Chapter 178: Eliminations, Round 1​

Noburi shifted his weight, preparing to get out of the tub, but paused when Hazō tapped his arm. He eyed his teammate with a raised eyebrow; Hazō shook his head minutely, flicking his eyes towards the other two contestants who were soaking alongside them. Noburi shrugged minutely and sat back.

It was almost time for chow call, and anyone who didn't have several dozen storage scrolls (many of them filled with delicious just-cooked meals) in their team's possession was finishing up their soak and getting dressed. It was only a few minutes before the boys' bathing room had emptied of everyone but the two of them.

"What's up?" Noburi asked, keeping his voice low.

Hazō paused and took a breath; Noburi instantly braced himself for yet another fun and exciting session of the Clear Communication technique. Inwardly, he sighed; why couldn't Hazō just talk like a normal person? I mean, sure, you had to appreciate the earnestness, and the effort that he was obviously putting forth, but it was always a little exhausting and a lot uncomfortable. After all, no one ever used the Clear Communication technique to explain how much they loved kittens. No, it was always "please admit your romantic feelings towards me so that we can both feel awkward for the next few days" or "I'll serve you forever if you don't tell anyone that my clanmate is a stupid idiot who leaked my other clanmate's secret technique but if you do tell anyone then I'll kill everyone you love" or "I know you're the greatest sealmaster in the world but I want to find a polite way of telling you that I think you're dumb as a box of hammers for doubting the efficacy of Kagome's 'Please Do Not Let the Monsters From Beyond Time and Space Eat My Face' butt-wiggle dance".

"Just spit it out, Hazō," he said, shaking his head in amusement. "I'm turning into a prune over here."

Hazō's mouth closed with a clop. "Right," he said after a moment. "I'm worried about you and Keiko, that's all. It seems like you guys have been avoiding each other for a couple of days...or, at least, wanting to avoid each other. Is there anything I can do to help?"

"Nah," Noburi said, climbing out of the tub and starting to towel off. "Thanks, but it's fine. Remember back in Leaf, when Yamanaka Neira was doing the psychological warfare drill with us and she told Keiko about my crush? Well, Keiko came to me at the end of the swamp event and asked if that was really true."

Hazō winced. "Ouch. What did you say?" he asked, stepping out of the tub himself and grabbing a towel.

Noburi shrugged. "I told her the truth. That yes, I had had a crush on her since we first met back in Mist. That I thought she was beautiful, and smart, and had a wicked deadpan humor. And that I knew it was never going to happen because she's not interested in guys, and that I was okay with that." He tossed the towel in a hamper and started pulling his clothes on with the efficiency of every trained soldier. "She took it pretty well." He chuckled at the memory. "She offered to make a list of all her personal failings in hopes that it would help me get over her."

Hazō laughed. "That sounds like Keiko."

"Of course, I told her that she couldn't make that list because that was your schtick."

Hazō mock-glared at him and Noburi chuckled. "It's fine," he said. "It felt good to clear the air, you know? It was like putting down this heavy thing that I'd been carrying. Yeah, things are a little awkward right now, but it'll be fine."

"You sure?" Hazō said, buckling his equipment belt on and sitting on one of the benches so he could pull on his shoes. "You know I'm here if you want to talk, right?"

"Oh Sage, you sound like my mother!" Noburi said, shaking his head. "Seriously, don't worry about it, man. It'll be fine. C'mon, let's catch up to Keiko before she assumes we've drowned in the tub." He turned immediately for the door, carefully ignoring the imagined pressure on his back from his adoptive brother's dubious gaze.

o-o-o-o​

The cafeteria was full, ninja from different villages clumping together and keeping watchful eyes in all directions. Noburi, Keiko, and Hazō were one of the last teams in; they automatically stepped to the side as they came through the door in order not to be backlit...only to have to catch themselves from bumping into the team before them, who had already automatically stepped to the side in order not to be backlit. Mutual glares, but fortunately no blows, were exchanged, and then both teams went to the serving lines to receive their portion of...food?...before heading for tables.

