Naruto: God of Shinobi

Chapter 28: The Rookie Nine

The room was large and loud in the way of rooms that had been filled with people who were all, in their various ways, trying not to show that they were nervous.

Naruto stepped inside and let the door close behind him.

He counted quickly. Thirty-something teams, give or take. Konoha. Suna. Two squads with headbands he did not immediately recognize. A team from Rain, if their grey cloaks were accurate. The particular spread of people who had been gathered from different places and different traditions and told to compete in the same space.

Heads turned. Eyes moved across Team 7 with the quick economy of people who were in the business of assessing threats and had just encountered new data.

Naruto scanned back.

He saw familiar faces near the far wall. The specific cluster of Konoha headbands that could only mean one thing.

They all made it, he thought. Not surprising. Some of them were always going to be here.

He started walking toward them.

Ino Yamanaka moved fast, which was one of the things that had always been true about her.

She crossed the room with the purposeful energy of someone who had spotted a target and had no particular interest in being circumspect about it, and the target she had spotted was Sakura, and she arrived with her blonde hair and her confident posture and her voice already in motion before she had finished closing the distance.

"Sakura! There you are!"

Sakura's shoulders went up a fraction. Old instinct. The particular tension of someone who had spent years in a rivalry and had developed physical responses to it.

"Ino."

Ino's eyes moved past Sakura and found Sasuke. Something lit up in her face. "Sasuke-kun! You are looking as handsome as ever!"

Sasuke did not respond. His face did what his face did, which was nothing, and his eyes stayed on the middle distance, and Ino's enthusiasm passed over him like weather over stone.

Ino turned back to Sakura. Her expression had sharpened into something competitive and gleeful in equal measure.

"So," she said. "Still chasing him? I thought you would have given up by now."

Sakura looked at Ino. She looked, briefly, at Naruto. Then back at Ino.

"You can have him," she said. Her voice was flat. Final. The voice of someone who had made a decision and was done reconsidering it.

Ino blinked. Her mouth opened. Closed. She followed the direction of Sakura's prior glance, and her eyes found Naruto, and they stayed there for a moment while she processed.

Then her eyebrows rose. Slow. A grin spread across her face with the unstoppable momentum of something that had found exactly what it was looking for.

"Him?" she said. "The dead last? The class clown? The one who never…"

"Stop," Sakura said. Her face had gone red.

Ino laughed. Loud and genuine, the laugh of someone who was not being cruel and was also not going to stop. "Oh my god. You are blushing. You are actually blushing right now."

"I am not!"

"You are. You like Naruto. You like Naruto Uzumaki."

"I did not say that!"

"You did not have to say it. Your face said it. Your face is saying it right now."

"My face is not saying anything!"

"Your face is very loud, Sakura."

They were arguing the way people argued when the argument was comfortable, when it had been worn smooth by repetition and carried inside it the particular warmth of two people who had known each other long enough to fight this way. It was familiar. It was loud. Neither of them was going to win.

Shikamaru Nara watched this from the wall nearby, arms folded, expression unchanged from the specific configuration it had occupied since approximately age seven. Bored. Tired. Something considerably sharper than either running underneath both.

"Troublesome," he said. "Both of you. Equally troublesome."

Choji Akimichi stood beside him. He was working through a bag of chips with the focused contentment of someone engaged in a serious activity. He held the bag toward Shikamaru. Shikamaru waved it off. Choji shrugged and continued.

Kiba Inuzuka was there with Akamaru riding his head, the small white dog's nose working the air with professional thoroughness. Kiba had his arms crossed and his grin going, the particular grin of someone who was enjoying watching other people's chaos from a comfortable distance.

Shino Aburame stood with his collar up and his hands in his jacket pockets and said nothing, which was what Shino did.

And Hinata Hyuga stood slightly apart from the rest.

She was looking at Naruto.

Then she looked away.

Then she looked back.

Naruto noticed. He noticed the way you noticed something that kept occurring in your peripheral vision, the repeated small motion of it. He shifted his weight. Something about it was uncomfortable in a way that had no good name. She had always looked at him like that, since the academy, and he had never known what to do with it. It was not threatening. It was not hostile. It was simply very present, and it made him want to be somewhere else.

