"Before you eat ramen, you separate the chopsticks, clap your hands and yell out…" Gwido began wording his next question but a clever grin turned Naruto's jaw rightward.
"That's a trick question. Everyone knows that the first step of eating ramen is observing the bowl and absorbing the aroma of the harmony that the ingredients have created, you know!" Naruto explained.
"Drats, I thought I would have had you with that one…" Gwido nodded with the admission of temporary defeat coloring his face.
"He's even getting questions that aren't even questions at all…" Faeras appeared to white out from the intensity of intellectual competition between the two, jabbing, thrusting and parrying, all performed with wits instead of crude and brutish weaponry.
"In taijutsu, there are offshoot styles of the entire ninja art: Strong Fist, Gentle Fist, etc…" Gwido began bending fingers off of his hand. Naruto's face paled out.
"There are, you know?" Naruto mumbled out. "I… I thought we were talking about ramen, not taijutsu."
"Unbelievable…" Kiyomi stroke her temples.
"You're a ninja, Naruto, taijutsu is one of the ninja arts…" Meiko shook her head. "A civilian is lecturing you about that?"
"Anyway," Gwido's face adopted a sheepish smile now that he realized he might have gotten his opponent. "There is also a style of martial arts offshoot style that, according to its originator, Mitsukuni Nanmen, is inspired by ramen. The way the user radiates charisma and power was inspired by the divine aroma, only experienced in front of a majestic bowl of ramen, the way the user flexes and moves has been inspired by the silk-like texture of the noodles and the hardy blows that the user delivers hailed from the experience of the sparking spices of the perfect ramen bowl. What is that style call.."
"Ran Ran Ken." Naruto nodded. "When you started going on and on I kind of got scared, should'a told me it would be something this simple, you know…"
"Ma'am…" Bennow lifted his hand. "I do not believe there is a subject in this universe that we can possibly answer this many questions to. We surrender."
"If that is how the entire Team Cephei feels..." Musha winked one eye, looking displeased by the fact that the intense fencing game between two ramen heads has been put to a cease this way.
"I hate the idea of giving up more than the next guy but… This is ridiculous." Faeras sighed.
"Agreed. Even if a botanist asked me a dozen questions about gardening and the biology of trees, I'd never answer this many of them in a row. Naruto's obsession goes one-eighty to being very impressive…" Rosanna admitted.
"Alright, folks, you know what that means!" Musha winked at the audience and gave them a quirky pose.
"You let us go?" Neji's bitter voice from the audience rang onto the stage.
"Not a chance, because the quiz show concluded in the second round, we still have one more round of air-time to spare, which means we're gonna use it for some other pair of teams, who will inevitably go into overtime, meaning we'll have to leave the resolution for next week!" Musha moved her finger in front of the crowd, discouraging false ideas of possible freedom being in the prospect for them.
"Next week?" a voice from the audience groaned.
"Yo, we better high-tail it out of here until the pink-haired lady ties us to a chair too, you know!" Naruto leaned up to his team and whispered it at the pair while a cube formed in his hand and then dissolved into a flurry of pixels that swarmed over at Kiyomi's grasp, interacting with the other clusters of pixels that Team Hokage had gathered.
"Alright, just three more trials left to go…" Kiyomi nodded. While her eyelids could now shut without setting off a spark of painful resonances all over her face that seeped deeper into her very core, she was still far from her perfect shape for the upcoming trials.
After Team Hokage passed through the shuffling opening of tiny cubes in the wall, they met a faintly lit room with a rather unsettling trio of souls lingering on the other side. While the visage of Morino Ibiki was by far the most appealing to see in the moist gloom of the room, the knowledge of who the man was and the role he served in the exam served as a sort of soothing factor for the chilling presence of the man.
"Team Hokage of Konohagakure, it is time for you to begin your next challenge. Your opponents for the round, the Genbu Shinobi Trio have been waiting for a few minutes now." Ibiki said, turning for the entrants.
