The gate clanged open behind us and we ran straight into a throat.
One second there was fence and sky and Anko's feral grin. Next second it was trees and dirt and the Forest of Death closing over us like lips.
Naruto launched out front like someone had fired him out of a cannon.
"LET'S GOOO—"
"Indoor voice," I snapped, already dropping into our formation. "You can be loud or alive. Pick one."
Sasuke slid into place a few meters behind Naruto, eyes already cutting over branches, roots, shadows—pre-empting traps on autopilot. I took rear-support, the messy third point of our triangle, glancing back every few steps for anything trying to sneak up on us.
And because I could feel too much.
Forests were bad news for me.
The worst memories in my head all smelled like wet bark and metal. Trees plus being alone equaled dying on the wrong world with my face in the dirt. That forest had been empty—no chakra, no help, no backup. Just silence and the slow realization that no one was coming.
This one was crowded.
I couldn't see chakra—not really—but as soon as we crossed the line, something prickled against my skin. The air here pressed in the way a full room does. The ground had this slow, buried thrum. My stomach couldn't decide if it wanted to flip or crawl away without me.
My brain immediately tried to file everything.
Naruto ahead of us felt like standing next to a bonfire that kept hiccuping. Hot, restless, flickery. Whenever I pushed my awareness toward him, it was like getting jostled by someone who couldn't stop bouncing.
Sasuke was the opposite: tight and compressed, like a drawn bowstring. The feeling off him didn't spread much, but it had weight. Focused, sharp pressure, all held in.
And under that, the forest.
It didn't feel neutral. The background against my nerves was this low, muddy pulse, full of tiny jumps and stabs—little lives everywhere, reacting to us, to each other. My senses kept catching on pockets of…interest? Hunger? It all blurred together. I could tell there was a lot; I couldn't tell what any of it meant.
The canopy stitched thicker overhead until the sky turned into a sickly green smear. Light got thin. Air got thick. Every breath tasted like rot and damp wood.
"The Forest of Death doesn't feel like a place," I thought. "It feels like a mouth. And we just ran over the tongue."
"The air's weird," Naruto said, because subtlety had never once picked him.
"It's a chakra-rich biome," I said. "Officially. Unofficial name: 'Konoha's Temporary Child Murder Zone.'"
He snorted. Sasuke made a quiet, offended noise that said "shinobi exams" in Uchiha.
"Hands," I said.
Naruto half-turned while still jogging. "Huh?"
"Hands," I repeated. "Squad Marks. Renewal time. Unless you want your tracking buff to expire mid-exam."
That got him. He threw an arm back toward me without even looking. I grabbed his wrist, fingers finding the faint ink swirl of the seal.
I pushed a bit of my chakra into the mark. Thin, careful, like tapping something to see if it was hollow. The ink warmed under my touch. Something inside the seal caught that and bounced it back at me.
For a second, I got a rush of Naruto through that contact—loud, hot, urgent. It was more feeling than anything else, a burst of restless energy that made my fingers tingle. In my mind, it registered as a sharp, buzzing note; not a picture, not a color, just a distinct signal against the background fuzz.
"Ow," he complained. "That tingled."
"Good. Your life alert is renewed." I let go. "Don't run out of range or I'll assume you died stupid."
"Rude," he said.
"Accurate," Sasuke added.
"Your turn," I said.
Sasuke didn't argue. He just shifted his arm back, smooth and controlled, like this was a perfectly normal thing to do while sprinting through a deadly forest.
His wrist was bare where I'd scrubbed and redrawn the seal earlier. My fingers brushed his skin, and I shoved chakra into the ink, feeling it catch and hum.
What came back wasn't a blast like Naruto. It was pressure. Clean, narrow, dense. Like a held breath that refused to leak. It settled in my head as a second note—lower, steadier.
Two distinct pulses now at the edge of my awareness, both layered over the forest's heavy background thrum.
I broke contact before the feedback made my headache worse.
"Couldn't you do that before we started running?" Naruto called back.
"Sorry," I said. "Didn't want to renew my subscription to your vitals in front of a torture proctor. I have boundaries."
"Her quiz was worse," he muttered.
"Debatable," I said.
We vaulted a fallen trunk. Naruto whooped like it was a training field, not a giant trip hazard.
The trees here were obscene. Trunks thick enough to have addresses. Roots clawed up out of the ground like fingers trying to drag us down. The more we pushed in, the more the light warped—everything tinted that dull green that made skin look wrong.
"Okay, ground rules," I said, partly to distract myself from the pressure in my chest. "Five days. We need one Heaven scroll, one Earth scroll, then we beeline to the tower in the middle. No opening scrolls early, no losing them, no dying. That last one's technically extra credit, but we're overachievers."
Naruto's hand went to his pouch.
"Speaking of—"
He yanked the Heaven scroll out and held it up like a trophy.
My heart did something illegal.
"Do you think it rattles?" he wondered. "What if there's, like, a second scroll inside? Or a hint? Or—"
He gave it a sharp shake next to his ear.
