Rustle, rustle.
The proctors quickly unsealed the exam papers, and the classroom turned deathly quiet.
Everyone stared at the counter in Morino Ibiki's hand. The bright red 100 on the liquid-crystal screen was huge and vivid, and breathing throughout the room grew noticeably tighter.
The exact number of candidates in this exam had never been announced, but Konoha alone had prepared three exam rooms.
Room 301, where they were now, was the largest and served as the main room. There were also the smaller Rooms 302 and 303. Conservatively speaking, there had to be at least 250 candidates in total.
If only one hundred people could pass a single written exam, then that ant at least sixty percent of all candidates would be eliminated in the very first round.
After doing the math, the candidates could hardly believe such a brutal elimination rate.
"Examiner, is it one hundred per classroom, or…"
"One hundred total."
Morino Ibiki cut off the unnad Iwa genin who had raised the question and set the counter down on the podium. Then, in a cold voice, he explained the rules.
"The counters in all three exam rooms are linked. The grading instructors will mark the papers and input the scores on-site. Once all mbers of a team have handed in their exams, the system will automatically calculate the team's average score. If the score qualifies, the number on the counter will decrease accordingly.
Once that number reaches zero, everyone who remains will be eliminated.
Do you understand now, idiot?"
The Iwa genin who had raised his hand turned pale from the scolding and could only spin the pen in his fingers without saying another word.
Seeing that no one else objected, Ibiki smiled in satisfaction.
He placed the counter at the very top of the podium so everyone could see it clearly, then turned the display so the candidates could only see the battery compartnt at the back, not the actual number itself.
Omoi, who had been quietly observing the device, sucked in a sharp breath.
So the exam itself restricted the number of people who could pass, and on top of that, they were not even allowed to see the actual number of remaining slots.
Since the three classrooms shared one total count, it was impossible to calculate how many had passed based only on how many had handed in their papers. And because teams were graded by average score, that uncertainty increased even further.
They had no reliable way of judging how many people had already secured a passing spot.
That uncertainty was terrifying.
If soone spent too long answering, then even with a passing score, they might still be eliminated because no slots were left. But if they handed in too early, their score might not be high enough.
And simply making sure your own score passed was not enough.
Whether or not you advanced depended on your team average, which ant you had to score as high as possible and drag your teammates up with you.
Every part of this exam was layered with pressure. Whether one was strong or weak, the stress was crushing.
The genin who figured it out imdiately turned to their teammates, calculating just how many questions they needed to answer correctly to make up for any dead weight on their team.
Rustle, rustle.
The proctors distributed the papers after counting them.
Kono, seated in the first row, was the first to receive hers.
After writing down her na, she looked at the questions she herself had designed and almost laughed. Then she picked up her pen and began writing rapidly.
The others also hurried to scan their papers the mont they got them.
Question One:
Translate: …%&;￥&#￥&;@#
It was a passage of several hundred characters in cipher, packed densely together like total nonsense. Forget translating it. Most of them could not even make sense of what they were looking at.
Their hearts sank, and they hurried on.
Question Two:
Before you stand ten shinobi. Among them are three spies, two double agents, and five loyal shinobi.
Spies always lie. Double agents may lie or tell the truth. Loyal shinobi always tell the truth.
Below are their statents. Analyze the identity of each shinobi, and provide the full reasoning process.
What kind of chaotic nonsense was this? Skip. Skip.
One after another, they skimd through the questions, and their expressions grew grimr and grimr.
The first half covered translation, logic, mathematics, and chemistry.
By the final two questions, they were being asked to draw force analyses of ninjutsu shape transformation and structural chakra diagrams for combined nature transformations.
Sasuke's expression darkened the more he read. By the end, he almost smiled.
Not because he knew the answers.
Because his heart had already accepted reality.
He could not answer a single one.
Sweat dripped from Naruto's forehead. The Certain Victory headband on his brow had already gone limp, and the cheat sheet hidden inside it probably had as well.
That was not what worried him.
Because after staying up all night, painstakingly preparing a massive cheat sheet with transparent tape and over a thousand words on it, he had discovered it had absolutely nothing to do with the actual test questions.
I'm dead.
A half-laugh, half-cry expression appeared on his face. He looked toward Kono's silver-haired figure in the front row, writing calmly, and then glanced up at the clock on the blackboard.
The exam lasted forty-five minutes.
Three minutes had already passed.
In other words, if he could not answer even one question, then he had at most forty-two minutes left to live.
