A handful of teams dashed on ahead the moment they realized the challenge had begun. They didn't just move forward with the passion to obtain the item they sought and needed to proceed in the exams, they used the full extent of their uncanny speed which they've acquired. They figured that as long as they rose above any obstacles like buildings and the street lights, the telephone poles and the like, they'll be able to move at speeds that would take them to the other side of the planet in a mere blink without being bothered by colliding with anything.
Naruto stepped onward, a bit hesitant but willing to do the same. He must have assumed that was the way in which his team would move as well but Kiyomi's arm on his elbow stopped the young man.
"Let the eager give hunters something to do. We'll move slower and, what's the most important, silently." Kiyomi declared.
"Yeah…" Meiko nodded in agreement.
"Seriously, you're agreeing with her, you know?" Naruto looked at Meiko. He had expected the more hands-on and passionate type Meiko to be on his side and eager to blast off with her full capabilities towards the goal.
"We've traveled around the world once, searching for this legendary item. The last thing on our mind was to move at full speed. It took us months to complete the journey whereas moving at breakneck speed would have done wonders but the last thing we wanted was to get everyone that was looking a sign of something interesting and in rush within their vicinity to intercept. Speed is intense, it's a beacon to everyone meaning ill will that you're right there and now this ghost Konoha is filled to the brim with people meaning us ill will." Meiko explained herself.
"If what the proctors said was true, we should be able to stand our own against a hunter but… Who knows how long it will take for the hunters to know what's what and begin banding together into teams of their own. The last thing we want is to stick our heads out of the cave when there're bandits with their weapons ready to strike waiting just outside the cave, thirsty for blood and loot." Kiyomi agreed.
"Hey, whatever works for you guys, you know." Naruto shrugged. He didn't look completely sold on the idea but following the directions of the girls had gotten him this far and there was nobody, in particular, he wanted to chase after right now so the future Lord Seventh settled down and got into position to follow his team leader.
"This Konoha is the same as ours. You can lead the way, you do know where the Forest of Death is, right?" Kiyomi smiled at Naruto.
"Really, you know?" Naruto wondered. "You're fine with that?"
"It's preferable, really, your head is tough enough to bash through any walls and if anyone were to trigger any traps, I'd rather it would be someone tough enough to survive them," Kiyomi affirmed, wondering if her teammate had the mental perception to realize he was both being poked fun at and commended.
"Cool." Naruto shrugged and dashed to the corner of the fence, peeking through the opening and then flickering to the other yard. The way he was moving around was just the best, nice and short-distance flickers, then a careful examination of one's environment, who was where and how far… Naruto was a natural at this, it likely was not his first rodeo of such nature.
A team moving like tiny flickers of light hit a barrier in their way. An ethereal set of hands that stopped them dead in their tracks, not even a full millisecond after they had departed from their starting location. The ethereal hands came from a dark alleyway down below. Luciano, the de facto leader of Team Stormcloud from Kumogakure managed to stick his feet onto the ethereal hands and run up them to diminish the counterforce affecting his body.
He saw his teammate, Emi-Wee hit the ethereal hands pretty hard. She was plummeting below lifeless and the violin that she used to set-off her illusions was in pieces. With a ticked off clack of his tongue, Luciano extended his hand, making the sealing glyph on his palm light up as he sent an ethereal chain construct of solid chakra move from inside his white coat and break Emi-Wee's fall.
It was because he was so preoccupied with saving his teammate's life that he missed out on what the Shadow Arms were doing. It was not until he felt a tight grip crushing his body and pulling him down that Luciano realized that the hands weren't just put up to stop them, they were a fully controllable construct of whatever lurked down below.
"You can keep that disgusting girl. There's not a shred of darkness in her heart, revolting like cotton candy… Your heart, however…" a shadowy hiss spread from the alleyway, spreading its way in the shape of panic inside Luciano's heart.
"You seem to be an entity that favors darkness…" Luciano smirked. "Luckily for me, light is somewhat of my specialty!"
