Morino Ibiki was not a man who could afford to care what others thought of him. His profession commanded deep fear, or at best a wary respect, and to reach too far beyond that would be to compromise his own effectiveness. However, on this one day, he allowed himself to feel a measure of satisfaction as the other examiners unanimously praised him as a miracle worker.
For he had accomplished the impossible: every single genin, from every single village, was rallying behind a single cause, their many differences forgotten in the name of a greater goal. Though it was, perhaps, a shame that this goal was the slow and excruciating death of all Chūnin Exam organisers.
"I thought for sure I was going to die!"
"How dare they make me choose between a bunch of nobodies and my little sister?!"
"Uchiha bloody Itachi? Really?"
"I only said all that stuff because I thought it was the end!" (a sharp look from a teammate) "But I'm glad she said yes!"
Team Seven, by contrast, were completely silent. Sasuke was quietly simmering, and he and Sakura wouldn't look at each other. This unfortunately left Sakura, sitting in the middle, with altogether too much Naruto in her field of view. Naruto himself was making a mental note to have all of Leaf's genjutsu experts assigned to permanent dishwashing and cat-wrangling duties as soon as he became Hokage.
But if Kakashi had been there (instead of metaphorically beating his head against the wall in the aftermath of his talk with the Hokage), he would have noticed that the three of them were sitting ever so slightly closer together than usual.
-o-
After the initial waves of righteous fury had subsided, the genin seemed to suddenly remember that they were preparing for a competitive examination, and began to apply themselves to the task of scouting out the opposition. Before Naruto could join in, though, an older genin blocked his way, looming over the still-seated boy in a calculated gesture of intimidation.
Of course, there was only one way to respond to that. Naruto lounged back in his seat with an expression of general satisfaction, for all the world like a yakuza boss receiving a petitioner about to beg for just one more month's extension. In addition to completely ruining the other genin's attempt to set the tone of the interaction, this had the added advantage of letting Naruto see his face without having to crane his neck. The genin's pale, pupil-less eyes left no doubt as to his clan affiliation.
"I am Hyūga Neji," the boy began, speaking with a flat tone that seemed to suggest he didn't consider Naruto worthy of emotion. "I am cousin to Lady Hinata, and I am going to give you your only warning: do not even think of abusing her trust to sabotage her performance in this exam. She may be naïve enough to see something worthwhile in you, but you and I both know that you are nothing but a disgrace to the very name of shinobi. Your attempts to gain undue influence over Lady Hinata are both transparent and despicable, and if you continue failing to respect your betters… I will teach you the full wrath of the Hyūga."
By the end of the speech, Naruto was more amused than angry. At the same time, he distinctly felt that he'd had enough of the Hinata Protection Squad and its efforts.
"Point A," he said, "Hinata can protect herself without you trying to be her samurai in shining armour, and she certainly has better judgement than you are showing right now.
"Point Two," Naruto continued, enjoying Neji's brief wince, "I've faced the head of your clan in battle. The fact that youthink you can intimidate me would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
"In conclusion: you are wasting my time. Why don't you go and do something that might actually help your team, and I'll come kick your ass the next time I have nothing better to do."
For a second, Neji just stared at him, like a clone whose AI had encountered a fatal error. As a Hyūga, it was entirely possible that this was his first time encountering such total disrespect. After spitting out some incoherent response along the lines of "You'll regret this", he stormed off to rejoin his team.
Naruto was aware that he'd made an enemy this day. But that was fine. He was never going to be friends with that arrogant prick anyway, and he'd just laid the groundwork for inducing incoherent rage in someone whose abilities were one of the few hard counters to the Uzumaki Style.
Since a clash with Neji now appeared inevitable, it seemed like a good time to check out the other two members of his team. One was an unremarkable girl with an odd name he could never quite remember, currently busy performing equipment maintenance on the contents of a medium-sized armoury. Something about her look of total concentration suggested that the rest of the assembly hall didn't exist as far as she was concerned.
