A lot of you guessed that I'd put in vampires, or made Naruto/Kitsune a vampire...as well as those of you who pointed out the scientific fact that a cadaver retains some small amount of blood after death.

To answer both questions, there's a simple solution: the jutsu work-around. The Narutoverse is vast, and essentially a writer's paradise; virtually anything can, has, or will happen. Uchiha Madara summoned a meteor and could command the Kyubi, so what's a blood-removal technique by comparison? RIB:ASOSS!Naruto is a cynic and a sadist, a tormentor and an assassin, and certainly wouldn't be above torturing weaker shinobi by stealing their blood and drinking it.

That's all I really have to say for now, since that's what people commented on.

"Sir." An Anbu arrived, dropping to the Hokage's side in a kneeling bow; his mask was Shishi, the Lion, and blacker than night...a member of the former Kurojutsu division.

"Yes, Shishi?" Hiruzen asked, not bothering to look up from his work; he had enough to do as it was, with the Chunin Exams and the trade that their participants (and outsiders) brought in. "Please make it quick...I have a lot to finish."

"The corpses of the three Otogakure Genin have vanished." The political disaster was delivered with all the force, and the subtlety, of a sledgehammer.

"What do you mean, 'vanished?' Surely there's some trace of chakra, some scent, something!"

"If there were, I wouldn't have mentioned this to you."

That was true enough; Shishi, even before being put into Anbu and Kurojutsu, had always been a very "solve-it-yourself" type of person. He would have gone to the Inuzuka clan, or perhaps the Aburame, rather than to the Hokage...something that had undoubtedly saved the aging Sarutobi from several dozens of hours of paperwork. He would also have already tried finding where they went, and been unable, in order to self-justify visiting the Hokage.

"Very well. I'm afraid that we can't do much right now; keep trying on your own, or with other Anbu."

Shishi nodded, vanishing as he flashed away. Both of them knew that the order was merely one that would keep them both busy for a while; if a former Kurojutsu member could not find three bloodless corpses, then that meant there was someone who was just as powerful and skilled as Shishi was...that person had taken the bodies with them, hiding their presence all the while, and vanished. What made it worse was that the body-thief was inside of Konoha's walls, and more than likely to be a citizen of the village.

Oh, the problems this would cause...

Sakura blanched at the news she looked down upon; she could take tests, and always got perfect scores on them, but this was ridiculous! How could she know the terminal velocity of a civilian as opposed to a Jonin of the same measurements, which implied that chakra actually had a physical mass? What on earth were Heffalumps and Woozles? Why does it matter that the phone cord is snapped in the fight against GLaDOS?

The questions didn't even make sense!

Irritated, she simply turned her paper over and went to sleep...oblivious to the rampant cheating that revolved around her, of course. Why would she bother to pay any attention to that, particularly when she could catch up on her beauty sleep? Sasuke would be-

She stopped the thought where it stood, hammering it into the dark recesses of her mind; she'd decided, during the week that her father had spent training her, that she would have to be a respectable ninja before she wanted to think about having a boyfriend or a family. She was an adult in the eyes of ninja and civilians, as an eighteen-year-old girl should be, but was easily the weakest of her trio...well, when Naruto/Kitsune wanted to be part of the trio. Otherwise, it was just a pair. In any case, she was the weak link in their chain. Sasuke, even without his Sharingan, had trained day and night for more than eleven years in the hope that it would make him strong enough to kill his brother: Uchiha Itachi, "the Second Coming of Madara."

There was no point in trying to compare herself to Naruto. He claimed to be at less than half of his strength, or perhaps at fifty percent, but his chakra supply was so utterly massive that a single weak jutsu would become a gateway to death with only a "slight" overcharge. And when her father had trained her, she had heard stories...some of them were simply educational, to help her work with Naruto as a teammate; a few were meant to make her aware of what he was able to do if he willed. Of all of them, however, only one had truly frightened her.

In their last mission together, the Kitsune had revealed one of his own personal techniques; it hadn't been elemental, or meant to fit his "berserker" style of battle. It was one that allowed him to continue on in life for as long as a month without any need for sustenance or sleep. He would use his chakra to lengthen his canines into fangs, hollowing them out and connecting them to his esophagus. From there, he would bite into them and use his chakra to drain them of their blood...when it was done, his teeth would go back to normal and he would absorb all the nutrients in the blood, bones, marrow, and even their organs. He could resume normal patterns of eating and sleeping when the time was up, or choose to drink blood once again; it had proven invaluable on many missions, giving Han Roku an automatic watchman and ever-alert fighter. If the chakra of the Kyubi was used, he could temporarily re-animate the corpse into a miniature kamikaze Bijudama.

She wondered if he'd been telling the truth...and seeing Naruto with blood on his lips had effectively confirmed her suspicions.

Naruto laughed inwardly, seeing the terror on the face of the woman he was sent to interrogate. After being given the simple instruction, "make her tell you where the second exam is held, and then head there," he had been left entirely alone; even his shoddy sensory skills were unable to pick up any chakra signatures outside of the room he was in. The closest that he could pick up, as he was only able to recognize high-level signatures, was dozens of yards away from the windowless room.

