"What do we do now!?" Naruto was losing his shit. "Meiko was amazing, you know, there's no way we'll pull this off without her?"
"I'm sorry, team…" Staeg let out a heavy sigh after returning to his team. "I have failed my responsibility as a leader. I am ready to pay the price for it, but I don't think all of us should…"
Kiyomi looked on at Team Eurydome, she tried to figure out if their broad-shouldered leader was just mad or if every team leader should have tackled responsibility like that, to begin with. Kiyomi knew almost nothing about singing, she knew that deep down. She could have stepped out on stage and hoped to either be as naturally gifted or as passionate as Staeg was but it would have been childish to do so.
"Yeah, you put us in a real pickle alright…" the second member of Team Eurydome, the shinobi who was likely named Iuteb as that name listed by Ibiki did not sound like it would have fit the kunoichi of Team Eurydome at all. "Then again, it's not like any of us were naturally gifted for that sort of thing…"
"Iuteb is right. You did wonderfully against someone who takes pride in their musical abilities. Went ahead and memorized all the text in a snap too. If it is all the same, I'd like to take the stage now. After that inspirational performance, there's no way I will do anything less than my best." Harpalke of Team Eurydome expressed her hype not only through the content of her words but also her body language, crouching and pumping it up with her shut fists.
"Your best may just be irrelevant. You either can sing or not." Iuteb sighed, "Although… I suppose there's no better option. Both of us lack the talent although at least one of us has any passion whatsoever."
Staeg nodded and tapped Harpalke's shoulder in encouragement. The leader of Team Eurydome appeared revitalized by the revelation that he may have inspired his teammate for success. "Remember what we're doing this for. Getsugakure requires more chuunin, Stea can't carry our village's burden on herself."
"I wonder what they could be talking about…" Naruto scratched his chin, engaged in deep pondering.
"Getsugakure has been stricken with a great famine some years ago. It used to be a lush and rich country, taking great pride in the immeasurable luxury of various fish it pulled. The caviar it used to provide used to be one of the world's greatest and most sought after delicacies and since most of the world considers fish an essential product, Getsugakure was one of the most economically stable and powerful villages that only trained ninja to protect the gold mine of their fishing industry." Kiyomi explained, looking at the timer that had appeared on the screen together with the words for the next song.
"At some point, the Three-Tails has stumbled onto the vast riches of the Getsugakure's fishing supply, narrowing it down to a very thin line. To put a long story short – hundreds of species of fish becoming endangered and primed for extinction and rising political tension because of it caused endless loops of coups, corruption, and famine that Getsugakure is only now recovering from." The Yamanaka finished her explanation while seeing precious seconds trickling down.
"I heard it was the Eight-Tails, isn't that guy called the Kraken of the Land of Water?" Meiko closed one eye and looked up with the other, trying to recall some finer details.
"The Eight-Tails goes between slumbering in the abyssal depths of the Tako's Reach, that's far from Getsugakure. Three-Tails is the more likely cause, given its newly gained freedom after the death of the Three-Tails' Jinchuuriki during the Kage Summit." Kiyomi shook her head before letting out a deep sigh. "Well… It's not like it matters. I'd prefer if we think about the problem at hand."
"Oh, don't worry, I've got my clone memorizing the words right now, you know." Naruto pointed at his back with his thumb, revealing a duplicate of the young man, scratching his chin and working all too hard at memorizing the song's words.
"You do realize that means you're going onstage, right?" Kiyomi was taken aback by this clever although very altruistic gesture from a teammate she expected only cowardice in front of an intellectual and technical challenge such as this one.
"Man… I never realized that the consequences of us winning will be that severe. There are so many people here, participating for so many noble reasons, you know…" the original Naruto looked down in self-reflection, likely the youth was already questioning his own reasons for taking part in the exams that likely ranged on something akin to "that's would be so cool to do".
"True. But that is also a part of the exams. Out there in the real world, that's what the missions you will be taking part in will entail. Maybe you will be told by your village what's right and wrong and, for all intents and purposes, that will be your new truth from that point on, however, your enemy will also fight their hardest because they will have their own things to lose and their own reasons for fighting. An important part of being a ninja is having the heart of stone to snuff those reasons out, possibly breaking the enemy, helping you assure your own victory." Kiyomi explained with a face as grim as it was befitting such a topic.
"Man… Even if we win, this is going to suck so bad, you know…" Naruto groaned before turning around and taking the first bold steps onto the stage.
"It doesn't have to feel good. If it does, you've sunken too deep." Kiyomi nodded, acknowledging the sheer guts of her teammate to step out onto the stage when he dreaded every single bit of the prospect of facing this challenge head-on.
