Chapter 115 - Arc 8 - Forest of Quest - Making Plans

“Did you know she can do that?” Kakashi hears to his side, a red eyed beauty pointing towards the screen in front of them while she asks. Her raven hair is messy, but that makes sense, most ninja stop caring about how they look most of the time well before they hit Jonin. His grooming routine is like two minutes and involves a Jutsu.

Watch parties like this are pretty common among team leaders, and this one is no exception. The Chunin exams are meant to get the attention of the Jonin, and show the measure of each Genin, it’d be weird if they only saw the final phase. What would be the point of testing different skills if the only ones that got seen were their outright fighting capabilities? Winning the exams doesn’t even guarantee promotion, it’s all about them and their recommendations.

It’s all recorded. The only recordings that other villages are allowed to look at are of their genin and what they do, it’s one of the biggest advantages of being the hosting village, you get to watch whoever. Well, Jonin teachers can request recordings of other people but the Hokage gets the final say on that which means it’s unlikely what they just watched is being seen by anyone but them and the leader of the guy involved. Maybe Guy, Guy could be watching Sakura. He’s been quite impressed with her for a while and Kakashi could easily see him wanting to tune in and see what her efforts have turned into. Then there’s the village of that guy, there might be one or two Jonin from there watching random genin. It’ll probably be in the end of exams highlights montage that goes to everyone unless the Hokage specifically removes it. He might not care, that’s an option, Sakura is very scary and that might not be a bad thing to publicize.

“I don’t even think she knew she could do that.” Kakashi answers, watching the panting and red faced Sakura on camera as she slumps down against Sasuke. That fire looked evil, it looked alive, haunted, and hungry. The reason why is obvious, Kurenai and Asuma just witnessed Sakura experimenting with Necromancy. “If she did, she wouldn’t have wasted the balls like that. She also looks more surprised than the dead guy.”

“The average student scored around six right? Then there’s the ten free points” Kurenai taps her knuckle with one of her fingers in thought, “so assuming they hadn’t split up the balls into a strange order, she likely removed sixteen of the points from the forest, just like that.”

“It wasn’t that special, any A-Rank fire Jutsu could do similar damage.” Asuma points out, rubbing his beard and watching the screen, “though that it was that fast and that casual is impressive… I also didn’t even see a hand-sign now that I think about it. Does she have the Chakra to do that regularly?”

“Do you two not know about Sakura’s secret?” Kakashi asks, getting looks from the two teachers. “The Hokage made pamphlets, here.”

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“So of our three bags, I got twenty four points, Naruto got twenty six, and Sasuke got Twenty two.” Sakura contemplates the bags in her hands, counting each with just one look inside the fabric and a little spin to move them around so she can see the bottom balls. Finding Naruto was easy, he was tied up right behind the bush he went behind to go to the bathroom. She’s grateful the explosion wasn’t any bigger than it was because Naruto was like right there. Once again she regrets that it’s impossible to feel where Naruto actually is, just a vague idea of where he isn’t. She could have seriously hurt him or worse, and that manages to feel worse than the guilt bubbling deep inside of her.

Twice now she’s killed someone without meaning to, and both times it’s seriously hurt. Foreign feelings inside her shift and squeeze and wriggle around, telling her she did something wrong. He wasn’t hostile and probably wanted to pick their pockets before fleeing; the bottom line is that he didn’t need to die, she didn’t even plan to kill him. Hardening her heart before a kill is very important. She learned that back in the academy, but both her time with the Inuzuka and her accidental kills have taught her just how important the process of readying herself before a kill truly is. Dehumanizing the enemy, making it about life or death, them or her, it’s the difference between feeling like crap for a day and shrugging the event off like it didn’t happen. “I think that means Naruto got twenty, I got eighteen, Sasuke got Sixteen, and six points were added to each of our bags.”

“Why would you have eighteen if Naruto got twenty?” Sasuke asks, not at all questioning why he would have gotten sixteen, otherwise known as six points on the base exam, plus ten for the special question. He must have had a hard time cheating properly, she knew she screwed up by not making a plan for him. Knowing the truth now, she’s glad she didn’t give up before hearing the special question, but the logic was sound. Sasuke wouldn’t have been able to handle the secret question if it was as bad as she thought.

“My eyes.” Sakura points to her ruby reds, and pulls the goblin sharpening stone to put next to her eye. The rock has a reflective surface, which is perfect for showing Sasuke what she means.

“The rock is glowing red… your eyes aren’t red, they’re glowing and the glow is stronger than your pigment.” Sasuke realizes, “huh.” His fingers rest on his chin as he observes the effect. Looking between the shiny rock, her eyes, then back again.

