Shikamaru Nara
Back to the Leaf character index.
Back to the Leaf character index.
BackgroundShikamaru is incredibly lazy, but unbelievably smart. Despite his belief that "the act of putting pencil to paper is a drag", he scored over two hundred on a disguised I.Q. test.
Shikamaru's intelligence leans to him mainly using strategy to beat his opponents. He claims that he can think 200 moves ahead and act on them. He thinks on his feet and uses his knowledge of the land and surroundings to his advantage. All of his strategies lead to him using his Shadow Possession jutsu. As a squad, Choji, Ino, and Shikamaru attack in a formation they call Ino-Shika-Cho. In this formation, Shikamaru freezes an opponent so that his teammates can disable the rest of the enemies.
Shikamaru entered the chunin exams along with the other eight leaf rookies. During the preliminaries of the second exam, Shikamaru fought Kin, a sound ninja. She nearly disabled him by using special bells that distorted his senses, but he managed to throw his shadow possession jutsu under a string without her noticing. In the third exam, he was supposed to fight Dosu, another sound ninja, but Dosu never showed up. As per the new matchings he fought Temari of the Sand village. Temari fought similarly to him. Her strategy and understanding of the battlefield nearly allowed her to read Shikamaru's attacks, or so she thought. Shikamaru saw farther ahead than Temari and ended up getting her with Shadow Possession through the hole previously created by Naruto. Despite this "winning" move, he withdrew from the fight. He did this because his chakra was exhausted.
When the attack on the village started, Kakashi assigned Shikamaru, Naruto, Sakura and Pakkun to follow after Sasuke. Pakkun sensed that there where nine sound shinobi in pursuit of them. After explaining that an ambush could not succeed, Shikamaru volunteered himself for a delay tactic that only appeared to be an ambush. He claimed that the Shadow Possession jutsu was created as a delay tactic, so he was best suited for the job. As he planned, Shikamaru stayed behind and halted eight of the ninja; however, one ninja was left behind to protect from an ambush. Shikamaru found this ninja's position by faking an attack on the other eight ninja. Unfortunately, a lack of chakra caused his jutsu to begin to fail. As this was happening, the leader of the ninja ordered the ninth to come out and "take of his head" referring to Shikamaru. As his jutsu failed, a dark figure fell behind Shikamaru. The dark figure was holding a body, the body of the ninth sound ninja. He was Asuma, Shikamaru's sensei, and he completely destroyed the other eight ninja in seconds.