The Genbu Shinobi Trio he indirectly introduced hissed and covered up their eyes from the bright, neon lights and glitter that reached them from the other room where the quiz show took place. The trio wore standard Iwagakure uniforms. Naruto didn't seem to care all that much about that fact but Kiyomi and Meiko lingered for a fair moment as the uniforms reminded them of the grand tragedy that befell Iwagakure. These folks weren't from Iwagakure of their universe, too young, too glittery and untouched by the calamity.
"Naruto, Kiyomi, Meiko, the Team Hokage of Konohagakure. The Genbu Shinobi Trio – Sekki, Keppra, Brakke. Welcome to your sixth challenge for the sixth piece of the Mind Coupon. You will find this challenge to be most unorthodox for the type of skills it will require. This challenge, in other words, in a test of ingenuity, but also – craftiness. It shall be your task to create a tool. You will have twenty-three minutes to create the tool, your opponents will be doing the same. At the end of the allotted time, I shall be testing the tools for the task they will be meant to accomplish." Ibiki explained.
Both the Genbu Shinobi Trio and Team Hokage clapped their eyelids for a brief time, staring at Ibiki and waiting for him to finish his explanation. Ibiki cleared his throat. "I was waiting for one of you to ask me to clarify…" he stated.
"We were waiting for you to clarify, you know…" Naruto replied. Kiyomi turned to Naruto, the young man took no bullshit from anyone, no matter how much older they were or how much they outranked him. Hell, the guy was ready to throw himself at Musha the last time when he thought she was just messing around with them. There was something to both respect, as well as revere about that.
"I see. Well… You will begin building the tool once the challenge starts without any tips as to what the task is. Once you are fifteen minutes in, the ad break will hit and the ads will explain the task. From that point on – you can either ditch the tool you have built up to and then and start anew or to continue on the path you've been on. Maybe you'll just want to make slight modifications, who knows, it's all up to you." Ibiki shrugged.
The image of a grassland field atop of a small hill flashed on the screen behind Ibiki. The room the crew was currently in was much more compact than all the other extravagant rooms therefore behind them was the only place where the large screen would fit. The grassland field image was covered with a filter of blood-red and it seemed as if blood was running down the lens of the camera that filled the entire thing with the image appearing somewhat choppy and static, the entire thing was spiced with grungy noises.
The Genbu Shinobi Trio took the flash of images as a signal to begin whereas it took the Team Hokage a brief while to catch up to the idea and follow suit with their own endeavor. The trio of Team Hokage dashed back to one of the less than suitable tables of complex engineering as Meiko took charge, quickly opening the table up by removing the plastic cover and pulling out a piece of the construction that served a tin container for tools and materials.
"This task's weird… I suck at construction, you know…" Naruto pouted. He likely would not have been much help in this case.
"I'm not the greatest with it too, I might just be more clueless than Naruto," Kiyomi admitted. Either way, knowing how amazing Meiko was at tinkering, the Yamanaka welcomed a fair chance to recover from her temporary headaches some more.
"Don't you worry guys, I'm all you're gonna need!" Meiko declared as she began putting pieces together, screwing, putting stuff in and taking it out.
"What are you… Making, exactly?" Kiyomi wondered.
"A badass weapon. It doesn't really matter what we make, we don't know what we're supposed to make." Meiko shrugged.
"Ummm… That's… I don't think that's what you should be focusing on, honestly. This entire challenge is meant to test our minds and not our brawn." Kiyomi tapped her foot a couple of times at the busted up tiles beneath her feet but she didn't get in Meiko's way.
"Weapons are like ninja. Narrow-minded people attribute them as good for just one thing but the true meaning of weapons is to be determined by the user. A client can order a ninja to watch over their cat for the weekend just as well as they can order them to kill someone." Meiko replied while engaged in a hardcore drilling operation. Kiyomi just took a piece of cloth from the table and wiped Meiko's sweat with it, just determined to do anything she could to assist her friend.
"Could you leave the sweat wiping thing and thing-handing thing to Naruto and just do that thing you did way back when I was defusing that sealing tag bomb when Hanasaku-sensei took us training?" Meiko asked.
"I'll try…" Kiyomi shrugged. Her mindset was not in the best of places and it has been years since she last used her techniques this way but she closed her eyes and concentrated.
"What's she doing, you know?" Naruto wondered.
