Chapter Six: Sext
Midday
Eventually, they decide to save the rest of their energy for the next day, and set up camp. The pink-haired girl gathers wood while the black-haired boy sets up traps around the vicinity, and the Boy wanders off to the river to catch fish.
As he spears at the quick flashes in the water with his kunai, he thinks it a pity that they don't have any pots with them. The Boy enjoys the occasional fish stew. It tastes better when the fish is freshly killed. In fact, he usually catches his own fish, and likes to keep them alive in his bathtub until dinnertime. When the time is ready, he moves the fish to a vat filled with water, and turns on the heat. He puts a lid on top of the vat, and then waits. After a few minutes, as the water begins to boil, the fish suddenly starts to vigorously flail and jump out of the water, hurling its body against the lid, trying to escape. But the Boy is always ready, with a firm hand on the lid, and the sounds it makes are like music to his ears. He fantasizes about it screaming, but of course fish don't scream.
The most violent thump is almost always the last. Afterwards, its tail occasionally brushes weakly against the lid – but it is nothing more than a corpse that has yet to realize it.
The resulting fish stew is delicious, although sometimes the Boy realizes that he doesn't feel like eating fish that night after all, and dumps the entire vat's contents into the trash.
"That should be enough, right?" the Boy ponders, looking down at the slick bodies strewed across the ground.
"I used to feast on sharks and whales for dinner," the Voice says wistfully.
The Boy is entertaining the notion of whether he could fit a shark in his apartment kitchen, when something suddenly violently explodes in the direction of the forest – their campsite. Instinctively closing his eyes, he puts up his arms, blocking a gale of wind that has managed to come even this far out.
As he waits for the dust to settle down, he feels the ground below his feet trembling. Something rustles, and then he hears something that sounds like a tree creak and then crack.
The Boy opens his eyes just in time to see above him a cavernous mouth, a bottomless black pit with two fangs arching downwards like a gate. And then it lunges down on him.
He throws himself backward just as the snake's fangs plunge into the earth beside him – tearing his sleeve – and tumbles across the ground to his feet. Meanwhile, the snake pulls itself out, and rears back, its forked tongue flickering in the air.
"I've never seen a snake this big before," the Boy remarks, taking in its size with faint interest.
"It's a summon," the Voice tells him, and the Boy's gaze sharpens.
"Someone must have attacked the campsite...someone who knew we were away."
For a brief moment, the Boy wonders if he should let the assailant finish the job and save him the trouble of doing it himself – but then he remembers the look on the black-haired boy's face as he stepped in between the Boy and the girl, and changes his mind.
Taking a step back and digging his heel firmly into the ground, the Boy feels the now-familiar sensation of the Voice's chakra seeping through his body, as well as the itch in his eye that always accompanies it. He can feel it making him stronger – faster – unstoppable.
He tenses up – and just as the snake's tail lurches down toward him, he jumps, letting it crash into the tree behind him instead. Landing down on the snake's tough, scaly back, the Boy nimbly races up toward its head. Sensing him, the snake tries to shake him off, but when that fails, it begins to coil itself into a tight circle. The Boy missteps and lurches to the side; just at that moment, the snake's tail whips out, and grabs him.
As the Boy squirms in its hold, the snake lowers its head, its opaque eyes gleaming, its maw opening wide to swallow him whole – and then the Boy bursts into a cloud of white smoke, leaving the snake squeezing at nothing but thin air.
The real Boy, observing the action from the top of an overhanging tree, readies his hand, which has sharpened into claws. The snake flicks its head around inquisitively, and just as it catches his scent, he leaps into the air above its head.
Spiraling downward sharply, he feels its scaly skin give way easily under his chakra-reinforced fingers, and he bullets through its neck. For an instant, all he can see is red, and though his mouth is tightly shut, he can feel some of the warm blood flowing into his ears and nose.
And then the Boy breaks out through the front of its neck, landing on the ground with a slopping wet sound as the snake's head crashes into the ground thunderously behind him. Its body continues to wriggle on the ground, but he pays it no mind, and without pause, he races to the direction of where he heard the explosion.
Just as a line of shattered trees comes into view, the Voice suddenly roars at him –
"Stop!"
The Boy immediately freezes, the heels of his feet turning up so forcefully that they dig into the ground.
"What is it?" he asks.
"Don't go in there," it growls, a note of urgency in its tone. "It's too dangerous for us to handle."
"Even with your chakra?"
"Contained as I am in your body...yes."
The Boy thinks it over.
"If my teammates die, I won't pass the exam," he points out.
