Sadao straightened.

Misaki did too.

They probably thought Ibiki's soon-to-be-uncle being in charge gave them an 'advantage'.

Yeah, no.

Ibiki hoped Head Inoichi didn't have too much power—he could just about see him going extra hard at their team, just to show there wouldn't be any mercy.

Nope.

Not good news.

"Now, I'm sure you're all wondering… what do we get to do for part two? More paper tests? Duels to the death?

"I'm sorry to disappoint; the paperwork is over, and all combat is in part three.

"No, we're testing something else."

Ibiki hoped whatever it was, it wouldn't be in this room.

It was still a sauna.

"We're going to Uzu!" Head Inoichi trumpeted.

Ibiki—

What would they be doing in Uzu?

Maybe protecting parts of the island?

But Head Inoichi said there'd be no combat—

"Or, rather, you're going to Uzu. Every team for themselves, and you aren't allowed to ask for help within Konoha, or between each other—no super-teams. Don't worry your pretty little heads, each team will be followed, so if you do go and kill yourselves in the attempt we'll fish you, or at least your bodies, out of the sea."

Gallows humor.

Yay.

Especially given just how far they were expected to travel.

Without aid.

"You are allowed to collect the supplies you brought to take the exams, so cheer up, but you won't be allowed to spend any money. Which means hunting and foraging, by the way, for those of you that didn't stock up for however long it takes you to get to Kaiso, the main port in Uzu—all crimes are still crimes, and you will be arrested if you commit them.

"As a final note, the firm deadline is the beginning of part three, the tournament rounds. If you get there early, great! You can spend the rest of your time training. If you don't, that's just too bad, isn't it?"

Ibiki swallowed. A deadline of a month? That was even the adults agreeing it wouldn't be easy.

Also, no money?

Was this even possible?

It wasn't even that they couldn't use whatever money they currently had—they weren't allowed to spend any money for the duration of round two.

"Alright," Head Inoichi said. "Ready?"

A few nods.

"Great! In twenty minutes, you have to be out of Konoha. You may begin!"

And a massive crush at the door, as everyone tried to leave at once.

(This only worsened the heat issue.)

.

They met at Ibiki's house, because it was the closest and therefore where the three of them had stored all their pre-prepared gear. They had been warned in advance that they had to have a set list of what they were bringing along, and that they had to actually bring along all of it. This made more sense, now; people who listed too much would be forced to lug all of it to Kaiso, while people who brought too little would have an even harder time making the trip.

Of course, Ibiki had spent much of his free time while the other two were training to be chuunin writing storage steals, so—not so much of an issue.

Sadao grinned, strapping the last knife just above his ankle. "Ah, I feel better already."

Ibiki rolled his eyes, then grinned. "Look better already, too."

Misaki wrinkled her nose. "We all need showers."

"No time," Ibiki said, because he had a plan. "Public library."

Sadao blinked. "The library's—"

"—free!" Misaki finished.

"Let's figure out shipbuilding, quick." Ibiki said, and then the three of them were sprinting away.

.

The public library was one of Head Inoichi's inventions, and it mostly just covered stuff that wasn't 'ninja'—it had fiction books, and history books, and stuff like that.

Ibiki didn't actually know that the library included anything on shipbuilding, but he did know it was free.

"Hello," Misaki said, "would you be able to point us to any books on shipbuilding?"

It turned out the library had four.

None were particularly in-depth.

"I don't think any of these boats were meant to survive the seas. These are all, like, river boats." Sadao said.

Ibiki didn't disagree, but what else could they do? He kept transcribing, so they could study them in more depth later. "How much time?"

Misaki glanced at the clock. "Seven minutes."

"Then shut up, Sadao, and let's write everything we can in the next three."

.

They made it to the gates, but only barely.

Several other teams were clustered around too, looking uncertainly at the road and surrounding wilderness.

"Gimme a minute to summon my fireflies," Ibiki said.

Misaki and Sadao nodded. Sadao rolled his shoulders, glancing around at the heavy packs everyone else was carrying. And then Ibiki was holding out two bugs, and his teammates were making faces as they held them up to the helix of their ears.

"It's not that gross; stop being babies."

Sadao rolled his eyes and then, because they were outside of the village, took charge. "Alright, daylight's wasting. Let's head south as fast as possible, deal with the boat aspect when we reach the shore."

Misaki and Ibiki nodded, and the three of them took off.

.

In the end, it didn't take long for them to get to the coastline. They were a bit exhausted when they got there—they probably should have paced themselves—but unlike most of the other teams they had seals to carry food, water, and other necessities; they did not have to deal with the burden of their supplies.

Of course, they hadn't packed nearly enough food or water to last a month, but they'd decided to prioritize reaching the coastline first.

The three of them stared out, stared as far to the south as their eyes would let them.

The day was calm, with little wind and no clouds at all.

Most of the waves only lapped at the shore, but every few seconds a larger one would come, crash more heavily against the land.

They couldn't see Uzu, but that wasn't a surprise.

They couldn't see any ships either.

"How long, do you think, if we just ran there? Pretending the shore was land and chakra wasn't a concern?" Sadao asked.

Ibiki squinted, trying to remember their geography lessons. "Maybe four, five days? It's not very close."

"It takes us like ten days to cross the whole of Fire! And that's with obstacles!"

