Naruto: The Bone-Eyed Maiden

"J-jump down!?"

The smudged ink on Naruto's forehead seemed to blur even more as he craned his neck, trying to judge how far it was to the ground. But below him, the air was filled with a layer of pale violet miasma, obscuring everything beneath.

It looked like a bottomless abyss.

Sasuke instinctively glanced at Konome, who remained calmly seated, as if silently asking whether the clearly unreliable proctor Anko had messed something up.

Noticing the doubtful look in Sasuke's eyes, Konome suppressed a laugh and kept admiring the view.

This round of the exam had been inspired by a famous battle royale game from her previous life. These genin were already grouped into squads, competing for the final qualifying slots. It was practically a perfect fit.

The academy lobby had been the game lobby, the schoolyard had been the staging plaza, and this naturally was the plane.

To make it work, she had even dug out the remains of the elephant bird she had blasted to death years ago and recreated it with her ever-shifting Konome Cells. The giant bird above them was, in truth, one of her flesh clones.

"Yes, that's right. You jump."

Faced with the genin's disbelief, Anko nodded as though this were the most natural thing in the world. She pointed toward the mist-covered land sealed inside the earthen walls below.

"You do not have much prep time. Once the elephant bird flies out of the park, anyone still inside the cage will be treated as having forfeited."

"What kind of joke is this…"

The examinees edged toward the side of the cage on trembling legs. Just looking into the fog below made their calves go weak.

Thanks to chakra, shinobi had excellent resistance against blunt impact. But jumping from several hundred, or even over a thousand, meters up was still beyond a normal ninja's limits.

If they jumped, the best-case scenario would probably be ruptured organs and shattered bones. Worst case, they would splatter into meat paste on impact. No wonder they had been made to sign life-and-death waivers before the exam. It turned out Konoha really meant to push them to the edge of death.

"I'm done. I quit!"

One genin from Kusagakure went deathly pale and sat down clutching the vines, shaking his head like a rattle no matter how his teammates tried to persuade him.

"That's fine. Unlike the written test, in this round, one person being eliminated does not affect their teammates' chance to advance."

Anko did not seem surprised in the slightest. Or rather, Yatō had already prepared for this.

"If you run into a life-threatening situation, surrendering is the smartest option. We'll have people escort you out."

Hearing that, the other two Kusa shinobi immediately stopped trying to talk their teammate into it.

"So? Have you decided? If you're too scared, that's understandable."

Anko kept prodding them verbally, clearly enjoying the way the examinees' expressions shifted. She was having the time of her life.

As expected of a test designed by Root's leader. It really did know how to play with people.

Once one of Root's victims herself, Anko was finally starting to understand the fun of being part of it.

"We'll go first!"

"This kind of aerial deployment is nothing!"

Just as the crowd hesitated, three brave figures stepped forward, instantly drawing everyone's attention.

One boy and two girls, all on the shorter side, all around Naruto's age, all wearing headbands marked with stars.

They were Subaru, Hokuto, and their teammate from Hoshigakure.

They looked at the genin of the Five Great Nations, all frozen by the height, with obvious pride.

Hoshigakure had always seen itself as the Sixth Great Village. To match the Five Great Nations, its leader called himself the Hoshikage, and what the village relied on was its unique Star Chakra.

Flying?

Miasma?

Wasn't this test tailor-made for Hoshigakure?

"Peacock Mystical Method: Winged Beast Formation!"

The three of them formed hand seals together and shouted in unison. A strange chakra, entirely different from normal chakra, burst out from their backs and formed translucent wings.

Then they leapt from the cage and flew into the violet cloud layer below.

Whoosh.

Their chakra wings spread and beat hard. Like three great birds, they disappeared in the blink of an eye.

"The Hoshigakure team can fly!"

Among the Kusa shinobi, some were practically drooling with envy. In the shinobi world, the rarity of flight was second only to bloodline limits.

Konome's eyes flared gray, her dojutsu piercing through the haze to lock onto the trio's movements.

Hoshigakure had been named after a meteorite that fell from the sky. The First Hoshikage discovered that it contained a strange energy, and by extracting it with chakra, one could obtain Star Chakra. The Peacock Mystical Method was merely a derived secret art built on that unique chakra.

Since its usage resembled a Tailed Beast cloak, many people in her past life had suspected the meteorite was a remnant of the Ten-Tails.

But it was useless to her now.

