"Yep, definitely not Shino…" Kiba sniffed the air just above his teammate's body. Even though he had no reason not to trust Kiyomi declaration that there was almost no way that the staff of the Chuunin Exams would permit these puppets to just kill their contestants, the Inuzuka was one to check, as long as he got to show off that unmatched nose of his.
Akamaru barked beside him in acknowledgment. Kiba's canine partner looked by far the most lost in the beginning but he was also the quickest to determine that this dead body was not Shino's, despite looking identical to the Aburame of Naruto's universe.
"A body double then? Maybe a clone? I've pulled a trick like this on Kiba and Akamaru once by extending a Shadow Clone technique, you know…" Naruto leaned to his teammates.
"That's smart." Meiko nodded with a smile.
"It must have been before the aliens switched the real Naruto out with this replacement." Kiyomi utilized the opening that her teammate provided. It was not too long ago that the Yamanaka had discovered the unbridled joy in riposting back at somebody who took the chance of an opening to brag.
"What's that, you know!?" Naruto rolled back his sleeve and shook his fist at Kiyomi while Kiba placed his hands inside his pockets and sighed.
"We're meant to look for clues on Shino's body to help us have a cleaner shot at picking the right puppet. Even if we pick the wrong one again and it ends up killing Kiba and Hinata, we won't proceed unless we find the right one. That means we have a couple of shots left at best…" Kiyomi brushed off Naruto's call for a quick quarrel and got back to the main issue at hand.
"You examined the body already, didn't you?" Meiko looked at Kiyomi.
"Visually, yes, there did not seem to be that much to go by. His body shows signs of struggle but pretty much any one of those guys could have caused that…" the Yamanaka turned toward the horror show inside glass cages. While the buggers and demons inside laid static, as if frozen in time, they appeared almost mocking now, knowing the context. It just made Kiyomi want to run up to the damned panel and start bashing those buttons and incinerating all of them…
"Kiba's pretty good with scent, you know," Naruto stated the obvious. After a pair of seconds of reconsideration of what it was that the future Seventh had said, Kiyomi picked up an interesting point he had raised. Kiba would be amazing at this task, this was horrible for them! As if he could hear Kiyomi beg Kiba to not approach the glass cages, the Inuzuka walked up to them with Akamaru by his side and began sniffing at them.
"What's he doing?" Meiko wondered.
"Trying to match the foreign scent on Shino's body, you know." Naruto squinted with his arms crossed, a gesture of jealousy. "These three hang around each other often, Kiba and Akamaru know what their friends smell like, meaning that if there's a foreign smell on Shino's body – they should pick it up."
"Struggle…" Meiko scratched her chin, she turned towards the eighth glass cage and pointed at the ordinary if a little chubby man who reeked of having given up on grooming located inside. "I don't think this guy killed Shino…"
"That's guesswork…" Kiyomi waved her hand at the glass cage. Then again, guesswork was all they had at that moment. While Kiba examined the glass cages, Kiyomi moved up to Shino's body and tried examining it again, it was not that the blonde knew of something she had not checked yet, it was more that she was desperate to find that missing clue and doing something made her feel like she was progressing down that path, even if she was not.
"Hmmm…" Kiba stopped in the middle, right between cages four and five. "Yep. I've got it!" he raised his hand up, not reaching toward one specific panel but just as a show that he was about to press the button.
"Wait! You've already taken your guess, it's our turn now!" Kiyomi stopped him. Kiba's hand froze in mid-motion and the Inuzuka turned around with a blush to his cheeks and an overly eager smile – he knew that she would say that. That was why he lingered in the exact middle point and reached out for pretty much thin air.
"Ummm… I think Kiba-kun should press the button." Hinata walked up, mashing her hands against each other as if trying to reduce them to fleshy porridge. "You did trick us by raising the pressure earlier. You lingered in front of the glass cages, knowing we'd object, even though all we had to gain was make things easier for you."
"Yeah," Kiba nodded with a wink. He was nowhere near being angry about Kiyomi's plan but he was aware of it. "Now, when it's your turn, you've got a whole body to work off of and one less fake puppet to pick from. Not to mention, there's a fair chance that the next puppet might kill me, the only guy who knows for certain who killed Shino."
"It's not like you can fight us. There's two of you and three of us, Naruto can make as many copies of himself as it is needed. If we want that button pressed – that's how it'll be. I didn't want to play that card, not this early but…" Kiyomi shrugged. "The next choice is ours. You might know the right puppet, that's good for you. Still, we might not have the uncanny, perfect roster for such a task and a skillset that excels at tracking the killer, but what we've got is our own shot at this."
Kiba stepped aside, Akamaru barked by his side and followed his partner by his thigh. "Take it then…" it was as if the Inuzuka dared Kiyomi to take the shot and miss.
"Hey, how about I make six clones and we all press the button together? That will still count as one shot and we'll hit the right o…" Naruto yelled out from behind.
