"Naruto! Get your lazy ass moving, we've got some students to free up!" Sasuke shouted to the blond jonin. Naruto turned around and followed his friend. They first stopped to take care of Ayami.
"Ayami, are you alright? I didn't hurt you too badly, did I?" the Uchiha asked upon finding her struggling onto her knees. She looked up to see the best friends, side-by-side.
"No, I'm fine Sasuke-sensei," she sounded cheerful, and her eyes sparkled with awe upon the two senseis. "You're both incredible ninja," she noted. Normally it would have sounded like a kiss-up statement, but she stated it so matter-of-factly, Naruto was actually flattered.
"How are you feeling?" Sasuke asked, crouching down to her level.
"Fine."
"Can you walk yet? I might have shaken your spinal chord a little more than I should have," he noted.
"I'm not sure, I just picked myself off the dirt."
"Hn," Sasuke inspected her quickly. "Then I doubt it. You won't mind if I carry you back then, right? Time's expired."
"Oh," she looked slightly disheartened, but shook her head. "No, I wouldn't mind. How did everyone else do? Are they alright?"
Naruto and Sasuke held up their bells to indicate no one had gotten one.
She looked confused for a moment, then realization snapped in. "No, I mean are they all alright? No one got hurt, did they?"
Naruto swore he saw a small smile twitch at the corner of Sasuke's mouth. "Yes, everyone's fine, but we've got to get them all free, and since Sasuke will be carrying you, you'll see soon enough how this all ended. Let's move."
Sasuke lifted Ayami by slipping a hand through her knees and just below her shoulder blades, following Naruto's lead.
They proceeded to release each of the other genin, and return to the meeting ground, where Sasuke placed a slightly shaky Ayami on the ground.
None of the genin met their senseis' eyes.
Sakura, her genin, and Kakashi trailed up behind the senseis, curious looks on their faces. "Well?" one of Sakura's genin probed. Sasuke and Naruto held up their bells a second time.
Sakura had to nearly tackle her genin as they were about to either spoil or tease. Kakashi said nothing, but Naruto swore he saw a smirk beneath the silver haired ninja's mask.
Sasuke sighed. "We need more stumps," he noted in an almost bored tone. He closed his eyes; Naruto took his cue and directed all the students, Sakura's included, away. Sasuke had requested of Naruto and Sakura on the day before the teams were assigned, that neither of them speak of or allow the genin to see his Sharingan.
"Why?" Naruto asked.
"I figure some things are best kept a secret," Sasuke said coolly, digging his hands into his pockets.
Naruto didn't ask again, though he continued to regard his friend with confusion.
"A few reasons. I don't want to explain the Mangekyou, first off." A bit of an awkward silence ensued. "I'd rather not scare them off, secondly, and thirdly," the Uchiha smirked a little. "They'll find out when the time is right."
"Mokuton no Jutsu," Sasuke muttered, forming the seal in a flash. Four more wooden stumps shot up from the ground. Sasuke blinked again, deactivating his doujutsu. Sasuke was rather lousy at said jutsu, as the Sharingan was not meant to capture bloodline limits in its vast library of techniques, but he'd studied enough from Yamato to find the basic concept of the wood-element jutsus; enough to pull up a few logs at least, so far. The Council had been reluctant to allow Sasuke, ex-traitor of Konoha, to try and learn such a secret, powerful technique, but, as Yamato had pointed out, he was headed back to ANBU, and Naruto rarely went on a mission sans-Sasuke, that one could never be to careful when it came to the Kyuubi. And so the Council was backed into a corner, and forced to allow it.
"Sensei," Raito commented when their view had been unblocked, "there are more than enough posts."
Sasuke's dark eyes continued to stare at his pupil, waiting for him to say something else.
Naruto intervened. "Two of them are for Sasuke and I to watch you from, two are for securing genin, and one genin gets to eat lunch."
Twelve eyes all shot to the blond jonin. "One?" Hideki asked.
Naruto nodded. "We might have five angry genin once we announce this, but Kumari will not be moored to the wood."
Kumari's eyes widened in surprise. "Me?"
"Hai."
She regarded him warily. "Why?"
"Would you prefer to be tied up?"
"No," she answered quickly. "But, I don't understand why."
"Simple, you opted for team work."
Six silent Shinobi stared at their senseis. "What does that have to do with the bells?" Seiya finally asked.
Naruto gave a crooked smile. "Perhaps I should allow a different shinobi to explain this. Kakashi?"
"Imagine this bell exercise was a retrieval mission. Would you have failed the mission? Yes. Why? Simple, Shinobi are put into cells for a reason other than just to annoy their teammates," he shot a look to this former students who had all developed an intense fascination with the sky. "As shinobi, you must place your team above personal gain, because you pass or fail as a team, whether you want to be a part of that team or not. If you don't learn this, you will be faced with an impossible choice at one time or another. May I, Sasuke, Naruto?"
The jonin nodded, fighting back smiles. In an instant, Kakashi had vanished, and reappeared holding a kunai in each hand, pressed to the throats of Seiya and Raito. "Kumari, Ayami, kill Hideki and Katsu or these two die," his voice was grave, and his gaze was hard, obviously frightening the genin. Neither of the kunoichi moved, and Kakashi brought the kunais just that much closer to their teammates necks. Raito and Seiya began sweating. "Now!" he shouted. The girls remained frozen.
Kakashi threw Raito and Seiya to the ground. "That is what happens when you don't work as a team. You'll have to make an impossible decision
"In this exercise, the goal was to retrieve the bells from Sasuke and Naruto, but the lesson was to work as teams. A successful group would have focused on the task at hand before their own lunch; in other words, you would have worked as a team to get all the bells, then divided them up amongst yourselves, even if the numbers weren't sufficient to feed all of the team. Understand?" Kakashi swept his gaze over all of the students.
Six curt nods followed. Kakashi straightened up, satisfied. "Well, then, I believe it is lunch time for the one genin who showed team devotion."
"Gotta love how Kakashi-sensei repeated it almost word for word," Naruto chuckled under his breath. Sakura placed a hand over her lips, and the corner of Sasuke's mouth twitched in amusement.
"Hasn't he come up with new ways to explain it? I mean, what the hell does he do in his spare time? Not like he has a life," Sakura giggled quietly, but threw a fond look at their sensei. "Have to admit, though, he's damn good at scaring the crap out of them," she noted.