Kasumi fell off the tree for the eleventh time and landed flat on her back in the grass. She lay there for a moment, staring at the sky, and considered whether being a civilian was really as bad as everyone said it was.
"Almost!" Lee called from twenty feet up the trunk, where he was doing handstand push-ups with a single finger with his weights on and a bright smile. "You are channeling too much chakra to your soles, Kasumi-chan. Less chakra and more consistency. Think of it as standing on the ground, not holding onto the tree."
"I am thinking about the ground." Kasumi whispered. "I'm very close to it right now."
Beside her, Fuki was four feet up her own tree, red-faced, her feet crackling against the bark as the chakra surged and faded in stuttering bursts. Every time she pushed off, she made it another foot before the connection broke and she slid down, leaving claw marks in the wood from her fingernails.
"This is stupid." Fuki's teeth were clenched. "I can punch through a wooden board but I can't walk up a tree?"
"Punching and chakra control are very different skills!" Lee hopped down from his tree and landed beside her. "Punching requires force. This requires balance. You are flooding your feet with chakra the way you would throw a punch, all at once, everything. But chakra control is not about power. It is about maintaining a constant, even flow."
Ami was the highest of the three. She had made it to eight feet before peeling off and stumbling backward, catching herself on her hands rather than falling flat, because Ami Tanaka did not fall flat if she could help it. Her forehead was damp with concentration.
"Sensei." Ami brushed bark off her palms. "You told us yesterday that you can't use ninjutsu. But this... How are you doing it?"
"I cannot use ninjutsu." Lee nodded. "My ability to mold chakra for jutsu is, and has always been, extremely limited. But chakra control is different from creating jutsu. I cannot shape my chakra into a jutsu, but I can direct the chakra I have to specific parts of my body with focus and training. I have been doing this exercise since I was younger than you." He walked up the tree again to demonstrate, casual, hands behind his back. "My chakra control is one of my strongest areas. It has to be, because I cannot afford to waste a single avenue that's available to me."
He walked back down headfirst. The girls watched him descend the trunk upside down and step onto the grass as if he'd walked down a staircase.
"Now. Let's try again. Fuki-chan, try to use half the chakra you are using. Ami-chan, you almost got it. Kasumi-chan..." He crouched beside her where she still lay on the ground. "You're using too little and need to use more."
Kasumi looked at him from the grass. "What if I fall again?"
"Then you will get up. And try again. Until the one time you do not fall." Lee smiled. "That is how I learned everything I know."
Kasumi got up.
They trained for hours. By the end, they made great progress. No one mastered it, but they were better than when they started. And that's all Lee expected from them.
They sat in the grass afterward, breathing, drinking from their canteens. The weights on their legs were a constant reminder that this was their new life as shinobi, their muscles tender and tight, but today's work had been kind by comparison. No running. No sparring. Just their feet on bark and the quiet frustration of chakra that wouldn't cooperate.
"Sensei." Fuki had her chin in her hand. "I've been thinking."
"Wonderful!"
"What do you mean wonderful?!" Fuki shouted.
"Oh no, I just thought it was great that you're thinking." Lee chuckled.
"Are you saying I don't think?! I think all the time! That's so rude, sensei!" Fuki crossed her arms and turned away from Lee.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I really didn't mean it like that." Lee placed his hand on her shoulder. "I know you think all the time, Fuki-chan. I saw how you were thinking about little chakra you needed to use to stay attached to the tree. I saw you looking at Ami-chan wondering what trick she was using to get so high. And then I saw you looking at Kasumi-chan laughing at how scared she was of falling." Lee told her.
"Are you a Yamanaka, sensei?" Fuki asked seriously.
Lee laughed as Ami rolled her eyes. "He doesn't need to be a Yamanaka to understand what's going on in your pea-sized brain."
"What? Pea-sized?! I have a big head so I have a big brain with plenty of lumps!" Fuki argued.
"Those are not…" Ami stopped herself once she realized she was about to argue with an idiot. "Sure. You have a big brain."