"She's connecting us with the mental link and then thinking pleasant thoughts real intense-like. That way she's gonna soothe us down a bit. Helps me work." Meiko smiled as her body overflowed with memories from Kiyomi's childhood that should have been meaningless without context but due to excitement and lovely nostalgia that it caused Kiyomi to experience – it felt just great.
"Wow, that's…" Naruto scratched his chin, enjoying the sweet effects of Kiyomi's concentration a decent deal as well despite doing most of the freeloading at the moment.
"Right? Kiyomi figured out she could do it after I kept pissing everyone off by thinking loudly on the link. She figured that if one could psyche everyone out that way, how about she tried thinking pleasant thoughts and it kind of worked. It wasn't what she would have liked to have learned at that moment since it didn't make her stronger but it did help us out a couple of times while we worked together." Meiko smiled.
"Wow… There were so many times she could have used it in the past… Like when we were training and she kicked my ass and it hurt real bad, you know…" Naruto pouted and looked at Kiyomi with a mean glare, one that he knew she couldn't see at the moment.
"Hey, don't ruin the vibe, that's why she can't use it for something like pain-management – everyone on the link can influence the vibes. If you're in pain, likely you're not thinking pleasant thoughts and that counteracts the whole thing…" Meiko objected to Naruto's mean-spirited remark. Just in time before the fifteen minutes mark, she lifted a pair of clawed gauntlets made out of a metallic frame and coated with leather and some gel that Meiko felt pretty excited to find in the box.
The blacksmith jabbed at the crafting table a pair of times, letting out a dull thud from the gauntlet.
"I thought it would slice the table clean in half… It didn't do that, you know." Naruto squinted at the curiously inefficient tool in Meiko's hands.
"That's because it's far from being complete. I left completing it to after we find out what it is that we must do with it." Meiko smirked.
"Alright, you guys, let's see what you made…" Ibiki gave both teams a strict glare and almost as if that glare scolded them with hot water, both teams stopped their tinkering and rolled up their tables to the examinee. Meiko approached him wearing her contraptions instead, the table of Team Hokage was merely filled with some scraps left over from the production.
"We've made a set of gauntlets. Right now they're just a blunt-force smacking mechanism that can whack someone really hard but they're also ripe with possibility to be enhanced with sealing techniques and modifications." Meiko shrugged, showing off her pounders.
"Impressive, you appear to have made an equivalent of a D-Rank weapon in just fifteen minutes. You have a knack for this." Ibiki struck a grin.
"I don't like it when that guy's grinning, it's creepy, you know!" Naruto pointed at Ibiki while he mumbled to Kiyomi's ear.
"It is. His face appears unnatural in that position." Kiyomi admitted.
"Genbu Shinobi Trio, what have you three made?" Ibiki wondered.
The creepy, green-haired fellow with sharp, shark-like teeth and dyed in gothic shades lips stepped aside from the table, exposing what appeared to be a paper mache volcano. It was colored black with some gouache and had a red jar of gouache filling it from inside as lava.
"We made a paper mache volcano…" the member of the Genbu Shinobi Trio of thicker proportions admitted.
"I see crafting is not one of your stronger suits, fellows…" Ibiki solemnly nodded to himself.
"It is not…" Sekki, the apparent leader of the Genbu Shinobi Trio as he always hung out in the middle of the formation, declared. "However, we are sure that we can convert this volcano to somehow serve a great variety of tasks. Iwagakure has always thrived obtaining what they needed from the mountains, after all. So when you think of it a bit, it's kind of perfect…"
Ibiki stepped to the side, freeing up the view on the screen. Judging from his expression, he did not agree with the judgment of the Genbu Shinobi Trio's craftsmanship being deserving perfection. The screen flashed red, black and white and began showing off people snoring in the all too familiar background of Forest of Death. The people woke up and started mumbling unintelligibly. Mumbling that almost seemed like complaining.
"Your task is to use your tools to help these people stop snoring." Ibiki calmly stated.
Meiko's face shriveled up as she examined her gauntlets from all sides. She was a sort of inventor as well so her mind shuffled with photographic images of possible outcomes that the gauntlets could have been converted into. Judging from the intensity and length of her just standing still and thinking, coming up with the right conversion and modifications was not all that easy.
