Chapter 20: Chapter 20: Suna Chunin Exams Arc: Three
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
The proctor for the second exam is the same as the first. She surveys the fifteen remaining teams, and gestures for us to follow her. We end up at one end of a long series of dried out canyons without a single drop of water.
"All of you teams will need eighteen of these gold coins." She holds up several 'gold' coins which were probably fake. "And get to the oasis at the other end of this series of canyons by sunset tomorrow, or we'll have to come and pick you up because you'll be dehydrated and near death. If you arrive without all members of your team alive you are disqualified. If you arrive without eighteen gold coins, you are disqualified." She then pulls out a scroll and starts reading the teams. "Team Six from Konohagakure, ranked first..."
I pull Toku and Muta back as she gives us six golden coins each.
"She's having the rest of them gunning for us." I hiss as I try to shuffle us into the back of the crowd. The other teams had only gotten six coins total. We are a juicy prize for every single team that knew they could take the three of us, much younger than any of the other competitors at eight and eleven.
Muta doesn't move. "So what?" He says back, not bothering to whisper. "We can take them unless you're scared." The response is so unlike him that I freeze.
Ichi and Ni form a rough furry wall around me, and Ichi growls. "Stop being mean to Hana." San looks between the two of us, caught in indecision, but finally moves over to join his brothers.
"What did you just say?" Muta isn't confrontational. He's normally so rational, what's happening? His frown at my words is visible, and all around him the kikaichu buzz louder than I've heard them do before. I feel a cold sweat break out across my skin. What's wrong with him?
"Come on, you two." Toku murmurs. "We have to be a team right now. We can fight later all right?" He sets one hand on both of our elbows and guides us to our entrance. "We need to make a plan."
"Does Hana-sama have a suggestion?" Muta asks, and his voice is so bitter that it turns my stomach. "After all, Hana-sama is always making plans."
"Mu-kun." Toku says and steps between us. "We have to put aside our differences." He turns back towards me. "Does running as fast as you can sound good to you?"
I nod weakly, mind still trying to figure out what is wrong with Muta. I have no idea what is wrong though. He'd been subdued yesterday, but he wasn't confrontational. I'd never seen him angry before, but I have an unsettling feeling that he is certainly angry now. And he's angry at me, not Sensei or Toku, because he's far too rational to take his anger out on a person who didn't, in his mind, deserve it.
The sun beats down, and even in this early morning, the temperature's rising, soaring, and we'd have to be careful to make it without using up too much water.
We're further along in the canyon maze than most other teams, which is a blessing, because when the explosive signal goes off in the sky, we take off as fast as we can down the canyon floor.
I stay away from Muta, Ichi and Ni flanking me, and San in between he and I. Tokuma runs between us, his byakugan active, meaning that he doesn't have to turn his head, but he does so anyway every few moments.
At one point he nearly runs into a pillar because he's so focused on looking at me.
At the two hour mark we stop to drink water and gauge the distance to the end of the canyon maze.
"It should take us another half a day or so going at a decent speed." Toku offers, and Ni whimpers. "Why does it have to be so far?"
I pat his head. "We'll be there soon, you see."
Muta snorts. I feel his derision ring out across the stone and something inside me crumbles. "Only because you want to run away from everyone."
I frown at him, and his dark cloud of pessimism. Alright. I've had it with this. He's going to tell me what's wrong with him, or I'm going to clock him in the face. "Alright." I say as I rise, hands on my hips. "Tell me why you've suddenly turned into a giant ball of angst. Is the rest of this team not good enough for the High and Mighty Lord Muta of the Aburame?" I walk forward so I can glare at him, and the kikaichu are louder than ever, the dull hum in my ears not only the sound of my rushing blood. "Well, is it?"
"Hana." Toku puts a hand on my arm. "Later, Hana. Please."
Muta turns away, but I see the disgust in his features and feel a kunai twist deeper between my ribs. Why is our teamwork breaking down?
"Trap!" I call out as a line of kunai launchers are suddenly triggered, and it is raining sharp knives. The Triplets get away, and I reach out for Muta, but he moves on ahead and straight into another trap.
The explosion is deafening, and a long wordless scream stretches into the still air. No. No. No! MUTA!
It takes Toku shaking my shoulders to make me realize that the scream is my own. "Hana. Hana!" My teeth rattle in my head, but I can't stop screaming. "Hana, he's fine. Muta's fine! The substitution jutsu remember? He's fine, Hana."
Muta brushes a trickle of blood from his lips, but he stands in front of me, as solidly as usual. There's a cloud of dead kikaichu at his feet though, and he seems shaken. "Are you-" He asks, but says nothing more.
I throw myself at him. "Don't do something like that ever again, Mu-kun." I forget that he's mad at me, and I don't know why. I forget that I hadn't contributed yesterday, but he had. I forget that I feel useless and small next to him, when I'd never felt that way before.