"PUT THAT AWAY," I exploded.
He shook it harder. "It's just a scroll!"
"You don't know that!" I lunged and smacked it out of his hands. "In this village, 'just a scroll' means 'pick a body part you'd miss least.'"
It spun once in the air. For one sick second I was back in another forest, watching my own blood drip. Then the scroll dropped into my hands instead of blowing our fingers off.
"Naruto," I said, very calm. "If you open this now, we're disqualified at best. At worst, it does something exam-shaped that we are not ready for. There is no universe where that ends well."
"…Ten?" he guessed.
"Higher," I said.
Sasuke didn't bother hiding his irritation.
"If the examiners wanted us dead," he said, "they wouldn't need the scroll. We have twenty-nine other teams for that."
"Cool," I said. "So we're more likely to be murdered by children than by test materials. Very comforting."
I shoved the scroll back into Naruto's pouch myself and closed the flap firmly.
"There," I said. "You touch that again before the tower, I draw 'free organs' on your forehead in permanent ink."
"Sylvie," he whined.
"I brought a lot of ink," I warned.
He sulked. Functionally, though, his hand stayed away from the pouch.
We kept moving.
The further in we got, the heavier everything felt. Warm, wet air wrapped around us, full of the sweet-sour smell of rot. Sound went strange—our footsteps felt muffled, but some bird shrieking way off to the side cut through clear as a knife.
If Konoha was chakra soup, this place was chakra stew. Thick, lumpy, full of bits that kept brushing up against my awareness and sliding off before I could tell what they were.
It started in my teeth, this buzzing under the enamel, then crawled up behind my eyes. Not sharp enough to be pain, not clear enough to be useful. Just crowded.
Back home, the forest had been thin. Nothing there but me and the cold and some hypothetical god who definitely had better things to do. No sense of other minds in the dark, no pressure, just my own heartbeat getting slower.
Here?
Here it felt like being shoved into a party where I didn't know anyone and everyone was staring.
"Five days in this," I muttered. "Great. Love that for us."
Naruto crashed through a fern so hard the plant squealed. Something many-legged and glossy skittered away.
"Man, this place is awesome," he said. "It's like my training grounds but angrier."
"Everything feels angry to you," I said. "You live at maximum volume."
"That's what makes me charming!"
"Sure," I said. "Let's go with 'charming' instead of 'terminally loud.'"
We hit a curtain of hanging branches—not unusual, just foliage, shade, and—
My nerves flashed cold.
"Naruto, duck," I snapped, grabbing for his collar.
He moved, but not fast enough. I yanked him backward anyway.
A chunky clump of shiny, horrible somethings poured from the branches where his head had been and hit the ground with a wet noise that made my brain want to reboot. The whole mass writhed as pieces crawled over each other, all legs and soft bodies and "absolutely not."
"GROSS," Naruto yelped, stumbling back into me.
My skin tried to evacuate my body.
Sasuke flicked a kunai up, slicing through the branch they'd been hanging from.
"Note," he said, staring at the glistening heap. "Watch the canopy."
"Note," I echoed, already moving toward a nearby trunk. "Do not go this way again."
I smeared ink onto my thumb and slapped a quick swirl-and-cross mark onto the bark at knee height. Nothing complex—just my own shorthand for "bad insect nonsense here."
Sasuke's eyes tracked the motion as we skirted around the pile.
"You're tagging trees now?" he asked.
"If I don't write it down, I get one forest worth of horrible and it all blurs together," I said. "Past us deserves hazard labels. I'll give you a translation key if we make it out."
Naruto rubbed his neck, still glaring at the branch.
"Think any of those things are edible?" he asked.
"No," Sasuke and I said together.
We picked up speed again.
Once the spike of adrenaline drained, there was a stretch of almost-quiet: just our breathing, our footfalls, the constant insect buzz. That was when my brain tried to go somewhere else.
The last forest had only had one noise: my own blood in my ears. Mud dragging at my hands when I tried to crawl. The underside of a log inches from my face. No chakra. No background hum. Just the slow, awful realization that I wasn't getting up.
I tasted iron and wet wood so sharply my throat closed for a second.
Nope.
I shoved my attention outward, into the noise.
If I paid close enough attention, I could pick apart bits of the background fuzz. Something big and slow off to our right—heavy, cold presence, like a rock that wanted to move. Higher up somewhere, a cluster of small, thin, twitchy feelings all tangled together: insect nest, probably, and absolutely not my problem if I could help it. A jittery team somewhere to the left, flickering pulses like they couldn't decide whether to run or freeze.
"Hey," Naruto said. "What're you doing with your hand?"
I glanced down. My fingers were sketching little seal strokes against my thigh, automatic.
"Cataloguing," I said. "Also freaking out, but I'm multitasking."
"You're weird," he said, kind of fond.
"Thank you."
The path narrowed between two huge roots. Sasuke stopped so suddenly Naruto nearly collided with him.
"Wire," Sasuke said.
