The mountain didn't care about the exam.
That was the first thing that settled in after a while — not all at once, but slowly, like the weight of time pressing in.
Ninety minutes.
Ninety minutes of moving, climbing, scanning, doubling back. Of pushing through undergrowth, checking hollows, tracing roots, sweeping every place that felt like it should hide something.
And finding nothing.
Not a single flag.
I exhaled slowly, staring at the water rushing past the rocks. Cold. Fast. Indifferent.
Two pairs.
Two separate sectors.
Zero results.
That wasn't bad luck anymore. That was a pattern.
Beside me, Lee wiped his hands and straightened, his brows drawn together in thought.
"We have not located a single flag," he said, more to himself than to me. "Not one, despite sustained effort."
"Yeah," I muttered.
Lee crossed his arms, thinking hard — you could practically hear the gears grinding.
"Then the conclusion is clear," he said.
I already didn't like where this was going.
"We must simply increase our effort."
Of course.
"If we search faster, more thoroughly, and with greater intensity—"
He dropped to the ground.
—and started doing sit-ups.
I stared at him.
A faint, imaginary sweat drop formed somewhere at the back of my head.
"Lee."
"One hundred more repetitions should significantly improve—"
"Lee. Stop."
He froze mid-motion and looked up at me, genuinely confused.
"…Is that not the correct course of action?"
I dragged a hand down my face.
"No."
He sat up slowly, still processing that, like effort not being the answer was a foreign concept.
I didn't explain immediately.
Because I was still looking at the number.
Ninety minutes.
Two teams.
Nothing.
Akito wasn't blind. Aoi wasn't careless. If the flags were anywhere obvious, one of them would've found something by now.
Which meant—
We weren't missing the flags.
We were searching wrong.
I looked up.
Past the trunks. Past the branches. Toward the canopy and the ridgeline beyond.
Memory clicked into place — not from the academy, but from before.
Field exercises.
Recon.
You don't sweep blindly.
You don't chase terrain.
You read it.
Find vantage.
Observe first.
Move second.
We'd been doing the opposite — running through the forest like this was some kind of scavenger hunt.
Hirose hadn't needed to trick us.
He just let us think the way students always think.
"They weren't placed for children," I said quietly.
Lee tilted his head. "Kazu?"
"Adults placed them. People who know exactly how we'd search." I gestured vaguely at the forest around us. "Eye level. Ground level. Obvious hiding spots."
Lee's gaze slowly followed mine upward.
Realization started to dawn.
"They're not there," I said. "Not where it's easy to look."
A pause.
Then—
"…Ah."
That soft, dangerous moment when something obvious becomes obvious.
I pushed myself to my feet, eyes fixed on the slope above us. The ridgeline cut clean against the light, the canopy thinner where rock broke through.
High ground.
Clear sightlines.
Places you'd never reach by accident.
"We stop running blind," I said. "We find a vantage point."
Lee stood immediately.
"To survey the terrain," he said.
"Exactly."
The plan finally felt… right.
Not movement for the sake of movement.
Direction.
I took one last glance at the creek, then turned toward the incline.
"Ninety minutes wasted," I muttered.
Then I started climbing.
"Let's make the next hour count."
The slope steepened quickly once we left the creek behind, the ground shifting from soft soil to rock and root, the kind of terrain that demanded attention from your feet while you were trying to think about other things. Lee moved ahead of me without being asked — his footwork clean and automatic, finding purchase on the slope the way people do when their body has been trained past the point of needing to think about it.
I followed at my own pace.
The forest changed as we gained altitude. The trees thinned, grew further apart, their canopy less dense up here where the rock pushed through the soil more insistently. More sky. More light. Longer sightlines between the trunks. The sounds of the mountain shifted too — wind cleaner and more direct, the distant noise of students searching below filtering up in fragments. A shout somewhere to the northwest. The crack of a branch. Then nothing again.
We found a flat shelf of rock near the ridgeline and stopped.
From here the mountain spread out below us — a wide broken sweep of canopy and stone and shadow, the clearing edges visible where the undergrowth thinned, the trail lines readable in the way terrain always became readable when you got above it. I had learned that in Afghanistan long before I understood why it mattered. High ground wasn't just tactical. It was informational. Everything looked different from up here. Everything looked like what it actually was.
I pulled the scope from my vest and pressed it to my eye.
The mountain came close.
I swept slowly. Methodically. Starting at the eastern edge and moving west in deliberate passes, the way you read terrain when you're looking for something specific and don't want to miss it by rushing.
A cave mouth in the rock face to the east. Dark, obvious, the kind of hollow that drew the eye immediately. Too visible. Flags placed for an exam weren't meant to be handed to the first person who looked up.
