A.N.B.U.

Chapter Twenty One : The Chunnin Exams (part 4)

Sasuke took off... Like literally just took off leaving Sakura and me alone... We run after him knowing is not going to stop... I was almost tempted to just leave them be destroyed... But then I remembered that ANBU had a really, really strict policy... No abandoning your charge, even if they were emotionally challenging teenagers with anger management issues... I looked at our scroll, Sasuke had snatched it from me almost immediately, well he thought he had taken the scroll. In reality, he had an ANBU-level tracking tag, well not that he would ever know but I still had to make sure he couldn't just disappear.

  Surviving in the forest of death was never a fun experience, but having to survive with a terrified, albeit terrifying girl and a dangerously annoying emo wannabe, all the while hiding under the cover of a screaming idiot was a new and unknown kind of hell... I couldn't even begin to think about the fact that there was no way we would get the rank. We were running around trying to find an easy team to steal their scroll. Not that any of the non-Konoha teams were easy. They were a lot more prepared than us, Kakashi-san probably wanted this team to get a wake-up call. He wanted us to get beaten up and to come back begging for more training and maybe better teamwork. I blame ANBU for that trial-by-fire mentality... These children were sheltered in the academy. Most ANBU had at least a bit more background than calculating shuriken velocity in less than an hour (well Nara-san could probably do it in a few seconds if he took the time, the only Nara I know from ANBU got the lazy beaten out of him and now he's one of the most respected captains...)

  I tried focusing once more on the task at hand, I could sense 3 full squads making sure the exams were going ok, not that they could intervene, I remembered the last exam and that long boring but bloody shift, we had to bring the corpses out, and then do an entire cleanup operation of the whole forest in case enemy nations decided they could plant a bomb ( in that case we had counted at least 3 and a few very intricate traps that had proven deadly for a Suna genin... The young child was given back to his family after an autopsy and a bit of redressing, his civilian's parents probably hate ninjas now...)

  The night was now cloaking the forest in its dark blanket... Sasuke still didn't want to stop, Sakura was at her limits and was trying very hard not to cry in front of her crush... I decided it was time to force him to stop :
"Oi teme, why are you running... I need to go do business. Could we stop ?"
"Hn... Baka, we have to go fast, not that you have any chance of passing the exams" He angrily replied.
"Sa-sasuke-kun, could we please stop... Naruto-baka has a point, we can't see well enough... We could wait for a bit and go back to tracking?" Sakura was too tired to try and go with her crush, she leaned on the trunk of a nearby tree, almost falling over from the overexertion. Sasuke begrudgingly agreed to stop and I went away for a little after we set up a password system... I had to know why 2 teams were tracking us. One was Morino's friend's team and the other was an unknown team from Kusa... I took the treetops and ran towards my new "friend" 's team. You could never be too cautious