The room sounded like static.
Not loud—just the soft, relentless hiss of a hundred pen tips grinding over paper, whispered curses, chair legs creaking. Underneath that, like a bassline only I could hear, chakra pulsed and spiked and coiled, a hundred nervous little storms bottled into one classroom.
"The Chunin Exams first test," Ibiki had said, scars catching the light as he scanned us. "Written. Begin."
Then the proctors handed out the papers, and the mood dropped from "tense" to "oh, no."
I flipped mine over.
Question One: tactical scenario. Two squads, three possible routes, enemy unknown. Calculate risk factors, assign formations. Easy. I'd scribbled this kind of thing in the margins of Iruka's handouts for fun.
Question Two: chakra theory. Ratios, efficiency, flow. Still fine, still in "Sylvie is a terrible nerd" territory.
Question Three introduced statistical casualty projections for multi-front campaigns in language that belonged in a Jonin war-room, not in a room full of twelve-year-olds.
By Question Five, I hit a reference to an S-rank mission that had never even been mentioned in class.
I stared at the sheet. My pen hovered.
"…Right," I whispered under my breath. "So that's how we're playing this."
Around me, I felt it happen in layers.
Confusion. Then panic. Then, for some of them, something else—this bright, sharp note of realization. Shikamaru's chakra, a few desks over, went from "half-asleep puddle" to "annoyed, but interested." Neji's focus tightened like a camera lens shifting into perfect focus. In the back, a Sand genin's chakra calmed, pulse settling into the steady tempo of someone who'd already seen this kind of trick before.
They weren't expecting us to know this.
They wanted to see who figured that out.
I let out a slow breath and started moving my pen again—not to answer the impossible questions yet, just to keep up the illusion of "good student focusing very hard and definitely not plotting how to cheat in front of a room full of sadists."
The rules had been clear:
Ten questions.
Start with ten points. Lose one point for each wrong answer.
Caught cheating? Lose two points. Get caught enough, your team hits zero. Whole squad fails.
Nobody had said we couldn't use our heads. Or our hands. Or our eyes. Or the entire shared nervous system of Konoha's most annoying cohort of twelve-year-olds.
I filled in what I actually knew—first two questions, a half-decent guess on the third, one line on the fourth—and then leaned back just enough to stretch.
"Time to see what everyone else studied," I thought.
The girl from Suna—we'd learned her name was Temari from Kabuto's cards—sat a few rows ahead and to the right, legs crossed under the desk, fan propped against her chair. Her chakra felt dry and sharp, like sun-bleached wood, with little flickers of amusement every time someone shifted too loudly. She wasn't even pretending to stress.
Kankuro, two seats over, hunched over his paper with exaggerated seriousness. His chakra, underneath the smug, flickered off in a strange direction, like a thread running up his sleeve and away. Puppet, probably. I couldn't see it, but I'd bet an ink pot he had someone or something feeding him answers from a better vantage point.
The Sound trio—Dosu, Zaku, Kin—were pure static. Their chakra scratched at the edge of my awareness, harsh and ugly, like metal scraping metal. One of them twitched his fingers in tiny patterns on the desk; another kept tapping their foot in a rhythm that didn't match the room. Whatever they were doing, it wasn't wholesome.
I let my gaze drift, lazy and unfocused.
Neji sat near the center, posture perfect. His pale eyes were "looking" at his paper, but his chakra was stretched like a net, flicking outward and back in clean arcs. Byakugan. He didn't have to move his head to see everything. Lucky jerk.
Shino barely seemed to move at all, but tiny flickers of chakra scuttled along the floor between desks. His bugs crawled up chair legs and onto people's papers, antennas humming with stolen answers. Efficient, a little gross, kind of brilliant.
Ino, two rows ahead, had her head tilted just enough that her long hair fell like a curtain. Every so often, her chakra hiccuped—sudden, tiny flares of sharp focus, then nothing, then focus again. Mind slips. Quick jumps into someone smarter, peek at their paper, jump back. Short bursts to avoid detection.
And Sasuke—
Sasuke looked bored.
But the air around him had that faint, warping heat that meant his Sharingan was on, even if he was being subtle about it. I could feel his attention lock onto one of the older genin near the front, track along with their writing. Copy-paste, Uchiha style.
So, to recap:
Everyone who mattered was cheating.
The proctors knew it.
We were supposed to do it too.
I smiled, just a little, and dropped my eyes back to my test.
"Fine," I thought. "If this is an information-gathering exam, time to weaponize notebook doodles."
I uncapped the tiny chakra reservoir tucked into the barrel of my pen and let a trickle seep into the tip. The ink tingled, just a bit.
