"The mugging option is pretty easy for any of us," Hazō said. "We're all kickass fighters, but we want to show that Leaf can do more than that. I had a thought on that...it might be a bad one, but I at least want to put it on the table. If anyone doesn't like it, I'll—"

"Just tell us!" Haruno said, clearly exasperated.

"Okay. You know that Mari-sensei is an infiltrator, right? Well, she's trained me a lot in deception—microexpressions, body language, speech rhythms, that kind of thing. I could try to go up to enemy teams and pose as a proctor, demanding to see their word-half. When they produce it I switch it for a fake and walk away. That would be a lot easier if I had your genjutsu backing me up, so I was thinking maybe you, me, and Keiko could be one team and Akane, Yamamoto, and Noburi could be another?" He turned to the other boy. "Yamamoto, from what I saw during sparring your lightning jutsu are crazy powerful, but they look like they take a lot of chakra. If you're with Noburi he could keep you topped up between fights. The three of you would be an absolutely brutal combat team and for this specific mission it feels like Haruno has more to offer to the deception plan. What do you think?"

The three teammates exchanged a quick debate conveyed in raised eyebrows and shrugged shoulders before turning back to Hazō. "Works for us," Yamamoto said.

"Great," Hazō said, letting out a sigh of relief. He hadn't been sure how that was going to go down. "So, who wants to take the stealth option?" He reminded himself to look around the group in general. Things were moving in the right direction but this whole inter-team alliance was still too new and fragile. It wouldn't do to let on that he'd already mentally categorized who should get which role, as well as planned out with Keiko and Noburi how they would chivvy everyone into the appropriate slot.

"That's probably us," Inuzuka said. "We're a tracking and intelligence-gathering team. Not that we don't kick enormous amounts of ass—"

"coughthroatpunch," Haruno pretend-coughed. Inuzuka tried and failed to set her on fire with his mind.

"Speaking of enormous amounts of ass, Sakura, are you enjoying those dango?" Aburame asked, his voice a model of friendly concern.

"Meeeyyoww," said Yamanaka, amused.

"Ooh, look at that!" Haruno said, grinning. "Mr. Screamypants steps up to defend his buddy! It's good of you, Shino—can't let a teammate go into battle defenseless, right? Even if it's just a battle of wits."

"Be nice, you two," Akimichi scolded. "We're supposed to be planning."

"Like I was saying," Inuzuka growled, "our team should probably take the stealth option. Shino can plant bugs on a team, we follow them until Hinata says that there's no proctors around, then Shino and his bugs drain them dry while Akamaru and I keep an eye and a nose out for proctors or whatever."

Hazō hesitated, trying to figure out how to frame the obvious response. Fortunately, Nara stepped into the gap.

"That is not stealth," Nara said. "That is combat with intelligent application of your unique advantages. Stealth means that the enemy does not even realize they were robbed until later. In honesty, none of us are well suited for stealth operations. This is not a failing on our part, it is simply that we were not trained for it; it is more important to teach genin how to fight so that we survive our first missions. Serious infiltration and stealth-related skills are typically acquired after achieving chūnin rank. Kiba, your team are uniquely qualified as hunter-nin and ambush assault, and are enormously dangerous in that role. Hinata's Byakugan also gives you some intelligence-gathering capability in that she can see through walls. That does not mean that your team is qualified for theft.

"That said, your team and mine are the closest to stealth that we have. The strategy that Ino described earlier is also not really a stealth tactic, but it at least disguises who targeted the enemy...unless, of course, they are familiar with the Nara and Yamanaka family jutsu. Even if they are, we still have their word-halves and we've done nothing against the rules."

"No," Keiko said. "You should be on psyops."

Nara nodded thoughtfully. "Interesting. Attribution is an issue."

She shrugged. "Hokage. Keep it to minor villages."

"And no property damage."

"I swear by the Sage's mighty beard, if the two of you don't start using complete sentences I am going to pour fire ants in your shoes while you sleep," Yamanaka said.