The Leaf teams had staked out a prime location and defended it against all comers: in the corner, near the door, just below the makes-a-good-secondary-exit windows. Team Uplift pushed through the crowded dining hall to get to their seats, only to find that there were now twice as many Leaf teams as there had been on the previous night.

"Hey! Gōketsu, about time!" Ino called, scooting over to make room between herself and Nara.

"Yamanaka," Hazō said, nodding and taking the offered seat while Noburi sat on the far side of Akimichi and Keiko settled beside him. "You guys in early, or did you get eliminated?"

Nara was poking at his food brick meatloaf with barely-disguised disgust, studiously ignoring his Akimichi teammate, who was happily shoveling the food down. The larger boy paused in his eating to wave happily at the new arrivals and gesture for them to sit beside him.

"Nah, just got in," Yamanaka said, not looking up because she was busy picking the peppers out of her food before taking the first bite. "We figured we had as good a total as we were going to get and it was better just to lock it in, so we managed to talk our proctor into coming in early."

"Kinda slow, weren't you?" Noburi teased. "We cashed out yesterday."

Yamanaka glanced up. "You did not!"

"We did," Keiko said, working her way through the meatloaf with the mechanical actions of someone long experienced with the doctrine of Mist Academy cafeteria food: Its job was to keep your body and soul together and nobody said anything about flavor. "Around eleven in the morning."

Yamanaka digested that. "Well, I bet we scored higher."

"Exchanging scores would actually be really useful," Hazō said. "I have no idea where we stand in the rankings, and most people don't want to talk about it."

"Unsurprising," Nara said, finally giving up and engaging his protein-rich enemy in unenthusiastic battle. "Anyone who admits to scoring high will be a target." He chewed a few more times, then choked the bite down. "How did the cooks manage to create such a perfect combination of burnt and undercooked?"

Hazō masticated thoughtfully for a moment, considering exactly what it was that he was eating. "The prawns aren't actually undercooked," he said. "The insides are supposed to squish like that. I don't think anything's burnt, either...the crunch is probably from the shells—they always leave a few in just to provide texture—and the smoky flavor is from the way they preserve the prawns. They smoked it a little too long though, so it's tough."

"What's a prawn?" Yamanaka asked.

"Water bug," Noburi said. "They're a staple here. You find them under rocks near the water's edge...the baby ones aren't much bigger than your fingernail and only have four legs, but they can grow as big as your hand and the big ones have up to nineteen legs. Don't worry, the venom isn't dangerous to humans unless you eat a ton of it. It's what gives the meat that tangy flavor."

"I need to get some of these," Akimichi said, wiping his mouth. "They're delicious, and the tang is really unusual. I bet my mom would love to have a regular supply."

Yamanaka pushed back from the table in horror, but whether it was at what she'd been eating or at what her teammate had said, Hazō wasn't sure. He honestly couldn't understand the problem...for Sage's sake, in Leaf they ate geese.

"You can find purveyors down at the fish market every morning," Keiko said. "They aren't typically exported to the mainland, simply because they go off too quickly for civilian transport and most ninja don't want to be mewed up on a boat for days. I'm sure we could arrange something; we have plenty of storage scrolls that you could use, for an appropriate fee."

Akimichi's eyes lit up. "How much of a fee?" he demanded.

Noburi wordlessly stood up and stepped back so that Akimichi could slide down to haggle with Keiko. The bigger boy moved down without even seeming to notice he'd done so, so engaged was he in his mercantile negotiations. Noburi was happy enough to find himself sitting beside Yamanaka instead.

"I'll tell you our score if you tell us yours," Noburi said to the blonde.

She glanced at Nara, who couldn't be bothered to shrug both shoulders so settled for just one.

"Deal," Yamanaka said. "Two ninety-nine. What did you guys get?"

"Six hundred," Noburi said with a smile. "...Half of which our stinking proctor cheated us out of. She gave us a fifteen point review, though."

