When Kakashi-sensei finally showed up, I'd written "I will not die stupidly" twenty-three times on the inside cover of my notebook.
It was either that or start diagramming ways he might murder us with household objects.
The training field was deceptively pretty in the morning. Grass still damp, sunlight slanting through the trees, birds doing their best "this is a peaceful pastoral fantasy" impression. It clashed horribly with the man leaning against a post, nose in a tiny orange book.
Naruto stomped ahead of me, already yelling.
"You're LATE!" he shouted, jabbing an accusatory finger. "We were supposed to meet at six! Do you know what time it is?!"
Kakashi peeked over the book with one exposed eye. "Mm," he said. "Adorable that you assume I can tell time."
I stopped a few steps behind Naruto and Sasuke, hands in my pockets. Clothes still Academy-standard, gear pouches new and stiff against my thighs. Hitai-ate tied at my forehead. Real ninja now. Allegedly.
Kakashi closed the book with a soft snap and straightened.
"So," he said. "You all ate breakfast like I told you not to, right?"
Naruto flinched. "Hah? Of course I did."
I did not flinch, because I had, in fact, listened when a jōnin told me not to do something in an ominous voice. My stomach had started a small protest march about that decision twenty minutes ago.
Sasuke didn't react at all. Which meant he'd gone with "light, efficient meal, just in case." Annoying overachiever.
Kakashi's eye crinkled. "Good," he said, sounding like he meant the opposite. "You're going to regret that."
He reached into his pouch, and my hand twitched toward my own out of reflex. Flak vest plus "mysterious grabbing motion" usually equaled bad day.
What he pulled out, though, wasn't a weapon.
Two tiny silver bells chimed softly in the morning air.
Naruto squinted. "…What are those for?"
Kakashi hooked them to his belt, metal glinting against dark fabric.
"Today's test is simple," he said. "Take these bells from me by noon. Whoever gets a bell… passes."
He let that hang for a beat, then smiled—lazy, cheerful, absolutely not nice.
"And whoever doesn't," he added, "goes back to the Academy."
Naruto screeched.
"WHAT?!"
He lunged like he might grab Kakashi by the vest, then remembered who he was dealing with and stalled halfway, hovering there like an outraged pigeon.
"You can't do that! We already graduated!" he protested. "We took the test and everything!"
"Mm," Kakashi said. "That just proved you can make an underwhelming clone. This proves you can stay alive around an enemy."
The word enemy landed heavy.
Sasuke's eyes had narrowed the second the bells appeared. Now they sharpened further, flicking from Kakashi's posture to the trees, the open ground, back to the bells. You could practically see him mapping angles and routes.
"…There are only two," Sasuke said.
Kakashi tilted his head. "Good eyes."
"So one of us fails no matter what," I said.
My voice sounded steadier than I felt. Inside, my brain was already spinning up into "test design analysis" mode.
Two bells. Three students. One elimination slot built into the rules. Manufactured scarcity. Classic.
Naruto's chakra spiked like a shaken soda bottle.
"You're kidding, right?" he said. "Right?! That's a joke, isn't it? Tell him, Sylvie, this is a joke—"
"I don't think he's joking," I said.
Naruto spun on me like I'd personally betrayed him.
"Whose side are you on?!"
"The side that doesn't want to die because our sensei thinks natural selection is fun," I said. "Calm down. Freaking out is exactly what he wants."
Kakashi watched us bicker, amusement humming off him. On the surface, his chakra was as lazy as his posture—soft, diffuse, composed entirely of "I nap through meetings." Underneath, though, something denser. Sharper. Weight earned in battlefields.
Naruto jabbed at the bells. "So we just have to take them from you, right? Easy! I'll grab one, Sasuke will… I dunno, brood menacingly, and Sylvie can do… seal stuff!"
"Bold of you to assume my seals are combat-ready," I muttered.
Sasuke gave us a sideways look. "You're both idiots," he said. "I'll just take them myself. Then I don't have to deal with either of you."
Naruto bristled. "Oh yeah?! You think you're better than us?!"
"Yes," Sasuke said flatly.
Naruto surged forward. I snagged his sleeve before he could swing.
"Maybe don't attack your teammate at the start of the survival exam," I hissed. "Just a thought."
"Survival?" Naruto echoed, going a bit pale.
Kakashi clapped his hands once, a lazy sound that somehow sliced the air into focus.
"You're missing the point," he said. "Right now, all I see are three brats who think being ninja means 'doing whatever you want loudly.'"