Nara rolled his eyes. "She was suggesting that our team should engage in psychological warfare instead of direct combat."

"Yes, thank you," Yamanaka said tartly. "I got that part. More details, please."

Nara sighed. "It's very simple. All we have to do is...."

o-o-o-o​

"Got one," Ino whispered, looking over Shikamaru's shoulder to the east while seeming to be fully absorbed in the mug of tea that her henged-grandmotherly hands were cupping. "Fang team. Already look pissed."

Shikamaru's eyes flicked over her shoulder, searching quickly through the faces. The sun was lowering on the horizon, throwing delightful amounts of shadow everywhere, but the street was still busy with civilians doing late shopping. When they sat down at the cafe there had been one proctor leaning against the wall of the HQ building two doors down and across the street but no other ninja in sight. A few had drifted by since then—proctors, regular Mist ninja, and a few Exam contestant teams. There'd never been a good opportunity, though.

"Clear," Shikamaru replied softly, pouring himself another mug.

Ino leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands. It wasn't an entirely natural position for the grandmotherly figure she wore, but it was a lot more subtle than keeling over. "Psycho Mind Transmission Jutsu," she murmured, keeping her eyes locked on the strawberry-blond ninja with the muscular arms and the scowl on his face.

She ignored the familiar tearing-paper sensation of her family's jutsu as she ripped her consciousness out of her body and flung it across the gap to her target. The entry was as unpleasant as always; no human body was without pain, ever, but everyone got used to their own particular pains. The persistent cramp in the shoulder from less-than-perfect posture, the sore muscles from overtraining, the mild but persistent ache in the joints as a result of chakra-boosted speed exceeding what the human body was designed for. Every person's pain was unique, and adjusting to someone else's was always unpleasant. Still, she was old friends with reentry pain and it didn't even slow her down.

?! said the awareness that lived in the body, struggling to erect barriers against this strange assailant who attacked from an angle never before imagined.

!!! she replied, smashing through his pathetic attempts at defense with contemptuous ease. She packed all the fragments of him into a ball and tossed it into the mental closet at the back of every human mind, the one in which unpleasant thoughts and childhood nightmares were kept. Conquest complete, she spread herself through the body and took control.

The body was interesting; taller than her own, but with a surprisingly low center of gravity for a man. The arms were longer than hers and it took a moment of puzzling over the body's kinesthetic sense before she could be confident in where everything was. The chakra system was, as usual, bizarre. She wasn't sure what elemental nature he had, but it definitely wasn't the same as hers. His chakra bucked and whirled at her touch, pooling in some places and lashing out in others. She smoothed it down, chained it in bindings forged from her will, and compelled it to flow smoothly through his coils.

"Shirō?" one of the boy's teammates asked. "You okay?"

"Hm?" Ino asked, suddenly noticing that she'd stopped walking. "Yeah, just distracted. Thinking about this bullshit exam thing. There's a proctor over there, I want to ask him." Without another word she strode to the man with the green armband, 'her' confused teammates following in her wake.

"Oy!" she called as she walked up. "Water guy! How about telling us where this next stupid event is?"

The proctor lazily turned his head to look at her. He was chewing something—tobacco, perhaps—and his jaws continued their bovine mastication even as he considered Ino's captive body.

"Piss off, kid," the proctor said, rolling his head back to look straight ahead again in obvious dismissal.

"Hey!" Ino shouted, crossing her arms. "No need to be rude, squidfucker."

"Shirō, what are you doing?" asked the brunette on Ino's left. She sounded alarmed; good. Alarmed was much better than suspicious. "Excuse him sir, he's not feeling well." She took Ino's arm, clearly anxious to be gone.

"I'm fine!" Ino snapped, wrenching her stolen arm out of the other girl's grip. "I'm just sick of this bullshit! The Chūnin Exams are supposed to be fair for everyone, but this? This is bullshit. We're supposed to guess where they're putting everything while the Mist kids are just getting told? Mist is totally cheating."