"You scored three hundred and fifteen points?" Yamanaka said in frank disbelief.

"Yep." Smugley Smuggington had been reinstated as the mayor of Smuggton.

"Interesting," Nara said, looking up from his food. "What did the proctors tell you about the minimum amount of time before the next event?"

Hazō paused, exchanging a glance with Noburi. "Our information-sharing agreement is still in effect, right?" he asked Nara. "It was supposed to last throughout the Exams, but I just want to check."

Nara nodded, flicking a hand gesture that even those unfamiliar with Nara sign language could guess meant something like stop wasting my time with pointless quibbling. "Yes, of course."

"They didn't say anything about when the next event would be. I figured they'd be doing it at the official end of the event."

Nara shook his head. "No. When we cashed out we were advised that there would be at least one hundred hours between the end of the third event and the start of the fourth."

"A hundred hours?" Hazō said thoughtfully. "That's a lot of time to go hunting for people's words."

"Indeed. It also suggests that the next event will be another socially-oriented event as opposed to a combat mission."

Noburi cocked his head in confusion. "How do you get that?"

"It is possible that the excessive rest period between events is simply to stretch the duration of the Exams, or to give us time to fight one another," Nara said, waving one hand to indicate that he was granting a technical potentiality that did not match his expectation. "More likely, however, is that it is to give the proctors who were acting as clients the opportunity to rest after living under nearly continuous henge for multiple days in a row. They were, of course, taking breaks periodically—I'm sure you noticed that your client always took a lot of time in the bathroom—but being henged so long would cause significant mental fatigue. Holding off on the next event until the proctors are rested suggests that it is not something that can be administered by the small group of proctors who were not acting as clients. It requires the body of contestants to have significant interaction with a large number of proctors and those proctors need to be mentally at their best. Ergo, social."

Noburi looked at Hazō. "It's like a boy version of Keiko."

Hazō nodded. "You two are made for each other," he told Nara.

Nara shuddered and went back to his meatloaf, the muttered "Troublesome" almost quiet enough to pass unheard.

o-o-o-o​

The night of the 6th, Hazō stayed up as late as he could, waiting for Akane's team to come in. Nearly everyone seemed to have shown up already; when midnight came and went, he finally turned in and then tossed and turned most of the night before finally managing to doze off...

...just before the proctors started racing up and down the halls banging pots together and screaming, "UP AND OUT! UP AND OUT! DRESSED AND IN THE ASSEMBLY HALL IN FIVE, GO GO GO!!!"

Muscle memory from years of studies catapulted him out of bed and into his pants. He was fully dressed and one step into the hall before realizing that he was no longer a lone and unpopular student, that that boy was gone and the one who stood in his place was a Chūnin Exams candidate with years of field experience and clanmates on either side. The recognition came out of his throat riding a wave of wild laughter; instead of slowing down he leapt forward even faster. Keiko and Noburi kept pace; Noburi caught Hazō's mood, his face splitting in a grin that was just as wild as his clanmate's laughter. An amused tilt of the lips was Keiko's equivalent of mad laughter.

The hallway was jammed full of half-awake foreign ninja stumbling out of their dorms in confusion. Soft foreign ninja, with enough years out of the Academy to have forgotten pre-dawn callups and not enough years in the wilderness to be accustomed to pre-dawn assaults. There was no room to pass through the herd, so the Gōketsu clan went up the walls and ran across the ceiling, crouching slightly so as not to have their inverted and awake heads crash into the right-side-up and groggy heads of their 'peers'.

o-o-o-o​

They weren't the first to arrive at the Assembly Hall—their dorm had been too far away for that—but there were only nine teams ahead of them.

The Assembly Hall was smaller than the cavernous space that Hazō remembered, although still large enough. The familiar stage still ran along the north side and the rough wooden bleachers along the south. A collection of senior ninja from various nations were up on the stage, standing at parade rest against the back wall. Shiomi-sensei, the grizzled old veteran who taught the dirtiest of dirty fighting tactics to the advanced taijutsu students at the Mist Academy, was standing at the podium, hands clasped behind his back and a statue's frozen expression on his face as he watched the candidates stream in.

