Naruto: God of Shinobi

Chapter 36: Passing the Second Stage

The fire had burned down to embers.

Orange and low, casting just enough light to see the faces of the people sitting around it. Not enough light to see past them, into the trees where the dark had the specific weight of a dark that did not move because nothing inside it was moving. The mist had come back, thin and purposeless, curling between the roots and settling against the lower trunks and going nowhere.

Forty-eight hours.

Naruto sat with his back against a tree. His knees were drawn up. His arms rested across them. His face in the firelight was the face of someone who had been thinking about the same problem for two days and had arrived at the same dead end both times.

The seal was warm on his stomach. It had been warm continuously, a low heat that was not pain but was never not present, the way a stone holds the sun after the sun has moved. He had pushed against it until his chakra gave out. He had probed it. He had tried to find a gap, a seam, anything that could be worked. There was nothing. It sat over the Eight Trigrams Seal the way a hand sat over a door, complete and without opening.

The void was closed. He could not reach the Fox. He could not speak to it. The silence where that connection had been was not empty. It was occupied by something that had no sound.

He had gone through his scrolls twice. Chakra theory. Ninjutsu fundamentals. The notes from the public archive, cross-referenced against everything he had memorized from the restricted one. Nothing mentioned a seal like this. Nothing mentioned how to remove it. The information did not exist in anything he currently had access to.

He needed the restricted archive. He needed to get out of this forest and get back into the building where the answers were. That was the plan. That was the only plan. Everything else was waiting.

Sasuke sat across the fire from him.

He had been watching Naruto. Not continuously but enough. His dark eyes moved from the flames to Naruto's face and back. He wanted to say something. The something was sitting in his chest, had been sitting there for two days, and it would not move and he could not find the words to move it.

He had an image he could not stop returning to. Sakura's arms around him. Her face against his shoulder. Her blood on his collar. He had not been aware of it at the time. He had been somewhere else. But he knew what it must have looked like to Naruto, waking up in the cave, seeing them like that.

He was not good at explaining. He had never been good at explaining. The words for the inside of things had not come easily to him even before he had things inside him that needed explaining. He looked at the fire and said nothing.

Sakura sat between them, closer to the fire. Her healed arm rested in her lap. The medical nin at the tower had set the bones properly, the work of someone who had done it many times, and the arm moved correctly now. Her ankle was still tender. But she could walk.

She was watching Naruto too. Everyone was watching Naruto.

He was angry. It came off him like the heat came off the embers, steady, constant, not attached to any one thing in the clearing but present in everything. He was not angry at her. She did not think he was angry at Sasuke. He was angry at something that was not in the clearing.

She thought about the moment he woke up. The way his eyes had moved across the scene without expression and then hardened into the expression he had been wearing for two days.

Was he jealous? The thought moved through her chest before she could stop it, warm and hopeful and probably wrong. She looked down at the fire. She did not say it.

Naruto was not jealous. He was not thinking about Sakura or Sasuke or the image of the two of them. He was thinking about the seal. About the archive. About the Fox behind a wall that had no door. About the fact that he had been running calculations for two days and the calculations all ended in the same place.

He wanted to fight something. He wanted to finish this exam. He wanted to get out of this forest.

* * *

The footsteps came from the trees.

Not quietly. The opposite. The footsteps of someone who had decided that stealth was not the point, that being heard approaching was better than being heard arriving, that giving warning was a form of courtesy or a form of information management.

Naruto's hand went to his kunai. His head came up. He found the gap in the trees where the sound was coming from and he held it.

Kabuto Yakushi stepped into the firelight.

His silver hair caught the orange glow. His glasses reflected the flames with the particular quality of reflections in glasses, two small fires where his eyes should be. His smile was the same smile it had been in the exam room, open and warm and arrived at by someone who had practiced it until it was indistinguishable from genuine. He was alone. Both hands visible. No weapon.

"Good evening," he said. "I thought I might find you here."

Naruto did not relax. His hand stayed on his kunai. His eyes stayed on Kabuto's hands.

Kabuto stopped at the edge of the firelight. He did not come closer. He stood with his hands at his sides and his smile in place and he looked at each of them in turn with the look of someone doing an inventory.

Sakura's arm, healed. Sasuke's neck, collar up. Naruto's face, hard and closed. He did not comment on any of it.

"What do you want."

Naruto's voice was flat. Flatter than usual.

"I wanted to see how you were doing," Kabuto said. "The second exam is almost finished. I have taken it before. Several times. I know how long the last few days feel."

Sakura looked at him. "You have both scrolls?"

Kabuto reached into his vest. Slow. His hands were visible throughout the motion. He withdrew two scrolls and held them up, one in each hand, the firelight catching the seals on their covers.

Heaven and Earth.

"Lucky," he said. "Or careful. Both, perhaps."

