A/N: The Chūnin Exams begin!
Team Rin
Chapter 11: Tests and Tokens
"Damn crappy alarm clock!" Naruto cursed as he burst from his apartment at a dead sprint, crunching into the fruit that would have to serve as breakfast. An apple a day keeps Sensei from kicking your ass, he reminded himself as he took to the roofs. The dull grey sky promised rain, but the air around the village buzzed with a tense excitement all the same.
Naruto supposed the civilians would have their own reasons for looking forward to the chūnin exams as well.
He grinned, feeding on the atmosphere more than his apple, and doubled his speed, almost feeling nostalgic for being nearly late to the academy.
"Naruto!" Natsuko's volume could rival Sakura's at her angriest. "Hurry the hell up!" Naruto marveled at his teammate's sensor abilities since he could not even see the building yet. He belted out a reply at the top of his lungs, earning a trail of disgruntled complaints in his wake, and managed to jump over the academy to land in the front courtyard with a flourish, knocking over a group of foreign shinobi in the process.
Naruto did not recognize the musical note symbol on their hatai-ites, and offered a hasty apology. They glared at him and he felt a brief flare of killing intent, but they were otherwise silent. He offered a sheepish grin, rubbed the back of his head, and retreated before the situation could escalate.
"Making friends already?"
Naruto rolled his eyes at his teammate's sarcastic question and just shot the redhead a grin. The pair of girls commandeered a small space around the shuriken and kunai targets like they had agreed upon the night before, and Naruto hopped on top of one of the wooden posts to make himself comfortable.
"A lot of people here," he said, able to scan the crowd from his vantage point. He tried spotting any of his other friends, but the mishmash of ninjas was too thick for him to spot anyone else familiar. "Shouldn't we be going inside?"
"They barred the doors," Natsuko said while twirling her staff in a clumsy figure eight pattern, ending each repetition with a slow, clumsy strike. Naruto raised an eyebrow in question at the amateurish display, but Natsuko shook her head the tiniest bit. He frowned, but took the hint not to ask.
"Could be a test of patience." Ayano sat just out of the range of Natsuko's bō in the lotus position. "See if anyone breaks from nerves before the test even starts."
"That's stupid," Naruto complained, already feeling the effects of the oncoming boredom. "Who's going to quit before they know what they're up against?"
Naruto did not believe anyone should ever quit, but to give up so easily would leave an even worse taste in his mouth.
"It has to be a trick! This has to be part of the fucking test!" an older ninja bearing the grass symbol of Kusagakure shouted, charging through the crowd toward the academy's front doors. He raised a fist back, the blue glow of chakra shrouding it, and thrust it at the doors with a battle cry.
Naruto had to shield his ears from the echoing gong that filled the air as the shinobi flew backward over their heads, howling in pain.
"People like that," Ayano said with a small smirk turning the corners of her mouth.
Nobody else tried to break into the building, but a dozen or more teams left the grounds the longer they all waited, complaining about being given misinformation.
Ayano and Natsuko seemed content to wait and Naruto followed their lead, swallowing his impatience.
It took until noon, a full three hours after they were supposed to meet at the academy grounds, before the front doors opened and a smiling Iruka-sensei stepped out into the day, flanked by a jōnin with severe scars scraping across his face and chin that towered over all of them. With his black trench coat, hatai-ite one a dark bandana, and a frown that stretched shadows along his face, the man looked to be Iruka-sensei's opposite.
"Hello everyone!" Iruka-sensei's shouted his greeting along with an enthusiastic wave that drew the beginnings of angry retorts from the crowd before the man behind his shoulder glared at anyone who started to make a commotion. "And congratulations on passing the first section of the first test!"
Naruto blinked.
What?
Ayano sighed and climbed to her feet, stretching. "Called it," she said. Natsuko rolled her eyes and poked the redhead in the back with her staff. Ayano caught it and knocked it to the side and Natsuko made an exaggerated stumble to save her balance while Ayano shook her hand, hissing in pain.
"What the hell is up with you two?" Naruto asked, but his teammates only sent him quick looks that conveyed something that went over Naruto's head. He grumbled, hating being out of the loop.