Fuki grinned. "Now back to what I was saying, how are you going to help us with ninjutsu and genjutsu?" She questioned. "You just told us yourself you can't mold chakra for jutsu. I want to learn cool ninjutsu too, not just awesome taijutsu. And you can't do ninjutsu."
Ami's head tilted. She'd been thinking the same thing but hadn't said it, partly out of tact and partly because she was waiting for Fuki to say it first so it wouldn't be her taking the risk.
Kasumi looked at Lee with the expression of someone who wanted to know the answer but felt bad about the question.
Lee looked at all three of them.
He smiled.
"Who said I couldn't help you with ninjutsu or genjutsu?"
The three girls stared at him.
"But you just said..." Fuki started.
"I said I cannot mold chakra for techniques." Lee held up one finger. "I did not say I cannot help you learn them."
"That... that doesn't make any sense, sensei."
Lee's smile widened. "Hmm. When the three of you can stick to a tree perfectly, I'll teach each of you a special trick. For now, go home. Rest. Eat well. We are doing physical training again tomorrow, and your bodies should have recovered enough by then."
"A special trick?" Ami and Fuki were super confused.
Kasumi figured that he was probably going to ask another jonin to teach them a jutsu or something. Since he can't use ninjutsu or genjutsu himself, that's the only logical option that she could think of. Unless there was something she didn't know about jutsus.
"Yep, so next Thursday, give it your all and you'll learn something special if you three manage to master it!"
They badgered him on the way to the mission assignment desk with more questions than they had arrived with, which Lee considered an excellent sign. A student who was curious was a student who was interested.
Twelve hundred kilometers northwest, in the mountain country of the Land of Earth, Tenten sat by a fire and ate.
The written portion of Iwagakure's Chunin Exams had been four hours of dense technical questions in a stone hall carved into the mountainside, proctored by a chubby Iwa jonin who spoke exactly once at the beginning and once at the end. No speeches about the real purpose of the test. No mind games about information gathering. No secret rule hiding behind the obvious one. Just the test, the time, and the door.
Tenten had passed with little issue.
The second stage was called the Gauntlet. Each participant was given a scroll and a set of coordinates carved into a stone tablet at the starting line. Reach the coordinates within forty-eight hours while carrying your scroll. If you arrived without it, you failed. If you didn't arrive at all, you failed. The terrain between the starting line and the objective was sixty kilometers of Stone Country's worst: a labyrinth of canyons, switchbacks, caves, and ridgelines scoured by the wind that carried rock rain, the tiny fragments of stone that the northern gale stripped off the mountains and flung south like a slow-motion shotgun blast. Along with giant mountainous creatures hungry for easy food.
And, of course, there were the other participants. Several dozen of them. All of them carrying scrolls, all of them hungry, all of them from villages that did not love the Leaf.
Tenten sat cross-legged by the flames and ate a cooked rabbit on a stick, and let the fire paint her face orange in the dark.
She looked small. She looked vulnerable. She looked alone. A girl with buns in her hair eating a rabbit by a fire in a canyon in enemy territory.
Goro had been a genin of Iwagakure for two years and he was sick of it.
He was sixteen, older than most of the examinees, and the two who followed him through the dark canyon were from the same class, Maki and Junsuke. They've been on the same team for two years. This was their last chance before they were separated from their jonin sensei and sent to the Genin Corps for lack of potential. Their sensei's efforts would be better suited toward developing the potential of other children who had talent.
"It's the leaf girl." Goro whispered, crouched behind a boulder. He could see the fire from here, the girl's silhouette against it, the thin shape of her eating something. "She really did come in alone with no teammates. Her scroll's right behind her against that rock."
"Why would a Leaf ninja even be here?" Maki's voice was thin. "Aren't we at war with them?"
"Doesn't matter why she's here. She's here, she's alone, and she's sitting by a fire in the open like an idiot." Goro checked the approach. Clear ground, loose scree, the canyon widening ahead into the opening where the fire sat. "We take her fast. Maki, attack from the right to pin her. Junsuke, you come in left and grab the scroll. I'll come up the middle and handle her if she resists."
"And if she's good?" Junsuke asked.