He turned toward the boys and walked over.

Shikamaru looked at him when he arrived. Properly looked at him, the way Shikamaru looked at things when he was actually paying attention, which was not the same as how he usually appeared.

"You look different," Shikamaru said.

"Well so do you. Kind of."

Shikamaru considered this. "I mostly look the same."

"You do. But you are standing differently."

A pause. Shikamaru studied him again. "What happened to you?"

"I went on a mission," Naruto said. "And then I trained."

"That is not what I mean."

"I know."

Shikamaru stared at him for another moment. Then he shrugged, the particular shrug of someone who had decided that pressing further was more effort than the answer was worth. "Troublesome. But it worked, I guess."

Choji held out the bag. Naruto reached in and took a chip. Ate it. It was salt and sesame, the same kind Choji had always eaten.

"You are still eating," Naruto said.

"I am always eating."

"I know."

Kiba grinned. Akamaru's ears perked. "You smell different too. Less like ramen. More like..." He tilted his head. "I don't know. Something else. Smoke, maybe. Or forest."

"I learned to cook," Naruto said. "And I spent time in the woods."

Kiba's eyebrows went up. "The dead last learned to cook."

"The dead last learned a lot of things."

Kiba laughed. It was an uncomplicated laugh, the laugh of someone who thought this was genuinely funny and was not trying to be mean about it. "Fair enough. What else?"

"You will see."

They talked. It was easy in the way that things were easy when there was history underneath them, not deep history, not the kind built from trust or shared crisis, but the ordinary accumulated weight of years of proximity. Classroom seats near each other. Shared lunch tables when no one else would sit nearby. Small unremarkable moments that added up to something without ever becoming anything dramatic.

These were the boys who had treated him like a person. Not with particular warmth, not with the kind of deliberate chosen friendship that meant something, but simply as a person. They had sat near him. They had not looked at him with the specific quality of fear and contempt that most of the village had refined over years. That was not nothing.

He did not trust them. Trust was a different category. But he did not hold anything against them either. They were acquaintances. The closest thing to friends he had in this village, which was not the same as friends, but it was what it was.

"You are still lazy," Naruto said to Shikamaru.

"You are still loud," Shikamaru said. Then he paused. "Or you were. You are not as loud anymore."

"I grew up."

"Troublesome." He said it in the tone that could have been irritation and could have been something warmer, and was probably both.

Choji offered the bag again. Naruto took another chip.

The boy appeared from the direction of the room's center, moving with the easy friendliness of someone who was comfortable in crowds and did not find strangers uncomfortable.

He was older than most of the genin in the room. Silver hair. Glasses. A smile that was warm and open and had the practiced quality of something that had been used often.

"Hello," he said. "You are the rookie nine, right? I have been hearing about you."

He looked around the group. His eyes moved across each of them with what appeared to be friendly curiosity.

"Kabuto Yakushi. I have taken the Chunin Exams a few times now. I know the layout, the patterns, what to expect. Thought I might be able to help."

He reached into his jacket and produced a small stack of cards. He began handing them out.

Naruto took his. He looked at it.

The numbers were low. Very low. Ninjutsu two. Taijutsu two. Genjutsu one. Intelligence three. Strength four. Speed three. Stamina eight. Hand seals two.

"What is this?" he said.

"Your scores," Kabuto said. "Academy records. Compiled and analyzed. I keep files on genin from all the major villages. It helps to know what you are working with."

"They are low."

"They are accurate. For when you graduated."

Naruto looked at the card. He looked at Kabuto. The smile was still there. Warm. Helpful. The eyes behind the glasses were attentive in the way that attentive eyes sometimes were when they were looking for something specific.

Sasuke had his own card. He glanced at it without visible reaction. His scores were considerably higher.

Sakura looked at hers, then at Naruto's. Her expression shifted. "Those are not accurate anymore," she said.

Sasuke glanced over. "Not even close."

Naruto shrugged. "They are what they are."

Kabuto's smile widened slightly. "You are not upset?"

"I do not care what a card says about me."

"That is a good attitude," Kabuto said, and the warmth in his voice was genuine-sounding in the way that warmth sometimes was when it had been carefully constructed. "Especially in an exam like this."