"Hey!" Naruto protested.
"Some of you," Kakashi added, eye sliding to Sasuke, "are talented but arrogant."
Sasuke's jaw ticked.
"And some of you," he finished, gaze landing on me, "are busy analyzing the test instead of preparing to take it."
My cheeks warmed. Called out in 4K.
"Anyway," Kakashi said, unbothered by my incipient identity crisis. "Rules."
He raised a hand and ticked them off.
"You can use any weapons or techniques at your disposal. Try not to crater the training field; the Hokage complains when I ruin the landscaping.
"Rule two: You attack with intent to hit me. Holding back will only get you hurt.
"And rule three: if you don't get a bell by noon, you go back to the Academy. No matter how many of you that is."
He nodded toward a lonely training post.
"The one who fails gets tied to that and watches the others eat lunch."
My empty stomach chose that exact moment to gurgle.
Naruto's head snapped toward me. "Traitor! You ate breakfast and you're hungry?!"
"I thought 'ominous warning from high-level ninja' meant 'listen,'" I said. "Sorry for assuming."
His betrayal was theatrical. "We were supposed to suffer together!"
"We're going to be suffering plenty together," I said. "Relax."
Kakashi set a kitchen timer on a nearby stump like this was the world's most stressful picnic.
"You have until then," he said, bells chiming faintly as he moved. "Come at me with the intent to kill."
Naruto choked. "K-kill?!"
My heart did a weird skip. Surely that was figurative. Probably. Hopefully.
Kakashi's chakra didn't twitch. His eye curved in that not-smile.
"Those who are late don't survive on missions," he said quietly. "Those who hesitate don't make it home. And those who can't handle a little pressure…"
He let the sentence trail off.
"Maybe they're better off doing D-rank chores for the rest of their lives."
Naruto bristled. "I'm not gonna be stuck catching cats forever!"
"Big talk from someone who couldn't make a decent clone," Sasuke muttered.
"You wanna go, bastard?!"
I stepped between them again, automatic. "Later. You can punch each other after we're not at risk of being demoted."
Kakashi's gaze lingered on us. Measuring.
Manufactured scarcity, forced conflict, threat of demotion. There were about six different lesson plans embedded in this, and none of them were actually about the bells.
You don't give three fresh genin a rigged setup like that just to see who wins. You do it to see if they turn on each other.
"So," Kakashi said lightly. "Any questions?"
Naruto shot his hand up. "Yeah! What if I take both bells and don't give them to these losers?!"
Kakashi considered him for a beat.
"Then," he said, "you might pass. Alone. While your teammates go back to the Academy and hate you forever."
Naruto deflated. "…Okay, that's a bad plan."
"Good instincts," Kakashi said. "They show up sometimes."
He pointed at the timer.
"You've got a few minutes to get ready. Use them well."
He raised his hand.
"Start—"
The air changed.
Sound dipped. Pressure shifted. My chakra sense scrambled for something—movement? Genjutsu? He hadn't even done hand signs—
"—now," he finished.
And vanished.
Not a blur. Just gone.
Naruto yelped. "HEY! That's cheating!"
"Basic rule of not dying," I said, already grabbing his sleeve. "When the jōnin disappears, you disappear."
Sasuke was, predictably, already gone. Smug cat energy.
I dragged Naruto toward the nearest clump of trees.
"Move first, freak out later," I said. "Come on."
We ducked behind the tree line. The training field stretched out in front of us, all innocent grass and sunshine, like it wasn't about to be our collective graveyard.
Naruto peered around the trunk. "Where'd he go?"
"Everywhere," I said. "Now shut up a second."
I pressed my back to the bark and let my eyes half-close, reaching with the strange chakra sense that had been tuning itself sharper ever since I woke up in this world. Morning chakra buzzed all around—bugs, birds, tiny things. Background noise.
Somewhere in that noise, a human presence was masking itself very, very well.
I felt nothing.
Which was, honestly, the scary part.
"He's masked completely," I muttered. "Great. Love that for us."
Naruto's expression flickered between fear and excitement like a glitching lantern.
"So what do we do?" he whispered. "Charge in? Shadow Clone? Dig a pit? I could dig a pit. Believe it."
"We plan," I said. "Or at least fake it convincingly."
He sagged. "Planning is boring."
"Planning is how you don't die in the first five minutes," I said. "Sit."
I crouched and scraped a stick through the dirt: three messy circles for us, a big X for Kakashi, scribbles for trees. Barely a diagram, but it gave my brain something to hang onto.