The classroom fell into a strange silence. Even the scratching of pens was almost inaudible.
More than a hundred candidates looked at one another. Pens hovered over blank pages, but hardly anyone wrote a thing.
Morino Ibiki's face remained unchanged. He had expected exactly this.
The first half of the questions had been his doing.
The second half had co from Night Ferry-sama.
Leaving aside the absurdly advanced questions on shape transformation and nature transformation, the cipher in Question One alone ca from an ancient military text written during the Warring States era. Its wording was archaic and obscure, twisted and difficult even for him to interpret. Without the answer key, not even he could solve it, much less this bunch of brats.
They had never intended anyone to answer these questions properly.
The content of the exam itself was not the real point.
This test examined three things:
Disguise, intelligence gathering, and intelligence transmission.
Gathering and passing information were basic shinobi skills. Everyone knew them.
But humans were not machines.
Under overwhelming pressure, even basic techniques could produce fatal errors.
Anyone in this world was allowed to make mistakes.
Except for the team's strategist.
And chunin, by definition, had to shoulder that role.
So the true core of this exam was simple:
Calmness.
The absurd difficulty of the questions and the zero-score elimination rule ford the first layer of pressure.
The proctors watching from both sides ford the second.
The ti limit ford the third.
And the cap on the number of people who could pass ford the fourth.
And that was not all.
The exam had only just begun, and no one had handed in a paper yet.
But later, every ti soone turned one in, that alone would add another layer of psychological pressure to everyone remaining in the room.
The more people who handed in, the fewer candidates would remain.
Right now, there were about twenty proctors watching more than one hundred people.
But twenty minutes from now, it might be twenty proctors watching forty people. Or thirty.
The difficulty of cheating would rise geotrically, and the pressure would multiply with it.
This was the ultimate Super Pressure Test Night Ferry had created after rejecting his old courage test.
The mont he had seen this design, he had been stunned.
He was the captain of Konoha's Torture and Interrogation Departnt, known as the sadistic chief examiner, yet even he felt his scalp prickle at this arrangent.
If he had encountered rules like this when he took the Chunin Exam himself, his mind might well have snapped.
There probably would not even be one hundred people passing this written test.
"Examiner, I'd like to hand in my paper."
"Ahem…"
He had barely finished making that judgnt in his own mind before reality slapped him across the face.
Ibiki coughed twice, nearly losing the fierce image he had built up.
He turned toward the source of the voice.
The person handing in the paper was the silver-haired girl in the first row.
She had already packed up her stationery and was now tidying the odds and ends on her desk. Her beautiful face showed no emotion at all. If anything, she only looked bored.
The proctors instantly recognized her.
She was Konoha's Number One Genius, Kono Taketori.
"Seriously? It's only been five minutes."
"That's Kono Taketori. She was already elite jonin level at six."
"Oh. Then that's not surprising."
The proctors muttered among themselves.
Since it was Kono, the disbelief in their eyes quickly turned into sothing like acceptance.
Compared to the monstrous feats already associated with her, finishing a test in under five minutes sohow no longer seed impossible.
But that was only how Konoha shinobi felt after years of hearing about her.
The foreign candidates were thinking only one thing:
You stole the questions, didn't you?
Kono finished packing her things and stood, exam paper in hand. Under the suspicious, astonished, and reverent gazes of the academic weaklings around her, she walked toward the podium.
The grading proctor imdiately rose to receive her paper and began marking it on the spot. Morino Ibiki suppressed his own shock and looked over it with him.
The cipher translation:
"Follow the advantages granted by strategy. Walk the path of mastering all arts and abilities. In all matters, no one shall surpass . A warrior must fully pursue both the literary and martial ways, study both, and beco a great vessel. On the path of military arts, let the heart be as stone, unshaken and immovable.
Great matters are easy to observe. Small matters are easy to overlook. If one does not understand other things, one cannot form true self-knowledge. Even if one believes oneself to walk the proper path, the straight road of righteousness, in the great difficulties of the world, one must examine the bias in one's own body and heart. One's own prejudice may in fact not be the correct path."
Perfect.
As they went through the answers one by one, Ibiki discovered that not only were they completely correct, they were in fact broader and more insightful than the official answer key.
Even if she had sohow stolen the exam in advance, it should not have been possible to answer to this degree.
He turned and looked at two specific candidates hidden among the crowd. They shook their heads subtly.
Those two were actually teachers disguised as candidates.
They had not even started writing the correct answers yet.