"Anyone who is still on the grounds is eligible for the next section of the first exam," Iruka-sensei was saying. "Please Follow Morino-san, and he will get you where you need to go." The jōnin cocked his head back toward the academy and spun on his heel to stride down the hallway. The mass of genin raced to follow, pushing and shoving the entire way.
Forcing everyone into the building at once was chaos, and Naruto could not catch Iruka-sensei's eye as the crowd pushed him along. He only managed to stick with his team thanks to Ayano's iron grip on his and Natsuko's wrists.
They followed Morino-san through a set of doors hidden at the end of a hallway and down a winding flight of stairs to a basement that Naruto had no idea existed.
The space was wide, empty, and Naruto suspected that he could make echo with little effort. Worn, plain wood creaked underfoot and covered the area from white-washed plaster wall to white-washed plaster wall. Columns hewn from solid yellow-orange stone rose every dozen meters in a line down the center of the room, supporting a ceiling sporting rows of artificial lights letting off a dull yellow glow that filled the cavern in the absence of windows and left Naruto in an antsy mood.
This place reminded him of the evacuation shelters beneath the Hokage Mountain but worse.
"Quiet!" Morino-san barked out the order, voice as imposing as the rest of him. A hushed silence fell over the group and the man clasped his hands behind his back.
"My name is Morino Ibiki, and I will be your proctor for the first exam. The transition from genin to chūnin is the simplest promotion to achieve in any given shinobi's career but," he paused, sweeping his eyes over everyone. "Make no mistake. This will not be easy, and the vast majority of you will not make it past my test."
Naruto stood up straighter at the challenge, anticipation building.
"That being said, in order to move on to the second exam all you will need is a token!" Iruka-sensei called from the back of the group. He made his way around the crowd, dozens of heads following his progress. "But getting that token is the challenge." He reached the front to stand next to Ibiki and clasped his hands behind his back as well and offering a bow. "I am Umino Iruka, honored to be your co-proctor for this exam."
"This test will be divided into multiple parts," Ibiki said and snapped his fingers.
Naruto blinked as he felt the brief disruption in his chakra that came with an interrupted genjutsu. Desks appeared lining the cavern's walls, each waist high with a lockbox resting on it. Naruto felt uneasy that he had not felt the illusion at all.
From the look on Ayano's, Natsuko's, and most of the other genin's faces, he was not alone.
"The second you walked in this room, you were randomly assigned to one of these desks." Iruka-sensei formed a hand seal and names appeared above each of the desks in green, glowing text. Naruto spotted his name nearby, but could not see either of his teammates. Out of curiosity, he tried to disrupt the genjutsu with a burst of chakra, but the names didn't disappear.
"Fuinjutsu," Ayano whispered, eyes wide and smile lighting up the same way it did whenever she something she thought was awesome, Which, Naruto lamented, usually meant something boring. "It has to be."
"Really? That's pretty rare," Natsuko said out of the corner of her mouth, eyes still forward.
"It could be Jiraiya-sama's work!" Ayano said in an excited hush. Her hands flexed and Naruto guessed she would dive into studying whatever was going on if she could.
"Inside each chest lies one of three clues to your team's two tokens," Iruka-sensei continued. "And to unlock the chest, you will have to answer a question that will test your shinobi knowledge."
Naruto tensed. Iruka-sensei's tests always kicked his ass unless he studied a ton, but there had been no warning this time.
"No fair." He grumbled under his breath.
"You will have ten minutes at your desk," Ibiki said, picking up the lecture. "And then an hour to locate your tokens in the village and return through that door." He pointed back the way they came. "Or you fail." Ibiki smirked at the last word, letting out a sliver of killing intent that gave Naruto the chills.
"Go!" Iruka-sensei called and Naruto shared a quick glance with his teammates before they bolted in different directions. The second Naruto got within a meter of his desk he froze and almost freaked out.
Everything outside a meter wide semicircle around the desk blurred until Naruto could only make out vague people-like blobs of color, and all the noise he heard seconds before sounded like it had been slammed behind a heavy door. Naruto pressed a wary hand to the air and found something invisible blocking his way.
He took a calming breath, pushing instinctual panic to the side because Iruka-sensei would not really put him in danger, and approached his desk. Both it and the chest were shaped out of the same plain wood as the floor. The chest had no latch that Naruto could see, but instead had characters inscribed in the wood right above where one should have been.