The other member was unmistakable. Rock Lee, the one genin whose outfit was more ridiculous than Naruto's, was known to every ninja in the village as the genetically-unrelated clone of the veteran jōnin Maito Gai. The latter was a taijutsu master obsessed with what he called "the burning passion of youth", and everyone else called a decades-long midlife crisis. He also claimed to be Kakashi-sensei's rival, though Naruto considered this doubtful, as it would involve Kakashi-sensei being excited about something other than his dubious novels.
What both master and apprentice shared, apart from outrageously bushy eyebrows, the worst fashion sense in the Five Great Nations, and a masochistic addiction to training, was a laser focus on taijutsu over all other shinobi disciplines. And whereas Gai's full abilities were as much of a mystery as those of any jōnin, it was a known fact that Rock Lee was so extremely untalented with ninjutsu that even the Academy Three were forever out of his reach. While it was clear that certain strings had been pulled in order to allow him to make it as far as genin level, it was also acknowledged that he trained harder than any three other ninja put together, and that if he survived long enough to gain the necessary experience, he could ultimately become the greatest taijutsu instructor of his generation.
More relevantly to Naruto's interests, this crippled prodigy seemed to be busy staring in Team Seven's general direction. The good news was that he didn't seem to be glaring at them on Neji's behalf. The bad news was that Naruto recognised that lovestruck expression. He'd seen it in the mirror far too many times during his misspent youth, and it had even been directed at the same person. Apparently, Sakura had a new admirer—because the one thing their team needed right now was more complications to their collective love life.
Well, that at least wasn't his problem. Instead of worrying about potential love triangles, Naruto slowly cast his gaze around the room. Chōji's team was hanging out on the left side of the assembly hall. A lanky, bespectacled Hidden Grass ninja was urgently dragging his two teammates away from Chōji and Ino respectively, while for some reason bowing repeatedly to Shikamaru. Probably not important.
In one corner, a red-haired boy with a gourd was surveying the room with an expression of peaceful curiosity, as if browsing a bookshelf containing many volumes of mild interest. His teammates, on the other hand, were positioned around him in an unmistakeable blocking formation, and their stances left it unclear whether they were protecting the boy from the room or the room from the boy. Naruto made a note to avoid them like the plague.
Hinata stood in another corner, screened by Kiba and Shino while she presumably scanned the room with her Byakugan. Akamaru was engaged in some kind of communication with Kiba, but which way the flow of information was going was anyone's guess.
A trio of ninja from the recently-established Hidden Sound were working different sections of the room, having brief conversations with every team they encountered.
And, most interestingly, a Leaf genin in his twenties, one of the oldest people present, had gathered a small crowd and was talking to them in a voice too soft to be heard from a distance. This warranted investigation.
"What's going on?"
"Allow me to explain. My name is Yakushi Kabuto," the genin told him with a smile. His voice was simultaneously enthusiastic and serene, like that of a door-to-door salesman who'd achieved enlightenment. "You see, I seem to have the worst luck with the Chūnin Exam for some reason—I'm already on my sixth attempt. Since I've been at it for so long, I've been trying to make the most of it by collecting and recording information that suits my particular interests." He pointed to a sizeable stack of cards in front of him, and drew one from somewhere near the middle. "I'd be happy to share any of it with you, my friend, and all I ask in return is that you make your own contribution to my little well of knowledge."
He raised the card in front of Naruto's face, such that nobody else could read it. It contained a standard summary read-out as used in ninja profiles, with "Uzumaki Naruto" written at the top.
Naruto hurriedly scanned the contents. Dates of birth, Academy entry and graduation. Genin status and number of missions completed by rank. Disconcerting, but nothing a fellow Leaf ninja couldn't pull from the records.
The next section was a typical pentagonal diagram that summarised his basic skills relative to others of his rank. Naruto couldn't remember getting one of those made since he graduated. He wondered who'd made it, and when. How accurate was it, anyway?
