Before the chapter, I want to give a shoutout to Dark Prime0 for being this story's first repeat reviewer! Thank you for your feedback; it's this kind of thing that keeps me writing.

Also, in response to Kyle Eulan: Eulyn is spelled with a "y", not an "a," but thanks.

Chapter 5

Logged

"So… What do you know about him, ability-wise?" Omoide frowned at his friend's question. "Besides the Sharingan, not much, and somehow I doubt he's going to pull that out on academy graduates." Hiruzen grunted an annoyed affirmative and toyed with a kunai. "He's just standing there in the field, waiting. How can anyone stand that still for that long?" Omoide shrugged, "He's weird like that." The boy's expression was contemplative for a moment as he thought of options. "I'd suggest we misdirect him into thinking we're attacking alone, but he knows us too well; he'd smell a rat from the moment we made contact."

"So are we going to wait for Kengen to test the waters, or what?" The young Uzumaki's brow furrowed in concentration, "No, that would be wasting daylight. Kengen isn't going to attack until one of us feels the enemy out and if we wait for him to do it, we'll end up with barely any time to execute a plan. Misdirection might not be a completely wasted effort, though…" He absent-mindedly bit down hard on his thumb and drew it across a sealing tag before lowering his goggles over his eyes. "Get me in close; I'll try to nail him with a paralysis tag. Cover me if I need to get out and meet me when you hear a barn owl hoot three times."

For his part, Sasuke was beginning to lose interest in the test. After the high of taking the bounce out of Kengen's metaphorical bungee had worn off, he'd quickly realized why Kakashi had always carried around reading material: waiting for an assault you knew would be easily rebuffed was incredibly boring. Sure, he'd learned his team could hide, but that didn't exactly alleviate his suffering at the hands of monotonous non-happening, now did it? Given the circumstances, he was ecstatic to have his thoughts interrupted by the sound of a fuuma shuriken whistling toward his back.

With a casual air to his movements, he pivoted to face the weapon and caught it neatly in his right hand. "You'll have to do better than-" But he was cut off by the last minute realization that whichever kid had thrown it had near-perfectly utilized kage shuriken no jutsu, hiding a second foldable shuriken in the first's shadow. He just managed to avoid it, bending backward at the knees and letting it pass over his face before springing forward off of his left hand and sending the first throwing star back to its point of origin. The whole exchange lasted all of five seconds.

Then he heard something bone-chilling: the poof of a Transformation dispelling. There was a static sort of tingling at his back and he stiffened, suddenly unable to move his limbs or back. Omoide was behind him, smirking and reaching for the bells at his hip.

Sasuke returned the smirk, "Sorry, wrong Sensei." The shadow clone dispelled in a puff of smoke. Omoide's face abruptly fell. "… Fuck."

-G

Kengen's reaction to the revelation of the kage bunshin was quite similar, and like Omoide, he tried to run for it. That was where the similarities ended however, as Kengen's rapid pivot brought him face to face with the exact person he was trying to escape. With a twitch of the graduate's finger, ninja wire was pulled taught all around them in a net. Kengen grinned and quickly kawarimi'd with a log before setting off the two-dozen medium-yield paper bombs he'd attached to the setup.

There was an ear-shattering BOOM and debris rained down from the sky for a moment in a rain of charred, splintered wood. A column of smoke rose from the patch of woods Kengen had inhabited until recently, marking the huge detonation. He didn't think he'd killed Sasuke, but he didn't see any way the jonin could have escaped the enormous conflagration, not with such limited space to maneuver between the trees and wire. He quickly checked around himself trying to locate his escaped sensei before turning back around. Sasuke stood there, his hand held up to his lip. "Lesson One: Ninjutsu."

A large fireball shot toward Kengen fast enough that he barely had time to kawarimi with a chunk of smoking wooden debris before it reached him. He felt a tap on his shoulder and tensed. "Lesson Two: Genjutsu." Snakes burrowed out of the ground and Kengen barely held on to the thought that it wasn't real. They were crawling up his legs, hissing and biting as they went. At this rate, he'd be covered before he knew it. He quickly clasped his hands together and tried to stop the flow of his chakra. 'Come on, come on, come on.' With a final yell, he broke free of the illusion, breathing heavily. Sasuke was holding a kunai directly in front of his face. He smirked, "Dead." Then he brought the kunai's ring down on the side of Kengen's head. Silently, he blacked out, mentally cursing everything to do with the Uchiha.

-G

A slap to the face was what brought Kengen out of the dark depths of his blackout. Quickly, he blinked back to wakefulness and saw Hiruzen above him frowning. "Welcome back, hime. Did you have a nice nap?" Kengen groaned and glared at the Sarutobi boy. "I'm not a fucking princess. How long was I out?" Omoide appeared at that moment, substituting with an exploding tag-covered log. There was a loud explosion in the distance as he glanced at his watch. "Alright guys, we have about twenty minutes to get this done, who's got ideas?"