"A shinobi's most powerful tool," Naruto read and felt the weight of the world roll off his shoulders. Iruka-sensei's strongest lesson ingrained in Naruto's memory.
He stood proud, and proclaimed in a confident voice, "Their mind!"
Nothing happened.
"What the hell?" Naruto lifted the chest up, finding it weighed less than a kilogram, and shook it around to see if anything happened. He heard something inside bouncing around, but the container did not open. He slammed it back onto the desk with enough force to jar his arms, but the wood did not give.
Glaring at his target, Naruto flipped through hand seals and took a deep breath. Maybe Iruka-sensei had been wrong and jutsus were the most important thing like Naruto had thought?
"Fūton: Daitoppa!" Wind burst from his lungs and whipped into the air, blowing the chest against the back wall with a crashing thunk and sending it bouncing around the invisible barriers faster than Naruto could track.
Until it cracked off the back of his skull, sending him flying to the floor with tears pooling in his eyes.
He rolled to sit up, rubbing at the back of his head with a wince, and his hand came away bloody. He cursed, glad for the privacy-bubble-seal-thing for the first time, and glared at the offending hunk of wood laying at his feet.
"A box is not going to stop me," Naruto said, worrying how much time he had left. If he let his teammates down here, he didn't know how he could face them.
He reached for the chest, thinking that maybe he just had to channel chakra into it, but the moment his hand touched it, Naruto felt chakra coming from the container.
"What?" He pulled his hand back and watched, dumbfounded, as a break in the wood appeared in the middle of a bloody thumbprint he left beneath the engraved question. He looked back and forth between his hand and the box, wondering how blood could be a shinobi's most powerful tool.
It left him unsettled, but did not stop him from opening the chest to find a tiny scroll the size of his thumb resting at the bottom. It was marked with a number two, and rolled open to reveal a single sentence.
"In the shadow of the Shadow."
"What the hell does that mean?" Naruto asked just as the blurry barrier around him fell, and the noise of a cavern full of shinobi slammed back to normal levels.
"The time can't be up yet, I…"
"I was just about…"
"…so not fair!"
Complaints overrode the excited calls of victory, and Naruto clutched his scroll in a tightened fist, scanning the room for his teammates and hoping they had gotten as lucky as he had.
"Quiet!" Ibiki shouted and the noise died down in a grumbling whine. "If you haven't figured out the first part, tough."
"You have one hour left," Iruka-sensei said, holding up an oversized stopwatch the size of his head. "And remember, there is no fighting allowed between teams this round!"
A fresh wave of whispering met Iruka-sensei's words and Naruto spared a glance toward his fellow genin, wondering how many of them had a better idea how to find their tokens than he did. The fire of his competitive spirit blazed as his old teacher clicked the stopwatch with a shouted "Go!"
Most of the genin shot off toward the doors or in a run around the cavern in a rush to find their teammates and save as much time as possible, but Naruto fought the urge to join them and waited.
Natsuko broke through the crowd less than a minute later, her face pinched in a wince. Naruto grimaced in sympathy. The girl only ever looked like that when battling with a headache from her sensing.
"Come on," his teammate said, voice steady despite whatever pain she felt. "Ayano's near the back of the cavern."
"Let's go!" He grabbed his teammate's wrist and dove into the sea of shinobi.
Ayano secluded herself in the back of the cavernous hall, but her teammates found her less than a minute after Iruka-sensei unleashed chaos in the form of swarming genin. Natsuko spotted her first, of course, and dragged their blonde teammate over. Judging from the girl's expression, Ayano assumed she was either suffering from an overload to her chakra sense, or hadn't gotten a riddle scroll.
When she plopped down on the ground and hung her head in her palms, Ayano guessed it was both.
She frowned and wordlessly held up the tiny scroll and Naruto flashed a grin as he held up a bloodstained one of his own. Her eyebrow quirked in surprise, but she held back a comment to spare Naruto's feelings.
"So we have two," she said, grabbing Naruto's scroll and comparing it to her own. Other than bearing the number two rather than three, it was identical to her own.
"Eh, Natsuko?" Naruto asked, but the brunette shook her head. Her face relaxed as more genin left the immediate area.
"Knew the answer, couldn't figure out how to use it to open the damned thing."
