Naruto was the first one to move after the fierce howling and total blackout ceased. His arm that tried to protect himself with a vain block twitched once. With the painful resonance spreading throughout his body, the future Seventh realized that he was alive and that Danzo's last-ditch effort to consume them hadn't worked out as the veteran shinobi had expected it. The young man looked around, throwing his head to the sides and doing the headcount – it seemed like everyone was accounted for.
"Huh… I thought I was a goner there, you know…" Naruto scratched his head, squinting in confusion. Now that he did notice it, he was in a different location than where Danzo's expanding final desperation move hit them. Could something have transported them? If they did, they could have done a bit better job as the crew was barely moved a hundred meters or so to the back.
"Minato!" Kushina leaned down by her injured teammate. The purple infection spreading all throughout the youth's body was beginning to subside, suggesting that their user might have perished or been caught in Danzo's desperation move, but the damage they've left on Minato's body was extensive. The young woman slipped up her blouse and revealed a seal on her belly. Pressing her hand to it and twisting it like a key inside a lock forced a black mass to appear inside the edges of the seal, almost like a miniature black hole that wasn't all too interesting in sucking anything else in.
The red-haired kunoichi dug her hand deep into the mass and yanked out a massive amount of red, ethereal energy that seemed transparent but light as a cloud. The girl tilted Minato's tracksuit and exposed a matching seal on his belly, which she promptly activated and forced the transparent red mass into. Her own condition appeared to be deteriorating as she did so, sweat began running down her forehead as black bags began forming underneath Kushina's eyes as she performed this curious action but Minato jumped up and coughed something black up, spitting the bile out at once.
"It's gotta be all those dead bugs, ya know…" Kushina sat on her bottom, barely holding her body in a seated position as her weakened hands trembled but she looked happy to see her teammate alive and well again.
"Kushina, don't tell me you've transferred some of your life force again…" Minato looked worried.
"Leave it to Minato to be worried about his team just seconds after recovering from a near-death experience…" Kotaro cheeked his teammate with a butt of his elbow to Minato's ribs.
"That's okay, ya know, I've got plenty of vitality for both of us!" Kushina showed her teeth in an apish grin, even though the rest of her body begged for some relief already.
Meiko helped Kiyomi up on her feet. Nobody on their team possessed unnatural healing abilities so Kiyomi just grit her teeth and decided to suck it up. Even if Kushina did offer her aid, it didn't look like this ability was something she could abuse and Minato was in a far direr situation, with the redhead managing to pull him out of death's clawed grip just seconds before it would have been too late. Her sealing technique was effective if nothing else…
"That was amazing! If we both make it through this, I'd love to train my Sealing Techniques with you." Meiko commended Kushina whom Minato placed on his back and prepared to carry her to the end of the exams.
"She will make it out." Minato declared with iron resolve. "Because I will carry her to the next stage on my own back."
"Still…" Naruto looked up in confusion, "How did we make it out of Danzo's jutsu, you know?"
"The brat…" Kiyomi pointed at Kawaki who laid on the ground, his vest jacket and shirt ripped up from extensive damaging while his Kama markings had disappeared completely from his body. It didn't look like the boy was injured but he was sleeping like a baby. "He must have absorbed the blast. Only ironic that Danzo tried sucking us up into his own corpse only for Kawaki to suck up the chakra from his own seal up instead."
"Kawaki-san can do that?" Minato wondered.
"Yeah, he can't control his abilities too good but he gets a bunch of new ones every time he lets more and more of his Kama power through. You might not have guessed it, seeing how many jutsu the poor dolt got hit in the face with recently, however, his body must have felt it to be an all-or-nothing kind of moment and pulled us all through." Kiyomi noted while looking at the downed body of their comrade. She patted Meiko on the back to pick the punk up together with her. "Well done, kid…" Kiyomi smirked through her own fair share of pain.
"I'm afraid it might be for the best if we part our ways." Kotaro declared.
"Huh? But we could use each other's help, you know!" Naruto waved his hands frantically. "I've popped the last one of my Natural Chakra gathering clones I've left behind in this fight, if I wanted to access Sage Mode again, I'd have to gather it naturally. All of us are on the edge of flipping over, you know!"
