I was too far away to stop him. Iwao was too shocked. All we could do was watch in horror as the worst possible scenario unfolded before our very eyes.

We couldn't stop it. But someone else could, and it was the last person I ever expected to do something useful.

Rio snagged Misao by the collar and yanked him into a restrictive embrace. The smaller boy thrashed and tried to yell out, but the brute silenced him with his forearm, uncaring of how his friend tried to bite past his sleeve.

"Iwao-kun," he asked with a confused frown. I was genuinely astonished at his quick reaction time, and with how little difficulty he was holding Misao in place. "What's going on?"

"There's no time to explain," I said quickly, hearing the voices grow closer.

"I wasn't asking you," he said dismissively. Par for the course with Ban Rio.

"Someone's trying to get us to fail," Iwao said. "Someone powerful. By taking this scroll, a trap would have activated, and we would have been injured at best. We were given a secondary mission, which we completed. But…I think Misao was told to sabotage us."

There were tears in our constrained teammates eyes as his futile struggles ceased.

"Oi, oi. Misao, is that true?"

"This really needs to fucking wait," I cut in, and Iwao nodded sharply.

"Remember way back when?" He asked me. "That time we got into sensei's office?"

"Hell yeah I do," I said. "And I've been working on a better method."

There was a window directly behind Gari's desk. Easily unlocked from the inside, but there was also a security feature. A seal. Working quickly, I disabled it and set Iwao to work copying it with mundane ink. Sloppy, but they wouldn't have the original to make a side by side comparison, and under the circumstances it would have to do.

I fixed a special device from the sealing chest in my inventory to the window sill. Its structure was reminiscent of an L bracket, and one side pressed against the glass itself. That side just so happened to have a storage seal printed along its face.

"Ready?" I asked, and Iwao nodded, handing me the seal replica. I placed it in the correct spot and activated it just as the footsteps reached the door. They found it locked, but they must have heard us (Misao and Rio). Instead of busting in, they suspiciously stopped.

I wasn't going to give them the signal they were waiting for. I activated my seal and the glass vanished. Back when I used a sealing scroll to get into the academy sensei's office, I had no method to perfectly realign the glass. If an object unsealed from inside a scroll appeared in a space that was occupied already by another object, both objects would be damaged. In the case of the window and metal sill, the glass would most likely be shattered.

But I realized that if I could make absolutely certain that the sealed object reappeared in the exact same spot it had been originally, then the problem would be circumvented. Creating the L bracket thing that stuck to the sill was the easy part. The standard storage fuinjutsu, which I had conned Gari into giving me the guides on, wouldn't work, because unsealed objects would always appear at the center of the seal. I needed a variant that returned objects in the exact same position they were initially in.

I outsourced the problem to Aimi, like I often did these days. She got back to me some time later with instruction on how to solve it. And thus, I was able to create my own version of the Kieta Kagi, a lesser known ninja tool favored by infiltration specialists.

It did its job well. We were out of the office in an instant, Rio still holding Misao, who's struggles had ceased, captive in his arms. Behind us, the glass reappeared, and the Kieta Kagi burned away into nothingness.

- - - { ワナビー } - - -

Rio threw Misao bodily against the stone wall of a building. He insisted on stopping in an alleyway on the way back, which I was against. We were probably being watched at this very moment, and I said as much. Rio didn't seem to care.

"What the fuck was that?" he asked.

"Someone powerful wants us to fail," Iwao repeated himself. Once again, I was surprised that he included himself in that, even though he knew that I was the only target. Yes, Rio would have reacted much worse if he knew that it was my fault his test was being manipulated, but we weren't in enemy territory now. Why was Iwao maintaining the ruse?

"Why?" Rio asked.

"I don't know," said Iwao. "Maybe to shame my father, or to take revenge on him."

And he was committing to it. I really wanted to ask why—Iwao and I weren't openly antagonistic towards one another anymore, but we definitely weren't friends. Still, I kept my mouth shut.

"And you wanted to help the bastards?" Rio said darkly to Misao.

"I didn't want to," Misao said shakily. "I didn't have a choice. Rio, we're going to fail this exam. Both of us. We're going to be sent into the Genin Corps." The, and most likely die, was implied.

"I'm not good enough! I won't…I can't…Bakuhatsu-sama offered me a job at the Explosion Corps if I did what he wanted. It was my only chance to make something of myself!"

There was a mighty smack as Rio hit Misao across the face, hard. Blood spurted from his nose, and the back of his head hit the wall behind him hard enough for me to hear.

"Yeah, we're going to be in the Genin Corps," Rio said dangerously. "Yeah, we have no future. I made peace with that a long time ago, like you should have. But you know who does?"