Naruto looked at the scrolls. He looked at Kabuto's face. He looked at the scrolls again.

"Give us your Earth scroll."

Flat. Not a question.

Kabuto's smile did not move. "I do not think that would be wise."

Sakura turned. Her eyes went wide. "Naruto…"

"We need an Earth scroll," Naruto said. He stood up. His hand was on his kunai. The embers cast the shadow of him long across the ground behind him. "You have one. Give it to us."

Kabuto looked at him. The smile was patient. The eyes behind the glasses were the eyes of someone who had looked at a situation from every angle and was now watching the situation unfold according to its nature.

"I understand the frustration," Kabuto said. "But attacking me would not end the way you want it to. Even at your best, you could not take me. And you are not at your best right now."

Sakura stood up. She put her good hand on Naruto's arm. Steady. Firm.

"Naruto. Stop." Her voice did not ask. "We do not need to fight him. He has not done anything."

Naruto's jaw tightened. His hand stayed on his kunai. He did not draw it.

Kabuto watched him the way he watched everything. Collecting.

"I am not your enemy," Kabuto said. "I am here because there is a team near the eastern edge of the forest. They have an Earth scroll. They are not hiding well. You can take theirs with less effort than it would take to take mine."

Naruto's eyes narrowed. "Why are you telling us this."

"Because you are interesting," Kabuto said. "All three of you. I want to see what you become."

He reached into his vest. Naruto's hand tightened. Kabuto withdrew a map and tossed it toward Sakura with an underhand motion. She caught it.

"The team is here." He pointed to a location on the map without touching it, indicating from the air. "They will not give you difficulty."

Naruto looked at the map. He looked at Kabuto. The warmth behind the glasses was constructed and he could see the construction and behind the construction was something he could not name but could feel, the same wrongness he had noticed in the exam room when the smile had landed too precisely.

"We will find our own scroll," Naruto said.

"You already did," Kabuto said. He turned. He walked back toward the trees. "Good luck."

The mist took him.

Sakura looked at the map. She looked at where Kabuto had been standing. She looked at Naruto.

"He was trying to help."

"I do not trust him."

"Neither do I. But the information might still be good."

Naruto held the silence for a moment. Then he nodded once.

"East."

* * *

They moved through the forest at a pace that was not fast and was not slow.

Naruto led. Sasuke followed. Sakura brought up the rear. The map was accurate in the way that information from someone who wanted something from you was sometimes accurate, which was completely, because the accuracy was part of the transaction.

The eastern edge of the forest was marked by a line of ancient trees, their trunks wider than the spaces between buildings, their root systems creating raised barriers between sections of the forest floor. The canopy was denser here. The light from the moon did not reach the ground. They moved in the dark between the roots and the dark was particular and directional, the dark of a place where someone had been waiting.

Naruto stopped.

He felt them before he saw them. Not chakra. The quality of the air when the air had been organized by people who were trying to disappear into it. The particular stillness of watchers. He had felt it enough times to know it without thinking about it.

"Ambush," he said. Quiet. Not a question.

Sasuke's hand went to his kunai. Sakura's hand went to her pouch.

The mist shifted.

Figures moved in it. Not from one place to another. From nothing to something. They materialized at the edge of visibility, three of them, then more, the mist producing bodies with the unhurried efficiency of a technique that had been built for exactly this moment. The figures had the right weight and the right movement but the wrong substance, the particular wrongness of things made from condensed air and directed chakra.

Mist Servant Technique. He had read about it. The Rain genin who relied on it preferred situations where visibility was already compromised and patience was already exhausted, where the illusions could accumulate past the point of useful tracking.

Naruto looked at the figures spreading through the mist. His face was hard.

"I do not have time for this."

His hands came together. His own chakra this time, not the Fox's, the reserves still thin from the Forest but present enough for what he needed. The seals were fast. He had done this often enough that the seals did not require attention.

"Multi Shadow Clone Jutsu."

They came out in waves. Ten, twenty, fifty, the smoke of them arriving and clearing in continuous sequence until the clearing held more Narutos than it had held trees. They stood with his face and his posture and the same hard expression he was currently wearing and they looked at the mist figures with the same absence of interest.

The Rain genin hesitated. The Mist Servant Technique worked against confusion. Against individuals trying to track multiple targets. It was not designed for a situation where the other side had more bodies than the technique had copies.

The clones moved.

They did not wait for coordination. They went in mass and they went with the arithmetic logic of overwhelming numbers, punching and kicking and grabbing, and the Rain genin fought back, dispatching clones, the smoke of each dispelled clone rising and thinning. But for each clone taken, the space it had occupied was refilled. The math did not work in the Rain team's favour and the math did not change.

Naruto stood in the center of the clearing. He watched. His eyes were cold.

Then he brought his hands together again.