"Do you want to die?" the Voice growls. "You will die if you go in there as we are now."
"Die?" the Boy repeats, his tongue rolling uncertainly around the unfamiliar word. He almost asks the Voice what that means, but of course he knows – it means the opposite of 'kill.'
"You don't want to die, right?" the Voice whispers. "To avoid that, we need to exercise precaution around those that are stronger, until we are stronger than them. And then we strike."
So the Boy waits in the cover of the forest. Even with the distance, he hears the sounds of battle, and then the black-haired boy lets out a scream – and then silence. After a few minutes, the Voice tells him that it is safe, and that the foreign dangerous entity has left.
What greets him is the sight of a large clearing that hadn't been there before, trees snapped like twigs at its edges, and the black-haired boy and girl are at its center. The other boy is twitching, and the girl is clutching at him, yelling his name.
The Boy touches down silently behind the pair. He spits out a globule of the snake's blood onto the ground, and at the sound, the girl twists around. At the sight of his bloody form, she lets out a high-pitched scream and hunches protectively over the black-haired boy.
"Relax, it's me, Sakura," he says soothingly, holding out a hand, palm up. Her eyes narrow suspiciously, but then light up in recognition.
"Naruto?" she whispers, her voice tinged with hope. She hesitantly reaches up with a hand, and he pulls her to her feet.
"Yeah," he says, shaking his hair, noting with amusement as some droplets of blood land on the girl's face. "What happened?"
"We-we got attacked by someone named Orochimaru...we fought back, but he was too strong..." Tears begin to well up in the girl's eyes, and the Boy cocks his head; the name is vaguely familiar. "He bit Sasuke! And Sasuke screamed and then he couldn't – couldn't..."
"And he just left?"
"He...he said that Sasuke would seek him for power..." The girl is starting to look even more upset, and eager to avoid having her cry again, the Boy puts an arm around her. But to his exasperation, the girl bursts into tears anyways, and despite having avoided him for the past several hours, she buries her pink head into his chest.
As he reluctantly pats her on the back, the Boy looks over at the prone black-haired boy and notes a swirling symbol on the back of his neck. Then he returns his gaze to the girl's head.
"Good thing you guys are still alive..." he whispers in her ear, smiling fondly. "Since I'm going to be the one to kill you," he adds in a voice so quiet that even the Voice doesn't hear.
At the pink-haired girl's insistence, the Boy doesn't go out by himself to track down two scrolls (for it turns out that their scroll got taken by the assailant). Instead, he first washes some of the blood off in the river and comes back with the fish he'd left. Gutting the fish with his kunai, they chew on the raw pieces, and afterward, he sets up additional traps to the ones already in place that weren't destroyed in the attack.
They take turns standing sentry over the night, and well into the next day, nothing happens. But finally at midday, as the girl changes the cold compress on the other boy's head, the Boy idly throws a shuriken at a squirrel, and as he does so, he senses something.
"Someone's here," the Voice warns him.
"I know," he says, twirling another kunai in his hand.
They come out soon afterwards, a team dressed in snake-patterned clothing. At their head is presumably the leader, a lopsided boy with a straw raincoat on his back.
"Well don't you two look worse for wear?" he says, eyes wide open. "But don't worry, we're here to fight Sasuke. Wake him up."
"What's the big deal?!" the girl bursts out, hand leaping to her shuriken holster. "We know that someone named Orochimaru is orchestrating this whole thing from the shadows! What does he want from Sasuke?! What is this weird mark on Sasuke's neck? You did this to him, and now you want to fight him?!"
The newcomers look taken aback, and the one with spiky hair looks uncertainly toward their leader.
"I wonder what that man is thinking...?"
"But after hearing all that, we can't just let you go," says the spiky-haired boy, a nasty look on his face. "I'll kill the girl. And the short one. And also that Sasuke guy. I'll kill 'em all!"
"Wait, Zaku," says the leader.
"Huh? Why?"
The leader bends over and taps the ground, and the girl visibly turns pale.
"You're not very good...a recently overturned stone, different colored dirt...and grass doesn't grow here. A booby trap is pointless unless it goes unnoticed."
"Pfft...stupid," the spiky-haired boy snorts. "As if we'd fall for something so elementary."
"Kin...you kill the girl. Zaku and I'll kill the other one," the leader commands, and in unison, they all leap into the air.
The Boy steps back with a pleased smile. As the two lunge at him with their hands raised, he drops on all fours. His legs whirl through the air, shoving both of them on their backs. They stumble, and then with a snapping sound, there are twin yelps of pain as the two shoot up into the air, dangling from a barbed wire wrapped tightly around their feet.