He pointed at Iwao.

"I don't give a shit if he offered you all the Daimyo's gold. For you to betray Iwao-kun like that, after everything he's done for us? I oughta gut you here and now."

"Rio-kun, stop," Iwao said softly. "He's your friend."

"No, he's not. I thought he was. But my friends aren't two-faced cowards."

"He's my friend," Iwao insisted, and after a moment, Rio rose out of his fighting stance.

Iwao slowly sank down in front of Misao, and silently took out some gauze and cotton. He began to tend to his nose.

"I'm a bad friend," he said. "I didn't realize how hard this must be for all of you. I knew a good percentage of my friends would be sent to the Genin Corps, and I knew what people who were sent there might go through. But I never…I never put those two things together."

His voice began to waver. "I don't want any of my friends to get hurt. So…I want you to promise me something. I know this exam is meant to be failed. There are only a handful of us that will get jonin sensei. But I still want you guys to do whatever it takes to get stronger from here on out. I want you to survive. I'm going to rise to a high rank as fast as I can. And when I do, I'm going to pull all of you out of the Genin Corps. No matter what, I swear it."

Misao was crying openly.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"It's okay," Iwao said. "I don't blame you."

"I do," Rio said, and Iwao shot him a look. "Fine, sorry. I don't forgive him, but if you do, I guess that's all that matters."

"Please don't tell anyone else," Iwao implored, and Rio's mouth twisted in displeasure. Still, he nodded.

"Then let's go," Iwao said. "The day's still young, and I doubt they're going to give us the rest of it off. Besides, you two still have your trapping specialization tests, don't you?"

As we headed back to the academy, I briefly fell in step with Iwao.

"Why did you do that?" I asked simply, clarification unnecessary.

He seemed to consider the question. "You'll be the top-ranked graduate," he said simply. "As long as I also rank high enough to justify it, my father will use his influence to put us on the same team, whether I want him to or not. Think of this as a favor among teammates. And positive reinforcement, for not keeping me in the dark."

I hummed, and let the matter drop.

- - - { ワナビー } - - -

Iwao was wrong; we did have the rest of the day off. We just weren't supposed to. Every team was given a mission that was intended to take the entire day, ours included. However, Yoshiro-sensei didn't know about my familiarity with the Explosion Corps when he devised this test.

Ordinarily, a mission like this would involve almost an entire day of recon. It was expected that we would only act once the bulk of the Explosion Corps' staff had gone home for the day. Sensei also expected Gari to make this exam harder for us, not easier. I'm sure people were supposed to still be there during the lunch break to stand guard, and that there were supposed to be more traps set up inside the building. But since Gari wanted us to get to his office and trigger the traps once there, he didn't add anything challenging that he wasn't sure I could get through.

It was barely afternoon by the time we handed off the mission objectives to Yoshiro-sensei, who still looked remarkably displeased by the entire situation. I expected him to ask for more clarification, but he didn't. Guess he wanted to take the plausible deniability approach.

All he said was this.

"Due to Ishida's and Imai's uncommon success in this exam so far, I decided you needed a much more difficult exam," he said, and I realized he was sharing the alibi he'd give Gari, when the powerful man inevitably came knocking. "I didn't think that retrieving a single target would pose much of a challenge, so I tasked you with retrieving multiple instead."

"How mean of you, sensei," I deadpanned as the rest of my team shared looks.

"Obviously, you are all so prodigious that even that challenge couldn't hold your attention for more than five hours," he responded just as dryly. "Though I can't help but wonder how Watanabe broke his nose in the process."

"He slipped," Rio said, and Misao, lips pursed, nodded in agreement.

"I see," Yoshiro-sensei said blandly. "You best try to avoid that in the field."

"Hai, sensei."

With so much free time, I did…almost nothing. I stretched a great deal, I ate a lot to refill my chakra reserves. I meditated for hours on end, manipulating my chakra to heal strained muscles and mend body fatigue. I had been put through the ringer these past few days, and even with all my effort, and all the hours of break that I wasn't supposed to receive, I still felt battered by the time my classmates, many dejected, trudged back to the academy that night. Some hadn't even returned by the time I decided to give into my weariness and fall asleep early.

When I awoke, it was to the final day of exams. The sun hadn't risen, and the first thing I noticed was Yoshiro-sensei staring at me with a raised eyebrow. He hadn't yet started to bang the pots in his hand together. Guess my body had just gotten used to the early wakeup.

"Once more, you will be split into groups of four to complete the final portion of the exam," Yoshiro-sensei said over breakfast. "Survival. Yes, yes, I know. You've come so close to graduating and officially becoming shinobi. But it's too early to celebrate. This portion will take three days, and will take you out of the village."

