Team Badass (A Naruto Fanfiction)

Revelations

The room was deathly silent as Chuunin hopefuls gulped in trepidation.

Morino Ibiki fixed his grim stare on each of the Genin. Knowing that his intimidating presence alone was helping to up the emotional battlefield, he smirked, revealing some white pointed teeth. The creepiness of it made some poor Genin nearly wet themselves.

Bored and impossibly annoyed by the constant slight hiccuping coming from his right side, Naruto clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, making nervous people jump at the sound.

Ibiki narrowed his eyes at the aforementioned blonde. "Stop that clucking. Otherwise I'll have you removed from the room and disqualified from the exams."

Naruto lazily shifted his eyes over to the scarred man, raised two eyebrows, then stopped clucking.

Ibiki relaxed a bit. Maybe he was getting rusty. It wasn't like the norm for three – not only one but three- individuals to be so utterly comfortable in his test. Still, it looked like he still had his savvy. The blonde listened to him after all.

*Buuuuuuurp*

Ibiki's eyebrows twitched in annoyance. Naruto simply yawned and stretched. Then he patted his stomach good naturedly. "Ah, I think I had too much lunch." Some Genin snickered, Naruto's teammates included.

Feeling the tension in the room starting to drain away, Ibiki roared, "Silence! Now that you have picked out your numbers and are now sitting in your seats, I will now explain the rules. Everyone gets ten points from the start of this exams. If you cheat, that's a minus of two points every time you're caught. For every question you get wrong, that's another minus one point. If you get all ten points taken away, then you're kicked out of the game. If any one of your teammates are kicked out, then the rest of your team is also disqualified. Understand?"

There was a chorus of discontent from the examinees. Ibiki chuckled, then carried on. "The tenth question will be given out ten minutes before the time is up. You get an hour, got that?"

"Wait a minute!" A blonde girl with a Sunagakure headband stood up. "Why is only the tenth question given after almost everything is over?"

"It's the most important question. That's all I will say. Now sit down!" The blonde girl shot the proctor a hateful glare as she reluctantly sat down. The other proctors passed out the exam papers and Ibiki started the clock. "START!"

"L-let's do our best Naruto-kun!" Hinata, red with her effort to speak to Naruto, stammered out.

Naruto paused, then looked to his right. "Huh? Hinata? What're you doing right next to me? Oh yeah, forgot. You got this seat."

"STOP TALKING OR THATS A MINUS TEN POINTS RIGHT THERE!" Irritated, Ibiki yelled wrathfully. From under the desk, Sakura gave Naruto the middle finger, telling him to shut up.

Naruto easily complied, not wanting to jeopardize their exam. He flipped the paper over and gave it a look. Hmm, first question...cryptography? Skip. Second question...skip. Third question...skip. F-fourth question...

From a few seats back, Sasuke wasn't faring so well either. Ha! I don't know the answer to any of these...pretty much screaming at us to cheat, isn't it?

On the other hand, Sakura was having the time of her life. She sped through the codes, decoding them with the finesse of a master cryptanalyst. She flew over the trigonometry questions, dived and somersaulted over the stealth questions, and with pride, copied down every single rules of the Shinobi code she had memorized by heart.

From afar, one Yamanaka Ino was plotting her espionage with an evil grin on her face. She carefully made the handsigns, then stole into Sakura's mind with a flourish. She copied all the answers and came back to her body. Sakura dizzily woke up, not too sure of what happened.