Naruto said nothing. He pocketed the card.

Something was wrong. He could not name it. It was not in any single thing Kabuto had said or done. It was in the space around it, the particular shape of a person who was performing helpfulness with slightly too much precision. The smile landing exactly right. The cards appearing at exactly the right moment. The friendliness calibrated to a frequency that most people would find comfortable.

Naruto watched him and waited for the shape of it to become clearer.

* * *

Kabuto was explaining the villages when the interruption came.

He had been walking them through the breakdown, Suna, Kusa, the smaller contingents, and then he said the name of the new village, the one with the musical note on the headband, the Hidden Sound, and from across the room a voice came back at him like a door being opened onto cold air.

"What do you know about Oto?"

Three genin had moved without appearing to move. They were simply elsewhere and then they were here, standing in front of the group, and the space they occupied had a quality to it that was immediately different from the space around them.

The one who had spoken was broad and wrapped in bandages, face covered to the eyes, a metallic sleeve on his left arm. His voice had a distorted quality, like sound traveling through something it was not meant to travel through. Dosu Kinuta.

Beside him, a boy with tubes embedded along both forearms stood with his chin up and his eyes flat. Zaku Abumi. The modifications were not subtle. Someone had done work on him that was not reversible.

The third was a girl. Hard-faced. A needle threaded with wire between her fingers, barely visible. Kin Tsuchi. She was watching the room, not just Kabuto, and her eyes moved with professional regularity.

"I meant no offense," Kabuto said. His hands came up, palms out. "I was only…"

Zaku moved.

His arm extended. The air pressure wave that came out of the tubes was not loud but it was visible, a distortion in the space between his arm and Kabuto, and it hit and the glasses shattered and Kabuto stumbled backward and bent over and his hands went to his knees and he was sick, quickly and completely, and then straightened with his face pale and his eyes watering.

The Sound Genin's expressions did not change. Zaku's chin came up slightly.

"Not so impressive," he said.

Naruto watched.

Kabuto was on his feet again, recovering, but something was wrong with the geometry of it. A man fast enough to partially evade that attack was fast enough to evade it entirely. The glasses were broken, yes, but the break was clean, the kind produced by impact rather than the kind produced by a man throwing his face sideways. The vomiting was quick. Complete. And then it was over, which was not how that kind of sickness worked.

He had dodged most of it. He had chosen not to dodge all of it.

Sasuke was watching too. His eyes had the quality they got when he was processing something he had not finished processing.

Sakura's hand was at her kunai pouch. She had not drawn, but her fingers were there.

Naruto looked at Kabuto's face. Pale. Shaken. Both accurate and performed, the way an expression could be both things.

He filed it.

The door opened.

Not loudly, not theatrically, just opened, the way a door opened when the person opening it did not need to perform their entrance because their entrance performed itself.

The man who walked in was tall. Broad across the shoulders. A bandana wrapped around his head and tied at the back, covering whatever was beneath it. His face was visible from the bandana down, and the face was a record of what had been done to it: scars overlapping scars, the map of a life that had been conducted in specific kinds of rooms with specific kinds of instruments. His eyes were dark and level and they moved across the room the way eyes moved across a room when they were used to reading it.

The Sound Genin stopped.

Not because they were told to. Because they recognized something, the way animals recognized something, without needing it explained.

Ibiki Morino walked to the front of the room.

The room was quiet. Not the quiet of people who had been asked to be quiet, but the quiet of people who had looked at something and decided, independently and simultaneously, that making noise was not what they wanted to do.

He looked at the genin. All of them. His eyes did not stop on any one face for long.

"That is enough," he said. His voice was not loud. It did not need to be. "The Chunin Exams begin now. I am the proctor for the first exam."

He clasped his hands behind his back.

"Anyone who does not wish to participate may leave. There is no shame in knowing your limits." A pause. "The shame, if there is any, comes from not knowing them. From finding out here instead of somewhere safer."

No one moved.

Ibiki looked at the room. Something in his face shifted, barely, the way a door shifted when it was a fraction of an inch from closed.

"Good," he said. "Then let us begin."

Next time: Psychological torture — the written test.