She can’t help but remember a remark he once made about Uchiha finding eyes like hers attractive, and her nose tinges a little red before she continues with a nod. “The glow must have transferred when I was in Ino, so he knew who to subtract the points from. At least that’s the only thing I can guess.”

“Wait, that was you?” Naruto asks, mouth gaping as he looks at her, “why’d you rub Hinata’s head?”

“She’s cute,” Sakura shrugs, “sometimes girls need to be rubbed.”

“... So we have seventy two balls,” Sasuke interrupts before Naruto can ask anything further, “that’s almost passing from moment one. That feels very lopsided.”

“Well yeah, if this was a test about getting ninety balls.” Sakura agrees with a playful laugh, lifting some of the points out of her bag and plopping some in theirs. “Thirty for Sasuke, thirty for you, twelve for me, we’re already most of the way there for us.”

“Us?” Sasuke asks. She expected him to ask her about why she’s not carrying as many balls, but he doesn’t. She’s not going to complain about being trusted, even if she wanted to brag about her plan.

“Isn’t it a test about collecting ninety balls?” Naruto asks, pouting at her when she shakes her head unhelpfully.

She takes pity on him after a moment, explaining before he can get frustrated. “First, this test isn’t about us, it’s about our village. We want as many members of our village to pass as possible, it makes Konoha look better, and prioritizing the village over our goals will also make us look better to the Jonin watching. You know, the people whose attention we’re showing off for?”

“I thought we were doing this to win.” Naruto asks, scratching his head.

“Err, well winning is one way to get attention,” She agrees, “but the more teams pass because of us, the better we look. The proctors are paying attention, they already implied they’re watching us multiple times.”

“When?” Naruto asks.

“When they said they’d escort those that are injured out before the timer. How would they know if they weren’t watching?” Sasuke grins, clearly feeling proud of himself for being the one to give the information for once. Sakura’s happy to share the wealth, Sasuke can be smart all he wants.

“We’re not good enough to ensure every leaf team wins, so let’s just focus on the people we have a tracker for,” Sakura says, raising her finger to point at the aforementioned trackers as if they can see them. “My system gave me a tracker for four teams including ours. One is from Kusa, but um, you’re going to want them to pass anyway.” She looks at Naruto, getting a raised brow from the boy. “We need to keep her in the exams because we don’t want her to leave Konoha while we do the exams.”

“Who?” Naruto asks, a little irritation on his face telling her that he’s officially annoyed she’s being cryptic.

As fun as it is to play with him, this is a little too important to be mean about. So she takes pity on him again with a thin smile. “Your cousin.” That shuts his brain right up, she actually gets to watch her brother short circuit in real time. She gets to watch him simply stop working, which is enough for her for now. “We can assume each of the other Konoha teams also managed to get around sixty balls, because if six balls is given to every Konoha ninja then eighteen balls are given to each team. Which means even if they got a zero on the exams they’d have forty eight points. We can assume they didn’t have zeros.”

“So, to be safe we should collect around thirty balls per team.” Sasuke concludes, “and assuming Kusa didn’t pass on too many points to that girl, it’s fifty for them… That means the most burden is because of some random girl.” He scoffs at that idea.

“Unless you can come up with some other plan to make her betray her country and stay here.” Sakura stares. “Go on, come up with something. Or are we letting Naruto’s cousin leave?”

“The proctors won’t like that…” Sasuke trails, lifting a palm to his forehead and shaking his head in his hand. “Fine. For Naruto.”

“We should probably hunt her down and ask how many she has,” Naruto says with a bright dopey grin, “that way we know how many to get.” That gets a long stare from both of them, “what?”

“She’s not going to tell us. She has no reason to trust us,” Sakura points out, “even I know that much.”

“But… We’re family.” Naruto gives Sakura a golden pout, then turns it on Sasuke who continues to stare at him completely unimpressed, “yeah, fine. Fifty it is.” Naruto relents mournfully. He just wanted to go see her, and if the situation was better she’d relent and let him go do that. She wants to see her too, but he gives in before she does which means he’s learning to listen to logic. She was somewhat expecting him to immediately demand the girl’s location and chase after her through the entire forest on the drop of a ryo. Before he came to live with her parents he would have absolutely done that. It’s why she was pensive about coming right out and telling him, but she should have known better.

“That brings us to the second problem of the test, keeping the balls. Our math assumes none of us lose any balls, including them, so we also need to figure out how to protect them. Which means that our first goal of the Chunin exams is finding and resurrecting as many giant beasts as undead summons as possible. This is going to be difficult, because my odds of success on creatures like these is definitely not high. We might be killing multiple monsters per summon, and that’s assuming one soul is enough to reanimate their own bodies. We might need two or three souls, even in the best case scenario we’ll need to supplement my summons with something else.”

