Our feet gently ascended the stairs with the silent grace only ninja could manage. Even Katsumi and I, who practically bounced up the stairs in low gravity from our own perspectives, had a level of grace that kept our footfalls soundless.

When the two of them veered off on the second floor to head to where they thought the exam was, to where everyone else seemed to be heading, I grabbed their wrists and pulled them onwards. "Trust me. We don't want to go that way."

"But room 301's right there," Katsumi said, pointing through the stairwell door to the clearly visible room and the crowd surrounding it.

"Trust me." I tapped the fake glass eye of my mask.

The illusion was interesting, from a chakra perspective. I wouldn't have noticed it if my byakugan were off, it was so subtle, but I could definitely see it with my eyes on. The chakra was attached like a bubble's film around the room in question at a wide enough radius that it hit us in the stairwell. There was a slight spiritual pressure on the parts of our brain that dealt with vision and spatial awareness. In short, it made you see something different and made your mental sense of location agree with that assessment. Only in self-reflection (or with hax eyes) could you see through it.

I pulled them onwards, despite their protests, and showed them the real third floor. "Oh," Katsumi realized. "Genjutsu?"

"Yup."

"So, all those ninja down there...?"

"Are idiots."

"Hey!"

I aimed my face in her direction. "The test has already started. This is phase one. We're in hostile territory now."

Her shoulders sagged ever so slightly. "Oh. Right."

The three of us walked into the real room 301. There, we found the proctor sitting at the back of the room and submitted the very last of our paperwork. Up until we turned that in, we merely had slots reserved for us in the exams. Now? It was official, and there was no backing down.

We took our seats. I intentionally picked some close to the back of the room, near the door we'd come in. None of the Konoha rookies were here just yet, but I could already see Ino, Chōji, and Shikamaru approaching. I couldn't help it; I wanted to be close.

"They're staring at us," Katsumi remarked softly. The tension in the room was palpable, and nobody dared speak louder than a soft whisper.

"We're the only Kumo ninja in the room. Of course, they're staring at us." I let out a long breath. "I wish we had some anonymity, but there's only three of us. Anyone who's done even a fraction of the research we have will know our names."

"You're right about that." Of all people, Kabuto sat down next to us. "You're hardly anonymous, Kaminyojin Kenta."

I didn't face him, but I did speak to him. "Yakushi Kabuto."

"You know me? I didn't know my name had reached Kumo."

"It's public record. I know the value of research," I replied.

"As do I." His hand slid down to his side and into his pouch. From within, he drew a deck of roughly two hundred chakra-encoded cards and set them on the long table beside us. He didn't even need to unveil them to me; their contents were as clear as day to my eyes. He drew out the card with my face on it, though the mask I wore was my simpler one and that younger me had less than half of my current tattoos. I recognized that photo; it was the one from my promotion to special chūnin. "Kaminyojin Kenta, age sixteen. 212 D-ranks, 27 C-ranks, 2 B-Ranks, and an A-Rank. No mission failures, ever. Was field-promoted to special chūnin, but demoted recently due to insubordination. Rumored to be a product of the Kaminyojin Blo—"

I'm fairly certain that my hand around his throat was why he stopped talking, but if anyone asks, I'm going to say he merely realized that spilling such information probably wasn't a good idea. And if he happened to find himself unable to talk, well, that definitely had nothing to do with the lightning chakra I shoved into the chakra points around his neck.

"Kabuto, my good man," I whispered just loud enough for the choking man to hear me. "I don't have blood on my hands. You know why? Because I'm a sniper. I'm never close enough to get the blood splatter on me. So, if you decide to keep running your mouth, you'll have a very long way to run to get away from me. But, if you decide to keep quiet and be a good little boy, I'll never have to look in your direction again. Got it?"

So what if I'm a bit sensitive about where I came from? So what if I'm a bit sensitive about the appearance of my demotion? I'm a warrior. I'm allowed to get pissed occasionally. Hell, I've styled myself around a fucking rage dragon. Besides, I know he was a spy of Orochimaru's. Allies, especially spies pretending to be allies, should know when to not open their mouths and spill each other's secrets. There is a time and a place for everything, and this is not fucking it.