The chakra lantern by Luciano's side lit up with intense shimmer, blasting through the shadowy hands. It did not outright defeat the Shadow Arms but it did weaken them to the point where Luciano could break out by himself. The young man placed his chakra chain seal onto a wall which helped him stick his injured teammate and keep her from disappearing into those dark alleys where that mysterious, dark-nature-loving entity lurked. Luciano removed a pair of ancient lanterns comprised of massive emeralds inside a rim of bone-fingers of something larger than a mere man. The lanterns could have been held by a ring of bronze inside of which the hands of a man could easily fit.
Positioning himself inside an abandoned balcony, Luciano aimed about the darkness with his lanterns, ready to fire off his sealing techniques and release the chakra present inside the gemstones inside his lanterns at whatever came to claim the darkness in his own heart. Whatever gloom occupied his nature, Luciano liked exactly where it was right now.
"Ari!" he yelled out, wondering how his third teammate did.
"Don't worry, Luciano…" a familiar to the young man voice came from inside the dark alleyway he stayed so wary of. "This leech isn't so bad at all! It makes you so strong!"
"Ari, what the hell!?" Luciano yelled out. "Come here, we need to regroup!"
The boy yelled out in pain, something mushy began sprouting inside his throat, obstructing his breathing. That was just the beginning, those same spores began bursting into fungal matter inside his eyes, causing massive tension inside his eyelids and blinding Luciano temporarily as he collapsed on the cold and hardened cement foundation of the balcony he hid in. This was the jutsu of his teammate, it was Ari herself that was attacking him!
"On the other hand, I no longer need someone like you. Your teammate is much more to my liking. The darkness in her heart is simply magnificent! Treacherous, greedy, envious… A host befitting the Zero-Tails, don't you think?"
Malicious laughter filled the air. Luciano's eyes were beginning to tear up, the pressure inside his head was causing the mother of all migraines. Why did Ari attack him? Of course, he'd have never seen her coming unless he knew she was compromised by the enemy… Thoughts were getting heavy… What was he thinking a second ago? A kunai knife trembled in Luciano's hand, he'd have plunged it into his own chest to take just one more breath and ease the tension but he knew somewhere deep down that if he let Ari's fungus out in the open he'd only let it spread more of her spores.
Not the third Exams in a row…
"Heh, can you believe how much faster we are in this universe!? And they said we'd get to keep this strength when we get back!" a version of Kiba Inuzuka younger than the one that Team Hokage had encountered during the First Stage of the Exams dashed onward in a spinning flurry of motion. The rest of his team failed to keep up the pace, slowly losing out on distance. It was not only because they were not as physically capable as their headstrong and most impatient member, it was also because they didn't really want to rush off ahead like this.
"Kiba-kun, please… Keep looking ahead…" young Hinata pleaded with her teammate.
"You worry too much, Hinata, we'll get in position before those hunters even…" Kiba was about to say something profoundly stupid and wrong before he noticed the jaws of solid water enclosing around him. Not a microsecond later, the Inuzuka was completely encased in a sphere of water coming from a long jet of water that belonged to rogue ninja on street level.
"Got one, Sasuke!" a slim ninja of shoulder-length white hair and razor-sharp teeth pumped with his other, free fist. One of his arms had halfway turned into the jet of water that formed the Water Prison Jutsu at its end. Because of the liquefying properties of the man's body, he could extend the usually pitiful range of this imprisoning Water Release ninjutsu.
"It's Kiba, a young one. Keep up the pressure, release him when he passes out…" a version of Sasuke Uchiha wearing a black coat with red clouds all over it ordered his teammate.
"Anything I can do, Sasuke-kun!?" a love-stricken young woman of blazing red hair and eyes that matched that eye-gouging shade of red hummed out in a melodious tune right into the ear of her squad leader.
"S-Sasuke…kun!?" Hinata gasped from atop of a nearby rooftop. She and Shino froze the moment that Kiba got captured by the enemy. She had intended to attack the Water Prison in the beginning but Shino restrained her and thought to try and scope the situation out.