"That is exactly why." Kotaro nodded. "There would be no greater assortment of villains and hunters than at the temple where we are to pick our mission objectives in. We'd just be picking a fight if we rushed in together. It would be better if we came at separate times, using trickery and stealth to outwit the enemy while splitting them across the entire territory, as much as possible. We could not survive another fight like this."
"The guy seems to be onto something," Kiyomi grumbled through pain resonating all over her body. The very idea of even putting her fists up, let alone using them, made her nauseous and her ribs stabbing at her chest from within in rebellion. "The point of this test was to make us realize that just rushing and powering through won't get us anywhere. Every time we've involved ourselves in meaningless squabbles, we've ended up stalling our progress and just getting ourselves further worn out. We might need to finish this stage slow, steady and quiet if we are to finish it at all…"
"I guess…" Naruto patted his abdomen and scratched it with a tired and bruised hand. Even Naruto's seemingly infinite stamina was being tested and it would be tested many times more until this stage was done. "I'd better start gathering strength for Itachi and Sasuke too, you know…"
It made too much sense that even bringing his best friend up would make him too easy to manipulate in any direction.
"Sheesh, if we don't start taking things more cautiously, even the wildlife is going to start attacking us soon enough…" Meiko shook her head in frustration, shortly before Kotaro and Minato nodded their farewells to Team Hokage and took off. Kushina looked too tired or too absorbed by resting her face against Minato's back to say her farewells. There would be still a time and a place for sentiments. Now was a time for action.
"The ground's still shaking even if we're done fighting, you know…" Naruto noted, while Team Hokage ascended to the trees and began moving toward the location of the temple.
"We're not the only ones fighting, still, something really heated must be taking place. I can feel heatwaves from it all the way here." Kiyomi agreed while wincing from the deafening rumbling noises that might as well have come from skies themselves being mixed with the ground for all they knew. It was unfortunate, or rather incredibly fortunate, that the layers of leafage over their heads covering up the sky persisted even in these cruel conditions, resulting in whatever apocalyptic annihilation the battles around them were causing somewhat obscured to Team Hokage.
"We're just going in blind now, no sensory, no back-up plans…" Meiko noted.
"True, all the more reason to be more careful," Kiyomi warned.
"So what you're saying is that you just ran here?" a short, bandaged man with an Otogakure headband turned his head, finding the fact very curious when addressing a man of puny build and spiky, brown hair and a red headband without the protector of any village on it.
"That's right, you see, my name is Fukusuke Hikyakuya and I am a famed racer. Fighting isn't really my thing but running I can do better than anybody else. And so, I've figured out that the best odds to catch me a bunch of genin would be to ally with stronger guys while waiting at the goal they would all be waiting to reach." Fukusuke explained.
"Yeah, well… Guess what, buddy, we've all gotten the same idea…" another Otogakure ninja allied to the bandaged youth with a metal arm pointed out before turning to a crowd of curious-looking individuals, all of whom were hunters.
Amongst them stood a quartet of rogue ninja from Otogakure, known as the Sound Four, a shapeless, black mass that called itself Zetsu even though most hunters have witnessed an army of white, fungal men calling themselves the same name taking over the village earlier making its story unlikely. Also a teen with pointy, sharp teeth and curly black hair and a red, sleeveless turtleneck with a bandaged sword on his back. Beside him floated a shorty of brown hair and a stumpy, bloated nose and a red cloak covering his entire body save for his head. A trio of Sunagakure genin stared at the curious assembly of hunters with a shaken set of eyes as they had previously taken the Sunagakure ninja for genin and tried taking them out, only for Gaara of the Desert to stop them singlehandedly, making the red-haired young boy the only one with a grumpy pair of eyes and a short-fuse.
"Outta my way, you know!" Naruto yelled out, charging out from the cover with a Rasengan in hand and swinging the sphere around like a weapon. The famed runner managed to elude the Rasengan with an impressive barrage of backflips before beginning to run about wildly. "Huh? What's this guy's deal? He's just… Running, you know…" Naruto wrapped his arms over his chest and squinted at Fukusuke.
"Uzumaki Naruto!" Gaara's husky voice pierced the howls of Fukusuke's body racing with the wind as a mighty shockwave threw the Land of Tea racer off his feet and sent him skidding across the ground and smashing through the temple wall – knocking him out instantly as specks of sand flew about like shrapnel in the stormy outrage of the young and bloodthirsty Jinchuuriki.