Even if a fully formed Ten-Tails stood right in front of her, she would not dare absorb it. Given her current body, Otsutsuki Kaguya could probably possess her without even needing an adjustment period.

Rustle.

Blood-scented sand whirled through the cage, rapidly forming a square platform.

"We're going too."

Seeing that the elephant bird had nearly reached the center of the park, Gaara glanced at Konome, saw that she still had no intention of moving, and stepped directly onto his Desert Levitation.

Temari and Kankuro followed suit at once. With his arms folded, Gaara sent the sand drifting away, already carrying a hint of the composure he would one day have as Kazekage.

"Come on."

Now Konome stood up leisurely and walked to the edge of the cage. Sasuke and Naruto exchanged looks, then pressed close to her, swallowing hard.

Without paying attention to their nerves, Konome took a single step out and stood directly on the air.

Naruto and Sasuke had not even finished psyching themselves up when they suddenly felt something shove them from behind. The next instant, both of them stepped right into empty space.

"Aaaaah!"

Their hearts nearly jumped out of their throats, but they quickly realized the air beneath their feet was unbelievably solid, like an invisible sheet of reinforced glass.

They tested it with shaky steps. It held firm, but they still did not dare relax, clinging close behind Konome like two flute-playing attendants trailing after an immortal.

"This way of flying…"

The foreign shinobi who had been present that night all frowned, finding it disturbingly familiar. Chojuro and the rest of the Kirigakure group looked at Konome very differently now.

It was exactly how Chief Proctor Yatō flew, standing on empty air without any visible chakra fluctuation.

Could she be…

Yatō's disciple?

The Kiri trio's eyes gleamed with the light of self-congratulation. In their minds, they had solved the mystery.

That explained why she had been given special treatment during inspection. She had to be Yatō's student.

And why would the proctor's subordinates not look after the proctor's disciple?

Konoha was insidious.

Yatō was serving as chief proctor, yet she had secretly sent her own disciple in as a candidate. That also explained how Konome had finished the written exam in five minutes. So she really had stolen the questions.

The more they thought about it, the more convinced they became. Their eyes filled with grim killing intent.

If Yatō had killed Ao at the gate, then them killing Yatō's disciple was only fair, wasn't it?

Konome, completely unaware of this spectacularly stupid train of thought, glanced once at Orochimaru among the disguised Kusa shinobi and led Naruto and Sasuke downward.

"We're following."

Suigetsu grabbed Chojuro and Ringo and jumped straight down. Orochimaru and Danzo exchanged a glance and followed suit as well.

Elsewhere, a swarm of insects formed a tornado-like spiral in the air. Hinata and Kiba, faces pale, could only shut their eyes and let Shino guide them downward, wrapped in insects.

The kikaichu could not make them fly, but they could let them glide and reduce their acceleration.

They had come this far. None of them wanted to be eliminated without even entering the exam zone.

The others all resorted to their own methods and jumped as well, eyes shut and teeth clenched. For a moment, the sky looked like it was raining black shapes, countless candidates dropping through the thick layer of miasma.

Bang.

A figure crashed like a heavy counterweight onto a reddish-brown conical rock, then exploded like a water balloon into a splash of liquid.

"Water Release: Water Formation Wall!"

A thick wall of water spread across the sky, then folded and tilted. Chojuro and Ringo landed on it and surfed downward as if riding a wave.

Boom.

The rushing water smashed into the rock below and shattered it. Using that momentum, the two landed cleanly, only stumbling a few steps.

The burst-apart Suigetsu pulled himself back together into a watery humanoid shape, his neck and limbs forming first, looking like some emaciated jellyfish.

The Kirigakure team landed unharmed.

Standing atop one of the sharp stone peaks, they looked down at the terrain beneath them.

Clouds of pale purple miasma drifted through the air. The ground itself had disappeared beneath a bog bubbling with brown gas. Countless towering reddish-brown stone spires rose from that mire, too many to count.

These were not the usual broad-based cones. They looked more like giant icicles hanging from the eaves in deep winter, only inverted and embedded in earth.

Thick, bridge-like dark green vines stretched from spire to spire, entangling and locking them together. It looked as though giant chains had been hammered into the swamp to seal the entire place under some enormous restriction.

And they were standing on the tip of one of those bamboo-shoot-like peaks.

"How is this even possible?"

Chojuro's hand shook as he pushed up his glasses. He stared at the landscape below as if he had inhaled too much miasma and started hallucinating. Suigetsu and Ringo beside him looked just as stunned.

