Konoha's Red Dragon

genin exam part 1

"you all made it. Good."
Kakashi hummed, snapping his book closed and putting it away.

"of course, sensei! We're not cowards!" Naruto chirped, waving a fist in the air with Sasuke clicking his tongue behind him, a smirk on his face.
Sakura looked at Aki briefly, giving each other a small grin. She still smelled a little uncertain, but she had more resolve now.

Aki didn't.
But she didn't want to disappoint her team either.

"good, because if one of you had decided not to come, I wouldn't have been able to let you move forward." Their sensei smiled at them and they all twitched. Aki thought it was reasonable. Teamwork was needed for tests, after all.

The first round that they had needed to pass, a preliminary of sorts, was an illusion based one. Two chunin, the gate guards that she didn't know the names of, had used a genjutsu to trick genin's into thinking the wrong floor was the right room.

Aki had immediately herded the three away, not giving Sasuke a chance to talk. Shutting down his glare with her own narrow eyed look.
They didn't need more competition than what was necessary.

Now they stood in front of their sensei, who was guarding the entrance to their next challenge. It smelled vaguely of paper and ink behind the door. A written test, perhaps?

She wasn't any good at those...

"there is a single problem, however."
That got all of their attention. Naruto and Sakura blinking, Aki tilting her head and Sasuke looking at him with narrowed eyes.

"what is it?" Naruto asked and Kakashi sighed.

"very rarely are there teams of more than three genins," he glanced at all of them and Aki tensed. She knew where this was going, "because of this, only teams of three are allowed to advance." He kept his voice a little softer than normal.

They all looked at each other.

Well. That was... actually, she should've seen this coming, never once had she heard of teams of genin in more than three, maybe only a few times in the history of the leaf. She didn't know if it was common in other villages. Probably not.

Aki drummed her fingers on the side of her thigh, looking down at the ground. Sakura looked uncertain, the boys just looked disappointed and upset. They were all upset,
their scents souring into something nasty to be around. Aki shook her head and tried to ignore the scents drifting from her teammates.

"this being said, there are two options you can decide on. All of you can turn around and leave as a team, and no one gets the chance to be formally promoted. Or, one of you can leave and let the other three advance and try again at a later time." He was watching them, observing them, seeing what they would choose.

Aki looked at the ground.

She hadn't really wanted to become a genin. And while she had promised Sakura you go, I go, she had her doubts about it.

She knew she wasn't ready to become a chunin, not even close. At least not to the standard she was holding herself too. She had minimal Chakra, and less Chakra control than Sakura.
Not by a lot, but she still lacked the Chakra control for the more fine tuned things, like clones and such.
She also knew she could never compete with Naruto or Sasuke in terms of Chakra reserves, they were their team's power houses.
And while they lacked control, they didn't necessarily need the amount of control to spare as much Chakra as possible for jutsu's when they didn't need to worry as much about a lack of it.

Her communication was poor as well, no fault of her own, the sign she knows can only go so far.
Sakura and Kakashi seemed to be the only ones who fully understood what she meant when she signed.