Chuunin Exams: Hell in a Hand Basket
Team seven was ready. As ready as humanly possible. They had done everything perfectly according to plan so far. They had trained tirelessly for this moment, pushing themselves to the limit each and every day. They had planned attack strategies, scouted out other ninjas in the village, even bought new equipment. That didn't stop them from sweating a little to themselves.
As soon as they met to go into the exams, however, that was over. They put on their game faces and made their entrance.
Hinata walked in in her new battle kimono, a white blindfold wrapped over her eyes. That flimsy piece of cloth would do nothing to block her vision, but no one really knew that. Her headband still dangled around her neck like a piece of jewelry.
To her left was Naruto. His spiky ponytail hung out behind him, streaks of red accentuating his feral features. His black gi had been accentuated with the same gold stitched fox on the back and red swirls on each shoulder. Kitsune Bi hung on his waist, attracting several whispers. Sword wielders were fairly rare in genin. His headband was now attached to the extended cloth pieces, which hung down. He looked dangerous like someone who had power in spades, and walked like it too.
Sasuke stood on Hinata's right. His own gi had stayed basically plain black, though he had added the Uchiha crest on his back and shoulders. Mikaze hung laizily on his hip, swinging slightly with each step. The sword attracted less attention than the clan crest, however. There wasn't anyone there from any nation that hadn't heard of the Uchiha clan's strength. He walked with the smug arrogance of someone who had already won.
As they began walking to the room they had been told, they saw a group of genin struggling to get into the wrong room. Naruto frowned, and looked at the sign, sighing slightly. A minor genjutsu had been placed on it, changing the room numbers. Amateurish. On top of that, the two 'genin' barring entrance to the room held themselves differently from the genin trying to get in. They were out of place, not real genin if he had ever seen them. Still, this would be the perfect time for their planned display. He made a subtle gesture to Sasuke.
The Uchiha called loudly over the angry crowd. "What are you idiots doing? If you can't see through an illusion that simple, you don't deserve to be in this exam." The crowd went dead silent as team seven strode through them to the two blocking the door. "And you two are going to be late for the exam distracting these morons."
The taller of the two sneered down his nose at the Uchiha. "Oh, a big tough genin, are you? Putting all us inferiors in our places? Since you ruined our fun, I think its only fair I ruin yours." He blurred suddenly, rushing at Sasuke faster than most genin could track.
Team seven was not made of 'most genin,' however. Sasuke grabbed the fake genin's kick in midair, holding him for a moment before jumping back. Naruto darted in and slammed a punch too fast for anyone but Sasuke, Hinata, and team eight to track. His taller opponent flew into his companion, and both smashed through the door. As they did, the illusion over the sign dissipated. The crowd slowly dispersed, giving team seven a wide berth. Naruto saw Kiba give him a thumbs up and smiled at him.
As they continued towards the real examinations room, however, they were interrupted yet again, this time by a spandex wearing genin. "Rock Lee, I presume?" Naruto's question appeared to shake their green visitor.
It only took him a moment to recover. "I see you have prepared well for this occasion. I desire a fight with Sasuke Uchiha!"
Naruto groaned inwardly. They had learned a lot about the other Konoha teams during their preparation time, and if Lee didn't get this fight, he was liable to hunt them down at the first opportunity and keep pestering them. He would never attack them without warning, however. Naruto decided it was time to stop the obsession with his teammate, however. "If you really want to fight Sasuke, here, You have to beat me first."
Sasuke smirked. This would be quick, no matter how fast Lee was, he wasn't fast enough for Naruto. Hinata stepped back slightly.
Lee smiled. "I will have to hurry then, you understand. It is a matter of importance I prove something." He blurred towards Naruto at high speed, far faster than he could move.
But he didn't have to move that fast to beat Lee. He only had to track it, and he could do that easily. He dodged a powerful kick that could have decapitated him if it connected and grabbed Lee's outstretched leg, swinging him off the floor and into the air.
Lee's expression of surprise was priceless as Naruto shot into the air after him. "All that speed is great on the ground, but up here there is only physics. Daitoppa!" The blast of air slammed Lee into the far wall, leaving a sizable crack in it. Lee slid to the ground, but soon got up.
"You held back on that blow." He accused.
Naruto shrugged. "I didn't want to kill you. Your not a bad guy, just a little arrogant, even if you'll never admit it to anyone."
Lee looked at him, jaw hanging open. No one had ever accused him of arrogance before. Naruto leaned down and looked him in the eye.
"Think about this, Lee. You challenged a member of the Uchiha clan to a taijutsu spar, to prove to yourself that you could overcome anything. Yet when I stepped in, you dismissed me completely because I wasn't an Uchiha, and you hadn't heard about me. Yet that is exactly what you are too. Despite your taijutsu skills, you are unrecognized. Unseen besides your teammate." Naruto stood erect. "Just think about that for a bit. And if you really want to overcome anything, you should try learning some jutsu." And with that, team seven left a stunned and battered Lee.