Then, next to Question Six—some nightmare about supply line optimization and mid-battle rerouting—I drew a small spiral. One loop, then three branching arrows. To anyone else, it looked like nervous scribbling. To me, it was a shorthand I'd been using since the Academy: spiral orientation mapped to multiple-choice options, arrow length to confidence levels.
Long arrow at "B." Medium at "C." Short one nudging "A."
I filled in "B" with a little flourish.
Question Seven: obscure treaty clause. Thanks to Iruka's lectures and my unholy love of footnotes, I actually recognized which agreement they meant. I answered it. Easy.
Eight and Nine were on advanced infiltration patterns. I sketched a small cluster of dots, connected them with lines, added another spiral. Anyone smart enough to read it would see the pattern. Anyone not smart enough… well, they wouldn't.
Which raised an interesting question.
My desk was near the aisle that split the room. Shikamaru sat one over from that aisle, two rows up. He'd spent the first ten minutes of the test staring at the ceiling with the dead eyes of someone deeply betrayed by life.
Now, though? The moment Ibiki had barked, "Begin," his chakra had shifted from "nap" to "trapped genius doing calculus under protest." He started answering slowly, lazily, but every line he wrote settled with this smug little click of rightness.
I wanted that. Not his answers, exactly. Just a calibration. A way to check that I wasn't overthinking myself into a ditch.
I hesitated.
"On one hand," I thought, "subtle seal hints could help more than one person. On the other hand, if I get caught dropping notes, Ibiki will skin me and use me as classroom décor."
I glanced at the clock. Time slipped by in steady chunks. Proctors slid between desks on silent feet, eyes sweeping, chakra senses pried open. Every so often, a strangled yelp broke the air as someone got caught looking too obviously, or making hand signs too big, or whispering.
"Candidate 27, back row," one proctor said coldly. "You and your team are out."
Three chairs scraped. Papers were taken. The team shuffled out, shoulders stiff.
The room's tension ratcheted tighter.
I sighed, quietly, and raised my hand.
The nearest proctor—a kunoichi with sharp eyes and sharper cheekbones—strode over.
"Problem?" she asked.
"Uh," I said, injecting just enough anxious wobble into my voice to sell it, "my pen's dying. Do you have a spare sheet? I… messed this one up with ink."
She glanced down at my paper. The doodles looked chaotic, but the answer bubbles were neat and filled. Nothing obviously suspicious. Just a stressed-out girl with ink-stained fingers.
She grunted and dropped a blank sheet on my desk. "You have to transfer everything if you start over," she said. "Time's still running."
"Yes, ma'am."
She moved on.
As soon as her attention slid away, I shifted.
The new sheet sat crisp and clean on top. On it, in the corner, I started copying my little spiral-legends—small, faint, harmless. Then, as I "accidentally" jostled my elbow, the sheet slid off the desk and fluttered into the aisle.
It landed halfway between me and Shikamaru.
I let out a soft, "Ah—sorry," reached down, and tugged it closer with my foot. I took a half-step into the aisle to pick it up, making sure my body blocked it from Ibiki's line of sight for a second.
Shikamaru's eyes cracked open just a sliver. He watched the paper slide, watched my hand scoop it up, watched the little spirals and arrows in that brief instant before it vanished back onto my desk.
Our eyes met.
He gave me the tiniest, laziest smirk. It said, "Yeah, I saw it." It also said, "You overcomplicate things," but that was just his face.
I didn't need him to copy me. I just needed him to know the code existed. If my answers were wildly off, I had a feeling his genius pride would compel him to huff and correct me later out of sheer annoyance.
I transferred my answers to the new sheet, fingers flying.
Chakra burned low and steady along the tip of the pen, tracing those tiny seal-shapes with a nuance normal ink wouldn't have. The backlash throbbed behind my eyes. Fine control was my thing, but even I had limits.
I eased off before my hand started shaking.
Across the room, Naruto's chakra flickered like a shorting light bulb.
I risked a glance.
He sat hunched over his paper, pencil gripped so tightly his knuckles were turning white. His eyes were huge and desperate, flitting between questions like they might magically translate themselves if he glared hard enough.
He'd written something—some words, a doodle of… was that supposed to be a shuriken?—but most of the bubbles were still empty.
Hinata, two rows over and one seat ahead of him, kept sneaking anxious glances back. Her chakra fluttered like a nervous, glowing moth. At one point, she shifted her paper just enough that, if Naruto looked, he could see.
He didn't.
Of course he didn't.
Hinata's cheeks went red. She turned back around, hands shaking.
I bit the inside of my cheek.
I could, theoretically, get something to him. I had enough control to flick a tiny ink dot with a bit of chakra, land it on his page. Tap his Pulse Mark with a signal only he'd feel: this is a pattern, this is a hint.