"Not now, Naruto," Kiyomi sighed. She needed something, a clue, an ace of some kind… She couldn't just press the button and miss, that meant that Kiba would be hitting the jackpot for certain. The Inuzuka returned to Hinata, hands in his pockets and leaned at her, signaling that he was relaying the information he had gathered back to his teammate, just in case the slim chance of him being the unlucky murder victim next turned out to be the inevitable one.
How? How were they to pull this off? Maybe they should have engaged Kiba and Hinata. No. It would have been best to engage them before Kiba could take a whiff. Bust his nose, then kick Akamaru in the nostrils and call for a truce? Straws… These were the bottom of the barrel straws! May as well have poked Hinata's eyes out too. Now, pressing the button was making it riskier, the odds were more likely that it would be someone from Team Hokage to be switched out with a murdered body double.
"I have an idea, you know!" Naruto raised his hand and made the Shadow Clone Jutsu hand seal. Kiyomi blinked a pair of times in confusion while six more Naruto body doubles appeared from a cloud of smoke.
"I think we've established that hitting all the buttons at the same time is not what we're going with." Meiko groaned out.
"No, my next idea is way better!" Naruto rubbed his nose with his finger and an ecstatic expression while the clones pooled together in a small group and began throwing their fists at one another.
"Rock-Paper-Scissors! Again! Again! Again!" the clones continued to play the childish game until, one by one, most of the clones lost the game and either dispersed or, in the case of the original, stood aside while the others completed the rotation.
"We pick No. 6, you know!" Naruto declared while giving Kiyomi a thumb-up.
"No. 6? Why?" Kiyomi wondered, knowing full-well she was walking into a realm of an idiot's dreamland.
"Because Clone No. 6 won the game, you know." Naruto snickered.
"Unbelievable…" Kiyomi muttered. She wasn't going to lie, somewhere deep down she had suspected that this was exactly how Naruto's plan was supposed to work.
"Oh, sorry, do you have a better idea, you know?" Naruto placed his hands by his hips, appearing almost offended that his team leader wasn't about to jump at the opportunity to take his wonderful idea for granted.
"This isn't a game!" Kiyomi jumped up on her feet. "Are you blind? Kiba knows the answer, if we shoot and miss, which we most certainly will if I give in to your imbecilic plan, he'll eliminate us. That will be it!"
"Isn't that always the case on the field though?" Naruto looked down, shriveling in disappointment. "Sometimes you just gotta take a leap of faith and trust your instinct, you know. Not everything's always in the clues…"
A deep sigh left Kiyomi's chest. With a tired and defeated expression, the Yamanaka rose up and stumbled to the panels. Then, with a reignited flare of passion, she turned back to Naruto and fired off some of that flame from her gaze at him, though without showing any particular care to what it'd end up hitting.
"Fine, I'm not choosing No. 6 though, I'll just trust my instincts." Kiyomi hissed.
"Suit yourself, you know…" Naruto shrugged. "I was just suggesting."
The Yamanaka slammed the button next to the glass cage inside of which the most ordinary of all puppets laid, one resembling a rather unimpressive and chubby man who had let himself go. Just like before, tongues of flames erupted from down under, consuming the man though that much could not have been assessed from the static way in which he accepted his end. After the flames had consumed No. 8, the glass cages tilted, thumped back down and then shot back up with darkness enveloping the entire room once more.
Once the light returned, Kiba and Hinata glared at each other in worry, then, after realizing that their team was still in the game as neither of them had been "murdered", they began scanning the room again. Kiyomi took a while to scan the room but once she saw a lying figure hunched over in a pool of mahogany-colored blood she gasped. Even if she knew inside the rational part of her mind that this was not real, something inside the irrational, subconscious part of her snapped and her glare blanked out as her body moved on its own.
"Meiko!" Kiyomi screamed out. The blacksmith laid with her armor peeled off like a can and her ribs torn open like a pair of frontal wings, bones sticking out from her chest with the final, shocked expression frozen on the redhead's face.
"Relax and start thinking, what could have caused this, which statue could have done this?" Naruto pressed his hand on Kiyomi's shoulder as the kneeled over her comrade. Kiyomi knew that she didn't get Meiko murdered, this was just a body double, a ploy but… It was what this challenge represented that chilled her to the bone.
Did it really matter that this Meiko wasn't the real one? Obviously it did, but… If she was a real chuunin and led her own team, she'd have just gotten Meiko killed. She trusted her instincts, played the roulette and missed the draw. Her clutched knuckles shook while a single pair of tears ran down her eyes.
"Hey, come on now…" Naruto sat down by Kiyomi's side, comforting her. "This doesn't mean anything, you know. Meiko's not really dead…"
"We failed. Kiba knows the answer and we've no way of winning now." Kiyomi whimpered before stiffening her upper lip and getting herself back in control. She was the leader of her team, she could only allow herself to appear weak and feel something for so long. If Naruto was consoling her, fulfilling her duty as a leader to keep her team coherent, what sort of a leader was she even?
"It doesn't matter, we'll pull through somehow, what's important is that we never give up, you know!" Naruto smiled, bending his arm by the elbow in a way that left his fist raised for a sideways bump. The cheer of that goofball was contagious. Kiyomi responded to his gesture in kind.