"Heh, I guess both of us come completely green to this. This will be fun…" Harpalke grinned with excitement but also a healthy bit of fear rustling deep down. This one failure here could have cost any of the two teams the entire exams – whatever their reasons were, one wrong note could have set all of them ablaze. There would be no additional income for a hungering village, striving for as quick of a recovery as possible but one that would likely never become the way it was before, back in its prime.
Just like in the field of battle. Whatever the reasons for fighting were, beloved people left at home, the integrity and well-being of one's village, secrets that were to stay hidden or secrets that one wanted to expose, all of that could have been snuffed out by one wrong move. Once again, Kiyomi felt baffled by how apparent it was that this exam was put together by people of multiple countries and universes, all of whom shared that mutual knowledge of how the life of a ninja intermediate and above was like.
"Man, your voice sounds so nice, you know." Naruto grumbled to himself. "Come to think of it, girls do have more melodious voices, even Sakura-chan sounds like a princess when she's singing or humming…"
"Who knows, perhaps you are right and I do have a natural advantage?" Harpalke shrugged with a shy smile that suggested the fact that she took Naruto's words as a compliment to her own features.
"Maybe… But it's not like there's nothing I can do about it!" Naruto smirked, placing his hands together in the dog-boar-ram combination of hand seals. One poof and a cloud of smoke later, the young man emerged from the smoke as a knockout-attractive young woman that, had it not been for the whiskers on her face, could not have been confused for the original user of the Transformation Jutsu.
"Sexy Jutsu!" Naruto sang out in a sultry, feminine voice before pressing his long and decorated fingernail to her lips and bending his gorgeous body in a suggestive pose. "Although… I suppose I will need much more advantage than this…"
"You loof, stop fooling around out there!" Meiko shot her fist out into the sky before pointing at the timer on the screen that was counting down the very last seconds. "You've only got three more seconds left!"
Meiko turned to Kiyomi's side, as if expecting some sort of scolding from the team leader but the team leader was utterly overwhelmed and caught by surprise by Naruto's technique. While Kiyomi had not lost all traces of reason, she was struggling to keep the immense amounts of blood streaming from her nose back in her body where it belonged and her face had dyed in a shameful blush that turned as crimson as her blood by the upper area of the Yamanaka princess' cheeks.
Naruto returned to his original form before assuming the hand seal position of the signature hand seal that both kunoichi had seen before countless times during team training. "Shadow Clone Jutsu!" The multiplication technique had multiplied the number of Naruto to an excessive amount, where the total number of people barely fit on the stage anymore.
"Now for the finisher, you know! Harem Jutsu!" Naruto's face appeared far too confident for the trick that he had pulled, using a combination of the Shadow Clone jutsu as well as the Sexy Jutsu from earlier to transform all of his clones into the curvier and feminine versions of their original selves. Just for the sake of showing off, each and every single "lady" had exclusive look in terms of their hair, their facial features and their voices, even though each and every single member of Naruto's harem had the signature whiskers of the original.
Meiko was unsure which fact was more outrageous, that their third, lifesaver member had gone on stage and just performed this stunt in front of everybody, including Morino Ibiki and Musha, that this very same young man would go on to become the Seventh Hokage of his respective universe in the future or that the trick actually worked.
Work it did – Naruto may not have hit nearly as many notes as Meiko did, his rhythm was subpar at best although all of his transformations had melodious voices and synchrony with each other, almost as if modeled after actual singers that the young man had encountered in real life. Given the distinctive appearances that seemed far too specific and well-executed to be random and something that Naruto came up on the spot, Meiko had settled on never bringing this matter up in front of Naruto for the sake of her own peace of mind.
"Hmmm. This isn't a tough call whatsoever. I'll have to go with Team Hokage on this one. Contestant Naruto displayed ingenuity and adaptation skills that allowed him to overcome the natural gap and disadvantages placed in front of him. That is everything a Chuunin should be, while Contestant Harpalke did possess a greater sense of musical hearing and feel the rhythm better, this was the battlefield claimed by Team Hokage." Morino Ibiki's face supersized on the screen with occasional flickers of static declared. The flickers appeared since the local technology was not quite there yet, compared to the marvels brought by Seventh Naruto and ones that the guests had snagged or borrowed from other universes while exploring prior to the event.
"Hell yeah, you know!" Naruto attempted to punch through the ceiling if the most immediate impressions of his overjoyed leap with the thrust of his fist upward would have been taken for granted.
"You knocked Kiyomi out…" Meiko pointed at the unconscious team leader who laid with whited out eyes and a tiny stream of foam dripping from the side of her mouth.