"It was a bit roundabout," Ayano commented, pulling Naruto's scroll open to read.
"I still don't get how blood is the most important thing a ninja has," Naruto said, crossing his arms. Ayano blinked, glancing up to the blonde and finding he was serious.
"It isn't," she said, and poked at her temple. "It's your mind. Iruka-sensei and Rin-sensei always say so."
"I knew Iruka-sensei didn't lie to me!"
"How did that open your box?" Natsuko asked, frowning. "Everything I tried didn't work."
"I guess you had to know a little bit about fuinjutsu?" Ayano asked more than said. When she figured out the engraved question, it had seemed so obvious. "Know that blood is used a lot?"
"Using your head to figure out the situation, shit…" Natsuko shook her head again. "Sorry guys."
"Don't worry! I only solved mine because I got, er, really lucky." Naruto ran a hand along the back of his neck, sheepish.
Ayano shelved the question that brought up until later and read both scrolls.
"In the shadow of the Shadow," she read and frowned. The new clue did not clarify hers. "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil."
"Those… really don't say much." Natusko tilted her head to the side thinking.
"I hate riddles," Ayano agreed, closing her eyes and trying to think. She wondered if the third piece would give them the context they needed.
"Shadow, shadow…." Naruto mused aloud, and Ayano thought it was easier place to start.
"Something with the Nara clan, maybe?"
"It would have be something to do with Konoha, so that could work," Natsuko agreed. "But what type of shadow gives off a shadow?"
"Could be a metaphor," Ayano suggested.
"Darkness?"
"That could tie into the 'see no evil' part, but what about the hearing?"
"Maybe deep water?"
"That's a bit of a stretch…"
"Got anything better?"
"I…" Need the third clue. Ayano trailed off rather than speak her mind and sighed. Natusko clicked her tongue against her teeth, agitated.
"Is there somewhere in Konoha that's really isolated?"
Ayano frowned as the other girl tried digging into the second clue. "Depends on if isolated means far away from everything, or just really, really secure."
"I don't think they would put the tokens somewhere where people wouldn't be allowed, especially foreigners."
Ayano ran her hands through her hair, urging her brain to work. "So the clues should still be general enough for—"
"The Hokage!" Naruto shouted, breaking his silence with an excited grin. Ayano and Natsuko blinked at him, nonplussed.
"What does Sandaime-sama have to do with this?" Ayano had faith her teammate could come up with his surprising moments of brilliance, but could not follow his logic.
"Not the old man," Naruto said with a dismissive wave. "The word. It means fire shadow!"
"Of course you would know that," Natsuko said dryly.
"I know everything about all the Hokages!" Naruto boasted with his impossibly bright smile.
"One of the shadows was capitalized." Ayano pressed two fingers between her eyebrows with her eyes cinched shut. She took deep breaths to calm herself down, willing her head to get past her fluster. "I can't believe I missed that."
"So something in the shadow of the Hokage that can't see or hear," Natsuko said, frustration still evident in her tone. "That doesn't really help that much."
"It's more than what we knew before," Ayano said. "But I wonder if it is a literal shadow or..." she trailed off with a shrug.
Naruto snapped his fingers and his eyes sparkled. "It has to be about the Nidaime!"
"I don't follow."
Naruto pulled a face. "Don't you guys remember the stories? Senju Tobirama was an awesome shinobi, just never as amazing as his brother because he could never use the wood element." Naruto bounced on the balls of his feet and Ayano had trouble reconciling her fight-first minded teammate getting excited over something so academic.
"I didn't think you paid attention in history," Natsuko admitted.
Naruto waved her off.
"I didn't! But I read everything about the Hokages. Everything about the old man Tobirama was how he couldn't ever get out from the Shodaime's shadow!"
Ayano frowned. The logic followed, but…
"How many times did you read the Hokages' biographies?" she asked.
"A lot after Iruka-sensei told me about how the old man got to be Hokage."
Ayano winced, kicking herself for underestimating Naruto. She should have known better by this point.
"It's better than anything else we have." Natsuko tapped her staff against the ground, considering. "Is there anything left of Nidaime-sama other than the mountain?"
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Ayano's eyes widened and her hand shot out to clap Natsuko on the shoulder. "If Naruto's right, it'll have to be the Hokage Monument. Eyes that don't see. Ears that don't hear."
