A/N: Chapter uploads are Wednesday and Saturday until further notice.

It was the week before our trip to Konoha, and the village was already getting ready. Consider that while the military aspects of the village had a lot to gain, so too did the civilian economy. Lightning Merchants were already beginning their journeys to Konoha, bringing along with them the Cloud Shinobi they'd hired as guards. Then came tourists and the families of wealthy merchants.

What we were going to was not merely an exam, but the economic equivalent of the Olympic games — though for business and war instead of sport.

Even though the final exams were still a month and a half away, we ninja traveled so much faster than the civilians that they had to leave now. Even with horses and sailboats, a land and sea-based journey with squishy merchants took forever. This was the first Konoha Chūnin exams that Kumo would be attending in decades; everyone was anxious to get there quickly for the potential business and trade deals.

Seeing the village explode into activity made me anxious. I was supposed to be a ringer. I was supposed to show off the power of Hidden Cloud (and help my teammates as well, so we could get every opportunity). I was praying the exams were what I remembered them to be, because if they weren't, this was going to be a very difficult task and there was a lot riding on me succeeding.

The mission scroll I'd received outlined the failure condition: failing to have at least one member of the team fight in the third round of the examination. The punishment for failure was listed simply as "Standard rank-appropriate mission-failure punishment, plus additions as the circumstances dictate." The first half of that was nothing to scoff at, but I could deal with that sort of punishment — docked pay, a black mark on my record, and the like. The second half, however, was basically authorization for the Raikage to punish me however he damn well pleased.

When we or one of our other allies hosted a chūnin exam, it was a big deal but it wasn't mission-critical. There was already frequent economic contact between the two nations, and our reputations within each other's borders are well-established. However, in Konohagakure, there was an entire generation of merchants, businessmen, and potential clients that had never personally seen us fight, nor had directly traded with Lightning's merchants.

Then, consider the fact that a single jōnin could easily make ten to fifteen million ryō over their whole career, possibly even more depending on the situation, and some of the most powerful ninja in the village can earn twenty times that in their careers. Now consider that we have about 1,300 active and recently-retired combat ninja in Kumogakure proper, plus clans in other neighboring cities that swore their loyalty to the Raikage in order to use Cloud's resources. Throughout the Land of Lightning, Kumo commanded a force of roughly 2,000 ninja. The annual cost of supporting a ninja force that big was somewhere around 1.5 billion ryō a year. Even a one percent increase in missions was a massive amount of money.

We are soldiers for hire. We are in the business of war. Even if they frequently are the same thing, our goal is not to win but to profit.

And right now, I'm at the center of it all.

No pressure.

"Do it faster next time!" Haruka yelled.

I nodded ever so slightly, acknowledging her advice, as I slid back into my stance. Across from me, Takeshi did the same. In his hands, he gripped his blunted wakizashi and katana, wielding both with impressive skill. He had a nasty habit of sprouting short-lived cloud-clone arms to slash at me with their duplicated blades. Even though they were merely training versions of the real things, they were still quite annoying.

In my hands, I wielded a mace. While it was capped in a thick layer of rubber and wasn't electrified like my melee weapon usually was, it was still a heavy tool in the hands of someone with bloodline-augmented strength. The Kaminyojin clan was famous for their maces, which complemented our prodigious strength and speed quite well.

But, despite me wielding my clan's signature weapon, despite me having a higher base speed, and despite me having a greater reach due to my significantly larger size, Takeshi was still kicking my ass. Give me a few kunai and a little range, and I'll have him literally pinned to the ground. But up close and personal like this? Takeshi was king.

And by god, it was fun.

I was fighting with only my half-mask today, which only covered my eyes in a solid piece of metal and left my mouth and nose exposed. I knew that Takeshi could see me grinning like a loon just as easily as I could see his own smile.

If I had to guess, his expression was more of an "I'm beating a clan kid with two bloodlines" smile than an "I'm merely having fun fighting" smile like my own. Even though I can see how one's thoughts affect their brain's chakra and blood flow like a living MRI machine, I couldn't actually read minds.

With a grunt, I swung my mace down, attempting to bash his shoulder. He blocked my mace with his wakizashi, simply giving it just enough of a nudge to the side that I missed entirely. I moved to strike again, but he was already counter-attacking from my previous blow with the katana. His blade slashed cleanly across my bare chest. Though my skin was unharmed by the blunted training weapon, I mentally acquiesced the round's point to him.

"You still need to work on your speed," Haruka reiterated to me as the two of us disengaged. "You're slow for a Kaminyojin."

"Yes, Haruka. I know." I could have gone faster, but not without burning a significant amount of chakra. That wasn't the point of this spar. This was to make sure I wouldn't die horribly if I got caught in a melee fight with low chakra by training my base, unaugmented speed. Well, as unaugmented as a Kaminyojin could get.

