Tale of the Setting Sun
Chapter 8: "Sand Ripples in the Wind"
Naruto had never seen so much open space in one place before – or such a uniformity in color. As far as the eye could see, fields of golden sand stretched into the distance. The horizon was not straight, but humped with faraway dunes, and the intense, constant heat from the sun caused refractions in the air.
Sunagakure (Hidden Sand) was not, in the strictest sense of the word, hidden. Neither was Konohagakure (Hidden Leaf), for that matter – the huge overhanging mountain with the busts of the Hokage carved into the cliff's face was a dead giveaway. But just like how Konoha was isolated by dense forests and mountains, Sunagakure's location was secured by the sheer extremity of its geographical surroundings. They had had to endure endless sandstorms and scale treacherous rocky cliffs for several days to reach the village. If any ordinary person or ignorant ninja had attempted the journey, they would surely have fallen long before the village's clay buildings came into view.
When Naruto and his team finally arrived at the gates of the village, they were directed towards a desert space encircled by a barbed fence. Inside were dozens of huge pieces of rock that jutted out from the sandy ground. As soon as the gate to the lot screeched open, he felt at least several dozen pairs of eyes immediately turn to glare at them.
Naruto had never seen such a large gathering of foreign ninja together in one place. Just judging from the hitai-ate of the nearest genin, he could tell there were at least four other villages here, including Amegakure (Hidden Rain), Kusagakure (Hidden Grass), Takigakure (Hidden Waterfall), and of course Sunagakure (Hidden Sand). Naruto shifted; the tension in the air was tangible.
"Ick, this place is disgusting," he overheard a genin from Takigakure complaining. "I've got mud all over my sandals."
"Let's hurry up and pass this stupid exam so we can go back home," her teammate grumbled.
"Confident, aren't they?" muttered Rai, from besides him. He, like the other two, were wearing thick cloth cloaks to protect them from the sun. He looked musingly around. "I wonder who the others from Konoha will be? I heard from my brother that some rookies are actually taking the exam this year."
"They must be really talented then," said Mayu uneasily. Her eyes darted around. "I know I definitely wouldn't have been ready for it when we graduated. I don't know if I'm ready now, actually..."
With a shake of his head, Rai squeezed her arm comfortingly. "You'll be fine. You've got me and Naruto backing you up."
Mayu's face remained pale, but she nodded.
While it was too early to say for sure, Naruto could already tell that the exam was not going to be a pushover; the other villages would have sent their best genin teams, and competition was going to be fierce. The question was, what kind of trials would they face? Different villages hosted the exam every time, and the tests were always different.
However, he had known this from the very beginning, and they had trained with this in mind. So long as Mayu didn't freeze up, Naruto felt reasonably confident that his team would be strong contenders. They would be able to weather whatever the test threw their way.
Probably.
"Nervous?" asked an unfamiliar voice from behind them. Naruto turned around. The approaching boy was wearing the hitai-ate of Konoha, but Naruto had never seen him around before. He looked several years older than them, with long hair tied back in a ponytail and a pair of circular glasses perched on his nose. "You're from Konoha too, aren't you?"
"Well...yeah," said Rai, tapping his own hitai-ate meaningfully.
"I'm Kabuto," he said, ignoring the cheek. "This is your first time taking the exam, isn't it? Is it your first time in Sunagakure too?"
"Yes..." Mayu gulped. "Is it obvious?"
Kabuto smiled. "Yep! You remind me of how I used to be."
"Is this your second time taking the exam, then?" asked Naruto.
"Nope...this is my fourth," he admitted. "This exam is held twice a year so this is my second year. It's my second time here in Suna as well."
Unable to detect a lie from the boy's tone of voice or his body language, Naruto felt himself losing interest; he doubted anyone truly competent would fail the chūnin exam twice, let alone three times in a row.
A glint of gleaming metal caught his eye, and turning slightly, Naruto saw the familiar leaf hitai-ate again on another boy. He was pale with long dark hair, and had the unmistakable clear eyes of the Hyūga clan. He seemed calm, though his fidgeting teammates looked a bit more nervous. Naruto looked him up and down; the Hyūga clan was rumored to be one of the strongest in Konoha. He wondered how the boy before them would measure up.
Mayu must have followed his gaze, for she commented, "They must be one of the rookies from the class after us. I don't recognize them."
"Yeah, they are," said Rai, perking up and turning away from Kabuto. Pointing at a girl with Chinese-style buns, he said, "The girl's Tenten. She's a weapons specialist like me; her dad used to train us together when we were young."