"Wait wait wait, how did I get here?" Hiruzen grinned down at his teammate; "Omoide rescued you from being Sasuke's chair. He was sitting on you, sharpening a kunai. While he kept sensei busy, I ran in and got you." Omoide nodded, smirking. "I think it'll take him a second to recover from that present I sent him. Anyway, I figured we should try banding together what with him being a jonin and all." Kengen glared at Omoide, clearly not enamoured with the idea. "Look, grateful as I am for you saving me from the Uchiha's ass, what makes you think we're suddenly working together, Uzumaki?" Omoide turned his most condescending glare on Kengen. "Yokoana, I don't like you and I'm fairly certain that it's impossible for you to like anyone, but I know for a fact that you're a stronger shinobi than either of us and you just got your ass handed to you. If we want to have any chance of passing this bullshit test, then we'll have to work together."

The green-haired boy frowned contemplatively and growled in annoyance as he came to the same conclusion. Angry as he tended to be, he wasn't an idiot and his arrogance wasn't quite to the point of stupidity. He knew his Uzumaki teammate was right and what's more, he'd just risked himself to get him away from their new sensei. "Alright then oh great leader, what's your plan?" Omoide grinned conspiratorially.

"Here's what I'm thinking: we need to have two people attack him while another person sets up a trap. Between my taijutsu and Kengen's vibration techniques, we should be able to keep him thoroughly busy. While we're doing that, Hiruzen can set up one of his clan's fire ninjutsu. If you hit him with it while we're cutting off his escape avenues, he'll be forced to go up." Absentmindedly, he began pulling out sealing tags and wrapping them around a kunai. "I should be able to set this off on him and if I've done it right, he'll be immobilized and incapable of any chakra-based escape. Once he's down, we can rush in and steal the bells before he recovers."

Kengen nodded for a second. "You know, that just might work." His accepting frown slowly turned into a hopeful smirk, tinged with annoyance though it was. With a rock back, he jumped forward onto his feet and grinned predatorily. "Let's go smash our sensei's face in."

-G

Sasuke glanced at his watch and sighed: ten minutes to go. Much as he didn't want to fail Omoide or any of them really, he just might have to. With a sigh, he leaned back on one of the tying stumps and looked around. Maybe he'd try Yakiniku-Q for dinner. The owners had always seemed like nice enough people…

Suddenly, the sound of flying shuriken alerted him to an insane number of incoming projectiles. A mix of basic and oversized throwing stars were coming from two directions, pushing him back through the logs. He whirled, expecting an attack from behind only to be tackled from what had now become his blind spot. 'That's twice in the same day with the shuriken transformation trick. I must be getting soft.'

Turning the momentum of the attack to his advantage, he rolled forward, sandwiching the offending almost-genin between himself and the ground. He heard a grunt as the air was driven from his attacker's lungs and jumped back to his feet.

His reprieve was short and he barely had time to recognize Kengen as the tackler before Omoide was coming at him, flying through a strange mix of academy basic and jyuken moves adapted for people with normal eyes. With his senses now on high alert, Sasuke noticed Kengen had recovered from his crushing and quickly pulled out a kunai to block the kid's two-handed stab, simultaneously stopping a jab at one of his pressure points from Omoide with his forearm. In this situation, some sensei might have worked with simple blocking or even told their students that they had officially passed their genin exam. Sasuke however, was not an ordinary sensei. With a smirk on his face, he began to fight back.

With effort as minimal as he could manage considering the two genin trying to kill him, Sasuke turned his block of Omoide's punch into a throw, grabbing the boy's wrist and bringing him around like a living flail toward Kengen. The green-haired boy neatly ducked the attack and made to push Sasuke's guarding kunai while he was off balance. Exerting visible effort, he removed one hand from his kunai as he stabbed forward and flipped through one-handed signs with the other.

"Busō o Hamingu (Humming Armament)." Sasuke made to block it only to see his kunai's blade shatter before his eyes. Somewhere at the back of his mind, he heard a low buzzing sound and perceived a wide, predatory grin on the boy's face as his kunai sheered almost all the way through Sasuke's brand new flack jacket. A sheer moment before the stab would have drawn blood, he managed to kick under Kengen's guard, sending him flying backwards and taking the kunai with him.

Meanwhile, Omoide had pulled his own kunai and forced Sasuke to release his wrist with a downward stab toward his sensei's. Having dropped the remnants of his broken knife and his hold on Omoide's wrist, Sasuke punched toward the blue-haired boy's face, forcing him to hop backwards. Unfortunately for the last Uchiha, this was exactly what his genin had wanted.

"Katon: Gōen no Jutsu (Fire Release: Great Flame Technique)!"