An old withered tree on the western approach, its dead branches pale against the sky. Same problem. First thing you'd notice from fifty feet away.
I kept moving the scope.
Rock formations. Dense brush. A narrow ravine cutting through the slope. Nothing.
Then —
I stopped.
A small clearing pressed against the mountainside where the slope leveled briefly before rising again. Not a clearing exactly — more like a gap, a place where the rock broke the surface and the undergrowth had thinned around it rather than been cleared. Three sides were swallowed by dense bush, the kind that grabbed your clothes and slowed your feet and made most people redirect without thinking about why. The fourth side opened onto the slope below, but the approach from below was angled wrong — you'd walk past the gap entirely unless you were already looking for it.
Against the stones at the center, tucked into the shadow where the rock jutted outward —
A red flag.
Tied low. Deliberate. Hidden in exactly the way something gets hidden when the person hiding it knows how people search.
I held the scope steady.
Fifty points.
I moved the scope down and found the problem immediately.
Three students moving fast through the undergrowth below the clearing. Purposeful. Heads up, eyes scanning. They were tracking something, following a line of reasoning that was bringing them directly toward the gap in the brush. They hadn't spotted the flag yet but they were close enough that it was only a matter of when.
I ran the distance in my head. Even with Lee at full speed we'd arrive into a direct confrontation — three students who had been searching for an hour and a half, finally finding what they were looking for, and then two people appearing from nowhere to take it. That conversation ended in a fight regardless of how it started. A fight over a red flag this late in the exam was a losing trade.
I moved the scope.
Found the second team further back — four students on a trail that bent east around a rocky ridge, moving at an easy pace. Flagless. Following the trail the way people do when they've run out of better ideas.
The trail curved.
I tracked it forward in my head — the bend around the ridge, the eastern approach, the angle it would bring them in on.
If they followed it far enough, it would deliver them directly to the clearing from the opposite side.
I lowered the scope.
Lee was watching me, perfectly still, waiting.
I looked at the clearing. At team one closing from the west. At team two drifting east on a trail that curved back around. At the gap in the brush and the flag sitting inside it and the narrow window between when team one arrived and when team two came around the ridge.
The math was tight.
But it was there.
I needed someone fast. Someone loud. Someone who could make a stranger angry enough to chase without thinking.
I looked at Lee.
…Too earnest.
Then Akito came to mind—
Specifically, the time he'd stolen a cake off a woman carrying it home for her grandmother's birthday.
I exhaled.
…Yeah.
Sometimes I genuinely missed that idiot.
Lee was already watching me, waiting.
He wouldn't come up with something like that on his own.
But he didn't need to.
He just needed instructions.
"Lee," I said.
"I have a plan."
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Lee had practiced the entrance three times in his head while running down the slope.
Land on the branch. Straighten slowly. Let the silence build. Then speak.
He landed on the branch.
The branch was thinner than it looked.
His foot slipped, his arms windmilled once, and he dropped off it completely, hitting the trail below in a graceless heap that sent a small cloud of dust into the air around him.
Sato and his two teammates stopped walking.
They stared at the boy on the ground.
Lee stood up immediately, brushing nothing in particular off his sleeves with great focus and concentration.
"Cough," he said.
Not a cough. The word cough. Said aloud. With complete composure.
He straightened his collar, clasped his hands behind his back, and tilted his chin upward as though none of the previous four seconds had occurred.
Sato exchanged a glance with the girl to his left.
"...Lee?" he said slowly. "What are you doing here?"
Lee's expression shifted into something that was clearly intended to be contemptuous but landed closer to a person who had just smelled something unpleasant and was trying to be polite about it.
"Hu hu," he said.
Another silence.
"You all," Lee announced, raising one finger with great solemnity, "do not have any youth."
It was the best insult Lee could come up with.
That was the problem.
"...Huh?"
The three of them stared at him with identical expressions of pure bewilderment.
Complete silence.
Lee held his expression of superiority through sheer force of will while the plan dissolved around him. The speech he had assembled on the way down the slope — the pointed observations, the carefully prepared condescension — all of it had produced nothing but three confused faces and an absence of any chaseable emotion whatsoever.
This was not going according to plan.
Then he remembered Kazu's instruction — specifically for this moment.
"I have two red flags."
Sato stopped blinking.
"Two," Lee added, with a confidence that had absolutely no business existing. "Red flags. Already found."
Sato did not stop to confirm this. He did not look at Lee's vest or consider the timing or ask a single clarifying question. Two hours of finding nothing had stripped away every instinct toward careful thought, and what remained was simple and immediate and pointing directly at the strange boy standing on the trail in front of him.