"She's a Leaf genin sitting by a campfire eating a rabbit. She's not good. She's lost and stupid and about to hand us a free scroll."
Maki and Junsuke moved to their positions. Goro counted to thirty and started forward.
The scree was loud under his sandals. He moved carefully, placing each foot on the flattest stones, keeping his weight low. The fire was maybe forty meters ahead. The girl hadn't moved. She was still eating, her back slightly turned, her scroll right there against the rock.
Twenty meters. He could see her face now in the firelight. Young. Pretty, in a dumb kind of way. She didn't look dangerous. It was a shame, he actually liked dumb girls. They were way easier to date.
Fifteen meters. He stepped over something on the ground, a shadow, a crack in the rock.
His next step sank half an inch deeper than it should have.
The scree shifted. Something clicked beneath his sandal, a sound so small it could have been a pebble, and then the wire he had stepped over, the one he hadn't seen because it was the same grey as the stone around it, went taut.
Everything happened at once.
The explosive tag on the wall to his left detonated at chest height and the blast hit him sideways with a fist of heat and noise that threw him off his feet and into the opposite wall. His ears went white. His vision went red. He felt his ribs break on the left side, two of them, maybe three, and he screamed.
From the right side of the canyon, Maki's scream filled the gap. She had hit a wire web, the ankle-height lines that connected to three separate trigger points, and two of them went at once. Several kunai shot out into her body, and the second explosive tag, this one lower, knee height, cracked the air beside her and sent her spinning into the wall with shrapnel cuts opening across her arms and face.
Junsuke, coming in from the left approach, heard both detonations and did what his instincts told him: he sprinted for the scroll. The fire was right there. The girl was right there. Grab it and run, sort out the rest later.
He made it eight steps into the bowl before his shin hit the trigger line at the canyon's bottleneck.
The quick-release tags on both walls fired.
Two fuma shuriken launched from opposite sides of the bottleneck in a crossing pattern, their four-bladed arms spinning so fast they whistled. Junsuke saw the first one come off the wall to his left and threw himself flat, the blades passing over his back close enough to slice through the fabric of his jacket and open a shallow cut along his spine. The second one, the one from the right that he could not see because he was face-down on the ground, took him across the backs of both calves as it crossed the canyon. The blades cut through muscle and he screamed and grabbed his shorter legs.
Goro was on his back against the canyon wall, his ribs broken, his vision swimming. Maki had gone silent to his right. Junsuke was screaming ahead of him. And the fire still crackling, calm, undisturbed, and through the ringing in his ears he heard something else.
Footsteps. Light ones. Coming closer, on the scree, and the footsteps did not stumble or hesitate because they knew exactly where every wire and every buried blade was.
The girl walked out of the firelight and stood over him.
She had a kunai in one hand. Her other hand was empty. She was standing like someone who had been waiting.
"Y-you..." Goro coughed blood. "You set this whole..."
"You boulder heads are just as dumb as I thought you were." Tenten grinned. She crouched beside him, and her eyes were bright and pretty. "You're the fourth team to fall for this exact same setup."
She reached into his jacket and pulled out his scroll. Then she stood, walked to Maki, who was curled against the wall lifeless, and took hers.
Junsuke was trying to crawl away. He had made it maybe two meters, dragging himself by his arms with both calves pouring blood. Tenten walked up behind him, crouched, and pulled his scroll from the pouch at his hip. He tried to grab her wrist with a shaking hand and she pulled it free without effort.
Three scrolls. Four total, counting her own.
Tenten stood in the middle of her trap zone with the fire at her back and three Stone genin scattered around her and tucked the scrolls into her pouch.
They were out of the exam whether they lived or died.
She left them.
She scattered the fire with a kick, recollected her usable tools back into her scroll with a few hand signs, and walked south through the dark canyon toward the coordinates carved on the tablet she'd memorized sixteen hours ago.
The rock rain started again an hour later, the tiny fragments of stone that the wind carried south from the high peaks, pattering against her jacket and her arms and her face like cold sand. She walked into it. She didn't cover her head or shield her eyes. It was Stone Country weather and she was in Stone Country and the objective was still a long way off.