They strode into the examination room at a sedate pace, ambling in like they owned the place. Naruto quickly scanned the room to see if he could identify any threats they hadn't tagged already. The crazy Oto team, the wierdos from Ame, the Sabaku siblings from Suna... all expected. What wasn't expected was the Kuso team. Naruto examined them closely. Two looked like normal genin, but the one in the center with the weird rope around his waist looked... predatory. He viewed the room like he was picking out which genin would make the best meal. His eyes locked briefly with Naruto, and Naruto quickly broke eye contact. No need to draw too much more attention to themselves.
"SASUKE-KUN!" There goes that plan. Naruto groaned inwardly as a flash of blond passed by his vision and slammed into Sasuke, who barely remained upright.
Ino Yamanaka. Quite possibly the single most obsessed Sasuke fangirl in the village, even more so than Sakura had been before she focused on training, and a member of team ten under Asuma Sarutobi. Naruto didn't know too much about that team's skills, but wasn't too worried about it. He had spied on thier practice session for an hour, and all they did was sit around. Ino talked, Shikamaru looked at clouds, and Choji ate. Not a very dangerous bunch, in his estimation.
Sakura glared daggers into her rivals back. "Ino-pig. Good to see your still as hyperactive and useless as ever." That threw Ino off for a beat. Normally when she did this, Sakura freaked out, quickly descending to her level, and was butchered. Still, being Ino, she couldn't be put off for long.
"Well forehead, you're one to talk. At least I have talent as a ninja, unlike you." She stuck out her tongue and walked back to her team.
Someone snorted behind them. Naruto turned to see one of the older genin he didn't know. "Sorry, and you are?" Naruto began.
The silver-haired genin smiled from behind his glasses. "Kabuto Yakushi. I saw your spar with Rock Lee. He's a tough nut, but you took him down just fine. I thought you might like to look at these." He pulled out a small deck of blank cards. "Nin-info cards. I can inject my chakra into them and reveal information on any shinobi. Missions completed, skills, anything really. As long as its been seen by more than a few people, I know about it." He pushed up his glasses. "So, who's on your list?"
Naruto considered pulling out the actual list and giving it to him, but that would be too much trouble. "Just for kicks, let's see how current your information is. Naruto Uzumaki."
Kabuto grinned slightly and pulled out the correct card. "Naruto Uzumaki, age twelve, rank genin. Credited with one a rank and two c ranks." He eyed Naruto again. "Became a genin less than a month ago after a seven year training trip with Deidara, a former Iwa-nin who defected to Konoha. Credited with enhancing the Kazetate no jutsu, has mastered Kage Bunshin and can use Daitoppa with no hand seals. Uses exploding clay as main weapon, but still uses other ninja tools. High tai and ninjutsu, as well as ridiculous stamina, decent weapons, but terrible at genjutsu." He put the card away. "That all correct?"
Naruto grinned. "Absolutely. Not everything I had hoped for, but better than I expected. You'll want to rewrite that after the exams are over, I'm sure. Now, on to business." He thought for a second. "Let's start with Gaara no Sabaku. We know he is disturbed, extremely dangerous, and a chronic insomniac. That's it." He stared at Kabuto's cards. "Can those tell us any more?"
"Hmm..." Kabuto pulled out the card in question. "The lack of information tells me something immediately. From what I have here, he has been credited with four A-ranks, six B-ranks, twenty C-ranks, and over a hundred D-ranks. Yet no one has specific information on his skills. Oh... that's not good." He paused. "Gaara is credited with over ninety confirmed kills. Odd, because the only real information I have on him says that he has zero taijutsu skills and is slow as anything. But that would explain the lack of information. Dead men truly tell no tales." Kabuto looked around nervously. Several other ninjas had noticed what he was doing. "One more card. That's it."
Naruto glanced around as well, seeing why Kabuto was so desperate to wrap this up. "Ok then. One more question. Any of the genin team from Oto."
Kabuto began to shuffle through his deck, only to suddenly flip back as a hand with a strange gauntlet attached smashed through where his head would have been. He landed soundly five feet away. A bandage wrapped genin with a musical note on his headband stood there. "You will give no information on us, Konoha ninja. But you should put this in your precious card." He stood tall, though with his hunched back he barely came up to five feet. "The Oto ninjas will all be making chuunin this year."
Naruto had to repress a chuckle. If this one was any example, they were slow. Their mission was looking easier and easier.
Then Kabuto bent over and threw up. With a crack his glasses broke. Naruto stared. The Oto genin's strike had clearly missed, that much was obvious. Whatever his attack was, it bypassed normal in so many ways. Two other Konoha ninjas moved up to help Kabuto, and the two teams began a standoff. One wrong move could start an open brawl.