"Capture him!" he snapped, already moving.
"Sato, wait—" his teammate started.
But Sato was already running, and the other two rushed after him without finishing the thought, because two red flags, because two hours, because sometimes desperation is faster than reason.
Lee's carefully maintained expression collapsed completely.
He stared at the three people now charging directly at him with the look of someone who had told himself this would work and was somehow still surprised that it had.
Then he ran.
He was fast. Unreasonably, almost offensively fast — his feet barely grazing the ground, his form suddenly immaculate in a way that made the previous thirty seconds of graceless failure seem like a different person entirely. The gap between him and Sato opened almost immediately, then held deliberately steady — close enough to keep them angry, far enough to stay ahead.
He didn't look back.
Lee hit the bush at full speed without slowing.
Not hesitation. Not a stumble. He went through the gap in the undergrowth like he knew exactly where it opened and where it closed, branches swallowing him whole in under a second.
Sato plunged in after him.
The bush was larger than it looked from the outside. Much larger — dense and dark inside, branches catching at sleeves and hair, the ground uneven underfoot. Sato pushed through with his arms raised, following the sound of movement ahead, certain he was closing the gap.
Then the undergrowth thinned and he stumbled out the other side.
He stopped.
His two teammates crashed out behind him.
Lee was nowhere.
What was in front of him instead: a small clearing pressed against the rock face, two students staring back at him with completely bewildered expressions, and a third student frozen halfway up a stone formation with one hand already reaching for a red flag.
All three of them stared at Sato.
Sato stared back.
The two students on the ground. The flag. The student frozen mid-climb with his arm extended.
The situation assembled itself in his head one piece at a time.
Then all at once.
Sato moved.
He crossed the clearing in three steps and jumped — driving his shoulder toward the climber's midsection before the other boy could react. The climber threw his arm down in a hasty block, caught the impact on his forearm, and the force knocked him backward off the stone. He hit the ground and rolled.
Sato landed, twisted, came up ready.
The climber found his feet. Settled his weight. Looked at Sato across the clearing with the expression of someone who had been two seconds away from fifty points and was not prepared to discuss it calmly.
A leaf came loose somewhere above and drifted down between them, spinning once before it touched the ground.
They moved at the same moment.
The clearing dissolved into noise — bodies closing, arms tangling, teammates surging forward from both sides without anyone deciding to.
It stopped being two people settling something and became six people with an hour and a half of frustration and no flags and a single red flag watching from the top of a stone. Someone hit the ground hard and didn't get up immediately. Someone else caught an elbow they weren't ready for and made a sound that was mostly surprise. The kind of brawl that doesn't have rules because nobody stopped to make any.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
"Good job," I said.
"Yosh—" he started, voice bright. Then he caught himself and went quiet. Something still working itself out behind his eyes.
"Let's go," I said.
"Y-yeah."
I dropped toward the stone formation and moved fast. Four steps across the clearing edge. Up the stone face in three movements — foot on the first ledge, hand on the upper ridge, weight forward — and I was level with the flag.
Single knot. I worked it loose with two fingers.
The flag came free.
"Wa — hey! Stop — that transfer kid is stealing the flag!"
The shout came from inside the brawl. Then another. Then two more, overlapping.
I looked down briefly.
Several faces had turned away from the fight and were staring directly at me.
I tucked the flag into my vest.
"Run," I said.
We ran.
The clearing erupted behind us — both teams abandoning the fight entirely, six students suddenly unified by the more immediate problem of someone walking off with what they'd been killing each other over. The pursuit organized itself fast, footsteps multiplying, closing ground with the particular energy of people who had forgotten to be tired.
I pulled a smoke bomb without slowing.
"Follow exactly where I go," I said to Lee. "Every branch. Don't improvise."
"Understood."
I threw the smoke bomb behind us.
White smoke bloomed across the trail with a sharp hiss. The pursuit tangled — voices shouting, footsteps faltering, bodies colliding in the sudden blindness.
I jumped into the canopy.
First branch, left. Solid.
Second, crossing right —
Lee landed half a step late behind me. Not enough to fall. Enough to slow him.
I adjusted my pace without looking back.
Third branch, higher, angling north —
The smoke thinned faster than I liked.
Three students pushed through.
The first cut branch gave way under them —
A sharp crack, two bodies dropping into the undergrowth in a tangle of limbs and leaves.
The third didn't follow.
She shifted her line mid-step and kept coming.
Fast.
Too fast.
She cut across the canopy instead of chasing our path, reading the terrain instead of reacting to it.
She reached Lee.
Her hand caught his sleeve —
Lee twisted, broke the grip, and drove a short strike into her guard. Not to win. Just enough to force space.