"Reality check," I said. "We're up against a jōnin. Those are the scary ones with whole war stories attached. We're… us."
"Hey," Naruto objected. "I'm awesome."
"You're very something," I said. "You're also made of chakra napalm with bad impulse control. Sasuke's a bloodline prodigy with a grudge. I have paper, ink, and anxiety."
Naruto frowned at the dirt. "You've also got the—" he wiggled fingers near his head "—weird feel-y sense."
"Technical term acknowledged," I said. "Point is, none of us are soloing a jōnin."
"So we just give up?"
"No," I said. "We cheat."
He paused. "…Okay, that sounds better."
I tapped the X.
"He wants us to turn on each other," I said. "Two bells, three kids. Built-in failure slot. He's testing if we'll throw each other under the kunai. And knowing him, if we do that, he'll probably fail us anyway."
Naruto squinted. "So the test is actually… not the test?"
"Welcome to ninja school," I said. "We just spent years taking written exams that weren't actually about the questions. Same thing now, plus higher risk of dismemberment."
He made a complicated face.
"So… teamwork?" he tried.
"I'm saying," I said, "that if we don't at least try working together, we're handing him exactly what he wants."
Naruto glanced in the direction Sasuke had vanished.
"You really think Mr. I-Hate-Everything is gonna go for that?"
"Honestly? No," I said. "Which is why we don't ask his permission to factor him into the plan."
He blinked. "That sounds like something a villain would say."
"We are literally child soldiers," I said. "Villainy is a sliding scale."
Naruto snorted. Some of the tension leaked out of his shoulders.
"Okay," he said. "So what's the plan?"
I pointed at his circle.
"You are distraction," I said. "Loud, bright, impossible to ignore. You get in his face, make him commit to you."
He puffed up. "I can do that."
"I am extremely aware," I said. "Sasuke is the hit-and-run finisher. If he sees Kakashi focus on you, he'll take the opening. Probably with fire."
Naruto's eyes gleamed. "Big boom."
"Exactly. I stay at the edges," I said. "Traps, seals, support. If we can't outrun him, maybe we can trip him. Worst case, I make the terrain annoying."
"Annoying is my territory," Naruto said.
"Consider this joint custody," I said.
He leaned over the sketch, thinking hard enough I could almost hear the gears.
"So I charge," he said slowly. "He focuses on me. Sasuke hits from behind. You… magic sticker the ground."
"More or less," I said. "We won't get a perfect setup, so we stay flexible. But if we all try to work toward the same opening, we at least have a shot at grabbing a bell without dying stupidly."
Naruto's gaze slid toward the clearing again.
"We're getting all three bells," he muttered.
"There are only two," I said automatically.
"Don't care," he shot back. "Somehow, some way, we're not leaving anyone behind. I'm not letting either of you get sent back."
I opened my mouth to say that wasn't how math worked… and shut it again.
The story had a way of bending around him. If anyone was going to snap the test over his knee out of sheer contrariness, it was Naruto.
"Fine," I said. "Aim stupidly high. Worst case, we find the edges of the rules. Best case, we annoy a jōnin."
He grinned, feral and bright.
"YEAH!"
A crow took off in the distance, startled by nothing. Chakra brushed the edge of my senses—there and gone.
"He's watching already," I said quietly.
"Good," Naruto said, baring his teeth at the trees. "Then he'll see when I kick his butt."
"Try not to die before your dramatic speech," I said. "It'll ruin the effect."
He flashed me a thumbs-up.
"Believe it."
I stared at our messy dirt plan. Naruto: chaos engine. Sasuke: precision strike. Me: ink, paper, and the refusal to let this play out the way it did last time.
It wasn't much. But it was more than "everyone runs in screaming."
"Okay," I said, standing. "You circle east and find a good ambush spot. I'll start setting some surprises where he keeps looping. If you see Sasuke, tell him we're coordinating whether he likes it or not."
Naruto smirked. "He's gonna be so mad."
"Angry people make mistakes," I said. "We will lovingly weaponize his trauma later. For now, move."
He slipped off through the trees, surprisingly quiet when he remembered he was actually a ninja.
I wiped the diagram away with my foot and pulled a small brush from my pouch. My fingers already itched with phantom ink lines, seals and spirals and "please don't blow up in my face."
We had a jōnin to mildly inconvenience.
We had each other.
We even had a plan.
Which meant, obviously, that the universe was about to set it on fire.