A stream of raging fire erupted toward Sasuke and he quickly took stock of his situation. He couldn't outrun the flames, nor could he go toward them. Omoide was guarding him on one side and Kengen had turned his tumble into a controlled stop. He had only one way quick enough to get him to relative safety. With a tensing of his legs, he made a chakra-assisted leap into the air.

Sasuke's eyes narrowed when he saw a kunai hurtling toward him from the side, attached to a length of ninja wire. Immediately, he tried to kawarimi, but then sealing tags on the weapon's handle glowed red and the world went cold. His limbs and back went rigid and he suddenly and quite literally couldn't move to save his life.

The glowing, ingenious kunai connected solidly with his jacket and then he was being pulled back toward the ground. Already, feeling was beginning to return to his body as the seals sputtered on the edge of dying. Even with such short battery life, it was an impressive display. 'A chakra suppression seal layered on top of a paralysis seal all with an area-of-effect setup; for a novice, that's genius.'

As Omoide jumped toward him, he finally felt the life flooding back into his limbs. With a grunt, he twisted to avoid the grinning Uzumaki…

Only to be met with a likewise grinning Hiruzen, his hand extending toward the bells hanging ever so tantalizingly close. With more effort than he cared to admit, Sasuke pulled Omoide around by his ninja wire and collided the two in mid-air. Flashing through hand-seals like there was no tomorrow, he tried to kawarimi with one of his pre-set logs only to find that they simply weren't there. All of them were gone and he couldn't exactly switch with the air that was left. Abandoning the substitution jutsu, he pulled the kunai still stuck in his flack jacket loose. Sasuke sent Omoide flying with a swinging kick to the side of his chest and landed with grace that belied just how good that attempt had been. He was almost breathing hard. Almost being the operative word.

The newly minted jonin took a look around and grinned inwardly. Kengen was panting, holding his chest and looking murderous that they'd lost. Hiruzen and Omoide were both lying on the ground, likewise out of breath and attempting to get back on their feet. Sasuke looked down at his watch and counted the last few seconds of the exam. 'And three, two, one.' The alarm seemed markedly louder this than it had before, blanketing the whole field and drowning out all other sounds. They had failed, even when they had banded together, combining resources and pulling out all the stops, they hadn't been able to get the bells and now they were going back to the academy and…

"Well, that was good. You all pass." Hiruzen (who had finally managed to get into a sitting position) and Kengen (who was kneeling on his way to standing) both stared at their sensei before uttering a simultaneous "What?" Omoide's eyes widened and he pushed up his goggles. "I was right! There was a secret criteria!" Sasuke smiled ever so slightly at his excited student. "Exactly how much did you have figured out?" The blue-haired Uzumaki looked up and to the right, his expression contemplative as he nervously scratched the back of his neck.

"Well, the whole setup of the test was fishy. There was no way any one of us could take you down alone, yet the bells seemed purposefully designed to push us into working individually. Then there's the simple fact that I've never seen or heard of a squad with less than three genin. Something was up and it had to do with dividing us, but that's pretty much all I managed to figure out before you called it." Sasuke nodded, "And after?" The Uzumaki boy quirked an eyebrow, "Well it's pretty obvious, isn't it?"

Kengen's eye's widened in realization. "It was a test of our teamwork, whether we'd be able to put our personal interests aside for the good of the group." He glared at Sasuke. "But why the elaborate setup; the food, the stumps, what point did they serve? There must have been an easier way to go about testing our group effectiveness." It was Sasuke's turn to raise an eyebrow. "Everything I did was to further drive you apart. Lack of food makes people irritable, the prospect of humiliation is a powerful motivator to chase victory blindly. However, these emotional responses have no place on a battlefield and if you'd let them get the better of you, then you wouldn't have had any place as shinobi as far as I was concerned."

With that, the raven-haired man's expression became even more serious. "Greed, pride, blind anger; when emotions like these are aloud to drive a shinobi, mistakes are made, lives are lost and countless people can end up dead. We are tools of our superiors and our own desires and to a certain extent we must act for ourselves and for those above us, but if that causes us to abandon our comrades, we are the lowest of the low. As my sensei would put it; 'those who break the rules are trash, but those who abandon their comrades are even worse than that.'"

He let them all think on that for a moment. After he decided they'd had enough time for contemplation, he made his tone slightly lighter. "Good job all of you. As of now, Team Ten is officially on active duty. Meet me on the south-stream bridge tomorrow at 7:00 AM sharp. See you then." Then he disappeared in a shunshin of leaves and wind, grinning inwardly as he went.

Well, for the story's first big, committed action chapter, I think I did pretty well. Kengen's abilities will be expanded on in later chapters, but for now, we're pretty much out of the warm-up phase. There might be a bit of it left in the next chapter, but it's effectively over. See you next time!

Scavenger