The three teammates shared a look and Ayano saw the same anticipation of victory she felt flare in both Natsuko and Naruto. In a move of unspoken agreement, they raced off at the same time, leaving the testing hall behind and breaking out into the light of day.
The monument carved directly into the cliff face was a short run away from the academy, but as they left the ground and sped along the rooftops, Ayano could spot dozens of their competitor teams running around with a rushed urgency. When they went vertical up the mountainside, Ayano found the scene repeated throughout the entire village.
"Think we might be first?" Natsuko shouted her question as they rounded up the Nidaime's chin.
"Maybe, but I don't think it matters!" As long as they finished within the timeframe, Ayano would call it a win.
"The hell it doesn't!" Naruto called, pulling ahead of her and Natsuko by leaping over the length of Tobirama-sama's nose. "I want to see the looks on everyone's faces when we beat them all!"
"Don't go putting a target on our back, idiot!"
"It's really not a good idea this early, Naruto!" Ayano called, but Naruto was already dashing across Tobirama-sama's left eye, yelling in jubilation as he scooped up something in his hand that glinted in the sunlight. Natsuko sprinted after their blonde teammate, but Ayano spotted another reflective glare from the Nidaime's right eye and ran to investigate.
A silver coin embossed with Konoha's leaf sigil was stuck in the middle of where Ayano assumed Tobirama-sama's pupil would be. A quick spark of chakra into the metal released it from the stone and Ayano held it aloft toward her teammates with a grin to rival Naruto's best.
"Naruto, you are a genius!" Natsuko pulled their teammate into a fierce hug, nearly toppling both of them down to the power of gravity.
"Eh, I just got lucky."
"Either way, you're the reason we were able to find these!" Ayano climbed the rest of the way to the top of Tobirama-sama's head and spun to face the village, arms wide. The tangled net of anxious doubt and nervous energy that had sat in her chest since the moment Rin-sensei handed her a leaf and told her to set it on fire unwound into the blissful glee of success. This first part of exam was meant to be the easiest. The challenges ahead would likely rate higher than most her team had faced before, but they had gotten over the first hump.
They could do this.
She tilted her head back and shouted her joy to echo across the village for all their opponents to hear.
"Er, Ayano?" Naruto asked, giving her strange look mirrored on Natsuko's face as the two joined her on top of the world. "Are you alright?"
"I'm great," she said, bouncing on her toes. "We're going to pass this exam! All of it!"
"Hell yeah!" Naruto agreed, pumping up a fist into the air.
"Not if we don't get back," Natsuko said, still looking nonplussed.
"Right, well." Ayano took a breath, trying to bottle her cheer for a better time.
"Let's go then!" Naruto leapt off of the statue's head, a laughing yell trailing in his wake. Ayano and Natsuko shared a look, shrugged, and bounded after him.
They passed both the strange team from Kirigakure with the pretty genin – Haku, she remembered - and Team Asuma on the way down – the teams climbing up toward Hashirama-sama and Minato-sama respectively – and Ayano wondered if they should have stuck around to check for other tokens. To maybe thin out the competition before things got too intense…
"Better hurry up, dog breath!" Naruto shouted toward Kiba as he and Akamaru led Chōji and Shikamaru up the vertical climb. "Or I won't have the chance to beat you for the rest of the exam!" The Inuzuka shouted something back that Ayano couldn't hear but left Naruto laughing.
"This competition is certainly heating up!" Haku called from the other side as her team climbed at a much more sedate pace. "I look forward to challenging you!" She waved at them, serene as could be.
"See you on the other side!" Ayano felt compelled to respond, earning a soft smile from the foreign ninja.
"Good luck finding your tokens, Haku-chan!" Naruto called and Haku blinked, surprised, but her response was lost to the wind as their momentum left them too far apart to respond.
They did not pass any more teams on the way back to the academy, and Ayano could not figure out if that was a good sign or a bad.
Iruka-sensei and Morino-san waited at the bottom of the steps they had led the genin down earlier in the day. Both wore matching expressions as if they had just eaten something sour and stood sentinel alongside the closed double doors that led to the hall proper.
"Iruka-sensei, we have our tokens!" Naruto held up his with a wide grin.