“I can make a lot of clones to follow them if you can communicate their locations,” Naruto suggests the instant she stops talking, “that’ll tell us if the beasts fall and any of the teams are in danger.”

“Right, and third, I need you to create a shadow clone and pop it with the instruction to send Business Naruto to go talk to the Hokage.”

“There’s no guarantee the info will travel that far.”

“Yeah well, let’s hope it does, I can’t rely on proctors to send the message because this might not be something they’re supposed to know,” Sakura huffs a little in thought, “Kabuto Yakushi is a spy for someone, and is probably around Jonin level.”

“Oh, that explains so much about that whole thing with Gaara and you and, yeah…” Naruto nods, before summoning a clone.

“Wait I-” They hear from the smoke, before they hear the sound of a clone popping.

“Good, so with all that handled we have a plan.” Sakura jumps to a stand, distributing the bags of balls between them, and pocketing her own twelve.

“What should I do?” Sasuke asks as he stands, “I’d rather not sit on the sidelines while you two steal the show.”

“What are you talking about?” She smirks at the anxious boy, “you have the most important job. Your Sharingan can be used for tracking right? Who do you think is finding all the beasts for me to resurrect? I’m going to need help killing them as well, since Naruto’ll be in hiding while focusing his energy on clones. You’ll take the dog to find monsters and I’ll trail behind and watch your back, springing into action whenever I’m needed.” She’s excited to see him instantly take off. “Wait for me!” Luckily she knows this forest pretty well herself, so it shouldn’t be too hard to keep up.

Naruto turns into a squirrel, and scurries into a hole, ready to make thousands of squirrel shaped clones and let them out a few at a time so as to not arouse suspicion.

[Quest Update - The Rookie 9 and the Exams
You’ve estimated that you need 90 balls to ensure the other teams pass, and eighteen more for your own team.

0/90 Balls Obtained

0/18 Balls Obtained]

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The Uzumaki name is more a curse to her than anything of meaning. Red hair, a brighter vitality, a healing ability that’s forced her into a difficult job from a young age. Karin hasn’t slept in days, they only got to Konoha just in time for the exams and they used her vitality to make sure all the visitors from Kusa were in tip top shape. One would think they’d care about her enough to make sure she’d be awake enough to pass, but in truth she’s just a tool to fill in team slots so her squad members can succeed without her. She’s to sit around, serve as a rejuvenation source, and then stumble her way to the tower when they’re ready. Which means she’s doing just that, sitting around completely alone and unguarded in an empty camp and trying to get a moment’s rest.

They took the balls so it’s not like it matters if she’s guarded, no one’s going to kill her for no reason. “Bastards.” She grumbles, looking down at her scratched up legs. She’s so tired they haven’t healed yet, which is absurd given she has healing Chakra. The crackling fire to her side feels nice on her aching body, which gets a happy sigh from her in her cold dark world. The fire is heating up some meat they packed, even if she doesn’t manage to get to sleep the calories and proteins will be nice. One blink, the meat is raw, another it’s sizzling, the next and it’s lightly charred. A much less happy, far more longing sigh escapes her lips, and she’s careful not to blink again lest exhaustion waste the food by sending her too far forward. She pulls it off the fire, puts it on a rock to her side, and falls to the dirt. She’ll eat it later… no, more likely, one of them will come and eat it and then give her shit for almost wasting their resources.

Whatever. “I hope nothing crawls in my ear.” She mumbles to herself, and blinks again, this time waking up to see something much worse than an angry teammate.

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“Sakura’s already killed someone.” Shino announces to his team, only to find Kiba and Hinata spinning around with wide eyes.

“The hell do you mean she’s already killed someone?” Kiba asks, “we’ve been in the forest of death for like twenty minutes.”

“Exactly what I said. We should be on our guard, lethal fights are already happening.” The bug enriched boy looks off to the side through thick sunglasses. “Our enemies are likely to be more aggressive if they start finding corpses, and I doubt she has the first blood in the entire forest.”

“Great…” Kiba hisses, Akamaru growling atop his head.

“Maybe she does have the first blood?” Hinata suggests softly, her fingers coming together in front of her chest, her hair tilting to the side with her head, a kind expression blossoming on her lips despite the grim topic. “If she thought Naruto was in danger, she would kill immediately. Maybe he tripped into an enemy’s kunai and she overreacted?”

“Shouldn’t you be more worried about that?” Kiba asks her, only to quirk his brow at her in surprise when she shakes her head.

“Naruto will be fine.” Hinata assures them, not a hint of doubt in her eyes. “He can regrow limbs.” The sheer confidence on her face doesn’t seem to put them as at ease as she expected it to, did she say something wrong?

“What? When would you have seen that?” Kiba’s rounding on her is unexpected, so she pulls her hood up over her head to hide the furious flush threatening to gain sentience on her face.