The briefing for stage two took place at the edge of a stretch of desert so vast that Karan couldn't see where it ended even squinting against the harsh midday light, heat shimmering visibly off sand that stretched, as far as anyone could tell, toward an unbroken horizon.
"Each team will receive one scroll," the new proctor told them — a broad-shouldered Suna jonin with sun-weathered skin and the particular economical way of speaking Karan had started to notice was common among Suna shinobi generally, as though words, like water, were a resource not to be wasted. "Sun scroll, or Moon scroll. Your objective is simple to state and considerably harder to accomplish: reach the tower at the wastes' center with one of each in hand before the five-day limit expires. You may take a second scroll from another team by any means you consider necessary. You may not open your own scroll before reaching the tower, on penalty of immediate disqualification and — depending on what you unleash by opening it early — considerably worse."
A murmur ran through the assembled teams at that last part, exactly the kind of vague, ominous threat Karan suspected was calculated rather than accidental. Fumiko-sensei had warned them, the night before, that stage two exams varied wildly by host village and cycle, precisely to prevent genin from a losing streak like this one, from decades of accumulated exam gossip. Whatever waited in the wastes beyond the scroll's contents, none of them were walking in with any real idea what it actually was.
"Five days," Sae repeated under her breath, testing the shape of it. "In that."
"Five days is generous, by the standards of exams like this," Tarou said quietly. "Which should worry you more than it reassures you."
Karan said nothing, mostly because he agreed with both of them at once, and instead focused on the practical work of double-checking his own gear one final time — water skins, ration packs, the small collection of kunai and wire he'd assembled over years of Academy and Chamber-honed habit. Whatever waited in the desert, he intended to walk into it as prepared as five years of discipline and three years of careful, doubled elemental training could possibly make him.
They drew a Moon scroll. Karan tucked it into an inner pocket, sealed and untouched, and told himself, firmly, not to think about it again until the tower actually came into view.
The wastes swallowed sound almost as thoroughly as they swallowed footprints.
Within an hour of the exam's start, Karan had already adjusted his expectations twice — first when the flat, featureless terrain he'd anticipated turned out to be broken by deep, wind-carved gullies that made straight-line travel almost impossible, and second when Tarou's kikaichu, sent ahead in careful scouting sweeps, returned with reports of movement in the sand itself, something large and unseen shifting beneath the surface at irregular intervals that none of them could immediately identify.
"Could be nothing," Tarou said, though his tone suggested he didn't believe that any more than Karan did. "Could be something Suna keeps out here specifically for exams like this one."
"Let's assume the second and be pleasantly surprised if it's the first," Sae said, already scanning the gully walls above them with the sharp, wary alertness that had made her taijutsu so effective in the skirmish outside Kirikawa.
They moved carefully after that, sticking to higher, firmer ground where the terrain allowed it, and Karan found himself grateful, more than once over the following hours, for every hour of Earth-nature practice he'd put into sensing the density and structure of the ground beneath his own feet. It wasn't a technique so much as an instinct by now, built slowly across dozens of Chamber stretches — a faint, background awareness of solid versus hollow, packed versus shifting, that let him steer the team clear of two separate stretches of sand that some quiet, earned part of him simply didn't trust.
"How do you keep doing that?" Sae asked, after the second near-miss, genuine curiosity cutting through her usual bravado.
"Practice," Karan said, which was true, and left the considerably longer explanation exactly where it belonged.
They spotted the Iwa team on the evening of the first day, perched along the ridge of a gully roughly two hundred meters distant, watching with a stillness that made Karan's earlier unease at the exam hall sharpen into something considerably more concrete.
"That's them," he said quietly, dropping into the cover of a rock outcropping without breaking stride, Sae and Tarou following his lead without needing to be told twice. "The team from the written exam."
"You're certain," Tarou said, not doubting him so much as confirming the stakes.
"Certain enough." Karan risked a second glance, careful and brief, and caught the same watchful boy from the exam hall staring back across the distance with an expression that had lost none of its earlier calculation. "They're not just crossing paths with us by accident. They've been tracking our position."
Sae's hand drifted, unconsciously, toward the kunai at her hip. "Do we run, or do we find out what they want?"
It was, Karan reflected, exactly the kind of question five years of Academy training and three years of Fumiko-sensei's tactical drilling hadn't fully prepared any of them to answer with total confidence, because the honest answer depended entirely on information none of them actually had yet.
"We don't run," he said finally, weighing the terrain, the fading light, and the particular stillness of a team that had made no move to close the distance despite clearly having the opportunity to. "Not yet. If they wanted a straight fight, they'd have already started one — they had the ground advantage and didn't use it. That means they want something specific enough to be worth waiting for the right moment."
"Which means?" Sae pressed.
"Which means," Karan said, watching the distant ridge with the same careful, patient attention he'd learned to bring to a training-dummy strike, a chakra-paper test, a desert gully that might or might not be hiding something dangerous beneath its surface, "we find out what that moment is before they get the chance to choose it for us."
The Iwa team held their position on the ridge as the light began to fail, and Karan settled in to wait them out, every instinct honed across years of careful, unglamorous preparation telling him that whatever those genin actually wanted, the wastes were about to make sure all of them found out together.
End of Chapter 14
Coming in Chapter 15 — What Iwa Wants
Night falls over the wastes, and the Iwa team finally makes their move — revealing exactly why one particular genin has spent two full days watching Karan more closely than an exam has any right to justify.
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