THE WILL OF FIRE: 2. The Phoenix (A Naruto Fanfic)

The Phoenix, Chapter 5

Chapter Five

You’ve gotta be kidding me!? Ibiki Murino, of all people. I read about him in my bingo book-he was good a torturing and I couldn’t imagine what the first round held for us. Surely, with Ibiki, there’ll be something complicated, something really difficult…

“You are not allowed to fight each other during the exams,” he started, “Unless given permission by the examiners. Even if the permission is given, you are not allowed to kill the other. Pigs who go against me will fail immediately. Understood?”

“This exam seems so soft and easy,” said the one with spiky hair. The examiners laughed and I knew he was way off. I scanned the room again but couldn’t quite determine the source that was giving me the chill. His energy was here, Kabuto was here, hell, even Karin was here. But where was he?

“We will now begin the first exam,” Ibiki said. “Turn in your applications, then take one of these,” he held up a stack of small papers that had numbers written on them, “And sit where the number tells you to. Then we will pass out the papers for the writing exam.”

A test? You have got to be kidding me! they found Ibiki to monitor a test? There had to be more to it than that. I saw Naruto totally freaking out now.

We did as Ibiki told us to and I ended up next to Karin, who was still scared of me and this other guy (or girl, I couldn’t quite tell) from Kusagakure. That guy/girl smiled at me encouragingly and I just eyed him/her carefully.

“The first exam has a few important rules,” Ibiki’s voice brought my attention to the front of the classroom.  “I will not accept any questions, so listen carefully. First rule: you will be given ten points. There are 10 questions on this test and each is worth one point. This test is a deduction based test. If you get one problem wrong, you will get one point deducted. If you get three problems wrong, your points will be deduced to seven. Second rule, the pass-fail decision will be determined by your team’s total points.”

I saw everyone getting panicked a little, especially Sakura, but I wasn’t worried at all. I was alone in this so I’d probably had to get ten out of ten. Easy enough, Shishou taught me that much. And I suppose I could take something out of the training with Uncle Orochimaru-say what you want about him, he still is a good teacher.

“Wait a minute!” Sakura shouted, “Team’s total points, what?”

“Shut up and listen, there is a reason for this.”

A reason? I leaned back, really wanting to hear this. I bet it had more to do with teamwork but the teams were practically scattered all around the classroom so there were little chances of that.

He continued, “Now that you know, let’s move to the next rule. If the examiner determines that you cheated or do something similar during the test, each action will cause you to lose two points.” Ok now that was more the Ibiki I heard about. “In other words, there will be people who will be forced to leave this place without their test being graded. Those who will try to cheat without thinking carefully will only hurt themselves. You are all trying to become Chūnin. If you are a ninja, act like a first-rate one.”

Hey how about that, I was just thinking the same thing. I looked across the room to see a worried Sakura. She was probably thinking about what I was feeling from Naruto-he’ll definitely get a zero on this one.

“Also,” Ibiki added, “If anyone in a team gets a zero, everyone in the team will fail.”

Ok, so team 7 was in a lot of trouble. I surpassed the urge to laugh at this. I mean, we all knew Naruto was gonna get a zero. So I guess it wouldn’t hurt if I tried to help him. But it will be a lot difficult since there were a lot of experienced sensory types and I had no idea if our talking in each other’s head radiated anything. It was worth a shot, but it would need to be loud enough for Naruto to hear and quick enough, just in case the sensory types, well, sense something. I knew if they could, I’d be the first to know. From Karin, of course, since she was the best sensory type I knew.