"Heh, too bad…" Kiba stroke his own nose with his index finger and approached the forth figure. "We win!" he yelled out while smashing the button with a slam of his fist.
The flames hurled from down below and consumed the headless grease-ball with facial features scattered all across its chest. By now it would have been somewhat comforting to hear those creatures scream or acknowledge the fact they were being destroyed in some other manner. Seeing them just stare blankly and accept demise made it somehow seem like they were being smug like they knew they were playing a one-sided game and picking the poor genin off like victims of a slasher pic.
Darkness enveloped the area while the glass cages shot open. Kiba's eyes widened while he stumbled back, just a bit of panic setting into his overconfident heart before the more vocal expression of what plagued his gut.
"No! This doesn't make any sense! I smelled the puppet! The right one!" Kiba kept bargaining with the darkness but, as it usually was the case, the abyss stared back but it did not bargain nor did it accept compromises. A whimper pierced the silence, one that transitioned into a blood-curdling scream and then the lights popped back on.
Kiba stared at Naruto and Kiyomi, the leader of Team Hokage stood solemn with her eyes closed, accepting her fate, whatever it might have been. Naruto angered and ready to fight back the potential assailant trying to drag him away. It took a while for the pair to realize that they had survived another round. It took about as long for Kiba to realize that if the two of Team Hokage were still standing by each other, that meant…
Kiba's head jerked to the side, just enough for his glance to catch the dreadful sight of Hinata laying with her arms thrown to the side and her neck snapped good two-hundred degrees to the side, far more than human necks were meant to stretch with lurid blunt force marks upon her neck.
"No! This… Doesn't make sense, goddamn it!" Kiba clenched his fists and cried out into the air, he still failed to accept the fact that his team was out no matter the outcome of this challenge.
"You did not smell the right puppet. You smelled a puppet – the puppet that replaced Shino." Kiyomi mumbled to herself, then repeated it loud enough for Kiba to hear.
"That's ridiculous! I know Shino's smell, I eliminated that smell and what's left must have been the killer!" Kiba growled back at Kiyomi, when one found it difficult to accept the truth, anyone trying to ease the process appeared as an enemy. It was easier to blame the world and truth itself than to accept reality at times. It was irrational, sure, but people often were anything but that.
"You knew Shino's smell so well, you knew you had to ignore it so well, that you did not even notice that Shino's smell wasn't there, to begin with," Kiyomi stated. "What you smelled was the body double, nothing else. Then, you picked one of the puppets you thought smelled the most like that but, truth be told, if the origin of these puppets is from the same source – they all smell the same anyway."
"My… Our smell is flawless…" Kiba blubbered, still begging the reality to change but, as it was the general case, it refused to do so.
"Your smell might be flawless but your brain is not. It is still the brains of a human and a dog interpreting these sensory inputs and whereas your noses cannot be fooled – your brains can." Kiyomi approached Hinata's supposed corpse and examined it from a bit closer, then turned back to Shino's corpse and approached it again, unzipping his jacket now that she knew what she was looking for.
There they were – streaks of red across Shino's neck. Far subtler than those on Hinata's neck. The first clues were meant to be the simpler ones the whole time. Shino was strangled with moderate struggle. He offered little resistance so the murderer was someone that favored strangulation as their go-to murdering method.
Meiko… She was one of the most important victims. Kiyomi got back up and approached her fallen friend, examining her torn open ribcage. Every other ribcage was cracked or altogether broken off. It must have taken a strong grip to tear someone like Meiko open like that, not to mention the uneven peel on her armor plates that bent them out of shape in their openings before peeling them off in their entirety. Strong hands, a strangler.
Hinata was just the cherry on the cake, had Kiyomi known what she was looking for and unzipped Shino's jacket while checking his neck in the light, she'd have noticed… Or probably not… Meiko's murder got the Yamanaka so flustered and worked up that she might have missed the obvious. With a confident yet casual-paced stroll, the blonde approached the glass cages and pressed the button beside the second puppet. Flames erupted from underground, devouring the snake with giant skeletal hands for its neck ribs.
Unlike its peers, the true murderer shrieked and coiled, bashed its head over the cage desperate to get out and keep its streak alive but then the flames took their toll. Only hints of ashes remained of the murderer while the screen in the room flashed with the face of Morino Ibiki appearing on it.
"Congratulations, Team Hokage, you have discovered the real murderer puppet and you can proceed onto the next challenge. Team Kurenai, sadly, even if you would have gotten the right puppet, two of your teammates have been murdered in the process. You're out." Ibiki's declaration, in the end, sounded about as short-cut and definitive as any of the killer puppet's murders. With the room they were in shifting and the walls rippling like the surface of a disturbed lake and a cube manifesting itself in Kiyomi's hand and joining the fold Team Hokage had collected, the pair of Kiyomi and Naruto rushed on ahead through the rippling wall.
"So you guys made it… Took you long enough." Meiko smiled on the other side, rejoining her team and ready to tackle the next challenge together with it.