"The enemy might not know where we are. Our best odds for survival are if we stay hidden? Why? Because this Sasuke seems older than us. What does that mean? It means he is more than we can handle right now. How do we come out ahead? We use every advantage we can get." Shino mumbled out. Hinata nodded a pair of times listening to her teammate. She admired how cool he could keep his head under such crazy pressure.
"Too bad for you, brat!" a raspy and utterly crazed voice roared from behind Shino. Before Hinata and Shino could realize they were being surrounded, a splash of red-dyed the Hyuuga girl's face and forced her to close her eyes. "This is almost too easy, the bitch has a blindspot right where you said she would, Sasuke!"
"Return, Juugo, we're not here to kill them!" Sasuke ordered the mad dog of his team and he did as he was told, dashing right beside Sasuke while Shino coughed up blood, skewered with spikes that appeared wooden in texture but were much tougher than that in reality.
"Plus, would it kill you to have some manners and not curse that way?" the red-haired woman by Sasuke's side scolded her squadmate.
"G-Guys…" the white-haired slim ninja grunted, he was failing to maintain his Water Prison. In a mad splash of showering waters, the Water Prison exploded as a three-headed giant dog erupted from inside it. Shino's incapacitated body dissolved into a swarm of insects while the blood on Hinata's face paled in color, becoming a mixture of black and thick goop and a more protein-rich, white slime present within one of Shino's insects.
"I think these guys will be more of a handful than we thought…" Suigetsu grunted. "The mohawk guy wasn't kidding – these kids are some seriously roided out brats!"
"Kill, crush, disembowel!" Juugo roared out, losing himself more and more to his Curse Seal.
A shimmer of metal lit up the night as Sasuke had unsheathed a piece of his sword with a displeased expression. "I guess we'll have to try harder, in that case. If we cannot take down these losers, we can never take down actual Jinchuuriki and we can forget about destroying Konoha."
"D-Destroying… Konoha?" Hinata gasped. The girl desperately tried to wipe her face, messing up her cream-colored jacket to the point where she had to ditch it.
"I guess this Sasuke had completely lost it, as Konoha ninja, we can't leave this be. We've gotta take 'em out!" Kiba declared.
"This might be more than we can chew, why? Just one of them managed to press our backs to the wall. Imagine them working together…" Shino questioned Kiba's judgment but the worst thing about this situation was that he couldn't just part ways and runoff by himself.
"I guess this will be some nice practice before the real deal…" Suigetsu looked around, realizing that they were in a simulated version of Konohagakure already. "Better get myself accustomed to cutting down children."
"Blusckel!" a member of Team Monazite from Iwagakure shook his unconscious teammate. The three-meter tall giant youth had just collapsed in mid-trip right after reaching the border of the village.
"Damn it! I knew it that rushing off ahead was a bad idea! Move aside, Kepdur, I'll try to heal him." A golden-haired kunoichi with an Iwagakure headband went through a collection of hand seals and touched the ground, forcing a stream of water to soak her unconscious teammate. The kunoichi stayed down and held her hand on the water, eventually, forcing it to vaporize. The vapors rushing into the few bruises that the downed giant had from falling unconscious while moving at breakneck speed and closed them all in a snap.
"I see… The ability to heal through water vapors. That would be troublesome to deal with. You will be the next target…"
"What's the matter, Haltigeir, why did you stop!?" Kepdur wondered after his teammate just jumped up, tripped over her long, pink dress and fell on the ground, ripping its lower section to pieces as she erratically tried to back up from her unconscious teammate.
"I… There was a… A voice…" she muttered, the racing heart of the young woman didn't let her name the source of her fears in ways that her teammate could easily comprehend. "There!" she pointed at a floating image of a man, rather, a man's upper torso stuck in mid-air while his lower torso had dispersed into a flock of crows. Crows that turned into shuriken and rushed onward at the medical ninja, sending her unconscious to the ground, just like her teammate before.