Team Uplift didn't manage to get the absolute best seats in the house (top bleacher, the end nearest the door), but they did at least manage to be on the top bleacher. More reassuring than having no one behind them was the sight of Hatake Kakashi slouching against the wall on stage, Maito Gai standing upright beside him with an expression of friendly interest.

That momentary sense of reassurance vanished when Hazō realized that Akane and her team were not among the candidates already in the room. He kept an eye on the door, hoping to see her come in, and tried to keep a mental tally of how many had arrived. With every non-Akane genin through the door, his stomach tied itself into one more knot. By the time his count got to one hundred and ninety-seven the knots of concern had started to become a molten slag of panic.

When Akane, Haruno, and Yamamoto finally arrived, all the panic transmuted instantly into relief and elation. He clamped down with the full power of the Iron Nerve to keep himself from leaping up and shouting for her; instead, he managed to keep it to a frantic wave of one half-raised hand. The way her face lit up when she saw him caused the elation to intensify.

"Hazō!" Akane shouted, running up the wall and leaping to the bleachers. Haruno followed her, graceful as the cherry blossoms for which she was named. Yamamoto went directly up the side of the bleachers themselves, his movements tight, thoroughly controlled, and utterly without any overt threat that would account for how other genin scrambled to get out of his way. That bubble of space around him was sufficient to net three empty seats for his team, directly adjacent to Hazō's.

Akane dropped into the seat beside Hazō and hugged him tight. "I missed you," she whispered.

"I missed you too! What took you so long?" Hazō hissed back, keeping one eye on the stage in a former student's deeply-ingrained fear of being caught talking.

"Our client was determined to stay out all—"

"Shh!" Hazō said. "They're starting."

Shiomi-sensei had unclasped his hands from behind himself and laced them together atop the podium. At this signal silence quickly spread through the room. The old veteran waited until the last whisper had faded before he spoke.

"The third event of this year's Chūnin Exams is at an end," he announced, his deep voice carrying effortlessly to the very back of the room. "Your performances in this event ranged from execrable to excellent; I will speak more to that in a moment, but first I must deal with the eliminations."

A sussurant rustle went through the room as candidates shifted nervously.

"This year's Chūnin Exams are well attended. There are a hundred teams here, from every corner of the Elemental Nations. You should all be proud to have been chosen to represent your villages. Every one of you is a competent ninja and a worthy fist in the service of your various leaders.

"That said, it is time to reduce the size of the field. Three hundred candidates was fine during relatively open events such as we have had thus far, but from now on things will be more focused, and we need more manageable numbers. Those of you with a running score low enough that you have no chance of making the cutoff for promotion will now be eliminated. Those of you who have violated an Exam rule will likewise be eliminated. Those of you who have been withdrawn by your Kage—for reasons that I must assume are purely political and have no reflection on you—will likewise be eliminated. Finally, those of you who have acted in ways that disgrace your village...." He paused, surveying the crowd with narrowed eyes. "You will most definitely be eliminated."

The sounds of nervousness were louder this time.

"Those of you who are eliminated will be permitted to remain in Mist so long as you do nothing to affect the score or the readiness of any team still in the Exams. Note that, should there be any dubious behavior that does not meet those definitions, Mist will accomodate any request from any village leader to have an eliminated team confined to barracks for the remainder of the Exams." He paused to let that sink in. "Now, as I call your name, please come down from the bleachers and line up at attention with your back against the stage so that the other contestants can see you. Team Nakamura of Wind."