Ayano thought she saw Iruka-sensei's lips quirk toward a smile, but otherwise neither shinobi regarded them with any sort of recognition. She held the coin she held up as well, and Morino-san broke the silence.
"Congratulations on passing this section of the first exam," he said with a heavy dose of bored dismissal.
All of Ayano's insecurities threatened to come rushing back.
"But now comes the final test," Iruka-sensei said, sounding more serious than Ayano had ever heard him. "You must choose which two of you will move on to the second exam."
Coming from anyone but Iruka-sensei, Ayano imagined Naruto would have railed against the idea with a shouted objection. Instead he looked as if he had taken a blow straight to the gut, mouth flapping without a sound.
Natsuko seemed torn between disbelief and devastation with her hands balled into white knuckled fists and her head hung low, brown hair shielding her face. She had failed to get her clue, and the guilt from that may have kept her from thinking clearly.
So Ayano spoke for them.
"We all go through," she said, keeping her voice as level as she could and trying desperately not to tremble or flinch under the intensity of Morino-san's attention. "Or none of us."
It was Rin-sensei's bell test all over again. It had to be.
"Is that so?"
"We succeeded as a team." Ayano spared a glance to Natsuko, trying to convey her support without speaking it. The girl looked startled. "What type of chūnin would we be if we betrayed our teammates?" Her heart thundered in her chest, afraid she'd made the wrong call and just doomed them all to failure.
"Ayano's right!" Naruto snapped out of his daze and jutted his chin toward the adults. He opened his mouth to continue, but Iruka-sensei broke out into a smile and landed a hand on the blonde's head, cutting him off.
"Good answers," he said, sounding like the jovial teacher Ayano remembered.
"Congratulations," Morino-san said. If Ayano stared at his face, hard, she thought she might be able to see the start of a smile forming.
Maybe.
"Team Twelve passes!" The door behind Iruka-sensei and Morino-san opened, revealing that they were far from the first team to finish as they joined the throng of genin within.
It did not stop Naruto from cheering at the top of his lungs, wrapping an arm around both her and the shocked Natsuko's shoulders and pulling them into a celebratory hug. Ayano laughed along with her teammate, her enthusiasm returning twofold.
"We're getting looks," Natsuko said, starting to look like her usual self again. She made no move to get out of the impromptu group hug, though, and began to smile.
Their elation lasted for all of twenty minutes until a kunoichi burst up through the ground in the middle of the room while riding a black, crimson, and gold striped snake the height of a horse and thrice the length. Her purple hair sat in a ponytail that somehow spiked up, while leaving enough loose to frame her face, and she wore a trench coat over a plain brown skirt and skintight mesh armor over her torso and down to her knees, leaving very little to the imagination.
Ayano's thoughts grinded to a halt in both shock and awe.
"Hello, brats!" The woman called with a cheery wave. Half the genin in the room had almost attacked her on sight while most of the rest were staring at her in disbelief, but the kunoichi seemed to take it in stride as the right side of her lips twitched up into cocky smirk. "I'm Mitarashi Anko, the proctor of the Second Exam! Before we begin, Hokage-sama has asked that I warn you all that if you decide to continue on with the exam, you might end up dead!"
She paused for a moment for dramatic effect, but Ayano did not think anyone had recovered enough from her entrance for the kunoichi's words to sink in.
"But if you think you're ready, follow me!"
The snake took off toward the doors leading to daylight, and Team Twelve paused just long enough to glance at each other and shrug before they gave chase along with their fellow genin.
Ayano held the suspicion that the second exam would be a bit more direct than the first…
A/N: So that's the alternate first exam!
A test of patience, followed by a philosophical question - of which the answer was only a clue, and required observation of their environment to solve - in turn followed by a three-part riddle leading to a somewhat-glorified scavenger hunt, all leading up to a test of comradeship. Each, in my view, an important aspect of the shinobi lifestyle.
For those without knowledge of Konoha, or with less on-the-nose clues, it would have also tested each participant's information gathering skills as well. Naruto just happens to be our resident genius in regards to the Hokage (no small part harkening back to chapter one when Iruka drilled it into his head to figure out what it actually took to get his hands on the hat).
Anyway, second exam is up next. It will take place in the Forest of Death, but the hows and whats will be shuffled about even if the where remains the same.
Looking forward to hearing your feedback!
