The pain of a gigabyte-class memory transfer was about three-quarters as inhumane and inexorable as a tax collector. It made for a lovely alarm clock. I was pumped and ready to slay an army of windmills at five in the morning.
I re-conjured only a handful of Shadow Clones for the lab; I thought I might find use for some extra heads when dealing with Kakashi. The dude was a pretty good liar, real classy. It sometimes takes one to know one. Sakura and Naruto were too green and dewy to smell the rotting fish, so I figured I had better get a good hard grip on the situation before it slipped away entirely.
When the village sorted us genin into teams, they evidently had compatibility in mind. They didn't do a good job, of course; theoretically, they couldn't have, even if their lives had depended upon it. But their intentions were obvious. The kids of old teammates were grouped together, teammates tended to have similar abilities—crude and basic ideas like that.
But it doesn't matter what a little man like me has to say. Politicians and bureaucrats are always and everywhere tremendously proud of their so-called work. One could probably bribe them to do just about anything, maybe even part with their souls. Those distinguished people have some pretty cheap souls. But otherwise, the village officials would never allow an insignificant genin competence test to disrupt their precious team planning.
The bottom line was that the teams were there to stay. The 66% failure rate that Kakashi mentioned did not mean two genin out of each three-man team. It meant two of every three genin teams. It meant that I had better make sure that my teammates were good enough to pass, even if they really weren't. It was stupid, it was unfair, and there was nothing a little man like me could do about it. If I knew what was good for myself, I'd better grin and play ball. Teamwork, camaraderie, friendship. The greater good, whatever the hell that means.
The previous night, I had carefully prepared a utility belt. It was black, leathery piece with a dozen pouches. I had packed enough food and water to last me a year, enough poison to turn a large lake or a small sea into holy water, enough metal to build a few high-rises, and enough explosives to tunnel straight through the border mountains of the Land of Snow. All of that went into scrolls, which went into more scrolls, and so on eight more times until it went into the utility belt. It was like nine circles of hell. See? Pretending to be deep ain't so hard. Even a puddle of sewage can do that.
I pulled on stiff, black, knee-length shorts with lots of pockets. More scrolls went into them. I paired that with a baggy white t-shirt, long enough to cover my belt. The color would help me dodge some heat from the spring sun, though it wouldn't do much to hide any blood spatters. That was alright. I wasn't planning to catch any.
White arm and leg warmers and nondescript navy sandals completed my ensemble. Invisible seals crawled all over my clothes, like the stuff of nightmares. High fashion, if I may say so myself. The seals held my immediately accessible arsenal.
When I received my Konoha ninja headband upon graduation, I'd brought it home and promptly set fire to it. I now tucked the surviving metal plate into a back pocket. Differential heating had given the plate some splotchy coloring around the edges that reminded me of dried piss on a pavement. I found it fitting for the emblem.
I marched myself out the house, feeling fresh as a jerky. The sun was sneaking a peak over the neighboring rooftops. He's always shy at that time of day. That was fine. I was awfully pasty, so I didn't like seeing his face anyway.
The training ground was a small field out by the northwestern border of the village. The grass grew in thin patches here and there, like an old man's hair. The greenery was all grayish blue in the early morning. I was feeling rather yellowish green and grayish blue myself. I sat down unceremoniously on a clump of weeds. I needed a drink. I flicked my left wrist and a bottle of icy brown stuff found its way into my hand. Must have been magic.
The fizz and sugar made me feel less like a desecrated corpse. Now I was a corpse with some honor, so I figured I had better get to doing something, make my contributions to society. I sealed the empty bottle back into my arm warmer. I got up and had a proper look around. The field was surrounded by tall beech trees. Their foliage could easily hide an assassin, two, or a hundred. A river, about twenty meters across, marked one side of the training area. I stood at the edge of the bank and looked down. The water was clear, and only a few meters deep at most, but even shallow, clean water would hide someone pretty well if it is twenty meters thick.
The ground was firm. No rabbit holes. No manholes. There were no large animals within two kilometers. All in all, the geography was rather basic. That told me the challenge was going to be something else, something artificial and convoluted that I couldn't predict. Whatever, I'd done my homework.
Next to the tree line facing the river, and running parallel, was a line of three wooden stakes, each about the size of a grown man, and driven deep into the earth. Facing the trees, I decided the stake on the left would be a good seat for eating my breakfast.