He moved again immediately.
She recovered just as fast.
Still coming.
I stopped on the next branch.
A thin, flexible trunk beside it had been pulled down and tied under tension with a wire anchored to the main tree.
I waited.
She was committed to the jump.
Lee passed me without slowing.
She landed half a step left of where I'd calculated.
Not on the wire's arc. Just outside it.
For a split second I had nothing — no adjustment, no backup, just the wire in my hand and a girl already recovering her balance two feet from where she was supposed to be.
I released it anyway.
The trunk caught her on the shoulder instead of the chest. Not clean. But enough — her weight was already committed forward and the impact torqued her sideways.
Her footing broke.
She slammed sideways into the adjacent branch —
The branch cracked under the impact.
Then she was gone.
Falling through the canopy, leaves and splintered wood following her down.
I landed beside Lee on a wide branch and he looked back at the empty canopy where three students had been thirty seconds ago.
Then he looked at me.
His eyes were wide.
"Kazu," he said.
"What just happened," he said. Not a question. More like something his brain was still processing out loud.
"Basic precaution," I said. "In case we got caught stealing."
He stared at me for one more second.
"It was incredible," he said, his eyes bright with something that sat halfway between admiration and disbelief.
"Move," I said.
We moved.
We ran hard — not the measured pace from before, but full speed, everything we had. The kind of running that leaves no room for thought. The mountain blurred past. Branches, rock, flashes of light through the canopy. The noise behind us faded quickly, then disappeared entirely.
I pushed to keep pace.
We ran until the slope leveled out into a wide shelf. I slowed, glanced back through the trees.
Nothing.
No movement. No shapes. No pursuit.
"Stop," I said. "We're far enough."
Lee pulled up beside me.
We stood for a moment, breathing hard, hands on our knees.
Then, without deciding to, we both dropped to the ground. Cool soil. Grass. Light shifting above us through the canopy.
Silence.
Then Lee started laughing.
Not a polite laugh. A real one. Sudden and loud.
His shoulders shook. He pressed a hand to his face. It didn't help.
Something in my chest loosened.
I laughed too.
Quieter than Lee, but just as real.
"That was so much fun," Lee said, still staring up at the sky.
"Yeah," I said.
"The look on their faces when they came through the bush—"
"And found a completely different fight already in progress."
Lee wheezed. "They had no idea—"
"No," I said. "They didn't."
We lay there for a while longer, the laughter fading into something quieter. Easier.
Above us, the canopy shifted in the wind.
The mountain was indifferent as ever.
The laughter faded slowly.
The quiet that followed felt different.
Lee lay there, staring up at the canopy, his breathing steadying.
"…Kazu," he said.
"Yeah."
"That just now."
A pause.
"I have never fought like that before."
I didn't say anything.
Lee's gaze stayed fixed above.
"I cannot use ninjutsu," he said. "Or genjutsu."
His voice was calm. Stating fact, not complaining.
"I want to prove that anyone can become a ninja… through effort and discipline."
A small breath.
I glanced at him.
"But this…" he said, frowning slightly, searching for the words, "we did not win by being stronger."
"No," I said.
Another pause.
"We avoided them," Lee continued. "Misled them. Took the flag while they were distracted."
He was quiet for a moment.
"That is not how I usually measure myself."
I let that sit.
"…But I did not dislike it," he admitted.
That seemed to trouble him more than anything else.
"I thought I would."
I looked back up at the canopy.
"You still earned it," I said. "Just not the way you're used to."
Lee didn't answer immediately.
"…It required timing," he said slowly. "Awareness. Preparation."
"Yeah."
Another pause.
"You don't get to choose what kind of strength matters," I said. "Only whether you can use it."
Lee considered that.
Then, slowly—
He smiled.
"…I see."
Lee sat up first.
"We should continue searching," he said.
"Yeah," I said.
I pushed myself up, brushing dirt from my gloves. My eyes moved automatically across the tree line, mapping terrain, distance —
Then I saw it.
To the east.
White.
Thin at first. Then thicker.
Rising above the canopy in a slow column.
I stopped.
Lee followed my gaze.
"…Smoke?" he said.
Not natural.
I exhaled slowly.
I had told myself, more than once and in more than one way, that I wasn't going to be the kind of person who ran toward things anymore. I had been very clear about it. Very certain.
"They found trouble," I said.
For a second, the mountain held its breath.
Then it broke.
Voices — distant, sharp, overlapping. Movement through the trees. Branches shifting. Footsteps changing direction all at once.
Not just us.
Everyone saw it.
I looked at the smoke.
Damn it.
I moved.