Shin turned back to face him. “Excuse me — who are you?”

The man dropped lightly from the branch. One moment he was up there. The next he was standing two steps away. Shin blinked. Shunshin.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Up close he was younger than Shin had first guessed. Relaxed posture, unhurried expression. Those fox-like eyes studied Shin with a sort of quiet curiosity.

“Who were you copying?” the man asked, ignoring Shin’s question.

Shin hesitated. There was nothing to hide. “Sasuke Uchiha.”

The man went still for half a second. He knows him. Then the smile returned, a little warmer and a little more amused.

“Then you’re…” He tilted his head. “Shin Takami?”

Shin blinked. “You know me?”

“Top students tend to be known. Every cohort, people pay attention to the top of the class.” He glanced at the shurikens scattered in the grass. “Though the throw you were using just now — Sasuke didn’t teach you that.”

“No.” Shin shook his head. “I picked it up from watching him. I wouldn’t expect him to teach me clan technique.”

“Clan technique.” The man repeated the words with something between agreement and amusement. He pulled out another shuriken, not theatrically, just naturally, and studied it. “You noticed the difference in grip from observation alone.”

“But I can’t replicate it,” Shin said. “I don’t know the principle behind it.”

The man looked at him. Then at the target tree. He raised his arm and threw again — same form, same ease, same satisfying thwack into the notch.

“Watch again.”

Shin watched.

He threw once more.

“And again.”

Shin’s eyes tracked every detail — the fingers, the elbow, the wrist.

“Did you see it?”

“…I saw the motion,” Shin said carefully. “But I don’t understand the mechanics.”

The man stepped aside and gestured for Shin to take his place. “The grip isn’t on the ring, and it’s not on the blade edge. You hold it between the edges — the flat gap between two points. When you release, you rotate the wrist slightly inward.” He paused. “Try it yourself. Do what I described.”

Shin turned to face the tree. He adjusted his grip — not the ring, not the blade. The space between. Ran his fingers along until they found the thin flat gap between two shuriken points.

Odd, he thought. But not unstable.

He breathed out. Let his mind go quiet. Found the notch with his eyes.

And threw.

Thwack.

Dead center.

Shin stared at his own hand.

First try.

A beat of silence behind him.

“…Huh.” The man’s voice had shifted. Shin turned to find him looking not amused now but genuinely surprised, his eyes sharper than before, studying Shin the way Shin had been studying the target. “That was your first attempt.”

“Yes.”

“Your talent,” the man said slowly, “is something else.”

Shin looked at him. The question had been sitting in his chest since the man first spoke, and now it came out before he could stop it.