Naruto: God of Shinobi

Chapter 30: The Second Proctor

Ibiki looked at what remained of the room.

He took his time with it. His eyes moved across the rows of desks and the genin sitting in them and the particular quality of stillness that had settled over people who had committed to something and were waiting to find out what that meant.

"You have all passed the first exam."

The murmuring started at the edges and moved inward. Confusion first, the sound of people hearing something that did not fit the shape of what they had been bracing for. Then something looser, relief finding its way into postures, a shoulder dropping here, a breath released there.

Ibiki let it run for a moment. Then he continued.

"The test was not about the questions. It was never about the questions." He walked the front of the room slowly. "It was about information gathering. About operating under pressure when the information you need is not in front of you. About finding another way when the obvious way is closed."

He paused.

"The tenth question was the real test. Not because of what it asked. Because of the choice attached to it. Whether you would stay when staying meant risking everything. Whether the people who left could recognize their own limits, which is its own kind of intelligence. Both choices were correct. What we were measuring was something different."

His eyes moved across the room. They stopped, briefly, on Naruto's desk. On the paper sitting face-up on it. On the nine answers filled in with clean, unhesitating handwriting.

Not for long. Just a moment. Then he moved on.

He turned and walked toward the door. He did not look back. The door opened and closed and he was gone, and the room stayed quiet for one more second before it didn't.

Ino threw her arms around Sakura with the full force of someone who had been holding something back and had now been given permission to stop holding it.

"We passed! We actually passed!"

"I know," Sakura said. She pushed Ino off. She was smiling. She pushed her off again because the smile was embarrassing.

"You are crying," Ino said.

"I am not."

"Your eyes are wet."

"That is a different thing."

Across the room, other teams were releasing in their various ways. Choji had opened a new bag of chips and was eating with the focused contentment of a man celebrating appropriately. Kiba was doing something loud. Akamaru was barking.

Naruto sat still.

He was looking at the paper in front of him. At the nine answers. At the blank space where the tenth question had never appeared.

He was thinking about the genin who had stood up and left. About the specific calculation involved in that. About the ones who had stayed, not because they were braver, not because they were stronger, but because they had looked at the risk and decided the thing they were risking for was worth more than the thing they were risking.

He was thinking about what it meant that he had not moved. What it said about what he valued. What he was here for.

He did not celebrate. There was nothing yet to celebrate.

The boy with the perfect paper. Ibiki had not mentioned it. But he had not forgotten it either.

The window came in.

Not breaking, not cracking, but simply ceasing to be a window and becoming instead a brief explosion of glass and frame and displaced air that scattered across the nearest desks and sent the genin closest to it stumbling back.

From the wreckage of the window, a figure dropped into the room.

She landed in a crouch, one knee almost touching the floor, and the dust from the impact was still settling when she straightened up. Mesh shirt. Long trench coat the color of something that had been through weather. Dark hair loose and uncontained. Her eyes were bright in a way that had energy behind it, live and active and looking for something to be interested in.

"I am Anko Mitarashi," she said. Her voice was loud in a room that had gone suddenly quiet. "The proctor for the second exam."

She looked around the room. Her expression was the expression of someone who had arrived at a party that had started without them and was now doing a rapid assessment of whether it had been worth the wait.

"You think the first test was hard?" She spread her arms. "That was paperwork. This is the real thing."

Naruto looked at her.

He noted it quickly, the inventory of a person he was seeing for the first time and needed to have filed before she became relevant. The knife holster on her right thigh, worn low, grip angled for a specific draw. The mesh shirt under the coat, not decorative. The way she stood with her weight distributed evenly across both feet, not forward-heavy, not back, balanced at the center the way people stood when they had learned that things sometimes started without warning. The brightness in the eyes. Not nerves. Not performance. Actual enjoyment.

Kakashi was dangerous the way a deep river was dangerous, the cold contained kind, the kind that didn't announce itself. This woman was something else. The danger in her was present on the surface, visible, almost cheerful about itself. Not less real for that. Just different.

She walked to the front of the room with the loose stride of someone who owned whatever floor she was walking on, not through authority exactly, through the simpler fact of not having any doubt about it.