Genjutsu, low D-rank. Fair. Naruto didn't know any actual genjutsu, and wasn't desperate to learn. Genjutsu was a discipline you had to dedicate yourself to if you wanted to get serious results, same as medical ninjutsu, and Naruto would much rather develop his own unique Uzumaki Style than be the biggest fish in a small pond of specialists.
Taijutsu, low B-rank, hovering uncomfortably near C. Sadly fair. The Uzumaki Style was all about delivering overwhelming force at a single unexpected point, rather than the ability to go toe-to-toe. Not that being able to beat up Sasuke wasn't a valuable skill in its own right, but craftiness and cunning were the very definition of being a ninja. Trying to win all your battles by punching people in the face until they fell over was embarrassing, like breaking through a wall because you didn't notice the door.
Ninjutsu, solid B-rank. Surprising. The Multiple Shadow Clone Technique was powerful, but as far as public record was concerned, it was his only non-Academy technique. He'd expected clan kids like Chōji to easily overshadow him with their variety of unique abilities.
Chakra control... oh, cold hell.
It was emergency damage control time. If it occurred to anyone to ask for this card, Naruto could be in several different flavours of trouble.
"You know," he said quietly, leaning over to the information broker's ear, "it would be such a shame if someone were report to ANBU that a Leaf genin was selling information on his fellow ninja to outsiders."
For the tiniest fraction of a second, Kabuto's hands were a blur. When Naruto looked down, all he saw was an ordinary, if extensive, set of Hidden Cloud playing cards, laid out in a particularly sophisticated solitaire game of "Hunt the Dragon".
Kabuto gave Naruto a cheerful smile. "I was merely offering to share a few tips with fellow players, and maybe pick up some new ones. It does get dull waiting between exam stages so many times, so I've had an awfully long time to refine my game. But I see you're not interested in playing?"
Naruto gave him a "You've got to be kidding me" look.
"I do apologise for any misunderstanding," Kabuto said. "With such a varied personal deck, sometimes I end up showing the wrong things to the wrong people. But since it does seem I've inconvenienced you, I'll try to keep it better organised in the future. After all… friends are always ready to do favours for each other."
Kabuto adjusted his glasses, during which brief period the cards reorganised themselves into a neat stack once again. Before turning to his next client, he gave Naruto a mischievous wink.
Naruto had a very bad feeling about this.
He was also left with the problem that a number of people had been in position to see he had something to hide. It was going to take something drastic to distract them before that first impression became fixed.
After a second's thought, Naruto climbed onto a desk in the middle of the room and struck a dramatic pose, doing his best impression of the protagonist of Saga Gaiden (the prequel in which Saga was still a kid, and kept making a fool of himself in his efforts to look cool in front of the girl he liked).
"My name is Uzumaki Naruto, and I'm not going to lose to any of you bastards!"
The room fell silent for a second, and then Naruto was greeted with a combination of disbelieving laughter (from the more emotionally secure genin) and killing intent (from most of the rest).
Mission accomplished. Everyone would remember him, and they would remember him as the biggest idiot at the Chūnin Exam. This also meant that the more cunning enemies would go after Team Seven last, since it made more sense to deal with greater threats first and wipe out the small fry later, rather than wasting resources on them that could make the difference between victory and defeat against their real challengers. If nothing else, it might cancel out the increased threat status Team Seven got from the presence of an Uchiha in their ranks. All Naruto had to do was keep his head down during the first event, until everyone was done dismissing his team from consideration, and then nobody would see it coming when they blasted through the rest of the exam.
-o-
Unfortunately, Naruto's strategy had one unexpected victim: Morino Ibiki, who had chosen that exact moment to walk into the room, and was now having to work very hard to maintain the air of deadly seriousness with which he'd intended to conduct the next part of the exam.
"Attention!" he barked after a second during which he arranged his face into a disapproving scowl, tensing facial muscles lest their twitching reveal his true reaction. "My name is Morino Ibiki, and I am the instructor in charge of this examination. I will now explain—"
But Team Seven seemed set on making his life difficult. Uchiha Sasuke raised a hand.
