Anko Mitarashi led the surviving genin out past the tower and along a service road that ran the length of a fence taller than any wall Naruto had seen inside the village, chain-link backed with wire and warning signs bolted every twenty feet, each one a little more graphic than the last.
“Training Ground Forty-Four,” she said, not slowing down, boots crunching gravel with the same unhurried confidence she’d shown crashing through a second-story window the day before.
“Most people just call it the Forest of Death. You’ll understand why by tomorrow morning, and if you don’t, you’re probably one of the ones it eats.”
She’s not exaggerating for effect, Kurama said.
I remember.
Naruto kept his face neutral, cataloguing the fence line, the sightlines, the deliberate absence of any watchtower that might let a proctor actually see inside.
This is the part where half the class stops thinking it’s a school trip.
Anko stopped them at a gate wide enough for three genin abreast and turned to face the assembled teams, grin already in place, a kunai spinning idly around one finger.
“Rules, and I’ll only say them once, so if you’re the type who tunes out during the boring part, this is where that habit finally kills you.” She let that sit exactly as long as it needed to.
“Five days. Your objective is the tower at the center of the training ground — get there with one of each scroll, Heaven and Earth, and you pass. You’ll each draw one scroll now. The other one, you take.”
Somewhere behind Naruto, a boy raised his hand like this was still a classroom, and Anko’s grin widened at the sheer novelty of it.
“What happens if we don’t make it in five days?” he asked.
“Then you don’t pass, and depending on where you are when the clock runs out, that might be the least of your problems.” She said it without a trace of malice, which somehow made it worse.
“Last year a team got turned around bad enough they were still fighting for their lives on day six, outside the boundary, no proctor watching. We got to them in time. Mostly. Ask me again if you still want details.”
Nobody did.
“Take from who?” a genin near the front asked, already regretting it from the way Anko’s grin sharpened.
“Each other, genius. That’s the test. There’s exactly enough scrolls in circulation for about half of you to actually walk out of here with a full set. Do the math on what that means for the other half.” She surveyed the crowd with open relish.
“Don’t open your scroll early out of curiosity. I promise you, the surprise inside is not a good one, and you will not enjoy meeting it early. Beyond that — anything goes. Kill each other if that’s what it takes. People have died in there. People will die in there this week. If that changes your mind about being a shinobi, now’s a good time to find out.”
The hush that followed had a different texture than the one Ibiki had built the day before — that had been a slow-burning dread over a written page.
This was blunter, more physical, the kind of silence that came from two hundred kids doing the actual math on their own odds for the first time.
There it is, Kurama said, quieter than his usual register.
The part where “shinobi” stops being a word on a headband.
Some of them already knew that.
Naruto didn’t look at Sasuke or Sakura, letting them have whatever private reckoning they were having without his attention on it.
Some of them are about to find out the hard way.
Same as always.
A proctor moved down the line with a locked box, and Team Seven drew their scroll in turn — Sakura’s hand steady on the paper, Sasuke’s Sharingan flickering active for half a second out of pure reflex before he caught himself and let it fade.
Naruto turned the scroll over once it was in his hand.
“Heaven,” he said, low, for the team only.
“We need Earth.”
“Obviously,” Sasuke said, already scanning the treeline through the fence like he could pick their opponents out of it by sight alone.
“We should decide now how we’re taking it,” Sakura said, quiet and businesslike, no trace of the girl who used to freeze up at the first sign of real danger.
“Not improvise in the middle of a fight.”
Naruto felt something warm and slightly surprised settle in his chest, watching her get there before he had to nudge her toward it.
“We don’t know who’s carrying Earth until we’re already committed. Which means the first team we corner needs to actually be worth cornering.”
“You say that like you already know who’s worth it,” Sasuke said, a flicker of something sharp behind the flat delivery.
“I know who isn’t.” Naruto let it go at that, and Sasuke, for once, didn’t push.
Careful, Kurama murmured.
He’s getting better at hearing what you don’t say.
He’s getting better at a lot of things.
Naruto watched Sasuke’s eyes track the fence line again, patient and assessing rather than hungry, nothing left in it of the boy who used to stare at that same horizon like it owed him something.
Good.
That’s the whole point.
The gates opened at the signal, thirteen at once along the fence’s length, and the forest swallowed them within a dozen steps.
It was nothing like the tended, cultivated green of the training grounds inside the village proper.
The canopy closed overhead almost immediately, filtering the daylight down to something dim and directionless, and the undergrowth grew in a tangle dense enough that sightlines collapsed to a few body-lengths in any direction.
Something enormous moved through brush somewhere off to the left, heavy enough that Naruto felt it through his feet before he heard it, and none of them turned to look.
“Bugs the size of my forearm,” Sakura muttered, eyeing a length of shed exoskeleton caught on a low branch.
“Wonderful.”
“Could be worse,” Naruto said.
“Could be the thing that molted out of it, still hungry.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“Wasn’t trying to be.”