But before they could go over to talk to them, several clouds of swirling sand suddenly appeared at the entrance to reveal a group of Suna chūnin and jōnin.
Naruto gave them their full attention, quickly taking note of their standard Suna attire. At their head was what appeared to be their leader: He was very tall, towering over much of the other Suna ninja, and had two red markings on the side of his face. Half his face was covered by a turban-like head gear with a sheet hanging down, and the remaining half was contorted into a hard glare.
"Thank you all for waiting," began the man, looking around at them sternly. "My name is Baki, and I will be your examiner for the Chūnin Selection Exam's first test. You will now all be assigned a team number, in order of your arrival here." There was a murmur of uncomfortable assent. The chūnin examiners began to walk around, giving out plates with numbers on it.
Kabuto returned to his team, and Naruto and his team waited patiently for theirs, as they had been the second to last to arrive. Finally, when the chūnin arrived at their number, they received the number 79. Right after the Amegakure team following theirs received their number, Baki gathered their attention once more. "If you will look around you, you will notice the slabs of rock that have been placed in the field. Pick one, and gather around it with your team."
After a moment's pause to process the information, Naruto and his team walked over to the nearest rock. The others surrounding them all hurried to do the same. Each rock was about two meters wide, with another two meters radius separating the rock from the nearest surrounding rocks, making space rather limited between each team. Squinting his eyes against the sun, Naruto craned his neck backwards to look up at the rock. It was easily over five meters tall.
"The field has been divided into twenty sections, with four rocks of equal height in each, and a team surrounding each rock. Your objective is to protect your rock and keep it above ground level. There are five ways to fail this test. One, if your rock reaches ground level, your team automatically fails. Two, if, by the end of the time limit of one hour, your rock is at a lower height than any other rock in your section, your team will fail. Three, if you physically touch any of your opponents or their rocks, your team will fail. Four, if your whole team is deemed unable to proceed with the test, you will fail. And five, if you kill any of your opponents, you will automatically fail."
"What? So how do you pass?" hissed Rai.
Naruto had found that while Rai had many talents, swiftness of mind was not one of them. "Basically, we have to protect our rock from the other teams, and only one team out of every four, at the most, is going to pass. We'll have to attack the other team's rocks using jutsu or projectiles so that they're at a lower height than ours."
He looked at the teams of their adjacent three rocks, and saw that they too were sizing him up. One team was from Kusa, and the other two were from Suna. The deck was stacked against them; the teams from Suna were going to be operating in their natural environment. They probably knew everything there was to know about sand and rocks, and would be using this knowledge to their full advantage. Furthermore, it looked like this first test was going to be entirely a physical challenge, which would be problematic considering their team's strengths.
Naruto pondered the mammoth rocks before them. Rai's artillery alone would do little against the tough rocks, and Mayu's genjutsu would have no effect at all. His wind chakra was sharp, but he hadn't tried cutting through rock before - meaning that their best bet would probably be to take out the opposing genin.
Suddenly remembering something, Naruto knelt and picked up some of the sand. He rubbed it between his fingers, and while most of it fell to the ground, some of it stuck to his skin – it was slightly moist.
"So? What's the plan?" prompted Rai.
Naruto looked up to see that he and Mayu were looking at him expectantly. He glanced at the enemy genin; they didn't appear to be listening, but...
"We'll go with Plan E," he said, talking quickly. Baki, the jōnin, was opening his mouth. "Mayu, take the Kusa. Rai, take the closer Suna team."
"Begin!"
Immediately, a flurry of action and clanging filled the air.
As Naruto quickly formed the necessary seals with his hands, he saw that the Suna genin were focusing their attentions on attacking the rocks. The genin from Kusa, like his team, were already attacking their enemy genin directly. As a stream of shuriken embedded themselves in their unprotected rock, pieces of rock shattered and crumbled down.
Ignoring the attack, Naruto exhaled a small but powerful gale of wind from his mouth: "Fūton: Kyōfū (Wind Release: Gale)!" Whipping through the surrounding rocks, it careened towards the Suna team farthest from them. They jumped behind their rock, easily avoiding it. The wind blasted harmlessly against the rock, which wobbled, but otherwise remained stoutly standing.
Naruto smiled.
Meanwhile, Mayu had lowered her hood, and unclipped her hairclips, letting her hair fall around her shoulders. Her hands blurred into action, and as she stoked them to life with her chakra, the blue bird-shaped clips began to twitch and ruffle their feathers, swelling to twice their size. Stretching their wings, they took to the air.
