Kitsune no Akuryō

Weed Pulling!!

Kon'nichiwa mina! Welcome back to Kitsune no Akuryō! It feels so unreal to have made 1,000 reads by now. I know that we're already this far in, but looking at everything, I'm not even really comprehending that it's happened in the first place. Thank you to all my lovely readers for coming with me thus far! The Chūn'in Exams have now begun! Competition is high and there seems like little hope of winning when Team 7 has no clue what it's doing, who its friends are, or even if there is any sort of team among three ninja eager to enter the next level at any cost!

     On the threshold of classroom 311 stood an imposing figure. "I am Ibiki. I will be the proctor for your first exam."

      He swept out of the room, and the fledgling genin followed cautiously after him, coming to a classroom of separate long tables. A sheet of paper was at each seat. Six ninja stood along the walls standing at attention. 

       As the genin massed around the entrance anxiously, Ibiki intoned, "Find a seat and don't dally. A ninja who is slow to action will be left behind."

      The genin looked up in surprise and scrambled to a spot. Amidst the chaos of finding a favoured seat or a seat closest to one's teammates or away from prying eyes, one genin moved slowly, his eyes roving his surroundings, slowly and methodically. This boy, the one in orange, was the last to sit just as Ibiki began telling the students about the exam.

     "This is  a written exam. Nine questions are on the paper and a tenth I will reserve for the end of the exam. Chūnin have been posted around the room to catch you if you are cheating. Should you be caught more than five times, you and your team will be disqualified. You have an hour to complete the test. Begin."

      The genin quickly rushed to answer the questions. Most students found that these questions were advanced beyond their experience while few among them thought and struggled until they came to plausible answers. The thoughts began sprouting as if in wildfire, "I don't know the answer to any of these questions. What do I do? There must be some way to answer, but he said---"

     For most the answer was simple, "I just won't be caught."

     The proctor and chūnin watched carefully to catch any wandering eyes if they were too obvious in gaining information, but they were perplexed by the orange boy, the bearer of the Kūybi. For the first five minutes he did absolutely nothing. He had not even flipped over the test. When he did flip over the test, he pulled out a brush, not bothering himself over the stylus given him. He then pulled out a ink stick and stone and began mixing, having spit into the ink stone.

     While the others worked feverishly to finish the test in the prescribed hour, he doodled on his paper with his brush. The chūnin couldn't tell what the images were, but, as the exam progressed, they often felt the need to take the step of sending the boy out like they had with so many others. However, he wasn't doing anything that was technically wrong; he was even molding chakra as was expected. He was just disregarding the exam as an exam which was a clear disrespect of it and its proctor, but little could be done about it if he wasn't cheating. Besides, the final question loomed in their minds as the decisive end of the matter if the boy had such a flippant view about becoming a chunin.

     Among the working students, Sakura was quickly working through the questions with relative ease. Even if the question became somewhat difficult, she still generally knew how to solve the problem. She was done before time was called, and as she was glancing through her answers, she remembered in that moment that these questions had never been asked of them or the consequences to these questions had never applied to a single mission which they had completed. Realizing this, she became increasingly nervous, namely for Naruto. She cringed to think of how he was doing but didn't dare look back for fear of being caught. His muteness wasn't an issue here.