"Follow me," she said. "I will show you where you will die."

She went through the door before anyone had finished processing the sentence.

The streets of Konoha in the early afternoon had the quality they had on days when the season had not committed to anything in particular, warm enough in direct sun, cool in the shadows, the kind of weather that felt neutral and therefore felt like nothing.

The genin moved through it in a different way than the village moved through it.

Anko set a pace that was not quite a march but was not a stroll either, and the group followed in the particular loose formation of people who were no longer celebrating and had not yet arrived at whatever was next but were suspended in the movement between. The sound of footsteps and the occasional quiet exchange and then less of both as the streets gave way to the outer paths and the outer paths gave way to the wall and the wall gave way to the thing beyond it.

Naruto walked with his hands in his pockets. Sasuke was on his right, not close, not far, the comfortable operational distance of two people who had learned each other's spatial habits. Sakura was behind them, keeping up, not talking.

He could see the Sand Siblings ahead and to the left. Gaara walked with the sand moving around his feet in slow, idle patterns, the kind of movement that looked unconscious but probably wasn't. Temari had her fan on her back. Kankuro was watching the sides of the path.

Behind them, Shikamaru had his hands behind his head and his eyes halfway closed, the specific posture of someone who was more alert than they looked. Choji was eating. Ino was watching Ino's reflection in a window they passed and then not doing that.

Neji walked with his eyes forward and his arms at his sides and his pale eyes doing what pale eyes did when the Byakugan was dormant but the habit of it remained. Lee was talking to Tenten. Tenten was nodding at specific intervals.

The gate appeared at the end of the path.

It was massive. More massive than the word gate usually implied. Iron bars as thick as a man's forearm, old rust bleeding down from the joints, the kind of thing that had been installed with the understanding that what it kept inside should stay inside. Beyond the bars, trees. Darkness between the trees in the middle of the afternoon. The forest going back further than the eye could follow.

Anko stopped in front of it. She turned.

"Training Ground 44," she said. "The Forest of Death."

She let them look at it for a moment. She had the particular patience of someone who had learned that the thing in front of them did some of the work for her.

The smell reached them even through the gate. Wet soil. Green and deep and old, the smell of a place where things had been growing and dying and growing again for longer than the village had existed. The trees nearest the gate were enormous, their roots breaking the ground at the base, their canopy blocking the sky at the top, and the space between them was dark in the way of places where the light simply did not reach.

Anko produced a stack of papers from inside her coat. She held them up.

"Before you enter, you sign these."

She said it the way someone said a thing they had said many times before and had stopped cushioning.

"What are they?" Sakura asked.

"Waivers." Anko's smile had a specific quality to it, not cruel, just honest in a way that some people found uncomfortable. "Consent forms. You are telling the village that if you die in there, it is not their fault. Release of liability."

The silence that moved through the group had weight to it.

"People die in the Forest of Death. Every exam. The village needs your written permission to let that happen. That is how this works."

She held the stack out. Teams moved forward one by one. The sound of paper being handled. Pens appearing. The scratch of signatures.

Naruto stepped forward. He took a form.

He read it. All of it. Not quickly, not performing carefulness, but actually reading, the way he read things now, the way he had taught himself to read things, because documents said things that conversations didn't and people put things in writing that they would not say directly.

The language was precise. The liability releases were complete. The acknowledgment of risk was thorough. The village had been careful about this. They had not left themselves exposed on any edge.

He signed. The pen moved once, quick and final.

He handed the form back. Anko looked at it. Then at him. Then at the form again.

"No hesitation."

"I read it."

"Most of them don't. They just sign."

"I know."

Anko tilted her head. Something moved in her eyes, the particular motion of someone who has encountered a data point that doesn't fit their existing model and is deciding how to update. She took the form. Filed it without looking away from him for another half second.

"Interesting," she said.

Behind him, Sakura had her pen out. Her hand was not entirely steady. She looked at the form. She looked at the gate. She looked at the form again. She signed.

Sasuke signed. His face carried nothing. He had the quality he sometimes had of someone for whom a category of thing had already been processed and filed, and this was in that category, and there was nothing additional to do about it.