Kabuto nodded as best as he could given that my meaty hands were wrapped around his neck. I would have loved to strangle him to death, or maybe fry his insides, but I really couldn't cause a more of a scene than I already had. With a shove, I released him.

He gasped for air, then stood on shaky legs. His teammates came to support him.

"Dude, you're scary when you're mad," Katsumi muttered.

Almost at exactly the same moment, however, Yamanaka Ino marched over to me. "What the hell do you think you're doing, attacking a Leaf Shinobi like that?!"

I took a long, calming breath, then took an equally long look at her. Her eyes stared back at me with piercing intensity. "Bah... he insulted my honor and my clan." I picked up the deck of cards Kabuto had accidentally left sitting next to me. "Plus, he's a bit arrogant, flaunting his research like this." I flipped through to Ino's card, then used my chakra to hack into the encoding and make it visible; it was a bit like picking a lock when you could see the pins — utterly easy for me. "Yamanaka Ino, heiress to the Yamanaka clan. Height, weight, mission record, recorded strengths and weaknesses... boy, Kabuto's card has a lot of information about you that would be dangerous in the wrong hands." I flipped the card around and handed it to her. She hesitantly took it. It took her only half a second to go from confused to pissed.

The cards had three states: hidden, short, and long. Hidden was blank and short had only the bare-bones information, but long had plenty of other juicy secrets, stuff that he shouldn't have known. "That bastard!" Ino shouted at the top of her lungs, drawing the attention of everyone who wasn't already looking at us.

Taking the deck, I activated all the cards and started hurling them around the room. Every single one of them ended up exactly where I wanted it to: right in front of the individual genin that card was about. Suffice to say, within seconds, there were a lot of angry genin, and all of them were looking for Kabuto.

And guess who they weren't looking at anymore? That's right, my team.

"Smooth," Takeshi commented, having reached the same conclusion.

"Thanks."

Shortly after that fiasco, Hinata's team entered, followed by Neji's a moment later. I eyed my two cousins. Neither of them had a chakra network around their eyes as well-developed as I did. And why would they? If canon was any indication, they used their byakugan far less than I did. As for their teammates, I didn't pay them much attention other than making passing observations, such as seeing the defect in Rock Lee's chakra network or the bugs inside Shino's body.

Then, like a ball of sunshine, came Naruto and his team. I flared my charka a bit, coating the inside of my head with more physically natured chakra. Then I signaled my teammates to do the same.

Naruto stepped into the room. Like a miasma, his chakra flooded the room, gravitating towards people's heads. In light of the effect of his chakra, that smile struck me as more malicious than it probably was — my paranoia was definitely skewing my perception right now.

Up close, with a lot of people to compare, I saw how Naruto's chakra pushed out and acted among strangers. It definitely was less pronounced than total strangers, while Ino, Hinata, and Sakura were affected the most. Hinata was definitely blushing, while Ino and Sakura weren't harping on him like I'd wondered if they would. Maybe I was overreacting?

Wait, Ino was brushing against Naruto now. And so was Sakura. Were they aware they're doing it? I couldn't tell, but they weren't pulling away either. And now Hinata was moving closer to the jinchūriki too.

I signed to my teammates. [Stay Back. I investigate. No apparent danger. Team uncompromised. Stay alert.]

[Affirmative,] they signed back.

I stood and started moving closer to Naruto. His eyes met my dragon mask's, and like with Gaara, there was no subtle twitch-flinch upon seeing it, unlike literally everyone else every single time they made eye-contact with it. Was it a jinchūriki thing? I'm really suspecting it was.

Shoving the questions about the nature of the bijū and their hosts aside, I covered the last few feet between him and me. "You know, you and your friends are a bit too green to be taking these exams. Still, I'm curious to see how well you'll all do." Taking out the last of the ninja cards Kabuto had, I handed them to each of the rookies. "By the way, I took these off a leaf ninja named Kabuto. Nobody should be carrying that many of their allies' secrets."

That got the rookies frustrated, but before they could go do anything, I singled out Naruto. "Uzumaki, right?"

"Yeah?" The blond kid asked. The moment he spoke to me, his chakra miasma lurched towards my head. I deflected it internally with my own chakra, but it kept trying.