The proctor's head snapped around. "What did you say?"

"I said you're cheating," Ino said defiantly, forcing herself to stand like an angry boy instead of an angry girl. "You know your teams aren't good enough to beat us so you're making the events impossible to find and then telling your people where to go while we thrash around!"

The girl on Ino's left blinked. "Shirō, what are you doing? We found the event already...."

Of course they had.

"Yeah, but we shouldn't have had to!" Ino improvised. "Leaf hosts it, Sand hosts it, anyone hosts it except for these losers and we have sensible contests that show who's better...and it hasn't been them for five years now. They host it, they know they suck like a two-bit whore so they do this bullshit."

"How about we knock twenty points off your total score for round one?" the proctor asked. "Now get lost before I take you in."

"For what, telling the truth?" Ino demanded. "I've been hearing that's a problem for you Mist assholes. Your last Kage had a problem with lying, didn't he? Lots of lies to his people, to his ninja, telling you that you were some kind of 'master race' of ninja, the best in the world. Rings a little hollow after he went down like such a pussy." She waited, wondering if the barb had gone home; every village told its ninja that they were the best, so it was a safe guess that Yagura had done so. She just wished she knew how he had actually died, since it would let her twist the knife a lot deeper.

She watched carefully as the proctor's face changed. He'd been irritated when she started, but irritated in the way that a parent was irritated when a bratty toddler kept tugging at their pants leg. Now his eyes had gone flat, real anger leeching in at the edges.

"Listen, brat—"

"Oh, shut the fuck up, you worthless piece of crap," Ino snapped, folding her arms and fighting to keep Shirō chained up in the closet. He'd been struggling since the moment she took over, but he was freaking out hearing the words she was making him say. "Go home to your mamma, water boy, and tell her to wipe the milk off your lip next time you suck." She delicately stroked one finger along Shirō's stolen lips as though dabbing up a bit of milk.

"Shirō, what the fuck are you doing?!" her male teammate demanded. "Sir, we're very sorry. Please excuse my friend, he's—"

"Stop kissing up to them!" Ino snapped. "They're a bunch of second-raters who used to be impressive but now they're nothing. They couldn't even hold onto their own people—those Gōketsu kids and a whole bunch of their friends got so disgusted with the place that they left! Ran off to Leaf because the people there aren't fucking psychos."

"That's it," the proctor snapped, grabbing her wrist. "You're done. Let's—"

Ino put everything she had into the punch, turning from the hips and lifting with her thighs. A short uppercut, hidden below the grabbing arm, smashing up under the ribs and knocking the proctor back. "No, I won't be your fucking catamite, you disgusting pedo!" she shouted, raising both arms in a wide gesture designed to attract attention; up and down the street, heads snapped around to watch the scene. "I don't need your help to win!"

She went forward, hands up in a horribly sloppy guard stance that left about six open lines of attack, and started raining blows on the proctor. Punches and knees and kicks, all of them sloppy but powerful. None of them came even close to landing—the proctor slapped them away effortlessly and smashed her in the chest with a heelstomp that threw her back. She overrode the body's instincts to tuck and roll, to slap out of the fall, to keep the head away from the ground. Instead, she threw the head back, making the impact even worse than it would have been. She barely managed to release the body before impact; the world went dark and wobbly around her as she struggled out of the stolen flesh, grasping furiously at all the threads of herself that were tangled throughout what was now a motionless sack of meat on the ground. She followed the imagined cord back to her body, meeting her own aches and pains with the satisfaction of greeting an old friend.

"Really, Ino?" Shikamaru asked disapprovingly. "You couldn't make him angry so you had to go to the pedo ruse? You're slipping."

"Hey, I didn't have a lot of time, okay? I didn't know squat about any of them and the proctor was too darn calm for our good."

Shikamaru sighed.

o-o-o-o​

"Hey! You three, get over here!"