Anko tucked the collected forms into her coat.

"Good," she said. "Now you are legally allowed to die."

She walked to the gate. She turned to face them with the gate at her back and the dark of the forest behind that, the trees framing her without her appearing to notice.

"Forty-four gates around the perimeter. Each team enters through a different one." She held up a scroll, sealed, dark markings across the surface. "Half the teams receive a Heaven scroll. Half receive an Earth scroll. Your objective is simple."

She began moving along the front of the group.

"Reach the Central Tower. It is in the middle of the forest. Bring both a Heaven scroll and an Earth scroll. Keep every member of your team alive and present. You have five days. One hundred twenty hours."

She stopped.

"If one of you cannot continue, the team fails. If one of you dies, the team fails. If you reach the tower without both scrolls, the team fails. If you open your scroll before you reach the tower, you are disqualified."

Her voice had dropped from its earlier register. Not softer, quieter. The difference between volume and weight.

"There is no withdrawing. Once the gate closes behind you, you are in there until the five days are over. The proctors inside will observe but they will not intervene except in cases of certain death. You may encounter things in that forest that you are not prepared for. I am not telling you this to frighten you." She paused. "I am telling you because you should know what you agreed to."

She looked at them. All of them. The look was not theatrical anymore. It had the quality of something genuine.

"You are going to be tested in ways you have not been tested before. Some of you will not come back. That is not a figure of speech."

She held the look for one more second.

"Good luck."

The scrolls were distributed inside a low building beside the gate. A man behind a desk. Sealed scrolls in a crate beside him. He handed them out by team number without ceremony.

Team 7 stepped forward. The scroll that came across the desk was heavier than it looked, the seal on it tight and dark.

Naruto took it. He turned it over in his hands once and then held it still.

"What did we get?" Sakura asked.

"We do not open it until the tower," Naruto said. "The scroll does not matter. What matters is the one we do not have."

Sasuke nodded.

Anko appeared from somewhere to their left. She had a quality of appearing in the vicinity of things without having been visibly moving toward them.

"Smart," she said. "Most teams spend the first day trying to figure out what they have instead of thinking about what they need." She pointed down the hallway. "Your gate is forty-one. Go."

The hallway was cold. Long. The building had the feel of a place that saw regular traffic and none of it comfortable. The door at the end was wood banded with iron, old enough that the iron had bled rust into the grain of the wood.

Naruto stopped in front of it.

He looked at his team. Sakura had her hands at her sides, not quite fists, close. Sasuke was looking at the door with the expression that was his neutral expression and also his preparing expression and also his everything is already decided expression, the one that covered a large number of states without distinguishing between them.

"We have done worse than this," Naruto said.

Sakura was quiet for a moment. "Have we?"

"The Land of Waves. Zabuza. The twins. We were less prepared for that than we are for this."

"We almost died in the Land of Waves."

"We did not."

Sasuke said nothing. He opened the door.

Gate 41 was iron and rust and the smell of old metal and beyond it the forest.

Anko had followed them. She stood to the side with a key in her hand, her coat moving in the slight wind coming off the trees.

"This is where I leave you." She unlocked the gate. The mechanism was heavy. The sound it made was the sound of something that had been built to contain things.

The gate swung open.

"Five days," she said. "Central Tower. Both scrolls. All three of you walking."

Naruto looked into the forest.

The trees were enormous. Their canopy sealed the sky at some height above, and the light that reached the ground was filtered and green and old, the kind of light that had passed through so many layers of leaf that it arrived already changed. The undergrowth was thick. The shadows between the roots were deep.

He thought about the information archive. About the scroll and what it had said and the shape of what it meant.

He thought about Gaara. About two containers. About what happened to a thing that had been handled badly for long enough.

He thought about a girl with blonde ponytails who had said certainly, if things work out, and smiled like she meant it.

He stepped through the gate.

Sasuke followed. Then Sakura.

Behind them, the lock clicked.

The forest was dark. The trees were old and large and close. The sound of the gate faded and what replaced it was the sound of the forest, which was the sound of many things happening at once in the spaces between the places you could see.

The second exam had begun.

---

Next time: The Forest of Death.

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