I had already gathered as much. It wouldn't be much of a survival exercise if it didn't span multiple days, or if it didn't take place in the wilderness. But, while I wasn't naive enough to expect the test to be easy, it was survival. We took survival classes every other semester for our entire time in the academy. Unless we have a Forest of Death equivalent that I don't know about, then I'm not particularly worried.

I was put in a group with Hatanaka Sho, Kudo Seiji and Uemura Nobu. All C level shinobi at best, so I didn't really have anyone to rely on in that regard. But I wasn't alone in that, I noticed. Takeo, Mari and Iwao were all in the same boat, and so were the Konjiki twins, though they had one another. The only elites paired together were Daigo—the bastard—and Hayato.

"Team B," a chunin, who I recognized as my taijutsu proctor, called out my team's designation, and we dutifully followed him out of the academy complex. Wordlessly, he led us all the way to the gate, where we checked in with the guards before leaving the village entirely.

The chunin, who eventually introduced himself as Isobe Motoharu, was short-ish but bulky, with dark, curly hair and a slight lisp. He was also a close combat specialist, which became relevant whilst deciding our formations.

I took the role of leader, which was uncontested, so coming up with that was my job. Isobe-san rarely spoke and never offered his expertise, instead choosing to sit back and take the role of subordinate. Though, occasionally, he would forsake that ruse to give us mini tests.

Like foraging that afternoon, which involved us identifying each and every plant we passed, and listing any uses it possessed (poisonous, edible, medicinal, etcetera). If they had any; most were just weeds. He also quizzed us on how to find specific flora, and along with what regions they grew in.

Then, a couple hours later, he up and disappeared, leaving a piece of paper to float towards the ground.

Find me, was all that was written on it.

"Tracking, I guess," I announced to my group. "Nobu, that's your specialization, right?"

"I was wondering why they only gave me the written," he grumbled. "Figures they'd make me embarrass myself in front of other people."

Well, that didn't exactly fill me with confidence.

"Just give me some guidance and I'll help you out," I said. Everyone took a unit in tracking, so none of us were completely useless at it.

But our quarry was a chunin. His tracks were hard to find—shinobi sandals were already designed to leave few tracks, what with their lack of treads (chakra could compensate for a loss of traction when necessary).

Shinobi—and all people for that matter— had weight though, and thus left their mark on the ground no matter what their shoes looked like. We were taught to run in such a way that the imprint was mitigated, but that could only do so much. The only person I've ever seen get around that was Karuishi in the conditioning test.

Isobe Motoharu was good, I knew. But he wasn't up to Red Ogre standards, when it came to stealth at least. We found hints of his presence on the ground, in crushed grasses and weeds, and in bugs trampled into the dirt.

At one point, he crossed up into the sparsely populated trees around us. Canopy running was a staple technique in canon, but the lens of Naruto was focussed solely on Konoha. You know, the Hidden Leaf Village? As stone shinobi, we had very little practice, and the area we were currently in right now wasn't a forest. It was barely woodland; the trees were far apart, and seemed much more fragile than those depicted in the land of fire.

Seiji and Nobu wanted to follow him up and give the technique a try, but I stopped them.

"The middle of a mission isn't the time to learn a technique," I said, clapping a hand on each of their shoulders.

Unless you're with someone who's so capable that they can complete the mission alone while simultaneously watching your back, I amended internally, thinking of the Wave mission and Team Seven. Although, I still thought that Kakashi's actions were inadvisable despite his skill.

"Besides, when one or all of you inevitably fumble, you'd alert our target to your presence. We need to follow him from the ground. Keep your eyes peeled, look at the branches."

Our enemies were masters of this technique, and though little fighting would probably take place in the central or eastern parts of the Land of Fire, where the forest was densest, we would certainly need to learn how to follow someone seeking refuge in the trees.

That would be hard mode. This was…well, not easy. Not since we couldn't follow him from a level perspective. However, the environment was far more forgiving than it would be in the Land of Fire.

The relative fragility of the trees and the spacing between them worked to our advantage. Since Motoharu had to leap further to reach each stable branch, he had to use more power. Power that left more of an impact on his launch point. Smaller branches along the stronger limbs he landed and pushed off against had been lightly bent or cracked altogether. Leaves that were too healthy to fall on their own had floated to the ground. Some of the more separated pieces of bark had flared and cracked around where his feet had landed.

Once we knew what to look for, it became easier. I was expecting him to reveal himself eventually, or at least slow down to give us a chance at catching him. But Iwa shinobi didn't work like that.