Noa's head snapped around to where a pair of proctors were waving them over. A man, stocky, perhaps in his early thirties, sandy blond hair, and a small but remarkably ugly wart not completely hidden by his collar. She'd seen him at the initial announcement; he wasn't the one who had taken her away to create her word, but he'd been taking people from near her. The woman behind him was new; tall, blonde, and stacked like a wagon going to market. Noa could practically hear Hironori's and Eisuke's tongues fall out of their heads at the sight. Sighing, she led the boys to their next opportunity for self-humiliation.

"Yes sir, ma'am?" Noa asked as her team reached the proctors. "What can we do for you?"

"Word check," the man growled. "Some of you bright sprogs are trying to counterfeit word-halves so that you don't have to actually do the work of finding the next event. Show me yours, girl."

"I'll need to see yours too, boys," the woman said, stepping slightly to the side so she was only in Noa's peripheral vision. Her voice was absolutely unfair, a musky purr that made Noa hate her instantly.

"Yes, ma'am!" the boys said, unslinging their packs and scrambling around for the papers.

Noa sighed and reached into her jacket for the pouch that she wore on a harness against her stomach. Why did this have to happen now? After forty-eight hours of fighting and dodging critters in the damn swamp, all she wanted was a bath, some dinner, and about a billion hours of sleep. Instead, their sensei had kept them busy for over an hour doing the after-action report, then insisted they spend another hour debriefing with the other Rock teams. Then it had taken forever to get a turn at the bath and now they were finally going to get some food, but no, the proctors had to turn up. Much more of this and her stomach was going to declare war on her spine.

He had several torn-up papers in his left hand; she caught flashes of green ink as he took hers, unfolded it, and held it up next to the rest, at arm's length and near eye level. He frowned and shook his head, then lowered them down so he could shuffle the top paper on the stack to the bottom and hold them up again. Once again, he shook his head and shuffled the next half-page down to the bottom.

"May I ask what you're checking for, sir?"

"Forgery," the proctor snapped. "We've had no less than six people trying to turn in fake matches to these halves"—he flapped the stack of papers in his left hand for a moment, then lowered his hands so he could shuffle to the next paper. "The Mizukage ruled that anyone carrying one of the fakes is disqualified."

"Well, boys, looks like you're doing fine," the female proctor purred; Noa glanced over just in time to see her take a deep breath and give Hironori and Eisuke a smile and a wink. Irritated and carefully not examining why, she turned back to her own proctor.

Just in time to see him try to swap her sheet for the bottom one on the stack.

"Hey! Give that back!" Noa shouted, lunging towards the proctor.

"Bonfire!" the male proctor shouted, dropping a small red pebble before turning and leaping up the side of the building nearest them. The woman was right on his heels, another red pebble falling from her hand as she went.

Of her team, Noa was first off the mark, fight-or-flight washing away the exhaustion of no sleep. She was halfway up the building when the pebbles hit the ground and erupted, throwing iridescent goop everywhere. She was barely out of the blast radius, but Hironori and Eisuke weren't so lucky; from behind her she heard squelching sounds and cries of "Hey!", but she couldn't stop to help. She needed that paper or she'd be disqualified!

She came over the edge of the building to see the two proctors were already halfway across the next roof. A third person, a young woman with wild green hair and a Sand forehead protector, had clearly just jumped from the roof Noa was standing on and was racing after the fleeing 'proctors'. For just a moment Noa allowed herself to hope that the other woman was a real proctor out to catch the fakes, but she pushed that thought aside. Her luck was never that good. This woman was almost certainly a confederate, meaning it was going to be three-on-one odds. Well, fine. They weren't allowed to kill her and she was already going to be DQ'd if she didn't catch them. Besides, if they thought that numbers were enough to defeat her...well, they might not like what happened next.

Still, first step in making tiger stew is to catch the tiger. Noa raced across the rooftop at full chakra-boosted speed, bracing herself to leap at the edge of the—

{{{blackness}}}

"...Noa?"

