He nods along with the others.

There's not much in the way of cover, or room to maneuver, but he can make do with his illusions. And most genin are going to have trouble hitting him through full protective spells.

The first fight will be Shikamaru and Shino. The others are dismissed to the contestants' seats, a private box.

He'll sit with his team, focused on the match.

Naruto doesn't really know who to cheer for so instead he just bounces in his seat a bit.

The match is more intellectually stimulating than anything else. Neither is really a front-line combatant, but both are very clever. In the end, Shino and his hive carry the day.

"That was not unexpected," Chihiro comments. "The Nara technique is a poor matchup to the Aburame."

"Yeah. Shikamaru's also not got much chakra - he was always getting tired fast in the Academy."

Naruto found the match kind of boring, so he spent it trying to guess at motives and personalities. It was so slow though. Even if both Shino and Shikamaru are obviously strategically smarter than him, and he probably could learn something if he could pay attention...

"A problem exacerbated by the chakra-eating beetles. That is why he was avoiding them so assiduously."

Next up is Rock Lee and Waterfall's Sen.

Lee is eager for this fight! He's very complimentary of Sen's talents.

He's also a pain in the ass to hit, and a single blow from him's enough to throw Sen into the wall hard enough something cracks.

The fight's not very long, all told.

Also a predictable outcome, though the level of strength displayed was... not.

Next up is Kankuro and Tenten. He uses his puppet mostly as a shield, opting instead to yank Tenten's implements back around at her. He displays an impressive amount of situational awareness and is able to back her into a corner, and graciously accepts the surrender.

Lee cheers on Tenten and is disappointed when she loses.

Then it's Naruto's turn! He bounces down to the arena, grinning at Neji.

Neji glowers. He's very good at it.

"I'm going to kick your ass, just so you know," he says, extremely cheerfully.

"As if someone like you could."

The proctor calls the match start, and the veins around Neji's eyes visibly bulge as he activates his Byakugan.

"I'm not going to complain about you being an overconfident ass, then," he says, jumping back - far faster than he had during the preliminaries - and making a cloud of clones. According to Hinata, this had disoriented her a bit and she'd had trouble seeing the back rows, so his clones spread around Neji - one hangs back, pretending to be the real body.

His goal is for the real body and at least two decoys to get in the ground, but he's expecting Neji to disrupt that.

Neji starts moving immediately, popping the clones nearest to him with targeted precision and fluid economy of motion. He hones in on the Naruto hanging back, using Naruto's numbers against him as much as possible.

Naruto hanging back tries to avoid Neji, and makes more clones (none of the other clones have shown this ability).

The ones Neji misses are going to spread out, jumping up to the walls, far enough from each other Neji will have trouble popping them in any kind of quick succession.

If they're that far away, then they're not really a threat. Or so Neji assumes.

Naruto has a vague sense that 'conservation of chakra' exists, so one of the ones mostly behind Neji is going to be the first to use the long-ranged wind technique, being only kind of careful about not catching clones in the cross-fire.

He twists out of the way like he has eyes on the back of his head.

Well, time to be a lot less careful then!

Have at least five slightly off center blasts - dodging one would require going through the heart of another.

Neji whirls, enveloping himself in a circular ball of chakra. The wind blasts bounce off it, and Neji touches down in the depression it scoops out of the ground, then continues his advance.

The clone pretending to be the main body is focusing on running away, since he doesn't need the clouds of distracting clones anymore (just a few to trip up Neji), as Naruto's wall clones repeat the wind blasts, interspersing them with hails of kunai and shuriken with the occasional explosive tag just to mix things up (oooooh he needs to figure out how to use shadow clone on ranged weapons, a few clones think, that'd be FUN).

He can't exactly spam this infinitely, but he's betting he can spam it more than Neji can spam the twirly thingy. Twirly thing looks like it takes a lot of chakra.

('Main' clone is also continuing to taunt Neji, mostly assorted ramblings about how he's not as amazing as he thinks - honestly Neji's a really advanced opponent but that seems to be a sore spot, and an angry opponent is an opponent making mistakes. None of the other clones are talking, so hopefully Neji will also get tunnel vision. Metaphorically, at least.)