A blast of smoke in the front of the room dispelled the tension as a scarred man wearinga black skull cap appeared at the front of the room, along with a dozen or so jonin and chuunin. All were glaring at the fighting genin. "This foolishness will stop immediately and you will take your seats. The first stage of the chuunin exam is about to begin. I am Ibiki Morini, your proctor."
The genin backed down and moved to their seats quietly. "The first part of this years examination is a paper test. You will have one hour to complete ten questions. Each person begins with ten points. For each question you get wrong, you lose a point, and every time we catch you cheating, you lose two points." He grinned. "And if anyone loses all of their points, that team fails. No questions. You will recieve your papers shortly." He began passing out papers to everyone. This would be fun.
As soon as he finished he walked to the front of the room again. "Begin now." A timer beeped as he hit the button. The ticking digital numbers would make them believe they had less time than they really did.
Naruto stared at the paper in front of him. "What the hell kind of questions are these? Decoding a cipher with no references? Trajectory of shuriken? Not many chuunin could answer more than one or two of these depending on their specialties." He looked around the room again. "Their specialties..."
He realized it then. Between all the genin the class, there were distinctly three types of ninja. Those, like him, who knew none of the answers, those who knew all of them, and those that knew one or two. He had to get all the answers without being caught. He racked his brain, trying to figure out what he had that could gather information. He saw Hinata's Byakugan activate, saw Shino talking quietly to a bug. Sasuke's two tomoed Sharingan burned crimson. The Oto ninjas were simply listening to how the pencils scratched paper.
He finally thought of a plan. He put his hands under his desk and took off his gloves.
He concentrated, turning out the smallest clay bugs he could. No more than the size of ants, seventy or eighty clay bugs crawled from under his desk, one at a time, to places he had marked out would blind the proctors the best. He only needed seconds.
He whispered under his breath, so quietly no one could hear, and formed a handseal under his desk. "Katsu."
Fist sized explosions ripped around the room. Every single proctor jumped back from the bright lights, covering their eyes, even Ibiki. He quickly formed several handseals, still whispering under his breath. The subtle genjutsu he cast on his desk wouldn't have fooled any of the chuunin, but they weren't a problem now. It covered the Kage Bunshin he made under the desk long enough for it to Henge into a fly. Once the chaos subsided, Ibiki glared around the room. He glared directly at Naruto, and Naruto grinned impishly at him. After all, based on the rules, Ibiki could subtract, at most, four points, and he probably hadn't seen the Bunshin until it was too late.
A fly landed on Shino's paper. Shino looked at it curiously. He had never seen one quite like it. He looked down to inspect it and discovered it only had four legs. Even more intrigued, he saw a strange pattern on its back. Symbols, it seemed, as though carved in. He sent one of his own bugs to read it.
The message was simple.
"Shino, this is a Henged Bunshin. Give it a few minutes to copy your answers and destroy it."
-Naruto
Shino almost grinned. Naruto always had a plan, and after a display like that, he had wondered what his teammate had in mind. After a few moments, the fly stopped crawling around the paper and crawled into Shino's hand. He nodded gravely at it, and crushed it in his hand. The small puff of smoke it emitted couldn't be seen by anyone in the rooms.
Naruto winced slightly as the memory of being crushed hit him, but smiled again as the answers came. He quickly wrote down answers one through nine, and stared at question ten. This would be... interesting.
Several teams who had not been cheating very well were disqualified.
As they closed on the forty five minute mark, only fourteen teams remained. Ibiki had been ruthless, him and his proctors cutting through ranks of would-be cheaters with applied psychology and observation. He cleared his throat, and the class snapped to attention. "Now, I will tell you the tenth question."
He droned on for a bit about it, but Naruto mostly tuned him out. He was going to keep going no matter what. He had a mission to accomplish. Several teams got up and left of their own accord. Perhaps eleven remained. Ibiki looked around the room. "Anyone else want out?" No one moved. "You all... Pass!"
Naruto snorted. Ibiki was just playing mind games. Typical of a torture and interrigation specialist, he supposed, but still. Boring.
He quickly snapped back to attention as Ibiki was interrupted by a figure crashing through the window beside him. Two kunai embedded into the walls, pinning up a large banner as a black haired kunoichi rolled to her feet. It read Anko Mitarashi, Second Exam Proctor. Naruto snorted. A sadistic shrink followed by a show off. So far, this was the most dissapointing thing he'd been through.
"My name is Anko Mitarashi, and you, maggots, are mine for the next three days. Follow me to training ground fourty eight immediately. Anyone who arrives more than thirty seconds after me is disqualified instantly. Now MOVE!"
(A/N) Next chap is forest of death. Signing out.