The room was completely silent for a moment before three boys in the second row stood and slowly shuffled to the end of the bleacher. Every eye in the room watched them as they made their way to the stage. For the first dozen steps they moved like men walking to the gallows, shoulders hunched and feet dragging; Hazō could literally see the moment when their shock was washed away by defiance. They straightened, closing ranks against the world and standing fierce. Their strides lengthened, falling into perfect sync as they took up position against the stage, directly in front of where Shiomi-sensei stood at the podium, with faces completely impassive and eyes staring straight ahead with no acknowledgement of the fact that they had just washed out of the Chūnin Exams in front of literally hundreds of their peers.

"Team Chinen of Earth."

Hazō blanched. Shiomi-sensei was going to stretch this out, force each team to wallow in their shame one at a time. Surely that stepped fully across the line from cruelty to sadism? Unfortunately, there was nothing he could do about it; there was no choice but to watch as one team after another was called. The only good part was that each team had learned from Team Nakamura's example; they strode down the bleachers and to the stage with honor and dignity pulled tight around themselves so that they cleared the path quickly. Having it go slowly was the only way it could possibly get worse.

"Team Gōketsu of Leaf."

Hazō had been dreading/expecting/fearing that name to be called, but he'd had time to consider what he would do if he heard it. When it sounded, he turned to his team and opened his mouth.

"Alley Oop," Noburi said, his voice tight with suppressed rage as he grabbed his left wrist with his right hand and reached out to Hazō. Where Hazō had intended to make the words a question, his were a demand.

Without a word, Hazō interlocked hands with Noburi, hands gripping wrists to provide a platform onto which Keiko could step. A massive surge of chakra gave them the strength to fling her forward, over the heads of all the other students in the bleachers. In midair, she flipped and twisted, pulling a pair of storage scrolls from holsters on her thighs. Twin pulses of chakra opened the scrolls, dispensing a pair of genin-sized logs from their extradimensional storage space. An instant later, the logs were gone, Substituted back to the bleachers, and all three Gōketsu genin landed in side-by-side three-point stances in front of the stage. They straightened as one, taking up their positions with drill-ground perfection and looking out across a sea of gaping mouths.

Even Shiomi-sensei seemed to have been given pause by the gesture of defiance; he said nothing for long seconds before eventually calling the next name as though nothing had happened.

The names rolled on and on, no particular pattern to them that would allow a team to know that they had made it past the cutoff. One by one, every member of SuperTeam Leaf was called, as were three of the teams that he could specifically remember buying seals from them during the swamp event. It served only to confirm Hazō's fear: Some of the Kage were smart enough to realize that rewarding collaboration between villages was dangerous. It was the first chink in the idea that all other villages were evil and untrustworthy, the first step towards a lasting peace built on mutual understanding.

Although...Shiomi-sensei had made a point of mentioning being withdrawn for political reasons. Was Jiraiya pulling them because he feared the political fallout if his clan didn't make a good enough showing? They had only scored middling-well in the swamp event, and they had come back to the barracks early in this event...if Mist had refused to divulge any details then Jiraiya would quite reasonably assume that Team Uplift had failed and been eliminated by another team. Or possibly—

His attention was brought back to his surroundings when Shiomi-sensei finally stopped calling names. The bleachers were half-empty, filled with genin who a moment before had been near panic and were now slowly relaxing at having dodged the kunai.

"You who remain in the bleachers," Shiomi-sensei said, "look carefully at these people I have called. Consider what decisions they made that kept them from being up there with you. Think carefully about how close you may have come to being down here with them. Take a moment for that, and then get out. You're eliminated."

The room broke out in gasps and protests, which Shiomi-sensei gaveled down with a fist pounded on the podium.

"ENOUGH!" he bellowed. He let the echoes ring, eyeing the candidates the way a raptor eyes mice until complete silence was restored.

"Many of you failed to keep your client safe, revealing that your skills are below those of your peers. A ninja village needs shinobi who can stand up to their enemies; those who can't are eliminated.

"Most of you who did keep your client safe devoted yourselves exclusively to escorting and protecting them. You demonstrated responsibility and generally effective tactics, but no proactivity. Chūnin are leaders and teachers; proactivity is required, and those who don't have it are eliminated.