The Boy has been itching to test out his snares again for a while.
"Dosu!" their female teammate shouts out, but is forced to turn her attention away as the pink-haired girl lashes at her with a kunai. Meanwhile, the Boy admires his handiwork as rivulets of blood begin to dye their clothing red.
"You think this could beat us?" the leader hisses out, raising his hands toward the branch they're hanging from.
"Well, yes, actua – " the Boy begins, but is cut off when the branch explodes into pieces. The two boys flip in midair and land (gingerly) on the ground. Baring their teeth at him, they raise their hands toward him, and he can see small holes in the middle of their hands. Falling silent, the Boy looks at them with a critical eye.
"What was that?" he asks. "Ninjutsu? But he didn't make any signs."
"I don't know," the Voice admits. "Best to finish them in one blow before they can do anything."
So the Boy surges forward, the Voice's chakra running through his body once more. A little irritated at the failure of his traps, he doesn't hold back, and an instant later, the two boys crumple to the ground, a kunai buried in the back of each one's neck. It takes several moments before their female teammate realizes. When she does, she lets out a startled scream, and without any hesitation, she abandons her fight with the girl.
As she tries to flee the clearing, the Boy throws a chakra-reinforced kunai at her, and it goes cleanly through the back of her head, leaving behind a small kunai-shaped hole. Her long hair flips up as the body falls to the ground.
The Boy bends over the spiky-haired boy, and begins to search his body. He notices the pink-haired girl looking at him with a blank look on her face.
"Are you going to say that was uncalled for too?" he asks her.
The girl doesn't respond.
"Because she could've been the one holding their scroll," he says. "Go search her body, won't you?"
The girl gets to her feet and complies.
The Boy collects their second scroll from one of the other teams of their year.
Leaving the girl carrying the black-haired boy behind, he touches down on the ground before the other team, startling them. In response, the fat one begins to puff up, and the blonde undoes her ponytail, but the shrewd one who's always looking at clouds stops them both and without another word, hands over to the Boy their scroll.
They reach the central tower without further incident, and spend the next few days camped out nearby. While the girl takes care of the black-haired boy, the Boy amuses himself by hunting down some of the other teams in the vicinity, though he decides to keep his distance from a boy with a gourd on his back and another one with white eyes that he knows could be troublesome to deal with.
On the fifth day, the Boy opens the two scrolls, and a chūnin materializes. He takes them to a large hall, where the old man who leads the village and a few jōnin are waiting.
It turns out that twelve people passed, and an entire team drops out on the spot, leaving the number at nine. The old man tells them that the third exam will take place a month from now.
The black-haired boy is given over to the masked jōnin, and the Boy is idly wishing someone would drop out to even out the numbers, when the old man instructs them to draw numbers.
The Boy pulls number 1, and is soon looking at a tournament chart with matchups. He is matched against the one who drew number 2, who turns out to be a boy with a bowl cut. And with that, the second exam is officially over.
Several days pass.
The black-haired boy is still in the hospital, watched over by the masked jōnin. The pink-haired girl trains with a female jōnin, and the Boy is finally left to his own devices.
One afternoon, as he heads to his apartment with a pail of fish (still alive of course) swinging in his hand, he takes a shortcut that takes him past the bathhouse. There, he sees a large man with long white hair and a scroll across his back, and suddenly, after an audible intake of breath, the Voice lets out a frenzied growl.
"It's him..."
"What?"
But the Voice ignores him for the first time in his life.
"It's him...it's him, it's really...it's him it's hIM IT'S HIM IT'S HIM IT'S HIM IT'S HIM IT'S HIM IT'S HIM – "
The Boy freezes, his eyes widening. His hands jump to his head, and he falls down to his knees. The metal pail drops to the ground beside him with a clanging sound, and the white-haired man immediately turns around, a suspicious look flashing across his face.
"HE'S THE ONE WITH THE KEY THE KEY THE KEY THE KEY THE KEY THE KEY HE HAS THE KEY THE KEY IT'S HIM THE KEY HE HAS THE – "
The Voice continues to scream gutturally in his head, and after a while, the Boy's eyes roll back and everything turns black.
A/N: I didn't want to spend too much time on the second exam (it was supposed to have ended in the last chapter), so I wrapped it up quickly without the preliminaries (Naruto didn't kill any of the other rookies - he knows it'd bring him more trouble than it was worth).
And last (but not least of course) thank you for your reviews.