I remember that we used to play substitution tag and that he'd caught me more times than I'd caught him. that he had a big heart and he wasn't afraid to break down and sometimes he just wasn't confident. "Mu-kun." I whisper. "I thought I wasn't enough." A single hand of his comes to rest between my shoulder blades, which is a large enough concession from him that I feel warm inside.
"And I thought I wasn't good enough." He says to my hair.
I pull back to look at him through my blurry vision. Why would he have thought that? "Are we friends again?" I ask, and his expression is so visibly painful.
"We were always friends, Hana." We're too caught up in that moment, too concerned about whether or not we'd at least patched the string between us.
"Look out!" Toku screams as he pushes us away. The next moment a blast of wind chakra roars across the canyon floor and it throws Toku, who'd been the only person without someone to hold onto and still in the gust's direct path, into a wall of solid stone. The sickening sound of cracking bone rings out loud and clear.
Ni's in front of him in an instant, his fangs bared and glistening wetly in the hot, desert sun. "Not here. We're not done here."
"Well, I've finally found the little brats." A single kunoichi from Iwa steps down from behind us, and Muta raises his arm.
"I won't let you hurt my team." We slide into position around Toku who's eyes are wide, and in this moment, truly unseeing.
The kunoichi laughs, her shoulders shaking. "I've already taken out the only person on this team worth mentioning: the Hyuga. Now there's only the little dog girl and the weird bug boy who can't work with each other left." She'd been watching us. She'd seen our quarrel. I feel my blood run cold. We didn't notice. She smiles at us, teeth shining white and holds out a hand. "Just give me your coins and I'll be on my merry way."
I feel my own lips draw back in a snarl."The day that hell freezes over." Her face changes until her grin isn't mocking, but murderous. The air has changed somehow, become oppressive and heavy. It's like breathing soup, but the Triplets are surprisingly clear headed.
"Then I'll send you three to the shinigami to check for me." She leaps forwards toward Muta who still has his arms raised, and I've got Ichi and San with me. I slide into Beast Mimicry as I breath in, and then I am both Ichi and San as I breath out. Not. Our. Pack. Her katana tears at our flesh, but we do not care. There must be wounds but we don't feel pain.
In this moment we are invincible, we are strong, and she cannot hurt us enough to stop us from moving. Muta's right beside us, and we move with him because that what it means to be pack, pack, pack. She's slower now, and we can sense Muta's kikaichu draining her chakra. We know where he's standing, and we know where they are on her body.
We can smell her fear, and it's bitter taste in the air as we move. Our lips draw back and our claws tingle. Muta connects a punch and a kick.
We sink our teeth into her flesh and shake her like a rag doll, and then we pull.
Blood splatters the ground like rain, and we growl with vicious satisfaction. We've won. Won. This is what it means to win.
I'm throwing up water next to a dead body a moment later. There's the coppery, bitter taste of blood that makes me want to keep throwing up, but I wipe my mouth on my sleeve and straighten up. In doing so, I glimpse the shredded wounds on the corpse out of the corner of my eye, and it's night again, night, night, night, that very first night and I'm seeing Toku holding his hand at the level of the woman's throat, and the sun is rising over Sensei's bleeding and unconscious body, and two slashes of my kunai blood black in the moonlight and now there's this.
Pieces of a body littering the canyon floor at high noon with heat waves still wafting up into the still air.
She hadn't even really had time to scream. My heart is pounding unevenly, and I can hear blood rushing through my ears like the roaring of an ocean. I set both hands against the canyon wall and close my eyes.
A comforting blackness greets me this time. I breath in. I breath out.
And I find Ichi bumping up against my hip. "We don't have time to wait here." He whimpers. "The White Eyed Boy is dying." Dying? Toku? My eyes snap open and I'm turning towards the rest of my team, all thoughts of panic thrown into the wind. There they are.
Toku with one arm held at an impossible angle, his eyes still wide and unseeing. "Are they gone yet?" He whispers.
Muta tries to lift him up. "Yes, Toku, they're gone." He's lost his glasses. I think to myself, and feel laughter, raw and wounded, bubble up in my parched throat. His glasses had always been so important to him. "Hana." He says, and his voice is a terrible plea. "What do we do? He's-" His voice breaks and he tries to push up glasses that are no longer there, kikaichu crawling in frantic waves across his face. "He's asking the same questions over and over."
I notice that he too, carefully avoids looking at the body for too long. My face stings when I move any muscles and there's a long gash on my arm and I'm sure I've sprained something, but it doesn't matter. I'm alive.
I stagger over and tear off Toku's right sleeve at the shoulder. He moans, but Muta has a hand over his mouth just in case he screams too loudly and attracts the other teams who must still be somewhere in the maze of canyons. "We need something hard to splint his arm." My hands trail over the purpling flesh on Toku's skin, and the breakage where shattered bone protruded from an awkward angle through his elbow. There isn't even a stick in this disturbing place.
I am tired. So, tired. I just want to lie down and sleep, pillow my head in the rough stone beneath my feet and sleep until everything is all over.
"Is he injured anywhere else?" I ask as I brush his bangs back from his face. "Toku?"