"Wind Style: Cyclone Devastation."

The basic version. Not the full output from the Forest. The chakra he had left did not support the full version and the full version was not required. The tornado formed in the clearing at a scale that was sufficient.

It took the mist clones first. Wind blades moved through condensed chakra without the resistance that substance provided and the Mist Servant figures came apart into their component air without ceremony.

Then it reached the Rain genin themselves.

One of them screamed. The wind took him. The blades were not discriminating and did not need to be. Another ran. A clone caught him and held him in place with the simple physics of mass and the tornado reached him where he was held. The third one did not make a sound.

The tornado dissipated. The debris settled. The clearing was quiet in the way clearings were quiet after the thing that had been making noise was gone.

Naruto's clones dispersed. He stood in the center. He was breathing harder than he had been. His chakra reserves had an opinion about what had just happened and the opinion was detailed and specific.

Sasuke looked at the ground. At the bodies. His face was pale and closed.

Sakura looked at Naruto. Her hand had come up over her mouth at some point during the tornado and it was still there.

Naruto walked to the bodies. He searched them with the efficiency of someone doing a necessary task. He found the Earth scroll. He straightened up.

"We have both scrolls," he said. "Let us go."

He walked toward the tower. He did not look back at the clearing.

Sasuke followed. Sakura looked at the clearing one more time. Then she turned and followed. She did not say anything. There was nothing to say that the moment had room for.

* * *

The central tower rose above the canopy.

Ancient stone, the surface of it covered in the particular grey-green of moss that had been growing for decades undisturbed. The roof had broken in places, the stone cracked and displaced by the weight of time and the roots of things that had grown where nothing had been intended to grow. The walls were scarred. Not by the weather alone. By the exams that had passed through this place over years, by the things that had been done near these walls by people who needed something the walls contained.

Naruto stopped at the edge of the clearing surrounding the tower.

He looked at the scrolls in his hands. Heaven and Earth. Both of them. He had Earth from the Rain team. He had Heaven from Dosu.

"We made it," Sakura said.

Her voice was quiet and held the particular quality of a thing said because saying it made it more real. She was standing without limping. Her arm was at her side and moved correctly. She looked at the tower with the expression of someone who had walked a long way and had arrived.

Sasuke said nothing. He was looking at the tower doors. At the darkness beyond them. He said nothing because he was thinking about something that was not the doors.

Kabuto appeared at the tree line.

Not from the direction they had come. From a different direction. He had taken a different route or he had not gone where he said he was going. His smile was the same. His hands were in his pockets.

"I will leave you here," he said. "My team is on the other side. Good luck in the third exam."

He turned. He walked into the trees. He did not look back.

Naruto watched the space where he had been. Then he turned to the doors.

The doors were massive. Old wood banded with iron, the hinges rusted to the colour of old blood, the wood itself dark from decades of weather. Naruto put his hand against one. He pushed. The door moved, the hinges complaining in a register that had been complaining for years, and light spilled out from inside.

They entered the tower.

* * *

The doors swung shut behind them.

The room was large and round. The walls were ancient stone worn smooth by the hands and backs and shoulders of every genin who had stood in this same place and leaned against these same walls. Torches burned in iron sconces at intervals around the circumference, the light from them orange and warm and landing on the floor in overlapping circles. At the far end of the room, a closed door. Above it, carved into the stone in letters that had been carved carefully and a long time ago, a message.

Sakura read it aloud. Her voice moved in the round space and came back from the walls diminished.

"If qualities of heaven is what you desire, acquire wisdom to take your mind higher. If earthly qualities are what you lack, train your body and prepare to attack. When heaven and earth are open together, the perilous path will become righteous forever."

She looked at the words after she had said them. "Heaven. Earth."

Naruto looked at the scrolls in his hands.

Sasuke's eyes moved across the carved letters. He read them again without speaking. Then: "The scrolls."

"Open them," Sakura said. "We have both. We have to open them."

Naruto unrolled the Heaven scroll.

The smoke came from it in a column. Not the small burst of a standard summoning. A sustained release, white and warm, rising toward the ceiling and spreading outward when it met the stone above, filling the upper half of the round room and descending. The smoke smelled of old paper and something older than paper. It was thick enough that the torches at the far walls became orange suggestions rather than sources.

The smoke did not disperse.

It coalesced. It drew itself together in the center of the room with the purposeful movement of something that had a shape it was trying to become. And then it was that shape.

A figure. Short. Green jonin vest. A scar across the nose. Dark hair tied back. The face of someone who had stood in front of a classroom for years and had cared about it.

Iruka Umino.

Sasuke's hand had gone to his kunai and stopped. Sakura's breath had stopped. Naruto looked at the figure standing in the smoke.