He had nothing to fear now, and could do as he wished.

A single hand-sign brought forth his mask, and a short search of memory reminded him of the signs needed to retrieve his armor from the seals which they'd been placed in.

Even if it was incomplete, as he could not summon forth Katon, Suiton, Futton, or Enton, or readily call upon Kurama's chakra, and he did not have his true sword...he was Kitsune once more; the Dark Lord had returned, in the flesh, to spread war and terror anew.

"I could do it, you know."

The woman's eyes were wide, tears coming forth and falling freely. There was no doubt that she knew what he was talking about; she was bound, and there was nobody to hear her scream. But would he actually rape her?

"Or I could choose the worse road, the painful road. Take all these knives of mine, this sword, and a whole host of needles. Decorate you in red, stuffed with black steel, and then pull them out so that you can taste them...over and over again."

His boots clapped against the smooth cement floor, and he bent down before her face so that she stared into the sanguine eyes of a man who was born to end lives. He was the truth, Omega, the end of all things; he held no sympathy, only a lust for battle and slaughter and death. A smooth finger traced her jawline, running down her throat, past the swell of her breasts. Her breath hitched at the tickle brought by the movement along her side, down her inner thigh and back up again, until his fingers were dancing just above her core.

"The choice is yours, woman. Get fucked like a whore...or become a live experiment on pain thresholds and how pain turns into joy. Of course, there's another way out. You just have to tell me where the second of the Chunin Exams is held."

She seemed to get her spark back, spitting at him. The saliva missed, but her words only sealed her fate. Even if she hadn't been a ninja for long enough to know much about the darkly-famed Kitsune, and therefore didn't realize that his threat had carried weight, it still didn't give her much of an excuse.

"Do your worst, asshole."

Her screams resonated throughout the building.

It was a small cube, nine squares on each face; the idea was to match all the colors to their respective sides, as denoted by the center square on each side...it shouldn't have been difficult. Sasuke ate puzzles like this for breakfast, and this one shouldn't have been any different.

Of course, he'd never come across a Rubik's Cube before. The thing was supposed to fall apart upon completion, and then it would reveal the location of the Second Exam; that somewhere, he guessed, wasn't a place most people knew about. Otherwise, why would they bother concealing it?

It didn't help that he was working against a two-hour time limit, or that his teammate's failures in their respective portions...though he doubted that either would fail, even if he had no clue what Naruto's piece was...would fail him as well. As he continued to work, the more he was conscious of time; eventually, he hurled the cube against the cement wall to hear an incredibly satisfying crack. Moving towards the fallen diabolical invention, he saw that he'd managed to separate all the blocks from the frame; a small scrap of paper, old and weathered, revealed itself.

Picking it up, and still in shock that he'd spent an hour and a half effectively twiddling his thumbs only to accidentally succeed, he read the message aloud.

Anko waited outside of the designated grounds for the second Chunin Exam, grinning giddily at the first children to arrive; they were Kakashi's boys, and the girl wasn't likely to be too far behind. "Looks like the scarecrow wasn't joking about their skill." She laughed to herself. "I wonder which one was the interrogator?"

The response came from behind her, directly in her ear. "That would be me."

She whipped around on reflex, a kunai held in reverse to stab into the sneak's neck, but he wasn't there; he was just under her swing, and came up to slice her jawline with his nails. Having jumped with it, he managed to spin around the Mitarashi's lithe body while lapping up her blood.

"Tastes like poison." He offered. "Must take quite a man to haul you in, Snake."

"Foxy boy?" Anko laughed. "I should've known that only one brat would be good enough to get the drop on me."

She held a soft spot for the boy in her heart, mostly for the stigma that was forced on him. She wouldn't play very far with him, but...that wasn't to say that she wouldn't play. She didn't get to play with very many people any more, particularly men of any state that was some mix of good-looking and sober.

"And, as a gift for managing that, how about you tell me why we're waiting outside of Konoha's most dangerous zone: Training Ground Sixty-Six, Hell's Eden?"

"You'll find out when everyone else does, you brat."

"I can make you scream just as easily as the whore in the dungeons."

The thought gave Anko pause for a second...and then she laughed harder than she had in a long time. It was something that hadn't happened for several years, and took several minutes to slow down. Kami damn him, the foxy boy could play this game!

Besides, it's not like he would have to wait for very long...other Chunin-hopefuls were on their way to Hell's Eden.

However, only four people would truly shine. The first was Sabaku no Gaara, unstable Jinchuriki of the Ichibi; second was Terumi Mangetami, who was just as beautiful as her mother; third was Yotsuki Robin, nephew of the Raikage and Hachibi Jinchuriki. Last, of course, was Naruto. Kitsune, the shadow of death that crept along the world once more, a dark star that shone brighter than any of those that lived in the light.

Believe it.