The Vongola guardians stepped into the cave, Tsuna entering first, followed by his self-proclaimed right hand man and the rest. The cave grew darker as they travelled deeper into the cave and soon even what little light they had coming in from their only light source, which was the sunlight streaming in from the entrance of the cave, disappeared entirely. A thick darkness encompassed the guardians, so much so that they had to resort to leaning against the walls to prevent themselves from crashing into them.

After what seemed like decades of walking in the darkness, Tsuna rammed into a wall in front of him.

"O-ow… that hurts…"

"Tenth! Are you alright?" called out Gokudera in the direction from which he thought Tsuna's voice was coming from.

"Yeah… there's just this wall here…"

"A dead end?" asked Yamamoto, stretching his hands forward and feeling his way to the front. "Oh, there really is a wall here… perhaps we took a wrong turn?"

"HIIIIIII—!!! No way!"

"Then we're doomed TO THE EXTREME!!"

"You noisy herbivores piss me off. Do you want me to bite you all to death?"

"YIIIIIIII—!! Hibari-san… No—"

Suddenly, a bright purple light shined from where Hibari's voice was coming from. Hibari's cloud ring was emitting a strong purple flame, dispelling the darkness.

"Wow… He used the flames on his Vongola ring to brighten up the place!" exclaimed Yamamoto, impressed. "Why didn't I think of that?"

"You're a baseball idiot, idiot. You're not supposed to be able to think that far," replied Gokudera, trying to make the sarcasm in his statement as evident as he possibly could.

"Hahaha, that's true…" replied Yamamoto, smiling as though Gokudera had not just insulted him.

"There's a door here…"

The guardians turned to face Chrome, who was pointing at the 'wall' that was previously preventing them from moving forward. There was a miniature door, only slightly taller than the 5-year-old Lambo, but wider than the shoulders of a fully grown man.

"Is this some kind of joke? The door's so tiny!" exclaimed Gokudera, pulling an incredulous face. "How're we supposed to go in?"

"Gyahaha! Lambo-san can fit right through the door!" mocked Lambo in a sing-song voice, strutting to the door and standing right beside it.

"Hahaha, the rest of us can crawl through it, I guess…"

"Are you kidding me? There's no way I'm crawling through tha—"

"I guess we have to crawl through then…"

"Good idea, Tenth! Allow me to go first!"

Gokudera got down on his knees and turned the miniature knob. It opened with a click and as he pushed the door open, he gasped.

The hand which he used to open the tiny door had disappeared. His arm up to his elbow was nowhere to be seen, and his arm resembled one that had been chopped clean in two.

Gokudera quickly withdrew his arm to examine where the other half of it had gone, and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that his arm and hand had reappeared.

"There's some kind of liquid veil that's covering the entrance, Tenth… It might be dangerous to go through it… but if you want me to, I'll go through it first and check that it is safe…" volunteered the faithful right hand man.

"I think…"

"Don't worry Tenth! I'll just stick my head in and see what's beyond that veil!"

"Ah, Gokudera, wait…"

Before the brunette could say anything, Gokudera's head disappeared into the door.

Seconds later, it fell back out with the rest of his body.

"Gokudera-kun! What happened? Are you okay?"

Gokudera appeared somewhat traumatised when he replied Tsuna, stammering and mumbling to himself.

"S-so many… there were so many…"

"So many what…?" asked Tsuna, uncertain if he really wanted to hear an answer.

"So many…"

Tsuna gulped. "So many… what…?"

"So many… stupid cows…"

"Ha?" came a synchronized reply from behind.

"There were hundreds of them… hundreds of annoying cows… so scary…"

"Hundreds of Lambos? Hahaha, that sounds interesting! Let me see!" exclaimed Yamamoto, shoving himself into the tiny door.

"No, Yama—"

And within a split second, he disappeared.

"That baseball idiot!"

"We'd better go after him…" muttered Tsuna, getting down onto his knees and crawling towards the door.

"There is no way I'm crawling through that," stated Hibari flatly.

"But, Hibari-sa— wagh!"

Before Tsuna could even try to start convincing Hibari to crawl through the miniature door, Hibari had already darted towards the wall and bashed a hole through it with his weapon, which was fortified with his flame.

As the walls crumbled, the scene that unfolded before them was enough to make their jaws drop.

As Gokudera had warned them earlier, an entire platoon of Lambo copies were clustered together, all swarming towards the centre of the wide room. And in the middle of the swarm came a weak groan.