"A word, sir?"
Ibiki knew what was coming. He'd intended to delay this particular conversation until a more convenient moment, but the boy looked like he was on the verge of doing something unwise. Better to be flexible here than to risk having to disqualify one of Leaf's most promising genin before the first stage even began.
He beckoned the Uchiha into a side room.
-o-
"How dare you?" Sasuke shouted. "How dare you? You knew full well what it would mean for me to think Itachi was nearby, and that he was killing again!"
"Yes, I did," Morino acknowledged, calm and implacable as a stone wall. "I could have chosen any number of S-rank criminals for the scenario, and I chose Uchiha Itachi because we had to know if you were a liability."
Sasuke's rage was disrupted by confusion. "A liability?"
Morino looked stern, even more so than usual. "Do you believe that you are the first shinobi to be driven by an obsessive need for revenge? There have been countless cases of shinobi choosing to derail or abandon their missions in the name of hunting down their foes, and they invariably end in disaster. You nearly failed the test, and you were saved only by the moderating influence of your team, and your ability to eventually see reason when you are being beaten over the head with it."
Sasuke didn't know what to say. His actions had seemed so right at the time, the fulfilment of a destiny, of the only way things could be. It had been jarring to be pulled out of that experience of certainty, and discover that apparently he was in the middle of being a tunnel-visioned loser even worse than Naruto. Doubly jarring to have his errors pointed out to him by Sakura, whom he'd previously seen as something not unlike a pet dog—she was definitely on his side, and he wouldn't want her to come to harm, but she was also frequently irritating and had a tendency to get underfoot.
Quite what he'd nearly done was still sinking in. He had nearly abandoned his team. The fact that they could have been in serious danger without him almost seemed secondary to the fact that he had done the one thing he considered a crime above all others. In truth, his life hadn't left him particularly well-equipped to understand what others meant when they talked about loyalty and interpersonal bonds—all he'd ever done was watch them break, one after another—and he often found it hard to see why they mattered so much when weighed against really obvious virtues like truth and honour and the drive to grow stronger. But even so, there were some things you just did not do, not if you wanted to keep thinking of yourself as a human being.
And now his actions had left him with a devastating dilemma. When it came to Itachi, there was only one choice he could make in order to stay true to himself, but what if that choice ultimately created a self not worth staying true to?
"Understand this," Morino said. "You are a particularly gifted genin. You possess one of the greatest Bloodline Limits in existence, if you can only master its full power. You are the last hope for a clan whose extinction would change the world more than you can know. You are needed. And you are someone who has the potential to become the next Uchiha Itachi."
Sasuke started to object without thinking, but Morino spoke over him.
"There is a reason that the Will of Fire is the will to protect. Some of history's greatest villains were champions of good until they became driven by the need to destroy evil.
"Itachi was a wise, selfless and honourable man who alone did more good during his years as a loyal Leaf shinobi than entire clans have accomplished over generations. I do not for a second believe the rumours that his betrayal was motivated by personal gain, or by hatred, or that he succumbed to deception or blackmail. The only possibility that leaves is that he somehow believed that the existence of his clan was evil, and that to eradicate it was an act of good. Do you believe it was an act of good, Sasuke?"
Sasuke shook his head. The question should not have even needed asking, and yet some tiny part of him wanted, in defiance of all morality, to believe that Itachi was in the right.
"No sane man can. The only way to call the murder of innocents an act of good is to shut yourself off from reason through blind zeal—the kind of blind zeal that gets a genin killed rushing off to fight one of the world's deadliest missing-nin."
Morino looked at Sasuke for a few moments. That was when it clicked. Sasuke realised what the jōnin was trying to hide.