We didn't even see him until night fell, and we came across a camp with a fire. From the ash development on the firewood, I could tell that it had been lit for some time.

I slapped a hand to Nobu's mouth before he could call out to our proctor.

"This is an exam, remember?" I muttered. "Use your head. If we followed an enemy to their camp, what would we be expected to do?"

"Depends on our mission," Sho said, brow furrowed but thankfully keeping his voice down.

"True. But you know what we definitely would be expected not to do?"

"Let ourselves be seen," Nobu realized.

"Or heard," I stressed. "Or fall into one of the traps set by our targets. Like the one by your left foot."

I pulled him away from the wire trap connected to a kunai throwing seal that was hidden in the burl of an old tree.

"What are we supposed to do, then?" Seiji hissed.

"Let's go with capture," I declared, not entirely sure myself. But if this wasn't part of the test, he wouldn't have set traps.

But how?

"I'm not sure how committed to the bit he is," I mused. "He's pretending to be a Konoha shinobi. Does that mean he isn't going to use his Doton skills? Or, is he going to use subterranean defenses because he's pretending to be a Konoha shinobi?"

That was the real question. For foreign shinobi who weren't skilled with Earth Release, defenses to ward off Iwa shinobi consisted of underground traps buried with low-rank Doton jutsu, which could be learned by anyone with even a little skill. Like the wire traps we dealt with in the infuriating Moguragakure test. However, those were far more extensive than those that could be feasibly set up by a novice armed only with a D-Rank jutsu.

More concerning would be sensory tags, which could be buried. If the earth around them was disturbed, they would release a pulse of chakra that could be sensed by any shinobi that wasn't an embarrassment to their village.

"Only one way to find out, I guess," I said. "You three stay here while I perform reconnaissance."

The conclusion of our tracking portion was anticlimactic. There were traps underground, but the wire traps were subpar. The tags were more of an issue—they weren't rigid and inorganic like metal, and they were small. All of those things made them difficult to detect with the built in properties of the Moguragakure no Jutsu. But not impossible, and I had already come up with a seal to counter them, one I just so happened to have two tucked away in my bandages.

They were a modified storage seal that I called Excavators. They scooped up all unprotected material in a small area. Actually, I had created it for offensive and fairly gruesome purposes, but found that it was too easily countered by any shinobi not interested in getting their flesh scooped out. Simple chakra manipulation by the target would cause it to fail.

However, sealing tags, along with the dirt around them, had no such defense. I scooped them up and, on the fly, I recreated the Doton: Shinjū Zanshu no Jutsu, which Kakashi used on Sasuke in the bell test. It was barely its own technique—all I had to do was make sure the earth solidified around the target instantly so that his hands were immobilized. But in nearly an instant, I had captured Motoharu, who was tending to the fire.

As soon as I grabbed onto the proctors ankles, however, I realized something was wrong. The bandages binding his pants didn't feel like fabric, and the legs inside of them didn't feel like skin. They were hard, like stone.

"I'm impressed," a voice said above me, and a hand reached through my refuge and grabbed me by the wrist, which still clutched what I thought was the chunin's leg. I was pulled through the ground and through the body of my target, which became just as soft as my surroundings under the effect of Motoharu's own Moguragakure no Jutsu.

"Stealth isn't my strong suit, I'll admit, but still. I am a chunin. I expected to have to hunt you down once I got bored of waiting."

There was no escape as he immediately put me in a submission hold.

"I yield," I grunted, annoyed at myself, and he let me go.

"Come out, you three," he called. "There's a clear path through the traps at three o'clock, if where I'm facing is twelve."

We joined him around the fire and ate some rations. I'm sure we'd have to hunt tomorrow, but right now there wasn't time. I was in a foul mood after being duped so embarrassingly, but I tried to stuff it down.

"There's no need for that," Motoharu said. "No one expects a fresh academy graduate to be able to take down a chunin. Like I said, getting as far as you did was impressive. We've been told not to hold back so I didn't, and you were still able to follow me all the way here. And you got through my traps without alerting me. The only mistake you made was at the very end, and Bunshin are designed to fool shinobi. Take it as a lesson."

I certainly would. Clones were a staple technique of any worthwhile shinobi, and I would endeavor to add one such technique to my repertoire as soon as possible.

"For now though, it's time to sleep," he announced. "Kudo-san gets first watch, Hanataka-san is second, Uemura-san is third and Imai-san is fourth. Think of it as a reward for doing almost all of the work," he said to me. The others didn't argue, though they did look a little embarrassed.

"And you?" I asked.

"I'm a chunin," he reminded me yet again. "And the proctor on duty. A couple sleepless nights won't kill me."