Not letting my annoyance (and a slight amount of fear) taint my voice, I said, "I'm Kaminyojin Kenta. You met my teammates the other night at that ramen stand. Katsumi and Takeshi? Them."

"Oh!" His face lit up and the smile returned in full force. "They were nice. Are they here too?"

"They're around. But that's actually what I wanted to talk to you about." I clutched his shoulder. My voice dropped half an octave. "Stay away from them."

The miasma changed. It struck me a different way, one easily countered considering how slow it was. The timing of the reaction was key, however; it reacted as soon as I spoke with hostility. "What?! Why!?"

"I'm really sensitive to ambient chakra, and you're leaking all over the place. I'd say you were slobbering like a dog, but that would be an insult to dogs. It's disgusting watching you coil your chakra around the minds of everyone around you, watching you twist what they are."

"What?! I'm not doing anything like that! You're just making stuff up!" He thinks he's innocent; there were no tells to suggest he's lying, as far as my eyes could see, not even in his brain's chakra flow. So, it really is unconscious? Well, that's points in his favor, at least.

I made a show of glancing around. "Uchiha. You have the sharingan, right? Can you look at what his chakra is doing around other people? Hyūga, you too. He's influencing everyone."

As I said that, I deactivated my own byakugan so that they wouldn't see it active. I also nudged my mask to give me a sliver of peripheral vision with which to see.

Sasuke's eyes turned red, while the veins around the eyes of the Hyūga cousins bulged. "He's right, you're leaking chakra, Naruto," Sasuke said.

"Lady Hinata, your head's practically covered in his chakra. There's a reason you were instructed to keep away from him," Neji said. "As this man pointed out, this is one of those reasons. Control yourself, Uzumaki."

"I'm not doing anything!" Naruto shouted defensively.

"I-I knew he was doing that," Hinata softly spoke, "but I didn't think it was doing anything."

"Chakra that unbalanced messes with the spirit chakra of anyone it touches. He's whispering into your mind and soul," I stated. Aside from being a warning, my comment was also something of a probe; my own teammates had not thought the statement was odd when I first told them, and neither did anyone now react as if it did. I was by no means an expert on chakra, and probing what is supposedly common knowledge can give insight into it.

"Come, Hinata," Neji demanded. "We must distance you from him."

"I'm not doing anything!" Naruto insisted again, a little more desperation in his voice this time.

I leaned in closer and whispered, "Maybe you aren't but maybe it's that which is sealed within you." He stiffened. "You know what I'm talking about. Now, until you can get your chakra under control, stay away from my team."

And with that, I turned and strolled back to my team, hands in my pockets. Reactivating my byakugan, I watched Naruto start to panic.

Strangely, the fox in his gut reacted too, if the shift in its chakra was anything to go by. Naruto's expression subtly shifted at about the same time.

I frowned. Was he already talking to the fox?

By the time I reached my teammates again, Ino had made herself scarce, Hinata was still a distance away and occupied by her cousin, Sakura had been taken aside by Sasuke, and the others had followed their respective teammates, leaving a very confused Naruto standing mostly by himself.

[Observing?] I signed.

[Affirmative. Threat?]

[Minor. Active. Mildly hostile. Threat diminished.] As paradoxical as those last two sign phrases were, hostility was slightly better for us, as it carried with it less risk of subversion. "Uzumaki Naruto," I said, switching back to the spoken language, "Classification: Master — emotional subversion."

"Understood."

In contrast to the pre-exam waiting period, the exam itself was utterly boring. It was exactly as I remembered it from canon. That wasn't a surprise, as the intelligence I'd gotten from Lord Ay had suggested it would be this written test.

As we'd walked in, I whispered to my teammates, I'll be watching. Considering my warning from before we'd left and my words from just a moment ago, it barely took them even a moment to make the connection to cheating on the exam, then to using me to cheat.

Alas, yet again, I am nothing more than a tool for the use of those around me. A breeding stud for my clan and an answer book for my team. Oh, woe is me.

But seriously, within ten seconds, both had signaled me for help, and help I did. I sent chakra strings out my feet, across the floor, into their chakra points, through their bodies, and into their hands. To give you an idea of how insane that actually was, it was like a surgeon trying to operate with his feet on the invisible man. I was probably the only person in the world that could pull it off.