"A voice? What are you talking about? I don't see any… Haltigeir, Haltigeir!" Kepdur lost all semblance of composure after hearing his teammate speak of some mysterious men and voices. He rushed to the collapsed kunoichi and examined her body for signs of injury but saw nothing. As far as he was concerned, both of his teammates had fallen unconscious unexpectedly.
"You shouldn't have rushed on ahead…" a man in a black coat, littered with crimson clouds walked out from behind a tree. His details seemed altogether quite unremarkable, he was of pale skin, relatively short and frail and had shoulder-length black hair but the most enigmatic and notable feature was his blood-red eyes. Yes, even in the darkness of the park that the man hid inside of, one would pick out those accursed red eyes without much trouble, one wouldn't even need the remarkable perception of a ninja to do so. "Should have prioritized not sticking out over getting to your goal faster." The man finished his thought.
"My, my, Itachi… You've taken out two whole brats of the three-man-cell just like that…" a pretentious sounding voice that spoke in an extremely mocking tone joined in on the party while a giant, blue-skinned man with black and white eyes, gills over his cheeks and lines of razor-sharp teeth appeared from the same hiding spot. Hanging behind the back of this rogue was a bandaged up weapon, shaped like a sword, although one of the rather titanic proportions.
"You can have the third one. The first one was a random pick but it was that girl who was the most dangerous one." Itachi explained himself. "Be careful though, Kisame, Momoyu-san did warn us not to underestimate these kids."
"That's right!" Kepdur clenched his fist. "This universe is brimming with chakra, I've been in it far longer than you two clowns, I can take care of you in three seconds flat!"
"Oh… This one's got spunk. I think I'll take you up on your challenge, Itachi…" Kisame chuckled and grabbed the handle of his sword, letting it slam into the ground beside him.
"Let's see if you can even scratch me, shark-bastard!" Kepdur laughed out. Itachi's glare sharpened, he took pride in the fact that he was a perceptive and somewhat of a sage combatant back in his own universe and his perception screamed right now that this was not a laugh of a ninja who was desperate after seeing two of his teammates collapse in a coma, this was the laughter of a ninja with a hidden ace up his sleeve.
Kisame charged onward, swinging his sword down low. The bandaged up blade dug deep into the gut of the poor Iwagakure ninja and sent him flying. Kepdur slammed somewhere beyond the Konohagakure wall and toppled a couple of trees while landing.
"Impressive, this universe really is something else, Itachi… I've never felt more powerful, just a puny little strike like that sent that poor lad crashing like a meteorite, didn't it?" Kisame laughed out like an overly excited child.
"Don't move your eyes away from the battle, it isn't over yet." Itachi kept it all down to business. Kisame looked back at his partner with a questioning glare but then turned back at a familiar shape of an unharmed young man floating back at where he flew away from with a smirk and not a scratch on his body.
"See? I can't be hurt… Now I'm going to pay back every smallest hurt you've put my team…" the words stuck in Kepdur's throat. The young man collapsed onto the ground, screaming in pain. A few moments later the obsidian flames covering him became apparent, rippling into view as if they were illusionary when, in fact, it was the invulnerability of the young man that was illusionary.
"I-Itachi! What's the meaning of this? You stole my kill!" Kisame stepped up over in his teammate's face.
"Your opponent had placed us into his illusion, making us believe he was invincible. You were just wasting chakra and stamina fighting someone meaningless like that. My skillset is perfectly designed to counter such ninja so it would have been a heinous offense to both of us if I let him wear us down like that without reversing his illusion." Itachi shrugged. "You can have the other three we meet."
"I'm holding you up to that, Itachi! These kids are a seriously tasty bunch, Samehada is getting crazy excited just being around them. She's never felt anything like that!" Kisame ran up behind Itachi who was moving back into the park and heading to look for more genin teams to eliminate.
The Second Stage of the Chuunin Exams was beginning to claim its first victims before the first minute of it even clocked in.