What also set it apart from a real fight was that I wasn't using a defensive layer of chakra. Like a lesser version of what the Raikage did when he cloaked himself in lightning chakra, my clan's hybrid chakra could form a defensive barrier around our skin.

Of course, the flip-side of running lightning chakra through your skin was that it heated up, so much so that wearing a top was uncomfortably hot, even in these mountains. Kaminyojin men often went completely topless (like I did) or wore only the flak jackets, and women went with simple bras, wearing the flak jackets only occasionally. Was it sexy as hell? Yes. Was it practical? Well, not necessarily, but it was comfortable. And with how far away I usually was from the battle, it didn't matter all that much to me.

Even up at melee range, wearing a flack-jacket didn't offer that much protection, especially against swordsmen like Takeshi, who could use chakra to make their swords sharp enough to puncture through, and mace wielders like the Kaminyojin, who could bash right through it. Thus, I chose to utterly forego it.

Rubbing the spot where his blunted blade grazed me (which happened to have a tattoo of the constellation Ares, which didn't exist in this world), I said to Takeshi, "One inch lower and you would have slipped perfectly between my ribs."

"Hmm..." He nodded, then tapped the tip of his blade to the spot I'd indicated on my chest, eyeing how it related to the underlying musculature and where it was compared to my nipples. Then he gave the blade a few swings, hitting the same spot every single time. Even now, it was a bit weird watching him silently rehearse a killing strike.

Then again, he did everything silently. That was just Takeshi. He simply made himself understood with action.

"If you two are ready," Haruka interjected, "get into your stances and start again."

Takeshi bobbed his head. I spoke for the both of us, "Yes, Sensei."

We were called to the Raikage's office the night before we of team Haruka were scheduled to depart for Konohagakure. But, despite immediately following the chūnin sent to fetch us, we were forced to wait a bit outside the Raikage's office. While the secretary told us that he was in the middle of an important meeting that had just run a little long, I could see the truth: Lord Ay was bench pressing the weights in the corner of his office.

...I don't think he was expecting us to get there nearly as fast as we did.

I took the opportunity to look around. If there was one thing I loved about my mask, it was that it hid my bulging veins when I snooped. Shifting my focus to the desk, I browsed the documents on his desk and in his drawers. Economic reports, military reports, secret intelligence (whoops, I'll ignore that), jutsu research results, a letter from Masaru detailing the prototype light-to-chakra seal he'd started developing, and much more filled every available space in and on the desk.

It was just a wee bit terrifying how much of a living security leak I was. People knew that I could see through walls. People knew I could read closed books. People knew I could see extreme ranges. Very few knew all three things. Only two people fully knew how I perceived the world (and one of them was now dead), and only they could have guessed just how powerful my sight was. And nobody knew that I could read anything at almost any distance through basically any chakraless obstruction.

The Kaminyojin clan served as a deterrent to bloodline users coming into the Land of Lightning unless they already lived here. No byakugan user would ever come here (again), due to the risk of their precious eyes falling into the wrong hands. Maybe the Raikage of the past and present had decided that it wasn't worth the expense of installing measures against dōjutsu with penetrative vision, or maybe they simply hadn't thought of it, but either way, the one thing that might have clouded my vision wasn't here.

A chakra haze.

My eyes saw the world as a 3D projection of a 4D world, rather than as a 2D projection of a 3D world as regular eyes saw it. Imagine drawing a box on a piece of paper, then drawing something inside that box. A 2D creature would see the edge of the box, but not the contents; you can only see the contents because you're looking "down" on that 2D world, a direction that does not exist for the 2D Flatlander. The same applies to me. You see a 3D box — say, a closed safe — but I can look "down" on it and see all the items inside it, from every single angle at the same time. I saw inside books, I saw inside people, I saw inside everything. Four walls, a floor, and a ceiling might have been enough to stop normal people, but to stop me, you'd have to saturate every possible location with moderate amounts of chakra.

It wouldn't take much chakra to obscure my vision to the extent that I couldn't read. Even soaking the important documents in chakra would have been enough. But nobody thought to do that. I saw the world in such a weird way that the method for blocking my vision was utterly unintuitive.

My attention was pulled away by the secretary entering the Raikage's office and informing him that we were here. Lord Ay racked his weights and stood up. "Send them in," I read on his lips. He stood, wiped his brow, slipped on his Kage's robe, and flopped down onto the couch behind his desk, as if trying to play off the fact that he'd kept us waiting. If I hadn't seen him through the walls and had only seen him as he was now upon entering the room, I probably would have thought he looked rather cool.

As it was, I had to stifle a laugh.

"Team Haruka," he greeted. "I trust you and Kaminyojin Kenta have gotten along well?"