Of course, it would have been easier if I could have used the Nara shadow jutsu, like the one stretching across the floor behind me right now, but alas, I could not. What it did give me was full, independent control of the limbs of both of my teammates. Puppetry, but with my electric chakra controlling them and numbing their muscles from the inside out. They could not even fight back well, as my chakra displaced theirs.

Then, with my byakugan active, I found the plants and started writing down the same answers they did.

As soon as they were done, I had my teammates flip their papers over, then released them from my control. As for me, since I had so much time to kill, I started doodling a bunch of eyes on the back of my paper. And since they were eyes from various fictional characters and Naruto characters that I'd never seen before, the distortion took hold full-force.

Wait... are Neji and Hinata bleeding from their noses? Crap. And now some of the proctors are bleeding too. Double crap.

"Number twenty-seven! Stop disrupting the testing environment!"

Sheepishly, I erased my doodles and then scribbled what was left out. "Sorry," I softly whispered.

A long half-hour later (it was a subjective hour and a half for me and longer still for Katsumi), the tenth question finally came. Naruto made his declaration that he wouldn't let the question scare him, as I'd expected, but it wasn't nearly as impassioned as I'd thought it had been in canon. I think I might have made the guy depressed; who would have guessed? Even with his speech, people still dropped out.

I think I'm finally, really stepping on butterflies now. After these exams, I'm going to basically throw out the last remnants of my foreknowledge as useless.

With an explosion of glass, the sexy woman known as Mitarashi Anko smashed her way into the room and hung her banner, proudly proclaiming herself as the proctor of the second stage of the exam.

"You're early, Anko," Ibiki deadpanned.

And just like that, the wind was taken from her sails. "Yeah, yeah. You at least cut a decent number of them out. Not as many as I'd hoped but more than I'd feared."

"Someone got them all riled up before the exam started," Ibiki replied, looking right at me. So, they were watching that? Hmm... I wonder what the Hokage will think of his precious jinchūriki's effect on people's minds.

"Then whoever that was was doing your job for you." Anko upped her volume and addressed us all. "Alright, everyone still here, your senseis will have instructions on when and where to meet tomorrow morning. Be there or you fail. Dismissed."

"Hey, wait up!"

We were outside the Academy, headed back to the market district of Konoha to get lunch, when Ino ran up to us. Without discussion of any kind, we simultaneously paused, allowing her to approach. She walked up to us, to me specifically.

"Look, I wanted to thank you."

I cocked my head a little to the side. "For what?"

"Naruto. The Yamanaka clan specializes in mind and memory jutsu; we take mental health deadly seriously. If you'd just been flinging accusations about Naruto, I'd be mad at you, but since Sasuke and Neji both saw it too, I decided to take a look at my own head. I want to say Naruto's a sweet guy, but I did find traces of manipulation. I'm going to my father to check the extent of the damage. If it weren't for you..."

"Mind manipulation scares me," I said, "but what scares me more is that it seemed to target girls more, and my cousin, the heir to my clan, had already been exposed. If you find out the exact nature of the manipulation, please let me know."

"Can do," she cheerfully replied. "I'll see you tomorrow at the next stage." And with that, she jogged off to reunite with the rest of her team.

"Kenta, I can take care of myself," Katsumi complained when Ino was out of earshot.

"Of course you can, up until the moment you can't," I declared. "I just want to stop that moment from coming, my Lady."

"Ugh. Fine. Whatever. Let's just go get lunch."

Unlike Katsumi, who was clearly starting to get mildly irritated with my protectiveness, Takeshi skipped along with a happy bounce in his step, and with good reason. That was a stupidly easy victory for us. (Actually, some of those questions were just high-school-level physics, so I technically didn't even need to cheat, so victory in the way we'd done it was just flaunting how easy it was.)

As our silent companion took the lead, the annoyed expression faded from Katsumi's face. I could feel the smile forming on my own at the same time. "One down..."

"Two to go," my cousin finished.

"How about some dango? My treat."

Takeshi stopped on a dime, spun around, and nodded vigorously.

Katsumi laughed. "I think he likes that idea."