"H-help…"

"Baseball idiot!" yelled Gokudera as he recognised the always-unusually-cheerful voice coming from under the battalion of Lambos. Without a second thought, Gokudera ran towards the overflowing Lambo mountain and started digging away at it.

The mountain of scrambling Lambos took on a different shape as all the Lambos that had been thrown aside climbed back on from the other side, somewhat increasing the size of the mountain. Gokudera realised that the mountain was anything but decreasing in size.

So he stood back and decided that he'd do what he had always wanted to do.

A hundred times the stupid cow, a hundred times the KA-BOOM.

He aimed his own mountain of bombs at all the areas he knew Yamamoto's voice was not coming from. As the bombs landed, smorgasbords of cows were displaced to the corners of the room, revealing a slightly-exasperated-yet-still-smiling Yamamoto.

"Thanks, Gokudera!"

"Whatever… the Tenth wanted me to help you out of there, so yeah…" lied Gokudera, sheepishly turning away from the taller boy to hide his blushing face.

"Hahaha, really? Thanks anyway…" replied Yamamoto with a grateful smile plastered over his face. "Why are there so many Lambos anyway?"

"I thought you would never ask~"

An eerily enthusiastic voice boomed from the furthest end of the room as a screen on the wall flickered on, displaying a very cheerful Byakuran sucking on a desert spoon.

"They are my clones, specially made for your first game."

"Your clones?" repeated Tsuna, still recovering from the shock of having a voice blast out of nowhere and echo throughout the entire room.

"I created them just for this purpose. You see, your first game is a simple game of spot the difference. All you have to do is to find your comrade. Simple, is it not?"

"Find the stupid cow? What's there to find? He's right here with—" began Gokudera, until he realised that the little cow was nowhere near the other guardians. "That dumb, stupid, idiotic cow! Where did he run off to this time?"

"Not to worry, he should still be in this room. All you need to do is to identify him, and you pass this round."

"And if we— for very obvious reasons— can't?" asked Gokudera in his most sarcastic voice, trying to emphasize on the impossibility of the task.

"Then I'm afraid you will just have to lose a guardian."

"We have to leave the stupid cow behind? No way! I mean, not that it's that bad a thing to leave that annoying thing behind… but still…" muttered the Italian teen, trying to convince himself more than Byakuran that he wanted the bovine to stay.

"It is not the child who will be left out," corrected Byakuran. "It is the girl."

"Girl…?"

All eyes darted around the room in search for the Vongola illusionist, who was the only girl on the team, but she was nowhere to be seen.

"When did she…" muttered Gokudera in disbelief.

"When you guardians walked through the wall, there was an invisible and intangible veil that was created to filter out one guardian to bring to my office. This was done in anticipation that some of you would not want to cross over through the veil of the door made for you to pass through, which would have let all of you through without the loss of a guardian," explained Byakuran. "No matter, I have gained myself a Vongola Mist guardian. How nice~"

"What did you do to her?!" demanded Tsuna.

"Nothing. See for yourself," said Byakuran, moving away from the camera to reveal a girl slumped over the floor in a prison cell. "I assure you, she is perfectly fine. She is merely in deep slumber, which she will awaken from once you have accomplished your task."

Tsuna breathed a sigh of relief, which was cut short by Byakuran's next statement.

"Of course, if you fail to correctly identify the lightning guardian, her safety will be jeopardized. But that shouldn't be a problem for you guardians since you will probably be able to find your friend. I believe you have already forged a rather close bond with each other, right? So this should be a piece of cake for you. You can start whenever you like."

"How are we supposed to find Lambo like this? All the Lambos look the same!" cried a very flustered Tsuna. "It's not possible!"

"Ah, yes. I almost forgot. You have 30 minutes from the time you stepped into the room to find him, which means that you are left with 17 minutes and 37 seconds from now."

"WHAT?!"

"Yes, yes~ If I were you, I'd start looking now. But if you are that confident of finding him quickly, I have no qualms about you waiting until the last minute—"

"How the fuck do you expect us to find him in less than 20 minutes?!"

"I wonder…"

With one last smile, the screen flickered off and the face of Byakuran vanished.

And in place of his face was now a countdown timer, displaying the numbers 17:04.

"That bastard! What are we supposed to do now?!"

"Find the cow TO THE EXTREME!!"

"HIIIIIIIII!! But there are so many of them… and they all look the same!!"

"Hahaha, this might be hard… but it sure sounds fun!" chirped Yamamoto, running towards the centre of the room where about fifty odd Lambos hopped onto him, burying him alive.

"When we run towards them, they attack us!" yelled Tsuna, exasperated.