It was not Iruka. It was the shape of Iruka, a projection from a summoning seal built into the scroll by the Third Hokage, a memory stored in chakra and paper, designed to do one thing at one moment when the conditions of that moment were met.

But the voice was real. Or real enough. The summoning had been crafted with care.

"Congratulations," Iruka said. "You have passed the second exam."

Sakura found her voice. "Iruka-sensei. If we had opened the scrolls during the exam… what would have happened?"

"The summoning would have triggered early," Iruka said. "You would have been rendered unconscious until the exam period ended. The proctors would have retrieved your team. You would have failed."

Sakura went pale. She thought about the Rain team. About Kabuto in the exam room. About the moments when opening the scrolls had been a possibility and something had stopped them.

She looked at the carved message above the far door. "So about the message up there.”

"Yes," Iruka said. He turned toward the words as though looking at them again for the first time. " The Third Hokage wrote that. He wrote it as instruction. For the ones who made it this far."

He turned back to face them.

"Heaven represents the mind. Intelligence. Strategy. The thinking part of a ninja. The first line is a warning and an instruction: if your mind is your weakness, strengthen it. Train it past where it is comfortable."

He paused. The smoke around his edges shifted. He continued.

"Earth represents the body. Technique. Endurance. The physical part of a ninja. The second line carries the same message in the other direction: if your body is your weakness, train it. Push it until the limits change."

He looked at all three of them. He had known all three of them when they were different from what they currently were. He was looking at what they had become and the looking was visible on his face.

"When heaven and earth are both strong, when the mind and body have both been trained past their former limits, the most dangerous paths become navigable. That is the lesson the Third Hokage wanted you to take from this exam. Not victory. What victory required of you."

He let the words hold the room for a moment.

Then he smiled.

"I did not think you would make it this far," he said. "Any of you. I doubted you." His voice was steady. It held the particular steadiness of someone who was choosing it. "I was wrong."

He looked at Naruto when he said it. The eyes of the projection found him and stayed there with the weight of something that had been true for a long time and was being said for the first time.

"I am proud of you. All three of you."

Naruto stood with his arms crossed. His face was hard. His jaw was tight. He was not smiling. He was not celebrating. The seal on his stomach was warm and the void was closed and he had two scrolls in his hands and a restricted archive he needed to break into and none of those things had changed.

Iruka's projection saw his face. The smile shifted into something else. Something that had not expected this.

"Naruto?" he said. "What is wrong?"

Naruto did not answer.

The smoke at the edges of the projection was already thinning, the chakra sustaining the shape beginning to run through its duration. The figure of Iruka was losing definition at the periphery, curling upward, the smoke becoming smoke again.

"The path ahead is dangerous," Iruka said. His voice was still clear even as the rest of him was not. "The third exam will test you in ways the first two did not. But you have made it this far. Do not stop now."

The smoke dissipated.

The room held the remnant smell of old paper for a moment. Then that too faded. The torches burned. The stone was the same stone it had always been.

The door at the far end of the room opened. The hinges moved smoothly. The light from inside was brighter than the torchlight, orange and warm, and the sound of it was the sound of other people, of a room that had been filling for however long the exam had been running.

Naruto walked toward it. He did not look at Sakura. He did not look at Sasuke. He looked at the open door and he walked toward it.

Sakura watched him. She looked at Sasuke. He shrugged, a minimal movement, the shrug of someone who understood that the thing happening was not something a shrug could address but who had no other available gesture.

They followed him through the door.

* * *

Kabuto had not left.

He had said he was leaving. He had walked into the trees in the direction of the other side of the tower. He had not left.

He stood behind a tree at the edge of the clearing, his hands in his pockets, his glasses catching the torchlight from the tower windows in two small reflected points. He had watched the doors open. He had watched them go in. He had stood there in the mist while the doors closed behind them.

The blond boy.

He had killed the Rain team. He had done it without raising his voice. Without hesitation in any of the usual places. He had used a tornado technique that Kabuto had no record of, that existed in no scroll he had read, that had been invented by a twelve-year-old and deployed with the control of someone considerably older. He had used shadow clones as a delivery mechanism for a secondary technique, the clones dispersing inside the snake in the Forest and releasing wind blades, which Kabuto had reconstructed from the description the Rain team had given before they were no longer capable of giving descriptions.

He had killed them.

Kabuto had seen talented genin. He had watched many exams. He had a reasonably complete model of what talented genin looked like at twelve years old, what they could do, how they moved, where the ceiling was.

This boy was not inside that model.

"This could prove to be a problem," Kabuto said.

He said it to the mist. The mist did not respond.

He turned. He walked into the forest in the direction of his own team, his own scrolls, his own role in a sequence of events that had been arranged by someone who arranged things from very far away. He had his part to play. He would play it.

But he would be watching.

---

Next time: Too Many Survivors - The Prelims to Cut the Numbers.

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