"A few of you devoted your primary efforts to hunting other teams, thereby demonstrating proactivity but a nigh-criminal lack of comprehension regarding the nature of your mission. Chūnin are the backbone of the ninja forces. They perform advanced missions while solo; reliability is required, and those who don't have it are eliminated." A snort that mixed equal measures of amusement and disdain slipped out of the gray old man. "On that subject, I would like to especially call out Team Okazaki from Rock. They decided that the optimal strategy for this event was to imprison their client in a goldsmith's vault for the duration of the event and spend the entire time hunting other teams. Apparently they calculated that they would score negative twenty points after the review but would cause everyone else to score negative two hundred. Clever approach but, as of this morning's total, your accumulated collateral damage penalties have put you at a very comfortable minus seventeen hundred and thirty-four points, not to mention the damage done to your village's coffers. Next time, gentlemen, I advise you think before you try to get too clever.

"Having stated what not to do, I would like to hold up two examples of what you should do, so that those of you who are being eliminated may have something to learn from. Team Gōketsu from Leaf: congratulations, you have demonstrated skill and responsibility as bodyguards and escorts. You were smooth and effective at protecting your client, you communicated well with her, and your performance satisfied her so thoroughly that she gave you a fifteen point review. I also applaud your proactivity. We are still investigating how you convinced that merchant to give your client literally every ryō he possessed so that you could cash out on the second day of the event; once we finish the investigation I intend to see your actions incorporated into the Academy curriculum." The words rang with professionalism and courtesy, but Hazō imagined he could hear a gleam of teeth behind them, close enough to the surface to make him shudder.

"Regardless of how you did it, I must congratulate you on your victory. With three hundred and fifteen points, you are solidly in the lead for this event.

"As an example of a different kind of success, I would like to compliment Team Asuma of Leaf. They did not come in first in the event—first, after all, is a position that draws the attention of every eye. Neither did they come in second, a position that draws the attention of those wise enough to realize that the second runner must dodge far fewer kunai yet still has every chance of victory. No, they came in third, even going so far as to earn exactly two hundred and ninety-nine points so that they wouldn't seem so threatening as those who had scored above three hundred. Granted, when you have someone with the Nara shadow techniques for controlling an enemy's body, and someone with the Yamanaka techniques for mind control and information extraction...well, it's hardly surprising that you did so well as you did in an event that was fundamentally about information management. I salute your perspicacity and look forward to finding out how you managed to earn a perfect twenty points on your review.

"With all of this said, I believe we can end this assembly. Those of you who have been eliminated, please remain here so that the proctors may brief you more thoroughly on the non-interference rules. Those of you not eliminated, feel free to go back to sleep or to wander the city. Everyone except for Team Gōketsu already knows how much time is available before the next event, so feel free to enjoy yourselves until time is called.

"Contestants, please face the stage."

Hazō turned in place, a parade-ground heel-and-toe, and looked calmly and expectantly up at Shiomi-sensei. It took every trace of the skills that Mari-sensei had hammered into him not to let his anger at Shiomi-sensei's cruel trick show on his face.

"Shinobi of the Elemental Nations," Shiomi-sensei began, gripping the podium's sides loosely with both hands as he looked down at the upturned eyes. "Regardless of whether you were eliminated or not, remember that simply being here is one of the highest honors a Village can give to its genin. I applaud you for the determination and diligence that got you to where you stand at this moment. Simply by being in this hall at this time, you have demonstrated that you are among the best your village has to offer. I feel certain that all of you will serve with distinction and bring honor to your people when the Reaper finally calls."

The old man snapped to attention and thumped his chest in salute, holding the gesture as he offered a shallow bow of respect to fifty teams of genin from all across the Elemental Nations who, for a few short weeks, had come together to not kill each other.

Author's Notes:

Note that Leaf was hit fairly lightly during the eliminations. You lost track partway through, but you know that all of SuperTeam Leaf is still in, as is Hinata's team, and you think there's at least a couple more Leaf teams in as well.