Suddenly, there was a shout of pain as Rai managed to hit one of the Suna genin in both legs with shuriken. The genin fell to the ground, and several chūnin rapidly appeared by his side with a stretcher. As the incapacitated genin was taken away, in vengeance, the remaining two turned their attentions on Team Kakashi. One of them was a puppet-user, and she directed her scorpion-like puppet towards Rai. It scuttled rapidly towards him, its stinger gleaming with the promise of slow-working poison. Letting out a stream of swears, Rai pulled out another scroll of artillery.
Trusting his teammates to carry out their part of the plan, Naruto sat down behind the rock and closed his eyes. Making the appropriate hand seals, he concentrated on first shaping his chakra into being as thin as sharp as possible, before sending it trickling deep underground. Slowly but surely, he could feel the air pressure building up below him, and in reaction, something else began to surge upwards.
In the distance, he heard further screams of pain coming from the Kusa team and felt a glimmer of pride. Mayu's genjutsu operated through her blue birds – if a bird made physical contact with another person, they would immediately fall under her trap. She could cause them to feel any sensation, including intense pain. The Suna genin probably wouldn't have fallen for the trick, seeing as how they were familiar with the birds of the region, but the Kusa genin hadn't suspected a thing.
Now this left the two remaining Suna teams. Leaving Rai to handle one, Naruto fed an extra burst of chakra into the jutsu, and then finally gathered it all into a concentrated ball directly below them: "Fūton: Kihō (Wind Release: Air Bubble)!" Opening his eyes – blinking rapidly to adjust them once more to the sun – he inhaled deeply, rapidly forming the hand signals for his followup jutsu. When his lungs were full, he blew the same strong gust of wind towards the rock of the Suna team.
Once again, they prepared to leap behind their rock – and froze as they couldn't. Looking down, they found their feet submerged in quicksand. With a yelp of panic as the sharp wind blew towards them, they ducked down. The wind blew over their bodies, and smashed against the face of the rock. With looks of blatant relief, they straightened up – and then froze once more, as the rock teetered dangerously. Disbelief dawning on their faces as their bodies continued to be swallowed up by the quicksand, they helplessly looked up as the rock wavered back and forth above them. After a few seconds of dangerous indecision, the rock finally lost its battle against the combined force of gravity and an unsteady base. Only the genins' screaming heads were visible above the ground now, and with a groaning sound, its base rose out of the ground as it began to fall on the immobile genin.
Sweating from the effort, Naruto rapidly urged more of the air pressure to build up, which would in turn cause the underground water to gush up. Just before the rock hit the ground, the genins faces slipped below the watery quicksand with a slurping sound. There was a tense moment of silence, in which the sounds of the other battles around them seemed magnified. Finally, a second later, the three genins heads popped up again above ground from besides the rock, which floated on the surface.
Naruto exhaled. Their faces were smeared with mud, but they were alive. Hacking and coughing out mud, they limply floated in the quicksand.
Naruto had directed his wind chakra to squeeze in on itself underground, causing the gas particles to accumulate and increase pressure. As a result, the stores of water below ground had moved upwards to the surface by pure hydraulic pressure. Since they were in a desert, Naruto hadn't been expecting to have access to a source of water large enough to create quicksand, but to his surprise, there had been an abundant water source beneath them.
Due credit for the discovery had to be given to the genin from Takigakure who'd been complaining about the mud.
Sitting down on the ground besides their standing rock, Naruto saw that Mayu and Rai were already done. The genin from Kusa were all slumped around their rock, frothing at the mouth. Mayu's blue bird was chirping from on top of one their chests. The two other Suna genin struggled as they stood pinned against their rock with multiple kunai. A destroyed scorpion puppet lay in pieces by their feet.
Taking in the chaos of the quicksand, Rai raised his eyebrows. "You overdid it, Naruto."
Mayu was smiling, the color of her face returned to its normal shade. She raised a finger, and one of her birds landed on it.
Naruto regarded the remaining desert space. The chūnin examiners were collecting the incapacitated genin, and most of the battles were still going on. The pristine rows of rocks from barely ten minutes ago were already in shambles. Some of the rocks had been shattered into pieces, and he could see several genin moving feebly under the fragments. By the looks of it, less than twenty teams would be passing.
"Team 79 passes the first test," said Baki. "Standby for the second test."
A/N: For the exams: Neither Kumogakure or Iwagakure will participate because they are not allied with Sunagakure.
1/21/17: Made minor edits.