- - - { ワナビー } - - -

I was awoken by a chakra pulse to my left. Three of them, actually, though the first was only to rouse me. Three pulses signified that a possible threat was nearby, and that I was to rouse quickly but remain silent.

"There isn't a threat," Motoharu said immediately. "I was just testing your reaction time."

I nodded, and he disappeared. Stretching slightly, more than a little aware that I was being graded, I quickly and silently took a position atop a tree.

Over the next hour and a half, I maintained utmost vigilance over our surroundings, changing position inconsistently to keep any theoretical unfriendlies on their their toes.

I was expecting an uneventful watch, which is why I was surprised when I noted a disturbance in the forest. I struggled to piece together exactly what it was; nothing moved unnaturally, I didn't think there was a sound, and there wasn't a chakra disturbance either. But for some reason, my eye keeps getting drawn towards the exact same spot.

Going over myself to investigate was objectively the wrong move. So, I signaled Motoharu, who materialized next to me instantly.

"Disturbance noted, eight o'clock," I muttered. We had extinguished the fire, but the starlight illuminated his frown almost as well.

"We aren't due for a check in yet," he murmured. "Wait here."

He wasn't gone for long. Yet his frown was still in place.

"Was it anything?" I asked.

"Yes, actually," he said. "Another proctor was trying to get my attention. Apparently, the powers that be decided this exam was too easy, so we've added an extra segment."

Oh, joy.

"Wake up the boys," he instructed. "We leave right away."

- - - { ワナビー } - - -

Not far away, a shinobi appeared in a shunshin, joining another who watched as the group quickly erased their camp's presence from the woods, sinking anything incriminating, like the remains of the campfire they made, into the ground.

How was the switch? He asked, using a form of syllabic sign language that had been created for their team's personal use.

Successful, the other responded in kind. The girl noticed him somehow, though that only served to make the job easier. Still, he's going to have to be careful to remove that suspicion.

He's a jonin and a subterfuge specialist. If he can't fool a couple of academy students, he should retire.

A breeze rustled the leaves overhead, and a bird landed on a branch above them. It looked like it might crow, so the smaller one put a kunai through its breast, catching it before it could hit the ground.

The circumstances aren't in his favor, he signed, placing the dead bird inside a thick bush. No one would find its body besides predators, so the distinctiveness of its wound was irrelevant.

There isn't time to perform a seamless infiltration. He has to get them to the border before the switch is noticed.

And he will, the first said. We'll make sure of it, won't we?

At his comrades nod, he thrummed a tightly folded stack of papers, which he knew to depict several unique graphs and paragraphs written by the girl he was watching, who remained oblivious to his presence.

It's time you learned, Imai Kasaiki, he thought grimly. Knowledge can be dangerous. I hope you have the good sense to survive the lesson.

- - - { ワナビー } - - -

AN: So begins the end. You didn't seriously think I'd end with a boring survival test, right? Shit is about to go down.

In my last author's note, I discussed the idea of changing the name of this fic, along with the summary. I've seen a lot of insightful reviews for and against this, and I've put a lot of thought into it. So, after much deliberation, I have decided to go through with it after all.

Here's why. I enjoy writing this fic, and I've had the idea for it for a long time. But the reason I finally decided to figuratively put pen to paper, even though it cut down on the time I have to write stuff that will actually be published, was because I thought it might help me gain exposure. I chose for it to be a quasi-gamer fic, with gamer in the title, in the hopes that it would directly connect me to the gamer audience, who I thought would most likely enjoy my actual published series (it is also inspired by gamer, though that doesn't really come through in the first book which is currently out).

And it has! For the amount of time that it's been out, I'm extremely pleased to have over 600 followers on this fic. But now, I feel as if the Gamer title has served its purpose. A good portion of people who are enthusiastic about gamer fics in the Naruto fandom have at least seen that it exists. And, as passionate as some people are about gamer fics, there is a much larger percentage that can't stand them.

I get it. Really. Honestly, my own enthusiasm for them died down a bit this last year (which is quite unfortunate because I've committed to writing a series lightly based around the premise). Don't worry, gamer enjoyers—I'm not deviating from my plans for this series in any way. It will still be recognizable as a gamer fic once all of the powers are finally developed. However, I do want to remove the immediate association in order to appeal to a wider audience. Maybe, at the end of it, I'll be able to make some gamer lovers out of haters!

So…yeah. Don't really know what the new name will be. I would love suggestions, in the comments or you can DM me. I'll definitely give you advanced warning though before I change it.

Anyway, that's it for now. Hope you enjoyed the chapter, and I'll see you next week!