Clack.

Ringo took a step forward. A reddish stone flake rolled off the tip of the peak and fell into the marsh below. It vanished with barely a sound, swallowed immediately as bubbles rose and burst. Wisps of pale purple gas seeped out and joined the haze in the air.

All three of them swallowed nervously.

At last, they understood where the miasma in the sky was coming from.

At the same time, Sunagakure's team also broke through the miasma layer and entered Death Paradise.

"Where the hell did we end up?"

Standing on Gaara's floating sand, Temari and Kankuro stared at the scene below in complete bewilderment, like fresh graduates dumped into unemployment.

The clouds above were ink-black. The air was thick with a foul, cloying stench.

The ground was carpeted in bones. Some places even had entire mounds of them. The skeletal remains were twisted and malformed, clearly from many different species crudely piled together.

Dense patches of vivid red fungus had rooted themselves in the marrow of the bones. From a distance, they looked like patches of ominous red fur.

Staring at that white-and-red hellscape, even Gaara looked lost.

His Desert Levitation was perfectly stable, but would he really not fall straight into hell if he messed up here?

Whoosh.

At that moment, the miasma above split open again, and a blue sphere came plummeting down into the sea of bones.

Crack crack crack.

The bones shattered as the blue sphere spun violently, pulverizing red-furred skeletons and flinging fragments everywhere like debris caught in a whirlwind.

Arms folded, Gaara's face stayed cold as the sand beneath him instantly rose into a wall, blocking all the flying bone fragments.

Sand and bone splintered through the air.

Buzz.

The violently spinning chakra sphere slowed. Neji stood there with bulging veins around his eyes, his hands still glowing with chakra. Lee and Tenten had gone completely still, staring at the infernal landscape.

"There are people above us!"

Neji's calm voice snapped the other two out of it. They immediately looked up.

The sand wall slowly fell away. Gaara, eyes full of killing intent, raised a hand and slowly curled his fingers as if grabbing the trio from afar.

On the white-and-red bone field, a tide of blood-scented sand erupted and came hurtling toward Team Guy.

Without a word wasted, the moment Team Guy landed in the Bone Wasteland, they ran straight into Gaara's Sunagakure team and battle erupted instantly.

Konome's gray eyes flashed.

She had not expected Neji's luck to be this awful. The moment he entered, he ran into the very team that countered taijutsu the hardest.

Kankuro's puppets neutralized Gentle Fist. Temari's wind techniques countered Tenten's projectile attacks. And as for Lee, Gaara's sand armor completely suppressed him.

In the original story, their fight had looked intense and heroic, but in truth, even after opening five Gates, Lee had failed to make Gaara bleed.

In plain terms, he never even broke the defense.

The only thing Konome could do now was wait and see whether the Neji she had trained could produce some miracle.

She slowly shook her head and turned her attention away from the Bone Wasteland.

Given Neji and Lee's abilities, they might not be able to beat Gaara, but this was Death Paradise, not that cramped tournament arena. With their speed and endurance, escaping should not be hard even if they lost.

"And what a beautiful view."

Naruto and Sasuke walked down the invisible staircase through the air, staring at the sight before them in awe.

In front of them stretched an enormous bowl-shaped depression in the land, almost perfectly circular. Its sloping edges were smooth and gentle, with the center sunk deep into the earth on a scale comparable to a meteor crater.

But its strangest feature was not its shape.

At the very bottom was not solid ground, but a massive hole, perhaps several hundred meters across, like a giant drain at the bottom of the world.

Countless winding streams flowed in from the distance and converged into this colossal bowl. But rather than forming a lake, they spiraled downward along the inner walls faster and faster until they vanished into the central opening.

The inner walls of the crater had been polished smooth over time by the relentless flow of water, forming gleaming spiral grooves that caught the light with a wet sheen.

"So this is Death Paradise?"

Sasuke stared at the bizarre basin and instinctively started trying to explain its formation using the geography lessons he had learned in school.

"No."

Konome looked at the perfect circular basin and the abyss-like drain at its heart, remembering the waterfall that had once helped her train her Wind Release, and the forest whose life she had once drained dry.

To test the combined power of her Eight Gates, Tailed Beast cloak, and Lightning Chakra Mode, she had once thrown a full-powered punch here. That single blow had completely changed the region's terrain and even opened the underground caverns and rivers beneath it.

"This is the final circle."