To intensify the ntal pressure on the examinees, he had specifically ordered them to solve no more than three questions within the first fifteen minutes.
And yet Kono had finished the entire paper before even that point.
Which ant she really had solved it in under five minutes by herself.
It seed the reputation she carried in Konoha was not exaggerated at all. If anything, the truth might be even more absurd than the rumors.
Unable to think of any thod she could have used to cheat, Ibiki had no choice but to accept the result, however unwillingly.
On the other hand, Kono calmly t the reverent gaze of the two proctors.
This exam was always ant to test cheating ability.
She had simply placed the cheating thod outside the board itself.
The highest form of intelligence gathering was to create the intelligence.
The pinnacle of infiltration was becoming the head of the organization.
Naturally, the greatest form of cheating was becoming the chief examiner.
A true shinobi would use any ans necessary.
In truth, she could have completed the paper in one minute.
But halfway through, she had suddenly felt that her earlier answers were not precise enough.
As a perfectionist, she had gone back and optimized the standard answers once more, which was why she had wasted a little extra ti.
The grading proctor input Kono's perfect score into the system.
Her portrait on the candidate list imdiately lit up in color, while the portraits of Naruto and Sasuke beneath hers remained gray-black.
Only once all mbers of their team handed in their papers and the average score was calculated would Kono officially claim one of the one hundred passing slots.
"Your score has been entered. You may wait in the first-floor hall for the exam results. Try not to wander around. The second phase will begin after the written test ends."
"I know."
Kono cast one deep look at Naruto, whose face was covered in sweat, then turned and walked out of the room.
Ibiki spoke of the Pressure Test with great admiration, but in truth she had designed the whole rule set primarily so that she could leave early.
The entire dumpling had been made just for this one splash of vinegar.
There was no way she was going to sit in an exam hall like an idiot for forty-five minutes.
Going downstairs to sleep while simultaneously directing Night Ferry to finish setting up the Death Forest test grounds was much more important.
As for Naruto and Sasuke, she had already slipped the cheat sheet to Naruto, and Sasuke's side did not need much worry either.
As far as she was concerned, her own exam was already over.
Bang.
The heavy sound of the door closing behind her made everyone's hearts skip a beat.
Just from the shocked look on the graders' faces, they knew her score could not have been low.
It was probably a perfect ten.
That ant if her teammates each managed at least four points, their team would pass, and the one-hundred-slot quota would instantly drop to ninety-seven.
The questions were incomprehensible.
The available slots had begun to disappear.
The second hand on the clock above the blackboard ticked relentlessly forward.
A crushing pressure began to settle over the room.
The proctors spun their pens swiftly in their fingers, clipboards already in hand.
Seeing sothing, Hayate Gekko, his face half-hidden behind bandages, scribbled quickly on his notepad.
The Kumo candidate who had just slightly turned his head froze in place. Trembling, he turned back forward again.
Looking at his blank paper, sweat was already collecting at the tip of his nose.
The two disguised teachers in the room looked toward Ibiki for instruction.
But he slowly shook his head.
Wait longer.
The genin inside the room were enduring a pressure test that pushed the limits of their sanity.
anwhile, Anko Mitarashi, the examiner for the second phase, was following Night Ferry toward the Forest of Death.
Crack.
Black tactical boots crushed dry twigs underfoot.
Night Ferry, acting under the orders of the main body, led Anko deeper into the so-called forbidden zone of Konoha:
The Forest of Death.
Anko followed carefully behind her.
Her unruly gaze was full of caution.
That woman did not look like a good person at all.
Following her alone into this desolate forest, if Night Ferry chose to make a move, Anko doubted even her corpse would ever be found.
Still, as she looked at the tall, silent figure ahead of her, caution was not the only thing in her heart.
She was curious.
What kind of face lay beneath that mask?
Beautiful and captivating, or ugly and vicious?
How exactly had she driven the forr Hokage advisor Danzō from power?
And as the sovereign of Konoha's dark side, what kind of strength did she possess?
The black cloak rolled and fluttered in the wind as though it contained endless mysteries, luring her closer.
What a mysterious person.
Anko's thoughts had already wandered far from the path when suddenly a cold, authoritative voice rang out beside her.
"We're here."
"Huh... this is..."
Startled back to herself, Anko hurried to a stop and looked up.
Her purple ponytail swung heavily behind her as her eyes traveled higher and higher.
Before them stood an enormous earthen-yellow wall, completely blocking her view. Its edges disappeared into the dense forest on either side, and even the sky above seed darker in its shadow.
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