Naruto squinted. "Where?"
Sasuke tipped his kunai at ankle height. Now that I was looking, the nearly invisible line across the gap snagged my attention instantly.
I exhaled.
"Reminder," I said from the back. "I'm back here so when the frontline geniuses explode, there's enough of you left for me to rearrange."
"We're not idiots," Naruto protested.
Sasuke carefully slid the kunai under the wire and lifted it. His silence had Opinions.
Somewhere overhead, something clicked.
"Down!" I yelped.
We hit the dirt as a rain of kunai came down hard enough to chew up the ground where Naruto had been standing. One buried itself in the trunk next to my head and just… vibrated.
Naruto lay sprawled on his stomach, arms over his head.
"I hate this forest," he announced into the ground.
"Already?" I pushed myself up, plucking leaves out of my hair. "We just got here."
He rolled onto his back and glared up at the canopy.
"Cowards!" he shouted. "Fight me yourselves, you stupid trees!"
"Please don't trash talk the ecosystem," I said. "It has more weapons than you do."
Sasuke's gaze flicked from the wire to the fallen kunai, then further into the trees.
"Not Academy traps," he said. "Whoever set that did it fast."
"So not for practice," I said. "Cool. Love that."
"Heh." Naruto puffed his chest out from the ground. "I could do that if I wanted."
"Great," I said, offering him a hand. "Let's schedule 'kills people with wire' lessons for after we survive the murder exam."
He grabbed my hand and bounced up, almost dragging me forward with him.
We kept going. The buzz under my skin didn't fade; if anything, it kept getting thicker, like cotton stuffed in the spaces between my thoughts.
To keep it from turning into one big anxiety blob, I forced myself to keep track.
Naruto: front, loud, jagged-feeling, constantly shifting but consistently there whenever I checked.
Sasuke: closer, compact and contained, like a weight hanging in a fixed spot.
Both marks answered when I brushed my chakra along the connection—small, reassuring flickers against the static.
Then there was the other thing.
It wasn't like the animals, all jittery instinct. It wasn't like the genin, little knots of tension and nerves. It wasn't even in one clear direction.
It was just… there. A low, constant scrape under everything, like someone dragging metal along stone very far away. No spikes. No sudden shifts. Just this distant, steady irritation on the edge of my sense.
The deeper we went, the more I noticed it. Thin, but persistent.
Probably the barrier, I told myself. Or whatever seals they used to keep this whole mess contained. Or just my brain frying from too much chakra in the air. Anxiety loved cosplay.
Out loud, I said, "If either of you randomly feel like puking or your head gets weird, that's either the forest, the barrier, or Naruto's diet. I'll update you as I narrow it down."
"Hey!" Naruto protested. "My diet is great!"
"Your diet is sugar and instant regret," I said.
"At least I'm not the one who eats ink," he fired back.
"I don't eat it," I said. "It just migrates. There's a difference."
"Can you both shut up?" Sasuke said. "We're in a death forest."
"Statistically, we'll still be talking," I said.
He didn't argue.
Sound kept warping. Our immediate noise felt stuffed with wet cloth, but distant things came through clear—branches snapping somewhere far off, an animal cry, the weird creak of something huge shifting.
Then a scream ripped through the trees ahead and to the left.
High. Human. Cut off too fast.
Naruto stumbled mid-step. "Was that—?"
"Another team," Sasuke said. His face barely changed. The feeling off him constricted, pulling tighter, sharper.
The echo hit me a second later. For a heartbeat, there was a flare in the background—panic, bright and jagged, tying my gut in a knot—and then it went out. I couldn't tell if that meant death, knockout, or "congratulations, enjoy the man-eating plants," just that something had stopped.
My chest tightened.
Three kids like us had walked through the same gate. Signed the same "if you die, you die" forms. Now their part in this little game had just… ended.
Our job was to make sure we didn't get the same curtain call.
I checked my marks again.
Naruto answered my focus with that same wild, stubborn shove of presence.
Sasuke with that coiled, steady pressure.
Both still there. Both still mine to worry about.
I rolled my shoulders, shook my hands out to bleed off some tension.
"Okay," I said, mostly for my own benefit. "Plan review. Avoid obvious traps. Don't pick fights we don't have to. Don't open the scroll. Don't lick anything."
"Who would lick something here?" Naruto demanded.
"You," Sasuke and I said together.
He spluttered. "Why are you both bullying me?!"
"Because this entire forest is 'do not put in mouth' energy," I said, "and you have protagonist-level bad ideas."
He opened his mouth to argue, then froze as a branch creaked overhead in a way that shut us all up.
We moved faster after that.
Behind us, the gate was gone. Ahead, the trees pressed closer, the light thinned even more, and that far-off scraping feeling in my senses kept going, faint and relentless.
"Just the barrier," I told myself.
It didn't feel like it. But for now, it was either that or admit I was picking up something I didn't understand at all.
And I really didn't want to add "mystery brain static" to the list of things trying to kill us.