"Meiko?" Kiyomi stepped up to her teammate and pressed her hand lightly on Meiko's shoulder.
"Yeah, I can do that…" Meiko nodded with a smirk. While Kiyomi didn't like the almost simian nature of Meiko's grin, she had no other choice than to trust whatever her teammate would come up with.
The Genbu Shinobi Trio looked paled out as they kept staring at one another and then back at their paper mache volcano, trying to figure out a universe in which a Ninja Academy level science experiment could have been converted into a solution for snoring.
"Huh… You're not modifying your gauntlets at all, you know." Naruto pointed out.
"No, I'm gonna make another device and then integrate the gauntlets into it. Don't worry, it'll be simple enough…" Meiko smiled.
"And it's gonna… Solve snoring? With a pair of whack-a-mole gauntlets?" Kiyomi shifted her weight on one foot, she didn't want to admit that she doubted her teammate but…
"Uh-huh…" Meiko nodded. Even if her tone implied that there was plenty that the redhead left out, she sort of admitted the most important part and that was good enough. Plus, it was not like Kiyomi and Naruto might have had a better idea if they just canned Meiko and her invention at this late stage of the challenge.
"You're done." Ibiki declared, white, artificial streaks illuminated the room while all six ninja working on their assignments straightened their backs and stepped away from their tables. Upon Ibiki gesturing with his finger for both of the teams to come up closer and introduce their submissions for the assignment, both teams did just that.
"Huh… They don't seem to have modified their volcano at all. We might just have this, you know." Naruto smiled and nodded as if doing his best to assure himself of Team Hokage's inevitable victory.
"Very well, Team Hokage, what is your submission that will solve the snoring of those poor people?" Ibiki turned at the trio from Konoha first.
"Knock 'em dead." Kiyomi faked a smile, trying to seem confident when, in fact, she was very unsettled inside.
Meiko pulled up a ring with a glowing paper tag in the middle compressed by two thick shards of glass. She put on the entire harness and flicked a switch, pulling the two gauntlets that connected by a string reeling mechanism that ruled in a pair of interwoven layers of steel wire. The blacksmith pressed her chest piece and then cupped her hands, still wearing the gauntlets in front of her as a fiery sphere manifested out of smaller flares fired off from the sealing tag on her chest. In the end, Meiko smashed the fireball in between her hands, detonating it in a ground-shaking heatwave.
"A loud noise like this will wake anyone up and if you can't go to sleep – you can't snore…" she smirked.
"I'm gonna kill her…" Kiyomi shook her head, stroking her forehead in disappointment.
"A paper mache volcano, Kiyomi, the other guys made a paper mache volcano, you know…" Naruto tried to calm his team leader down some.
"That is… Horrible… But it technically does solve the problem so I won't disqualify you guys. Let's see what the Genbu Shinobi Trio from Iwagakure has." Ibiki appeared to be similarly disappointed by Meiko's obsession by making weapons and having them solve every problem in front of her.
"Well… Our solution is a bit similar to that of Team Hokage's…" Keppura admitted and pulled out a red food pill from his ninja pouch. The boy dangled it over the volcano that now bubbled, brimming with heat from inside, suggesting that the boys have managed to add a heating mechanism of sorts to it during the extra time they had to complete their invention.
Keppura dropped the red food pill and momentarily it exploded into a revolting, burning sensation. It simultaneously sieged both the eyes by forcing them to water from irritation, the nose by making it drool as well as leaving a peppery scold in everybody's mouth. The pill seemed to be some sort of chili or habanero spice, which resulted in the pepper bomb effect that the volcano caused after the boy dropped the food pill in it.
"If you're not asleep, you're not snoring…" Keppura made an innocent shrug. "In our defense, our presentation would have been better if we weren't the second team counting on the same idea."
"It really would not have been. Team Hokage's performance was pathetic but… Somehow… They won." Ibiki ruled by raising his right hand and pointing at Kiyomi, Meiko, and Naruto as the two who were the least involved in this challenge leaned over the third goofball with menacing glares.