Team Oboro, hailing from Amegakure, never even saw it coming. Their plan had been to wait to the midpoint of the exam, so that the strongest teams would have finished and the weaker teams would have worn themselves out.
They were still in top-shape and pumped for action by then, and with their nearly-perfected strategy of genjutsu and clone techniques, procuring a plate from the first exhausted genin team – from Suna, as it were – that passed by had been like taking candy from a baby. Armed with the necessary plates and the intelligence that their allied Ame team had given them prior to the exam, they'd been on course to reaching the exit of the maze and passing the second exam with ease.
If they hadn't gotten so caught up in the elation of their seemingly imminent success, they might have lasted a few seconds longer.
Their first indication of danger was when Mubi dropped his umbrella on the ground with a clatter. The boy himself quickly followed after, convulsing uncontrollably on the ground as white froth bubbled out from the side of his mouth. Reacting instinctively, Kagari and Oboro jumped away from their teammate, just in time to avoid the two kunai that now embedded themselves harmlessly in the ground.
Kagari's and Oboro's hands both blurred: "Bunshin no Jutsu (Clone Technique)!" As several clones appeared around them with swirling clouds of mist, they rapidly continued to form seals in succession. "Earth Release: Earth Swim Technique " The earth below them turned fluid, and the two rapidly sunk below its depths, leaving behind their clones. Sure enough, a few seconds later, the tremors of unmistakable battle filtered through the earth towards them. Oboro turned to Kagari, who nodded back at him, his eyes narrowed from behind his rebreather.
The two burst back up to the surface, spinning in midair as their umbrellas rapidly spat out poison-tipped needles in opposite directions. All around them, as they stood back-to-back in their practiced stances, their sacrificial clones burst into mist. Oboro blinked at the dark clearing around them.
"Where are they?!" he hissed, looking around rapidly. Given that they hadn't even sensed their enemy creeping up on them, he hadn't expected to take them out so easily – but he hadn't expected the enemy to simply not be there. But all he could see was Kagari's anxious face besides his and – what was that small blue thing fluttering around above them next to that stalactite? Wait, was that a bird? This far underground?
Before he could even open his mouth to yell out a warning however, his remaining teammate dropped like a stone besides him, white froth creeping out from his orifices.
Oboro felt his heart sink as he remembered the promise he'd made to his younger brother before he'd left the village. Quickly making up his mind, he threw his umbrella down on the ground and raised his hands.
"I surrender," he said loudly. "Just let me and my teammates live and I'll give you our plates." Just as his eyes flicked down to his left pocket, he saw a flash of red above him. His heart thudded sickeningly. And then everything turned black.
...
Naruto didn't know what to think, and this – there were no other words for it – simply bewildered him. He was no stranger to pain, and over time, he had gotten into the habit of analyzing the cause of everything that hurt him. He reasoned that to minimize pain, he had to understand it. But what he was feeling now wasn't the usual kind of pain, which was sharp and obvious. Instead, what he felt now was a blunt axe that hacked away at the fraying edges of his mind, as a numbing sense of disbelief and something else he couldn't name spread throughout his body.
"So go tell your village and your Hokage. Go tell them that Takigakure's raising up a weapon, in order to become one of the five great villages. Come and destroy it for us."
Naruto had moved methodically to tighten the rope bindings around the two Takigakure genins, but his mind had already begun to race with the implications.
If Mushimi was telling the truth – and his body language and tone all supported that he was – then first of all, this meant that there was more than one tailed beast still roaming the world.
Naruto had tried once before to look up information about the Nine-tails in the Archive Library, as he was unable to dismiss the feeling of uneasiness he'd gotten during Mizuki-sensei's Memorial Day lecture.
And he had managed to ascertain one thing before being chased out by the chūnin librarian: There was absolutely not even a single scroll on its origins, its known powers, or its fate. Granted, he didn't think that there could have been extensive research on such a colossal force of nature, but the fact that there was absolutely no information on it could mean only one thing – that it was classified, not to be disclosed even to the shinobi.