But would he even get it?
Naruto could be smart, but he was not pattern-smart under pressure. And if he hesitated, looked confused, looked around…
Two points per caught cheat. Team score shared. My fancy little nerd tricks could tank all three of us.
I breathed out through my nose.
"This isn't about right answers," I reminded myself. "It's about staying in the room."
If this was a test of information-gathering, they wanted to see who used tools and who understood risk. If it was also a test of resolve—staying put while the rules bent around you—they wanted to see who broke.
Naruto didn't break.
That was one thing in this universe I'd learned to count on.
"Sorry, idiot," I thought. "This one's yours."
Another team got bounced. This time, Ibiki himself caught them. He didn't shout. He just rested a hand on the girl's desk, leaned down, and said something too soft to hear. Her face went chalk-pale.
"Candidate seventy-four, seventy-five, seventy-six," he said a second later, straightening. "You're done. Leave."
The boy at her side slammed his fist on the desk. "This is crap!" he snapped. "There's no way to answer these questions—"
Ibiki's gaze turned toward him. Slowly.
The boy clamped his mouth shut.
They left.
The room's fear thickened into something almost physical. Chakra signatures trembled, some spiking high, others constricting so tightly they were barely there.
I forced my shoulders to unclench and went back to work.
Ticking clock. Scratching pens. The faint, disgusting crunch of Sound chakra when one of their tricks misfired and sent a shrill note through the room that made my teeth ache.
Ibiki prowled the aisles, hands in pockets, eyes everywhere.
Up close, his chakra felt… awful. Not in the way the Sound trio's did, all jagged hate. Ibiki's was old scar tissue. Thick. Layered. A thousand shards of other people's terror and pain ground down into something hard and uncompromising.
There was no joy in it. No sadism. Just a solid, unshakeable belief: this was necessary.
He'd broken a lot of people to get here, and he hadn't forgotten a single one.
When he passed my desk, my pen slowed, but I didn't stop.
His gaze flicked over my answers, my little doodles, my ink-stained hand. I felt the weight of his attention pause, evaluate, move on.
Approval? Disinterest? "Too small to bother with?"
Didn't matter. He hadn't said "You, out." That was enough.
Minutes stretched.
A boy from the Cloud village put his head down on his desk and refused to pick it up again. His teammates whispered furiously until a proctor caught them. One whisper too loud, one glance too many. Ejected.
Hinata flinched every time someone got tossed, but her chakra, underneath the fear, had this stubborn little thread of blue steel. Nobodies and clan brats alike were breaking, walking out, failing. She stayed.
Across the room, Shikamaru's pen moved at a steady, lazy pace. No extra sheets. No flashy tricks. Just that soft little thrum of "I figured it out and now I'm bored again."
I wondered, briefly, if he'd seen more in my doodles than I meant to give away. If he'd words for what this test really was before I did.
Probably.
Show-off.
The hand on the clock slid closer to the top.
My answers were… not perfect. I'd guessed on two, half-built a structure around another, and trusted Shikamaru's distant, low-key satisfaction to mean I wasn't totally off base in my reasoning.
My wrist ached. A dull line of chakra fatigue crawled up my arm, behind my eyes. This was not the kind of exam that loved fine motor types.
I flexed my fingers once, shook it out, then forced myself still again.
"Last five minutes," one of the proctors called.
A wave of tension rolled through the room.
Naruto's chakra fluttered like a dying candle—and then steadied.
He didn't reach for Hinata's answers. Didn't look at me. He just gripped his pencil hard enough to squeak and started writing something in big, determined strokes. I had no idea what he was putting down. I doubted it mattered.
I smiled, tiny and helpless.
"There you go," I thought. "Do it your way."
Ibiki reached the front of the room.
"Pens down," he said. "Now."
The scratching stopped.
He waited until every hand left every page, until the proctors had moved down the rows collecting sheets, until the only sound was breathing and the occasional stifled cough.
His presence filled the silence. Bigger than any jutsu, just a man who'd seen too much and wasn't impressed by our fear.
"Before we grade anything," Ibiki said, voice carrying easily, "I have one last thing to tell you."
Chakra in the room spiked again. Eyelids twitched. Backs straightened.
He let the moment stretch, squeezing it until we were all just a little bit closer to breaking.
"The tenth question," he said, scarred face unreadable, "will decide whether you pass… or you walk out of here as failures."
The air tasted like iron.
My hand found the edge of my desk and gripped it. Naruto's chakra snapped toward him like someone yanking on a wire. Sasuke's tightened. Hinata's fluttered, then held.
I swallowed.
"Okay," I thought, pulse loud in my ears. "Here comes the real exam."