"Yes, Lord Ay," my jōnin sensei replied. "He is a welcome addition to the team."

"Good. I also trust that you are all fully aware of the nature of his mission?"

"We are," Haruka replied.

"Again, good," Ay said. One of his legs, which had been resting atop the other, moved so that both of his feet were flat on the floor. "Then let me re-emphasize what the core of Kenta's mission is: displaying the power of Kumogakure to the world, and to the Land of Fire. To that end, while he may be a ringer, if Kaminyojin Katsumi or Lee Takeshi should have the opportunity to advance, it is Kenta's duty to help you in any way possible. For you two, however, this is merely the chūnin exams. Understood?"

"Yes, Sir," we replied in unison.

"That said, you are all fine shinobi. I expect you to all pass on your own strength." Ay concluded by giving us each a confident look.

"Thank you, Sir." Of the three of us, Katsumi bore the praise most visibly, her cheerfully expression wide and bright. Under his mask, however, Takeshi was also smiling.

"Now, to help facilitate your success, I've had a dossier of Konoha's exam prepared for you, including the likely structure of the examination and a summary of the Leaf teams registered to take the test. The names themselves are public knowledge, but the rest is not.

"Kenta, as this is your mission, I am giving this information to you alone. You may share it with your teammates if you so desire, but consider this: the chūnin exams are a test of team and individual skill, not of the strength of our spy network. If you don't share this, you will be keeping with the spirit of the exam, but if you do, your odds of success increase. In any other circumstance, I'd order you to read it. Now, however, the choice is yours — and your team's."

He handed me a packet of papers. The first few pages were on the exam itself, the rest was on the other ninja. Even at a glance, I could tell that this was valuable intelligence. "Thank you, sir. We won't make this decision lightly."

"As you should. Do inform me of your ultimate choice."

"Yes, sir."

There were a lot of papers to go through in the information packet I'd been given. 87 Leaf, 30 Sand, 21 Rain, 6 Grass, 6 Waterfall, and 3 Sound ninja were fighting in these exams. Every report had public knowledge, trusted espionage, and unconfirmed speculation, clearly labeled as such. For some, like Naruto Uzumaki himself, the information was sparse. For others, like Gaara of the Sand, information was more widely available due to his infamy.

In every case, I'd poured through the data, especially that of the Konoha Rookie 12. And although I told nobody, everything I read left me feeling more and more confident that this was a decently close-to-canon timeline. My mere existence hadn't stepped on too many butterflies just yet, I don't think.

"The information is good," I told my teammates after having processed said information. "The question is, how much of it do you want? I'm willing to tell you everything, or at least a summarized version of it."

The two of them looked at each other, had a silent conversation, and then turned to me. Speaking for the both of them, Katsumi replied, "Just give us a vague hint for each stage of the exam and a list of people to avoid."

"I'll need to get back to you on that list, but for now... Alright. In stage one, cheat. Be stealthy. Stage two... only fifty percent can pass, but we can narrow that even further to our advantage. Also, bring survival gear. Stage three is the usual tournament. One-on-one this time," I supplied.

Takeshi grunted while Katsumi gave me a thumbs-up. "Cool. We can work with that."

"Good, now give me a few minutes."

True to my word, I had a list of the dangerous ninja a few minutes later. It would have been really fucking nice to have a neural net AI to help me compare all these values, but lacking that, I'd mostly gone with my gut.

"In no particular order... Gaara, Kankurō, and Temari — Suna, team Baki. They're the Kazekage's children. Kagari, Mubi, Oboro — Ame, team Oboro. Shigure of team Shigure, also Ame. Hōki of team Bumi, from Taki. Lee Rock and Hyūga Neji — Konoha, team Gai. Aburame Shino and Hyūga Hinata — Konoha, team Kurenai. Uchiha Sasuke of team Kakashi, Konoha. Nara Shikamaru of team Asuma, Konoha. And finally, Kinuta Dosu of team Dosu, Oto."

I double checked to make sure I hadn't forgotten anyone that was dangerous to us. The only reason I included Hinata was that I didn't want us hurting her. I admit, it was a purely selfish, fanboy motive. I also didn't include Naruto because, based on this information alone, he wasn't spectacular, and if my teammates looked at it, they might get suspicious about my canon knowledge (what little of it I hadn't forgotten yet).

"Those Suna and Ame teams all have significant body counts while practically everyone else on that list is a bloodline wielder, comes from a significant clan, has a powerful teacher, or some combination of the above. Most of them are also significant wildcards. I'll point them all out to you when we get there."

"Err... maybe a little more information?" Katsumi requested.

Takeshi, however, shook his head. "That was enough for me." He stood from his seat, pushed in his chair, and started walking away. "Thank you," he called over his shoulder.

Katsumi and I stared at him as he walked away. "Did he just say two complete sentences?" My teammate asked.

