The Dragon of the Sand

First Stage

Gaara. 

He continued to stare at me. My eyes widened in surprise as we held each other's attention. I was snapped back into reality when I felt a hand on my shoulder. 

Narrowing my eyes at my friend, I turned with as much sass as I could muster and stuck my nose in the air. My intentions were to make it clear that I was upset with him and that for now, I wasn't going to focus on him. I don't know if it worked, but when I glanced over my shoulder, Gaara was gone.

"Good job." Takumi complimented, removing his hand from my shoulder. "They aren't important right now." I nodded to his words. We were then allowed to enter the room.

I learned the names of Eyebrows and Sasuke's friends as a proctor did roll call. Eyebrows was actually Rock Lee, the blond kid was Uzumaki Naruto, and the pinkette was Haruno Sakura. Interesting.. I wonder how they'll do..

My thoughts were interrupted when the head proctor entered the room.  The proctor introduced himself as Morino Ibiki. He then explained the first stage of the exam as a written test of ten questions. We would have an hour to complete it. He also warned that the proctors around the room will be watching for cheating. If you are caught, two points will be deducted from your score. If you are caught five times, then you, along with your entire team, will be disqualified from the entire exam. 

Ibiki then asked if anyone would like to leave the exam before it started. If someone chose to leave, their entire team would have to go too. However, they would have the option to return next time. A few hands were raised, and some people grumbled towards their teammates as they exited the room. 

Glancing around, I made eye contact with Takumi and Kenta. We all nodded to each other, signaling our determination to make it through the test.

"Very well." Ibiki announced. "Let's begin."

We received our tests and were told to start. I looked at the paper. There were nine questions that had an answer box next to them. The tenth question wasn't even on the paper. There was only a spot to place your answer. Interesting.. Interesting.. I thought as I looked over the questions. I've never heard of any of this.. There's no way that a Genin could possibly know any of this! I started to freak out a little bit as I scanned over the questions. There wasn't a single thing I could scrap together in my mind as an answer. Calm down. There's got to be some kind of catch. Okay, first of all, some of these can be answered with mathematical logic. Ah, but math can be tricky if you're using the wrong equations.. How can there already be so many people answering? I must be missing something...

I looked around the room. Well, I looked around while also trying not to seem suspicious, which probably only made me look more suspicious. Ah, I see. Cheating isn't acceptable in normal school exams. Yet here, cheating only deducts points. We're ninja, we aren't like normal children in  an exam. Therefore, they want to test our information gathering skills and see how well we do without getting caught. I nodded to myself as I came to the realization that they actually wanted us to cheat. 

Dammit.. That's a bit unfortunate, though. My skills aren't built around gathering information with special techniques.. All I've done so far is follow people or confront them in disguise. That's worked, but I wasn't in an open room where my true appearance was already presented and where I can't escape and hide.. It's time to learn a new technique I guess..

Resting my chin on my hand, I started to think of a plan. Observing my surroundings, I found that I was in a decent spot. There was only one examiner who could easily see what I was doing. Also, there was someone who seemed to know what they were doing only two chairs to my right. The examiner was to my left and he was sitting right in front of a window that was allowing rays of light to enter the room. Hopefully this works or I'll have to come up with a new plan.. 

The first step was to distract the examiner. Using the metal in my blood, I pulled it forward with chakra and created a metal plate on the palm of my hand. Carefully entering it into a ray of light, I tilted my hand until it was at the perfect angle. The ray bounced off the metal and shined into the examiners eyes. He began to squint and searched for the source of the beam. I have to work fast. I then pretended to sneeze, jerking my head into the crook of my arm. While doing so, I managed to spit out a very tiny needle that was embedded with my chakra. The needle managed to pierce the arm of the kid with the answers. 

Removing the metal plate from my hand, the examiner was able to fully see. I stared down at my test, pretending to think about my answers. I could tell that he suspected me, but I started writing, focusing on the answers as if I knew them myself. Ah, please don't notice... The examiner finally looked away, but I knew he would be keeping an eye on me. 

The next part of my plan I kind of stole from Gaara. He was one of the first people I observed at the beginning of the test. Gaara used his sand to make an eyeball, connecting it with his own eye. He then dispersed the sand in the air and sent it to someone who had answers. Getting some of the sand in the guy's eye, the kid was distracted and Gaara reformed his eyeball, collecting the information from the paper. Heh, I should be an examiner if I managed to watch all that.. I figured if Gaara could use his chakra filled sand to see, then I could probably do the same with metal containing my chakra. 

Acting as though I was rubbing my eye, I tried to see through the metal. I don't know why I expected this to work. Nothing was happening. Maybe I can push my chakra into that guy and see what he sees... Focusing on the fragile chakra in the small needle, I tried to force it into the kid. I really have no idea how, but that somehow managed to work. Well shit! Let's go! It wouldn't be long before he caught onto me though. I was only able to look through one of his eyes. I suspected that there was a possiblity that I coud see what he saw only in exchange for him to see what I was looking at. Jotting down all of the answers as fast as I could, I released the guy's eye and pulled the chakra back into the needle. 

Fascinating...