The noise was very far away and hard to understand.

"Noa, come on, sis. Wake up."

She was lying down and half a dozen ninja were crowding around her. Four of them were two blurry copies each of her brothers, the last two or three were a medic-nin in his professional coat.

"Wh' happ'n?"

"We don't know," Eisuke said. "It took us a few seconds to get loose from the goo. When we got to the roof you were lying unconscious about thirty feet from the far edge. There was a charred area in front of you, as though a low-power explosive tag went off. It was weird though...the edges of the blast circle were sharp, like the explosion went so far and then just stopped."

Noa pondered this.

"There'za wall," she slurred. "Invis'ble. Ran inna it."

"Headfirst, apparently," the medic-nin said with a disapproving click of the tongue. "Fortunately, your forehead protector took the impact. You're going to be a very unhappy young lady tomorrow, but you'll live." He scrawled some notes on a page and then handed her a dozen twists of paper. "Take one of these three times a day, with food. Drink plenty of water, eat, get some sleep. You'll be fine in a few days."

"Thanks, doc," Hironori said. "We were really scared there for a bit."

"Yes, well, be more careful next time. Now, get out of my sick bay."

o-o-o-o​

"Hey, welcome back," Noburi said. "We were talking about sending out search parties."

"Oh?" Hazō asked, dropping down on the pile of cushions around the low table on which dinner rested. Someone, probably someone whose name rhymed with 'Hōji', had piled it high with noodles, dango, fruit, bowls of rice, and what looked like half a dozen chickens worth of kebabs. Two pitchers, one with milk and one with water, sat on either end with beads of cold condensation running down the sides. Hazō gratefully plowed into the bounty.

"We were not worried," Akane said, smiling. "We all had confidence in you." She rested a hand briefly on Hazō's back in greeting and reassurance.

"So, how did you do?" Hyūga Neji demanded.

"One," Hazō said, gulping down some chicken and quickly grabbing for the pitcher of milk. The sauce on the chicken was apparently made out of lava. "Noburi, what did you do to the food?"

Noburi raised his hands. "Wasn't me, man. That's what they ordered."

"Gaaah," Hazō said, rolling the rice around his mouth in a so-far futile attempt to soak up the heat. Tears were coming out of his eyes and his nose was running.

"How did it go?" Yamanaka asked, politely handing Hazō a cloth for his nose.

"Quite well," Keiko said. "They spotted the switch but we had no trouble escaping with the word."

Haruno laughed. "You should have seen it. Me and Fumble-Fingers here go running by with these guys right on our tail. Our quiet friend here watches us go by, taps three seals, then comes after us. The chick we ripped off comes flying over the edge of the building, runs after us...and slams into this invisible dome. Dropped her like a sack of potatoes after you cut off their granupositors."

"Nice!" Inuzuka laughed, leaning in for a high-five.

"Still, only one word, huh?" Hyūga said, smiling.

Keiko shrugged. "We could not find more targets after that first group. I note that, although Hazō failed to accomplish a difficult sleight of hand that he had only ten minutes to learn, he successfully conned three chūnin candidates into handing over their word halves."

"We had trouble finding targets as well," Akane said. "The other teams are probably in bed by now. Everyone was tired after the swamp."

"Still...only one, huh?" Hyūga said again, trying and failing to hide the smug. "We got three. Took out a team from Wind."

"On the other hand," Haruno said thoughtfully, "while you were out punching people like the very straightforward person you are, our team demonstrated infiltration skills. Shikamaru, didn't you say those are things people typically learn after they become chūnin?"

Nara studiously ignored her, refusing to be drawn in.

"Don't worry, Neji," Haruno said with false reassurance. "I'd be happy to teach you some things, if you'd like. I'm sure you can become a big strong ninja like us if you just eat all your broccoli."

Hyūga's glare utterly failed to set Haruno on fire, but it came close.