"Oh, Gaara from the Chuunin Exams, isn't it?" Naruto smirked. Before he could challenge the youth, the Hoshigaki in a red turtleneck snuck up and stabbed the young man with a katana from behind him. Naruto grunted while the Hoshigaki wrestled him to the ground and pinned him to it, readying his shark-skinned Samehada sword to shred Naruto's skin and chakra right off before the genin would be weak enough to finish off.
The grand plan was interrupted by a loud puff of smoke when the clone dispersed. A squad of Naruto clones flooded the temple grounds, rushing through the entire array of hunters that have gathered there and gunning straight for the reduced stack of crystal spheres laid on an altar inside the temple grounds. Zaku Abumi of the Otogakure ninja raised his hand and sent a soundwave that threw a handful of clones off balance and forced them to dispel, the rest worked their own magic but Naruto's numbers were too many to fight off all at once.
"Regroup, you fuckwits!" Tayuya of the Sound Four commanded the entire troupe of hunters. "He might put his hands on the cube but we can stop him from retreating with them!"
A handful of Naruto clones took a dive toward the stack of crystal spheres and placed their hands over them, focusing their chakra through their palms. The spheres lit up with a rainbow gleam and the white cube contained within each sphere began to slowly emerge, inch by inch, one corner at a time. The clone extracting the cube got dispatched by a slashing crescent of wind sent at it by Temari, Kankuro's puppet theatre dispelled the rest.
"He might be supercharged and a future version of Naruto we've met, but it's still Naruto we're talking about…" Kankuro showed his teeth in a smug grin as all clones got dispatched at once.
"These were just clones." The floating shorty pointed out. "The clone user must be nearby, if he is resorting to deceitful tactics like these, odds are that they think themselves too weak to take us all on at once."
"Shoot… I'm rather short on chakra, you know." Naruto breathed out a weary sigh, sitting atop of a branch that Team Hokage surveyed the temple opening from. "Sorry, guys…"
"Can't you just ask the Nine-Tails to give you more?" Meiko wondered.
"I could… But I'm dealing with a shifty fox here, you know. It can just refuse me or give me too much and if it gives me more chakra than I've already got, its chakra will take my body over again…" Naruto reminded the bunch of the time when he went absolutely berserk because he let too much of the Nine-Tails' chakra surge through him.
The forest area shook and trembled, exploding in a wild wave of shrapnel and unchained natural energy. Everything went white before the pain and the realization that the trio was out in the open, right before the bunch of hunters to see, writhing on the ground due to their wounds. Despite the imminent danger of most hunters still at play being on their backs, the trio of Team Hokage looked up at the monstrous force that caused this devastating explosion and left a gigantic tunnel in the area of the forest leading up to the temple.
"If it's a man, I'll kill them… If it's a woman, I'll kill them anyway… Kill everything!" a bona fide monster mumbled its way through words, clad in armor of black plates and spikes that looked like an in-between mixture of bone and wood alike. Meiko had seen something of this sort before.
"K-Kouta…" she mumbled with a weakened voice.
The mad, transformed genin held a blond woman in his arm by the woman's throat. His grip was less than subtle as blood was trickling from the woman's mouth from the extensive damage to her airways and throat. A handful of lifeless-looking bodies had littered the massive, five-kilometer tunnel between a scorched area of the forest further down the road and the temple while the twisted version of Kouta breathed furious smoke from his nostrils, foamed and bled through gaps in between his armored plates while his crazy eyes ran across the battlefield, imagining thousands of twisted ways he could kill every single person in this place.
"I think… I'd better run away from here…" the hunter Fukusuke peeled his face off of the rubble he laid on and began limping away, whining with each step. His only talent in life seemed hampered by the wounds he had sustained while fulfilling his one, minuscule role in this engagement.
"You… You're so strong, killing you would justify my existence as nothing else would!" Gaara's eyes widened in excitement as he extended his arm to throw a shapeless blob of rushing sand from his gourd Kouta's way. With a flick of his hand, the armored monster repelled the rush of the sand but the sand wrapped around his arm, attempting to apply pressure and crush it. A resonating blast of chakra scattered the sand into lifeless grains that showered the entire battlefield while Kouta extended his hand and formed a glowing, golden sphere in his palm.