Ibiki shrugged. "It's not very close."

Sadao groaned, rolling his neck. "Okay, so a ship is necessary. Let's build a quick shelter first, and set some animal traps, and then we can look at our notes."

.

It took them several days to even put a plan together. None of them had ever built a ship before, and it quickly became clear that trying to build a ship without training, tools, or the correct equipment was…

Not going to work.

To say the least.

Ibiki kicked at their last attempt, which was at least vaguely boat-shaped but definitely not sea-ready, and tried to keep his temper in check. "It's just not—" Ibiki cut himself off, kicking at the pile of wood even harder instead. He felt tears pricking at the corner of his eyes, the reddening of his nose, and he tried to relax his muscles, unfist his hands.

"We need a new plan," Sadao said, and Ibiki resisted the urge to snap at him.

"Is stowing away a crime?" Misaki asked. She was staring far into the distance, where a merchant ship was passing just close enough to shore to be a black speck on the horizon.

Ibiki blinked.

Sadao did too.

"Is it?" Sadao asked.

Ibiki… didn't know.

.

Asuma frowned. Asahi and Kurenai did too.

"Who do you think is most likely to know who my father is, and believe me when I tell him I'm his son?"

"No one," Kurenai said. "Outside Konoha, I mean. Sarutobis aren't exactly… visually distinct."

Asahi snorted.

"Well, do you have a better idea?"

They couldn't pay their way, that was impossible, but if they could just talk their way onto a ship—

Kurenai pursed her lips. "I wish this was a mission in foreign territory. Then I could just use a genjutsu and be done with it."

But Fire had a law against doing such things to both Fire residents and visitors, so no luck there.

Asahi, meanwhile, was looking at several ships in consideration. "I bet we could find a ship with a really crappy captain who doesn't have enough crew and do basic labor for him."

Asuma considered. "That's true… it'd suck, but it would only be a couple days."

"If we're only offering labor one-way, will there really be that many takers?" Kurenai asked.

"That's why I said a crappy captain; we need someone desperate enough not to care."

"And," Asuma added, "we need to get to them before anyone else." He swung his pack back onto his shoulders, the other two did the same, and they began making their way down to the bustling port town.

"Let's start by asking around," Asuma said. "Last thing we want is to get stuck on a boat going the wrong way."

.

Kakashi snickered as he watched Asuma try and fail to talk himself onto yet another ship. Then, feeling a whisper of movement, he nudged to the side, allowing another invisible figure to stand next to him on the wall.

"Hey, Obito, how's team Tsunade?"

He couldn't see Obito's smile, but he could hear it in his voice, smell it in his chakra. "They started out trying to actually build a ship. That went as well as expected. On the other hand, they've already managed to sneak onto the boat your team is trying to work its way on, so…"

Kakashi squinted down at his team below as Asahi took his turn playing negotiator. "How much do you think Sensei will be upset if I interfere?"

"Pretty upset."

"I could argue that my team was busy with the Spring Session of diplomacy in the Capital, didn't have time to adequately prepare?"

Obito snorted.

"Yeah, yeah… just, I mean at this rate it's going to be another week until they give up, and if they succeed now then we could spy on them together."

"And if they succeed now then they'd think that merchant ship captains will just trust anyone to come aboard and get to work.

"Which, really, they probably should have figured out by now. You really think it's going to take them another week?"

"Yeah, the three of them are far too used to diplomacy. They have definitely not spent any time near ports, or close enough."

"To be fair, seafaring people are… weird. If you haven't experienced them before, you might actually think they'd be willing to take some free labor, like merchant caravans are."

Kakashi squinted. "Yeah, that's true… but I mean, come on. Limited space, close quarters, no way to escape… I get how they ended up so certain they'd eventually succeed, but it's really grating that none of them are really thinking about why they haven't yet."

Obito grinned. "Like either of us would have been any better as genin. Or listened to Rin, if she did figure it out. Oh, it looks like there's movement—I should get in position."

"Yeah, yeah, abandon me," Kakashi said.

"You volunteered for this," Obito reminded him. "We all did."

Which, to be fair, was true. There was only so much byoki hunting you could do before you were dying of boredom, and they'd reached that level months ago.

They were still byoki hunting, to be fair, just much less aggressively—most of it seemed to have disappeared, gone down or out of just… vanished. So they were giving the byoki a little break, giving it enough time to recoalesce in the hopes that they could better trace it next time.

Unfortunately, there was too much to do for them to just take time off, so they'd 'volunteered', under the reasoning that at least genin-watching was free entertainment.

Kakashi supposed they'd really overestimated how entertaining genin could be.

Obito was gone, and the merchant ship was beginning to load up the last of its people.

Kakashi turned away from it, dashing along rooftops as he followed his squabbling trio.

A nice month off, he'd thought.

Free entertainment, he'd thought.

Well, hopefully one of the other teams trying smaller ports would show up soon, and he'd have company again.

.

Another spy of Orochimaru's was caught.

This one had managed to get some information back to the sannin, some of Sakura's own encrypted notes and a few of their newer seals.

They'd caught him feeding those to the snake, but they hadn't caught them fast enough to prevent the snake from escaping.

The spy took a suicide pill before Konoha even had the chance to try to interrogate him.

Sakura—

Worried.