"M okay." He mumbles, and attempts to stand up by pushing himself up with his other arm. Muta hurriedly slings Toku's good arm over his shoulders.
"I don't think so." He says when he looks up at me again. "But we can't really travel very far like this, and we're going to run out of water."
We make it only a little farther down the canyon that afternoon despite the good time we'd made that morning, and we leave a trail of blood and chakra in our wake.
We're wounded animals, with the buzzards right behind.
Dusk has fallen.
"We can't light a fire." I cross my arms over my chest. Muta sighs and gestures at Toku, who we'd set on the ground and covered with all of our blankets. Despite that, he's still shivering in the cold night air due to being unable to effectively cycle his chakra.
"But, Hana, if we don't light the fire Toku could freeze to death." Muta's right, but I don't know what we're supposed to do in a situation like this.
I let go of Ichi. "Go wrap around Toku, but make sure to be careful of his injured arm."
Ichi looks at me, looks at Toku, and then looks at me. "If he doesn't get help soon, he'll die."
I sigh and bury my hand in the ruff of fur at the base of his neck. "I know, but if we have to survive the night first." I turn back to Muta. "All of us have to survive tonight first, and we can't light a fire if we want to do that. There's got to be teams still hunting for weak prey. They'll be on us as soon as we give them a big beacon to show them where we are."
He looks down at his hands. "Can we make it to the end of the maze?"
I blink at him. "We could have." I whisper. "If we'd really pushed we could have made it at dawn tomorrow."
"We can't really stay here." Muta stands back up, still swaying on his feet. "If the sun comes up, we'll get killed either way whether or not we made a fire. The kunoichi's team is probably looking for her, and we won't be able to fight both of them."
The noon sun. Pieces. I hand him a soldier pill from the dwindling supply. "Well, in that case, we should get moving." I pop another one into my mouth.
It tastes as bitter as blood.
It is possible to exhaust your chakra stores and become addicted to soldier pills to keep moving if you develop the nasty habit of going on too many long missions. I imagine that Kakashi would be able to understand the feeling, but he is a country away in Konoha. Or maybe he's running ANBU missions. I have no idea, as it's too far above my clearance levels. But by the time we stagger across the finish line a few minutes before dawn, Muta and I seem to be well on our way towards at least a dependency.
Toku hadn't stopped shivering the entire night, and in the pre-dawn light his lips are tinged with blue. We'd moved with the strength of worry and Toku's pained mumbling while he's strapped to Ni.
"I don't know how we made it." I whisper to Muta who looks just as dead on his feet as I feel. Even the Triplets are staggering as though drunk on too little sleep to make a difference. We could have all been slaughtered. We were so lucky.
"We had desperation on our side." He murmurs back, tongue thick and heavy, his words almost intelligible. I'd been half carried by Ichi practically the entire second leg of the journey.
"Congratulations at having completed the Second Test." I bare my teeth at the proctor and when she asks for our coins, I throw them at her face with the last of my strength. Take them. I don't want them. They nearly cost me Toku.
Would I have traded Toku's life to make chunin? Would I have let him die if I knew that I could prevent Itachi's destiny? Is it worth the risk?
The answer seemed increasingly to be no. But here we were. All of us still alive, and we'd passed their Kami-damned stupid test that had nearly killed us all.
"Medic." I gasp falling to my knees. "We need a medic." My eyes want to close, I want to collapse forwards into the sand, but I can't. There's no Sensei. Toku's down. Muta, The Triplets and I are at an all time low, and we're in hostile territory.
I claw my way up, back on my feet once more.
No. I can't sleep yet.
I'm still swaying on my feet as I make my way over to lean against Muta's shoulder. He's still holding onto San's neck to keep upright, so I figure it's okay. We make a terrible looking pair, but neither of us cares.
"Hana." He whispers. "I'm sorry for being mad. You didn't mean it the way I thought you did."
"What?" I slur. What is he talking about?
"You were upset yesterday, but it wasn't because I did better." Oh, yesterday...the day before yesterday was four years ago, Mu-kun.
"I didn't do enough." I mumble.
He laughs, his breath huffing across my neck. "I thought you were upset that I was good for once."
We carry each other forward. "You were always good. But we're better as a team."
He hums his affirmation, and I can feel the sting of stretching the cut on my face as I smile.
"Hana-chan?" I blink, and Sensei's in front of me wearing nothing more than a night shirt and a pair of old, ragged pants. "And Tokuma-kun and Muta-kun." He's sweeping an eye over all of us and bellows for a medic loud enough to wake the dead.
I let my eyes slide close as the first rays of the sun poked up above the low horizon. Ah, Sensei's here. Safe.
A.N. And thus passes the second test.
Thanks to Sis for telling me to edit something last chapter! (It's been fixed now.)
And to WhiteFang001: I hope you liked the second test. I kind of mushed together a long of different ideas.
And Sam: I'm so glad you think it's fantastic.
And HidenYori: Thanks so much for your review!
And of course, huge shout out to everyone who favorited and followed.
Let's keep going.
~Tavina
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