Hanabi quietly jotted down a few of the bigger uploaders.
Later on, if there were any promotional commissions to hand out, she could pass them to people like this.
Long-press to like, one tap for the full combo—Hanabi closed the video.
Then she turned her attention back to the Stage's live broadcast.
After running through the current status of several of Konoha's Genin, the picture suddenly jumped into a flashback.
The person who appeared on-screen was Mitarashi Anko, and the timestamp looked to be the previous night.
"I can feel it—it's right over here!"
Anko, weaving through the trees, had finally found Orochimaru, hanging upside down among the trunks as he recovered.
"Found you, Orochimaru!"
"Long time no see, Anko." The moment Orochimaru spotted her, a smile spread across his face.
"You're an S-rank threat wanted by the village. So even if it costs me my life, I'm going to kill you right here."
A few senbon appeared in Anko's hand.
"This is what you taught me, and it's the duty of someone who was once your subordinate, Orochimaru!"
Mitarashi Anko was Orochimaru's student—and she carried the Cursed Seal he had planted on her.
Anko flung the senbon, but Orochimaru flicked out his tongue and batted them aside.
Then his tongue shot straight out and seized her.
"Hidden Shadow Snake Hands!"
Anko instantly fired off a jutsu, trying to bring Orochimaru down.
[Showing off snake tricks in front of the snake master]
[Dying. Compared to the earlier fight, this is just playing house. Anko doesn't actually think this'll take down Orochimaru, does she]
[Are these two a couple?]
[Mutual love, mutual murder?]
[Husband betrayed her and the wife's still here?]
With so little to go on, the audience cooked up some genuinely strange theories.
Anko, thinking she'd pinned Orochimaru down, tried to use the Twin Snakes Mutual Death Technique to take them both out together—but Orochimaru simply swapped out with a substitution and slipped away, leaving Anko to rage uselessly.
[Dying]
[Capital-N Noob]
[Hahahaha, being THIS weak is its own kind of talent]
[Honestly this feels like the level of a normal ninja]
[Right? These last two episodes are basically a lesson in what a normal ninja actually looks like]
[Before it was earth-shattering, now the drop-off is a little steep]
[Naruto's mom can channel the Nine-Tails' power—she fought the evil god earlier and wiped a whole island off the map. I'd put Orochimaru at Hokage-level too, since even Naruto's mom is wary of him]
[But going off Neji's analysis earlier, Naruto's mom is strong on raw power, except her actual execution is kind of… weak?]
[I figure Naruto's mom only ever fights curb-stomp matches, so it's hard for her to gain experience?]
The audience went back and forth.
Anko, meanwhile, was left immobilized as her Cursed Seal flared up, until ANBU rescued her and brought her to a room high up in the Central Tower to rest.
"One thing's clear: Orochimaru came here with some kind of objective, and before this he'd been in a fight with someone else."
So far, Anko still didn't know what Orochimaru was after—because so far, Orochimaru hadn't found his chance to brand Sasuke with the Cursed Seal.
And on top of that, the fight with Kushina had genuinely worn Orochimaru down, so after meeting Anko, he—or she—didn't let slip much of anything.
"He did warn me, though, that the Chūnin Exams can't be stopped…" That much, at least, Anko had gotten clearly out of Orochimaru.
"Pardon the interruption."
Just then, a Chūnin examiner walked in.
"What is it? We're in the middle of discussing something important here." Anko was in a foul mood.
"Sorry, but please take a look at this."
The group slotted a videotape into the television.
[Huh? Hold on—bro?]
[The Ninja World has VCRs and TVs too?]
[What the heck, I thought this was the Middle Ages, and now it's jumped to the modern era?]
[Dude, there was a walkie-talkie way back, and you're only now complaining about a videotape?]
[The Land of Waves even had a ferry lmao]
[The tech in the ninja world probably develops on different rules than our real world, so some of it matching our level seems pretty normal to me]
[Eh, not quite—it feels capped at around 1970s–80s tech?]
[Did seriously nobody else clock the old-school TV and the static snow, holy crap]
[Worried a girl's gonna crawl out of a well next, right 233]
The Ninja World didn't just have VCRs—it had game consoles too. A dozen-odd years down the line, all kinds of high tech would come pouring out, which was even more absurd.
"Look here—"
The content on-screen turned out to be Hanabi's three-person team.
"Ah—that's the one who almost wrecked the first exam!"
Anko spotted Hanabi on the screen too.
Because the whole thing was so absurd, Morino Ibiki had urgently briefed the other examiners on the entire situation.
"This is… an hour and a half?"
One of the ANBU caught the timestamp.
"Even for the Hyuga, this is over the top. And this Hyuga Hanabi doesn't seem to have her eyesight, either."
Anko mulled it over.
—Could she be Orochimaru's target?
There was no way Orochimaru had come to Konoha for no reason.
When Anko had questioned him, Orochimaru had said he wasn't interested in the Village of Konoha—he was interested in a person.
Orochimaru hadn't revealed anything more specific, but Anko's flaring Cursed Seal was its own reminder: maybe this whole thing was because Orochimaru had set his sights on someone.
"Huh? Me?"
In front of her screen, Hanabi tilted her head.
So it wasn't just the audience with the absurd theories—people inside this world had their own oddball ideas too.
"This is a victory of intelligence-gathering, after all."
The reason these people landed on such absurd theories, at the end of the day, was that they couldn't possibly know every piece of information—they could only see a sliver of the whole picture, then make their best, most reasonable guesses from what little they had.
[As expected of the protagonist squad—cleared it in under an hour and a half]
[I love the parts where they don't downplay their power levels]
[If you're the protagonist, then flex for me]
[Act however you want, just don't act all meek]
[Poor souls, all poisoned by light novels]
[Sigh, yeah—everyone playing the pig to eat the tiger, and then they play it so long they actually turn into pigs]
[A protagonist who'd even forgive a human trafficker—I threw up]
[The kind of story where the hero gets tortured first and then powers up for the comeback-kill—I'm kind of over watching that now too]
[Naruto and Sasuke seem to take an L pretty regularly though]
[Hanabi's never taken an L, and neither has Naruto's mom]
[Holy crap—so the one who's ALWAYS eating dirt is Mr. Block-of-Wood, isn't it?!]
[Right? Naruto can call in his mom, Director Hanabi runs the whole chessboard, and only Mr. Block-of-Wood gets curb-stomped daily]
[Eat, sleep, beat up the block of wood, huh]
[Front-row heads up: Director Hanabi took a big L in the OVA, nearly crashed the whole thing 233]
[Hanabi Yiji: how could a woman's affairs ever be called "eating dirt"?]
[The whole house burst out laughing, fam~]
"Ah-lala…?"
Hanabi tilted her head.
It wasn't her intention, exactly.
But it seemed like a bunch of scenes that were originally supposed to be Sasuke's big flex moments had all turned into him eating dirt instead?
"Well, let's just call it a tiny sacrifice for the sake of the plot~"