"I'm just as surprised as you..." I muttered back. Then, switching both my train of thought and my dialect to the faster version, I began, "Alright, here are the highlights. Gaara of the Sand is, as his epitaph suggests, a sand user who's extremely lethal at short range..."

The run from Kumo to Konoha takes five days at Kumo's Standard Marching Pace. Yes, that was a real, officially designated speed. We were expected to be able to maintain that speed for a whole day of running, accounting for six ten-minute breaks and an hour for lunch. Despite the fact that it was slightly above highway speeds, it wasn't actually all that hard of a pace for a ninja to maintain. In short, chakra-assisted bursts, some ninja had clocked over the speed of sound — eighty miles an hour was a snail's pace in comparison, but it was the fastest speed that would leave a ninja combat-worthy regardless of how long they'd been running.

We did it in three days. Three days ending in pleasantly heavy breathing and wide, runner's-high induced smiles. As far as training went, it was fairly relaxing as, rather than running around Kumo's borders or countless laps on the indoor tracks, we got to a whole new landscape, including the transition from stormy, barren mountains to lush mega-forests.

To me, the transition was even more interesting. All my life, I'd thought my byakugan stained the world slightly yellowish in color. That was not the case, for as the world grew more forested, the tint transitioned through orange, to red. Almost simultaneously, the temperature rose in perfect time with the color change while the ever-present static electricity that clung to Kumo faded. I realized then what it was: the Land of Lightning was soaked in lightning chakra, while the Land of Fire was soaked in, you guessed it, fire chakra. It was a weak, thin film — there probably wasn't enough fire chakra in a cubic mile to perform a single fireball jutsu, but the mere presence of it still affected the very world around us.

I wondered... was the chakra from the plethora fire-using ninja, did the chakra make the ninja into fire-users, or it was a chicken-and-the-egg question of one causing the other? And was this nature chakra or was it something else entirely? Definitely food for thought.

I do apologize, though. I tended to get lost in my own thoughts from time to time as I contemplated this strange, beautiful world. I had so many questions, yet no frame of reference to answer them. How much can I even trust that knowledge I was reborn with? What I know seems to hold true, but then I run into situations like this, with the change in the ambient chakra, and I'm left scratching my head again.

Anyway, the three-day trip...

It was, as I said, quite fun. I'd loved running in my past life, and I love it even more now. The wind in my hair, the sun beaming down on my bare chest, the happy drumbeat of my heart in my chest, the gorgeous landscape passing by my superb vision — it was exquisite.

Like my teammates, I was traveling light. That was a relative term, however, as I was carrying with me almost my entire functional arsenal, several hundred pieces of equipment and corresponding ammunition, sealed within scrolls and those nested in even more scrolls. On my back, I carried my bow and quiver of iron arrows. On my hip, I had a scroll of tools I might need to access quickly in a fight. In the sealing tattoo on my chest, rather than my DAKKA puppet, I had a massive scroll with just about everything else, from incidentals and toiletries to railguns and the DAKKA itself. That scroll was a massive, sixty-pound hunk of paper and ink containing literal tons of weaponry. And all of that was reduced to the size and weight of the ink under my skin.

Takeshi, Katsumi, and Haruka were similarly light, only with scrolls strapped to them instead of inside tattooed seals. Takeshi had his swords, the real ones this time, strapped to his hips; Katsumi wore spiked gauntlets charged with her explosive chakra, making her hands extremely deadly; and Haruka wore a pair of knuckle dusters, which complimented her taijutsu style just fine.

Each of us was also wearing our usual attire. Haruka wore the standard Kumo jōnin attire; Takeshi wore nearly the same, save for using a genin's flak-jacket instead, and had his usual oni mask on his face; Katsumi wore her black pants and had her chest bare save for the bindings that pressed her developing boobs flat; and I wore nothing on my upper body save for my archer's gloves emblazoned with Kumo's insignia, my mask, and a single silver earring on my right ear.

Unlike normal, I wore a more ornate mask; it was still polished metal, but that's where the similarities to my other masks ended. It was shaped like a dragon's face, but with four mouthparts shaped in an X. The eyes of the mask were glass hemispheres painted with fluorescent orange nail polish, which made them look like glowing dragon's eyes. Having been made by me in homage to a character from my past life, it was subject to the same distortion effect that plagued my speech, writing, and drawing. Wearing the mask only made the effect worse, to the point that people would go out of their way to avoid looking at it a second time, often looking at my feet instead. And, in a world where bowing was a sign of both respect and submission, subtly forcing people to bow gave me an edge.

It was perfect for the occasion. Lord Ay wanted me to show off my power, and by extension, the power of Kumogakure. Any advantage I could get would be useful.

Ready or not, Konoha, here I come.