"Oh man!" Naruto scratched the back of his head. "What the hell happened, this jutsu usually only has this sort of effect on super-perverted old guys, you know…"
"I have no idea, honestly…" Meiko shrugged. "But I'm not carrying her around. I used to do that all the time back in the day before I realized she was getting slugged on purpose just so I could carry her around. I guess she's a bit lewd in her own kind of way…"
"We've been bested…" Staeg sighed on the other side of the field, taking a step onto the stage to get a better look at the team that had eliminated his own right on the most undignified first step of the ladder.
"Hmph… Eliminated by these guys…" Iuteb sighed while observing Naruto poke Kiyomi's forehead a couple of times just to see if their team leader would respond with signs of life to external stimuli. "Do you guys think that maybe we just suck?"
"No way," Harpalke grinned with an enthusiastic shake of her head. "They may not have their big bad troublemaker with them at the moment, but they've replaced her with another one that more than matches her in terms of unpredictability. These guys will go far."
"Unless they hit a random challenge they've no way of dealing with like we have…" Iuteb sighed while the trio of Getsugakure's Team Eurydome prepared to leave through the side where Team Hokage had entered. Upon walking up closer to the winning team, a swarm of black cubes burst forth from Staeg's chest and began gathering around Naruto who, after extending his hand out to the front, formed a solid, black cube in his hand out of them all. A cube that was quick to fade out after blinking in sync with another black cube in Kiyomi's possession, floating just above her chest that just barely moved as a sign of life.
Meiko waved farewell to Team Eurydome that posed a serious challenge and very nearly eliminated Team Hokage despite her being quite adequate at all things musical before crouching back to the team leader and placing her hand out in front of Kiyomi's mouth. The blacksmith blinked a few times before shaking the hand further back.
"Geez, her breath's hot, you really did a number on her…" Meiko stood up and tried putting her hands inside her pockets as she did during training when she wore a tracksuit but found her gauntlets rubbing at the leathery pteruges by her sides, forcing the redhead to press her hands behind her, assuming a staunch, militaristic stance.
"Wuh… Well what are we gonna do with her? We can't just leave her here, you know!" Naruto squinted while shifting his eyes from Meiko back down to Kiyomi. "If I knew this kind of attack would be so effective against her, I'd have used it all the time during training. Would have saved me so much effort, you know…"
"I'm not carrying her." Meiko repeated before an awkward pause while the two sent flurries of visual arrows one at another. Despite Meiko possessing mighty ocular offensive, she caved in and leaned to grab her unconscious team leader by her wrist, choosing to drag her around like a sack of potatoes instead of going back on her word and carrying the unconscious Yamanaka into the next challenge.
The wall parted just like the other one, bringing Team Hokage into another room. Somehow the cube appeared to be well aware which teams have been eliminated, which meant that no matter which point of exit Team Eurydome would have chosen – they'd have left to the exit from the facility regardless whereas Team Hokage was sent to another point of the seemingly infinite interior.
"Wow… This room's packed, you know…" Naruto observed the obvious. There may have been around ten whole teams standing in the room and all of them looked surprised to see one another, meaning that they were not just standing around here – they've all just entered, same as Team Hokage.
"The cube must be messing with both space and time. I don't think there's a way that everyone here completed their challenges at the same time…" Meiko observed, doing her best to deflect or stonewall the awkward stares from all of the teams at the unconscious team leader they had with them.
It was Musha's face that appeared on the screen this time. Hair that some time ago used to gently fall over and conceal one half of the woman's face now seemed to have grown unruly and just gotten in her way, meaning she had to puff or push it aside even as she was standing still and narrating the event. It seemed worrisome to attempt and imagine how it must have behaved during combat, then again, likely the jounin had intended to get herself in order before any actual missions came up.
"Well, now that we have eleven teams in here, we can begin the next stage. This one's a special one, you might like it or not, depending on your attitude but at least five teams stand to gain a Cube Coupon if everything goes smoothly…" Musha clapped her hands out in front of her, treating the gathered genin as children even if some of them were proper adults, some of them to the point of embarrassment as by this age a ninja was meant to have at least made it to chuunin.
"Or ten teams might get eliminated…" a young man in a white tracksuit and spiky, jaw-length blond hair that struck a profound similarity to Naruto's. This did not look like a random similarity as the youth who would become the Seventh stared at the youth on the other side of the room with a sense of shock to be compared to a sudden cold shower.
"A relative of yours?" Meiko wondered.
"Y-Yeah… I think that's my dad, you know…" Naruto nodded after a gulp.
Sorry 'bout the delay. I'm on my vacation and while I planned to do some serious writing during my time off-work, it turned out that I ended up without internet access or much of anything but hardcore vacationing for a whole week...
I'll try to make up for it ;)