"Chakra Grenade!" he roared out with a voice that was as much pain as it was fury. The monstrous shape flung its hand forward, sending the sphere to float at the bunch of hunters while Team Hokage struggled to roll out of its way. It seemed like every hunter had forgotten all about the injured Konoha ninja that had fallen into their lap and cared only about the more immediate threat that would have left them as battered and broken as the bodies the transformed monster left in its wake.
"I am beginning to understand why Mana dumped this guy…" Kiyomi joked just before wincing in pain as she clutched her ribs.
"We need that cube." Meiko pointed at the temple, the resonating explosions had scattered the crystal spheres containing the cubes that needed to be unsealed still. She pulled out a handful of paper tags and pressed her palm to them. "I've put a handy seal on them. We just need to put that seal onto one of those balls and we're golden."
"I can maybe make one more clone with my own power if I push it, you know," Naruto grumbled, looking serious for once. "I'll be using my reserve strength, meaning that if Itachi brings a fight to us – we'll be in trouble, you know."
"We'll be in trouble if we don't do this." Kiyomi shook her head. "Try your clone, if it fails, we'll all try to rush the spheres."
Naruto pressed his hands together in the clone hand seal position. To call the lifeless waste of oxygen that came out of him a clone would have been a grave offense. It was a chalk-pale waste of space with flappy limbs that laid like the pathetic sack of bones that it was face-first while only its rear had the strength to rise over its head and shine proudly for all to see.
"Everybody it is…" Kiyomi sighed.
Meiko blasted out from the cover of fallen trees and leafage, she felt sharp pain in the side of her face, the pain felt just like what the cause of it was – a handful of massive needles that dug into her face and blinded her on one side while making the whole left side of her go numb. Kiyomi jumped out from the cover at the same time, the kunoichi leaned down to avoid a steel wire trap right in front of her and stood back up after a blast of detonating chakra cannon caught her from behind, a blast meant for one of the hunters but packing enough of a wallop to make the ground rumble and shift the foundation of the temple. The blonde twisted around the rushing Sound Ninja and bumped the bandaged creep with her butt when the punch of his mechanical arm had missed her, she couldn't lean down to pick the sphere up nor could she roll, all she could do was fall down flat on her face, her hand on top of it.
The sealing glyph that she had attached to the crystal sphere lit up, matching the sealing glyph in Meiko's hand and the crystal sphere ended up shining in Meiko's hand while Naruto and the blacksmith hurdled back into supposed safety. It was a simple transferal seal, that once attached to a small and simple object transferred it to the location possessing a matching seal. Kiyomi's ribs ached too much to move. She had done all she could have done in this stage of the exams.
Meiko's grip pulled on Naruto's wrist. The young man who would become the Seventh Hokage one day objected with a sorry look but Meiko shook her head and pulled harder. It hurt her more than anything else to make this call, but it was the call that Kiyomi would have made, it was the call that she had made earlier.
"No way, we need to go back, it doesn't matter how scary the enemy is, we don't leave people behind, you know!" Naruto yelled out.
"This isn't how things work around here. If you go out there – you'll probably die, you'll definitely fail and if we fail this exam again, Kiyomi will definitely murder us in our sleep." Meiko yelled back at his face, powering through the rumbling madness. "Right now Kouta is giving us maybe a minute or two of time to get back to the Ninja Academy and proceed, if you fail to take that chance, you'll never get a chance to face Itachi or face Sasuke."
"Forget it, you know!" Naruto turned to the devastating battlefield and tightened his headband. "I don't leave allies behind and I never go back on my word! That's my ninja way!"
Naruto ran out like a madman into the cascade of flashes of bright light without an ounce of chakra in his system. Meiko picked Kawaki up and pressed him tighter to her sides. A stray golden arrow hit Naruto in the shoulder, one he had no chance of tracking with his weakened body, the boy's eyes whited out as he collapsed leaving just a falling arc of blood that came out from his mouth but failed to keep up with Naruto's fall.
Holding the crystal sphere in her hand and still clutching to Kawaki, Meiko took off from the madness and the battlefield where both of her remaining teammates laid unconscious and close to dying. The staff would probably interfere soon enough, things certainly were getting dire there.
"If your team gets wiped out or killed, you're out, obviously…" Anko's words rung through Meiko's ears as the blacksmith took an arrow-nosed charge backward through the Forest of Death with the goal that Team Hokage was meant to deliver to the Ninja Academy still sealed within the sphere she clutched in hand.