Naruto sighed as Mitarashi Anko once again gave the rules and instructions for passing the Second Phase of the Chunin Exams. Once this was over, she was so going to be on the worst D ranks he could find, including cleaning and repairing the boy's toilets at the Academy. Heck, as soon as this was over, she and Ibiki would be scrubbing the floors in all of the Academy toilets with toothbrushes, and then he was going to make Ibiki be the one to give the Academy students The Talk, after he made Ibiki teach several of the more embarrassing Kunoichi lessons.
On second thought, having Ibiki and/or Anko give the Talk to poor impressionable young Academy students was probably a very bad idea. It would probably traumatize them for life, especially if the two Torture and Interrogation specialists decided to have some fun with the lecture. He wanted there to be a next generation of Konoha ninja, thank you very much.
The two little Genin that would be accompanying him in the forest were looking a little too smug for his tastes. It looked like he would have to ensure that there were preliminaries in order to make sure that his appointment to their team while their usual teammate was out with the Chicken Pox wouldn't fast track them before they were ready. If they passed the preliminaries, more power to them. Konoha needed more qualified Chunin.
Soon, they were in the forest, and he stood there torn between a decision as to whether or not he wanted to break Gaara's record in reaching the tower. On the one hand, it would be beating Gaara at something for once, considering the fact that his friend had made Chunin first, had made Jounin, and had become Kage well before he did. On the other however, if he wasn't in the forest, there would be no guarantees that there would be preliminaries to truly test the little Genin that were with him, and they needed to be tested since being promoted before you were ready was a bad thing, as he'd been told any number of times by any number of people.
After sending out a bunch of Shadow Clones to make sure that things didn't go too far since he didn't want people dying in the forest this time as he wouldn't put it past Tsunade to put him on corpse clean-up duty in order to get revenge on him for handing her The Hat for a month and forcing her to deal with the arrangements for the Chunin Exams since he couldn't be involved because he was participating, he led his team deeper into the woods. All too soon, they came upon a team from Iwa.
The Genin who couldn't have been older than fifteen looked like they were about to wet themselves when he appeared.
"I'll show you mine if you show me yours" he said as he reached towards his belt pouch where he kept the team's scroll.
The Iwa Genin all looked horrified for a moment before they nervously unfastened and dropped their trousers as one.
He buried his face in his hands.
"Your scroll." he groaned. "I meant your scroll. Pull your pants back up."
His teammates laughed like a pair of hyenas on nitrous oxide as he relieved the poor team of the scroll which turned out to be the one he needed. As soon as he had their scroll, the hapless team from Iwa disappeared so fast that he could have sworn they'd picked up the Hiraishin.
Screw arranging for the preliminaries, he was getting the hell out of here before his reputation took another hit.