"Maybe that's the only difference between the clones and the stupid cow… the clones are more irritating…" commented Gokudera while blowing up chunks of afro-clad 5-year-olds and releasing Yamamoto from his monochromatic prison.

"Thanks, Gokudera…"

"Yeah, yeah…"

Five minutes passed with Tsuna calling out Lambo's name, to which twenty to thirty cows responded by jumping onto him and flattening him to the ground. Yamamoto hardly got the chance to do anything before another fifty odd Lambos tackled him down and rendered him useless in the search. Gokudera barely had time to notice any difference between any two Lambos, let alone between the hundreds and the real one, before having to blast them away from his boss, Yamamoto, Ryohei and himself. Hibari appeared to be a natural Lambo repellent; not a single Lambo came within the five-metre radius from where he was standing.

The situation appeared hopeless; no one was any closer to finding the real Lambo, and they only had ten minutes left.

Gokudera lost his patience and was about to summon his box cannon when he heard his name being called.

"Hey Gokudera…"

Yamamoto waited for the grunt which indicated that Gokudera had acknowledged that Yamamoto was talking to him before going on. "Didn't you do something to Lambo's horn the other time? Like, write on it with a marker or something?"

"What are you talking about…" was Gokudera's reply until he realised that Yamamoto was right.

He had written 'stupid cow' on Lambo's horns before Lambo's battle with Leviathan.

Picking up a random Lambo copy, Gokudera studied the horns and realised that the horns had no words written on them.

"Look for the Lambo with the words 'stupid cow' written on the horns!" commanded Gokudera. "That's the real one!"

The rest of the guardians, except Hibari, obeyed and started inspecting all the horns of all the Lambos present in the room.

"It's no use! There're too many of them!"

Tsuna was already starting to toss the Lambos aside after each inspection when he had made it a point earlier to carefully place them down onto the floor so as not to harm any of them.

No good. We only have three minutes left.

Yamamoto was still searching patiently, re-inspecting the same Lambo at least five times, thinking it was a different cow.

Two minutes.

Gokudera started panicking and Tsuna had already started freaking out much earlier. Identifying which Lambos they had already checked was as hard a task as finding the real Lambo.

One minute.

Nothing. No progress. And they were down to one minute.

Thirty seconds.

Tsuna started tearing and perspiration drenched Gokudera's face.

Twenty seconds.

Still no Lambo.

Ten seconds.

"Can't find it to the EXTREME!!"

Nine.

"Not this one… not that one…"

Eight.

"It's no use…"

Seven.

"HIIIIIIII—!!"

Six.

"Argh!"

Five.

"Please…"

Four.

"No…"

Three.

"Shit."

Two.

"Oh my god."

One.

Screen flickered on.

Zero.

"Time's up."

It was over. Byakuran had won.

Before I say anything, I'd like to thank you all for patiently reading through this fanfiction of mine and giving me great reviews that keep me going! =D

Anyway, I was just reading through the list of All Characters (A/B), and the names that made it onto the list simply amuse me, to say the least.

Sure Tsuna, Gokudera and all the rest of the guardians are rightfully placed in that list. No complains there.

But take a look at Enzo. I mean, (no offence to Enzo fans, but really) who writes about Enzo? And an even better question, who IS Enzo?

And Hibird.

Not that I have anything against Hibird, mind you. I love Hibird.

But who pairs Hibird up with a human? And if Hibird is even selected as either Character (A) or (B), shouldn't the Rated M selection be, like, unselectable?

Which brings me to my next point... pairings.

The pairings some people include in their fanfictions never fail to astound me. It's like they dig out all the most unpopular/unknown characters whose very existence AMAZES US ALL and draws lots to see who to haphazardly matchmake.

For example, take a look at Nurse Lady X Kusakabe Tetsuya.

Sure, nobody writes about them, or even if they do, it's not like I can find them because nurse lady's not even on the list, like it should be. But such inconceivable pairings do appear in certain fanfictions, and it leaves me dumbfounded.

Or how about YamaNAKA Takeshi (No, it's not a typo error, he ACTUALLY exists) X GIANNINI?

For those who know YamaNAKA Takeshi to start with, who's the Uke and who's the Seme? The very thought of Giannini being in a Rated M section is unthinkable, so I'm not even going to TRY to come up with a theory on why Giannini should never be a Seme, but always an Uke instead, or vice versa for that matter.

Anyway, I'm pretty much done with my rant here, and boy do I LOVE being a writer just because we are entitled these little sections above/below the 'horizontal ruler' to talk about anything we feel like talking about. I feel so privileged. *sniffs*

Thanks for reading!