The clues were all there, for someone with the flawless perception of the Uchiha. The way that Morino, despite his upright military bearing and arms habitually folded behind his back, stood just a little closer to Sasuke than a superior officer would, yet without infringing on his personal space. The tone of his voice, underlaid with a faint current not of compassion—Sasuke knew well how easily that could turn to pity—but of understanding. And hidden in the depths of Morino's eyes, so subtle that Sasuke wouldn't have known to look for it if he hadn't noticed how Morino's eyebrows weren't quite set firmly enough for the rebuke he was delivering… deep recognition. Maybe even kinship.
It came to Sasuke how alike he and the head of Torture & Interrogation really were—both burdened by a duty others couldn't understand, a task that only they could accomplish. Both forced to set aside trivial bonds and the desire for others' approval in order to do what must be done. Morino must have recognised that long before Sasuke did. With the superior wisdom of his experience, he must have seen Sasuke on the verge of unwittingly abandoning his path, and reached out to set him straight. And at the same time, with iron discipline he had resisted the temptation to form a personal bond that would only distract them both from doing what had to be done.
Was Morino aware that Sasuke had noticed? It was hard to tell, but he had a feeling that the jōnin's expression had turned a little bit more stony, the eternal tension in his stance a little more pronounced. He was strengthening the emotional wall in order to make things easier for Sasuke.
Morino went on as if the relationship between him and Sasuke had not changed at all, which, in a way, was the whole point.
"You made one choice today—with help—that does not lead to the path of becoming a new Itachi. There will be others. Some will be obvious, others unimaginably subtle. Some will call for sacrifices you do not want to make. Not a single one of them will be easy.
"I am not speaking only of choosing between good and evil, a concept even a child can understand. I am speaking of choosing between reason and emotion, of knowing when to follow your feelings and when to lock them away so that you may do what is right. That is the choice which you faced today, and the choice which will decide whether you follow in your brother's footsteps."
Nothing was said for some time as Morino allowed his words to sink in. Sasuke did his level best to memorise every one, aware that these must be the challenges that Morino himself had overcome in order to get where he was now.
Finally, there came a dismissal.
"Go. There are many more trials to come, and countless bookmakers are waiting to see whether the last Uchiha will fulfil his potential."
Sasuke frowned as he was waved out. Had that been a joke from a man who never joked? Or a hint of affection? A reminder that Sasuke's choices had consequences beyond his own future? Or simply an acknowledgement that, in the end, Morino-sensei had faith in his abilities? Sasuke couldn't tell. He really did have a lot of work to do before he was ready to play at Morino-sensei's level.
-o-
"It has been drawn to my attention," Ibiki began, "that some of you have objections to the way the preliminary phase of the Chūnin Exam was conducted. Well, then, I shall explain, and then you will enter Stage 1 without unnecessary distractions.
"The scenario you experienced was the product of many months' joint work between Hidden Leaf and Hidden Sand's best genjutsu specialists. Its objective was twofold. First, it tested to what extent all of you were capable of following instructions under stress. The Chūnin Exam creates a high-pressure environment, and deviation from instructions can result in permanent injury or death.
"Second, for our foreign guests, it was a test to establish that none of you would seek to take advantage of a crisis in order to act against the interests of Hidden Leaf in any way."
At this, there was much angry murmuring, and more than a few people quietly wishing for his permanent injury or death.
Ibiki noted the focal points in the crowd, but was otherwise unmoved. In his profession, death threats were gifts—they were clues to some of the central levers of a resource's psyche, hinting at the nature of their own fears, their defensive mechanisms and their habitual pathways of thought. Resources casting death threats at an interrogator fancied themselves archers firing arrows from the castle walls, when in reality they were footmen throwing open the gates before a besieging army.
"Before any of you take offence, be aware that certain genin teams did in fact fail this part of the test, and have been deported from Leaf without right of return. Additional punishments will be imposed by their home villages. Every participating village has agreed that its shinobi will act as our allies within the context of the Chūnin Exam, and there is no greater crime in the shinobi world than betraying an ally.
"Now," he concluded, "follow me through this door into the next chamber, and then the Chūnin Exam can begin."