It gave him a headache to think of it, and Naruto had decided that it must have been one of the village's top secrets, something to be handled only by the elite and the Hokage himself, and certainly not by lowly Academy students such as himself. And so, he had put his inquisitiveness aside.
But now, he found himself being forced back into a similar train of thoughts. And as fearful as the thought of tailed beasts in the plural was, the second implication in the genin's words was in Naruto's opinion, even worse – that these monsters of legend could actually be sealed away within people. He didn't know much about Fūinjutsu, except that it was a type of jutsu that sealed objects within other objects. He'd always assumed there was a limit to what could be sealed, and what could be done with what was sealed.
But if a tailed beast could be sealed within a person...and if that person could somehow harness the tailed beast's chakra, then such a person might very well be invincible. And Mushimi had said that Takigakure was raising up such a person – a jinchūriki, he'd called it – in order to become one of the five great villages.
Did this mean that all of the great villages had a jinchūriki of their own? A weapon, that by all intents of nature, shouldn't exist? If that was the case, then could the Nine-tails not in fact have been destroyed by the Fourth Hokage? Could he have sealed it away instead? Inside a person? Maybe even a baby?
Naruto suddenly recalled that the Fourth had been a sealing master. He had found this out when he'd been trying to figure out what the black seal on his abdomen was. Come to think of it, he hadn't seen his seal in a long time. But that was because it only appeared when he nudged his red chakra. But why was he thinking of his red chakra now? He hadn't touched, or thought of it in years.
"Come and destroy it for us." Mushimi's hate-filled eyes flashed once more in his mind's memory. Naruto felt another headache coming. He knew those eyes very well. Where had he seen those kinds of eyes before? Hadn't they –
"Naruto!" He jerked in surprise, his hand automatically reaching for the tantō strapped across his back. Besides him, Rai blanched and took a step back; recognizing his teammate, Naruto immediately relaxed and let go of the blade's handle. Looking around, Naruto noted in surprise that the Takigakure genins were nowhere to be seen. In fact, they seemed to be walking somewhere.
For a split second, he couldn't remember where and why they were moving.
"What's up with you?" said Rai, eyeing him curiously.
Naruto hesitated.
"Nothing, I just spaced out," he finally said.
...
The rest of the second exam passed by quickly and easily, despite their increasing misgivings. Naruto's shadow clone found an Amegakure team with two plates that had let their guards down enough for them to be sneaked up on.
Mayu's genjutsu incapacitated two of them with ease, and after Naruto took down the third with a simple chop across the back of his neck, they trussed up their second genin team to a boulder. With three plates now in their possession, they rested briefly before moving onwards, and after several more hours with no further confrontations, they finally reached the end of the maze.
They emerged out of the sloping dark tunnel to see that it was midday aboveground. They were somewhere in the desert away from the Suna village, and there was not a cloud in the sky.
The strong sunlight seared their eyes after having spent days in almost constant darkness. Nevertheless, Rai flung himself on the hot sandy ground with a moan of bliss, soaking up the sunlight with his outstretched arms. Following him outside, a wide smile spread across Mayu's face even as her eyes squinted in pain.
Naruto on the other hand, remained tense, his eyes roving around as if looking for possible ambush spots.
Rai, seeing this, rolled his watering eyes. "Naruto, we're finally out of that hellhole. Lighten up."
Naruto ignored him, continuing his visual search. Rai sighed in long-suffering exasperation. But before he could say anything else, the sound of light footsteps alerted them to a Suna chūnin climbing up the hill towards them. His face was mostly covered with bandages and a face mask, and he wore the standard Suna flak jacket.
The man held his hand out. "Plates, please."
======================
If you want to support me, Or just want to read ahead of the public release, you can check my p atreon :
p atreon.com/sybife