The ground itself told its own story if you bothered reading it — old claw-marks scored into bark well above head height, a stretch of earth churned up by something with more legs than it had any business having, a patch of undergrowth flattened in a wide, deliberate circle that none of them stopped to investigate too closely.
Whatever the village used this ground for between exams, it clearly wasn’t kept tame on purpose.
Every so often a distant scream carried through the canopy from some other quadrant of the forest, human or animal impossible to tell at that range, and each time it happened the three of them kept walking without comment, the specific discipline of people who’d already decided which sounds were worth stopping for.
They moved fast and quiet through the first hour, Sasuke on point with his Sharingan doing slow, careful sweeps rather than the constant burn that would exhaust him for nothing, Sakura tracking terrain and sound with the same unglamorous competence she brought to everything, Naruto trailing just enough to watch their backs without crowding either of them.
The forest pressed in close and stayed that way — no clean breaks in the canopy, no landmarks that held still long enough to be useful, every direction looking exactly like every other direction the moment you stopped concentrating on it.
Good design, Kurama observed, somewhere past the second hour.
Disorientation does half the killing in a place like this before anyone even throws a kunai.
Yeah.
Naruto let his attention drift wide and loose, the particular alertness of someone who’d learned the hard way that the forest itself was rarely the actual threat.
The real danger’s never the trees.
It found them a little past midday — a rustle in the brush ahead that was too deliberate to be wildlife, followed by three genin dropping into the clearing from three different angles at once, headbands from a smaller village Naruto didn’t immediately place, a girl with twin blades already drawn and two boys flanking wide to cut off retreat.
“Heaven scroll,” the girl said, flat and fast.
“Hand it over and we let you walk.”
“You first,” Sasuke said, Sharingan flaring fully active, and the fight opened before anyone finished deciding to start it.
It was fast and ugly in the way genin fights were supposed to be — no clean exchanges, no room for anything elegant, just close-quarters scrambling through tangled brush that punished anyone who tried to fight like the terrain wasn’t there.
Sasuke closed on the girl with the blades, Sharingan reading her opening feints half a beat ahead and turning what should have been an even matchup into a one-sided correction, every one of her strikes meeting empty air where he’d already stopped being. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
Sakura took the larger of the two boys with a straight taijutsu exchange, absorbing one solid hit to the shoulder that would leave a real bruise and answering it with a chakra-reinforced strike that put him flat on his back gasping.
The third boy went for Naruto directly, a volley of shuriken followed fast by a kunai rush, and Naruto let himself get pushed back exactly as far as looked honest before closing the gap and ending it clean — a disarm, a sweep, a knee against the boy’s chest hard enough to fold him without breaking anything that wouldn’t heal on its own.
Not a performance.
Just enough.
The girl broke off first, dragging her winded teammate back into the brush rather than risk the third, and the whole thing was over in under two minutes, breathing hard, no scroll changed hands, no one seriously hurt.
“They didn’t have Earth either,” Sakura said, catching her breath, checking the fallen boy’s pulse out of pure habit before letting him go.
“No,” Naruto agreed, already scanning the treeline the retreating pair had vanished into.
“Wrong team.”
“You could’ve finished him faster,” Sasuke said, nodding at the boy still gasping on the ground where Naruto had left him.
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because he’s not the enemy, he’s a kid with a bad draw and a scroll we don’t need,” Naruto said, and shrugged when Sasuke’s expression didn’t quite let it go.
“Also, breaking someone’s ribs for a scroll I’m not taking seems like a waste of the effort. Call it professional courtesy.”
“That’s not a real reason.”
“It’s my reason. I don’t need it to survive an audit.”
Sakura huffed something that was almost a laugh despite herself, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of one hand, and even Sasuke’s mouth twitched before he caught it and smoothed it back to neutral.
You’re distracted, Kurama said, and it wasn’t a question.
Naruto didn’t answer right away, still watching the spot where the brush had stopped moving a beat too smoothly, the kind of stillness that came from someone controlling their own noise rather than the forest simply going quiet on its own.
There’s something else out here, he said, finally, keeping it inside where only Kurama could hear it.
Not that team.
Something that was watching before they even showed up.
I felt it too.
About a minute before the ambush.
Kurama’s voice had lost its usual dry edge entirely.
You know the shape of it already, don’t you.
Yeah.
Naruto’s eyes moved, unhurried, to where Sasuke stood catching his breath, Sharingan fading back to black, entirely unaware of anything beyond the fight he’d just won.
I know exactly what it is.
I don’t know yet what it’s actually here for.
Not this time.
You have a guess, Kurama said.
I have more than a guess.
Naruto looked away before Sasuke could catch him looking at all, and said nothing else out loud, filing the wrongness away where it belonged — noticed, not acted on, not yet.
Whatever was circling them from just beyond where he could see it, it hadn’t shown itself for a reason, and until it did, tipping his hand first would cost him more than waiting ever could.
“We should keep moving,” he said instead, already turning deeper into the trees.
“Day’s not getting any longer.”
Neither Sasuke nor Sakura argued, and the three of them pushed on into the green dark, the forest closing quietly back in around them as if nothing had passed through it at all.