The genin-level examination naturally covered more than just the three basic techniques and academic knowledge.
It also tested a candidate’s ability to read and judge missions—their duties, their situations, the choices demanded of them.
The academic portion ran deeper too.
Beyond that came taijutsu and live combat.
This part turned out to be a little unusual.
Chiba had assumed the Third Hokage would bring in some chūnin instructor to handle it.
Instead, the man produced a shadow clone.
“I’ll be your combat examiner,” Hiruzen said.
“If you can force me to draw on anything beyond taijutsu, I’ll call it a pass.”
The real Hiruzen took out his pipe, then thought better of it—this was a school, after all—and simply tapped it lightly against the desk instead.
“We don’t need to move outside?”
“No need.
Right here is fine.”
Hiruzen smiled faintly.
Chiba bowed to show he understood, and then he and the clone formed the ready seal at the same moment.
Then, in an instant—
Whump!
Chakra gathered around his fist, and he drove the punch forward.
The clone made no move to use ninjutsu, simply reinforcing its bare hand with chakra to block.
But.
The instant the blow landed, the chakra packed into it detonated outward, right at the point of contact.
In the next moment, Chiba closed the distance and struck again—except this time his right hand had already been quietly compressing a Rasengan, and as his left hand pressed the attack, his right hand swept around and slammed the Rasengan into Hiruzen from the opposite angle.
It was only a clone.
No reason to hold back.
Hiruzen felt a flicker of genuine surprise.
This boy’s control was frightening—not only could he detonate chakra with that kind of precision without harming himself in the process, he could compress a Rasengan one-handed, at speed, in the middle of a exchange.
Control like that was beyond plenty of jōnin.
What terrifying talent.
The clone parried with both arms, then blinked behind Chiba and swept a kick low at his legs—but Chiba shifted position just as fast, evading with speed that ran close, disturbingly close, to the clone’s own.
Hiruzen felt another jolt of surprise beneath his calm.
He was old now, his speed, strength, and stamina all well past their peak.
But on taijutsu alone, he still carried the weight of an elite chūnin.
For this boy to hold his own against that—Might Guy hadn’t exaggerated a word of it.
Several exchanges in, on taijutsu alone, the clone genuinely couldn’t put him down.
As the clone pulled back to create distance, Chiba flung four or five kunai.
The clone caught it immediately—
Threads.
Impossibly fine chakra threads, strung through each kunai.
His eyes sharpened.
Both hands drew kunai of his own and slashed at the threads—he severed three of them, but the rest bent away under Chiba’s control, closing in on the clone in a pattern that looked chaotic but wasn’t.
Thunk, thunk!
The clone dissolved into a block of wood, two kunai buried in its surface.
He’d used a Substitution.
“So you’ve mastered chakra threads, and you can put them to use in actual combat.
Good.
Very good.”
Hiruzen’s eyes brightened.
As a scholar of ninjutsu himself, he could see that Chiba had gone deep into the study of chakra threads—his were finer and tougher than the ordinary kind, hard for a typical shinobi to even notice in time.
And the way he’d used them to steer an attack around a block, redirecting it mid-flight, was genuinely clever.
That had only been kunai.
What if there’d been exploding tags strung along those threads instead?
Between the handful of techniques Chiba had shown and his command of taijutsu alone, Hiruzen was already convinced of the boy’s ability—he more than met the standard for genin.
He exceeded it, by a wide margin.
A prodigy.
Unable to manage nature transformation, yes—but exactly as Chiba himself had argued, shape transformation still had plenty of ground left to explore.
“Lord Third, so—?”
“You’ve passed.
From now on you only need to submit a weekly study report to the medical division and the Academy.
No need to come in for regular classes anymore.”
Hiruzen smiled faintly.
He wasn’t willing to reopen early graduation as a policy.
But bending the rules a little on this foundation was something he could allow.
“Thank you so much.”
Chiba let out a breath of relief.
Getting into the medical division mattered a great deal to him.
For one thing, staying healthy through his training required understanding the body properly.
For another, developing most nin-taijutsu techniques demanded real knowledge of anatomy and muscle structure.
Take a technique like superhuman strength, for instance.
Trying to replicate something like that blind, without understanding the body first—
That wasn’t development.
That was suicide.
“You earned my approval through your own ability, so there’s no need to thank me.
If you want to thank someone, thank yourself.” Hiruzen inclined his head slightly, still smiling.
“What made you think to train in chakra threads in the first place?”
“That wasn’t actually where I started.”
Chiba laid out his thinking.
Compress chakra dense enough to shatter objects, then fold it into a combat style built on taijutsu?
No wonder the boy wanted to learn the chakra scalpel.
Other men’s stones could sharpen his own blade.
Hiruzen understood what Chiba was after now—borrowing from techniques that shared some underlying principle, to make up for what his own approach lacked.
The reasoning was clean.
Precise.
Something in Hiruzen’s chest went a little complicated at that.
Looking at Chiba, he caught, faintly, a shadow of the student he’d once been proudest of—the one who had since become a missing-nin of Konoha.
He said nothing for a long moment.
Finally, without much energy left in the gesture, he waved a hand, dismissing Chiba.
Chiba had no idea what was going through the old man’s mind.
So he simply bowed and stepped out of the classroom.
Once outside, he let out a quiet breath.
Facing down Hiruzen’s clone—it would be a lie to say there’d been no pressure.
In truth, he could have met the bar the Third had set far more easily than he had.
He could have simply released the Rasengan faster, for instance.
He’d already worked out most of that optimization the day before—with his level of chakra control, he could finish forming and releasing a Rasengan within two breaths.
But settling for that would have wasted an opportunity this hard-won.
Chiba needed to show more of himself, comprehensively, to make sure Hiruzen took real notice of him—so that down the line he might have a chance at access to Hiruzen’s books, rather than simply flashing his strength and leaving it there.
Even in the shinobi world, for a commoner, books and scrolls were worth far more than money.
He went back to class as if nothing had happened, listening attentively as always.
His teacher didn’t seem to know the specifics of what had occurred and made no announcement to the room.
After school let out, he ran his usual loop around the village as always.
A while later—
“The Hokage came to your school?”
“He did.
He sought me out, and he’s letting me study at the medical division.” Chiba didn’t hide any of it, speaking earnestly.
“Sensei Guy, thank you so much.
I won’t forget what I owe you.”
“Ha ha ha ha, no need to thank me for that—that’s all your own doing!”
Guy laughed heartily, then paused, something clearly bothering him.
“Wait.
Why do you need to study at the medical division?
Are you learning medical ninjutsu?”
“I can’t even manage ordinary nature transformation, so medical ninjutsu is probably out of reach for me too.
I just want broader, more thorough knowledge.”
“Huh???”
Guy looked baffled.
If you can’t learn it, why go to the medical division at all?
He genuinely couldn’t follow the logic.
Then he scratched his head and burst out laughing again.
“Forget it, I don’t understand any of that, but you’re a smart one, you don’t need me telling you what to do.
Come on—youth is burning hot right now, let’s go find Lee!”
“…”
The two of them ran on through the sunlight, one behind the other.