The room hummed with scratchy brushes and shallow breathing.
Kanzō's proctors moved like shadows between rows. No sound but paper.
• Omoi finished first without grandstanding—tidy formulas, clean reasoning, margins full of wind-angle notes he didn't need.
• Samui never once erased; her answers looked like they'd been written before she sat down.
• Reina read every prompt twice, answered once—efficient, surgical.
• Raizen stared longest at a question on tactical retreat conditions, then wrote a blunt, correct paragraph about living to win the next fight.
• Tetsuo scowled, answered what mattered, left hypotheticals half-blank.
• Karui fought the paper like an opponent—rushed two answers, circled back, salvaged enough.
General side:
• Mizue diagrammed, cited, and cross-referenced like she was born on grid paper.
• Kaien (Mabui) steady, precise—admin brain shows.
• Atsuro practical field sense, fewer words, solid logic.
• Aika concise, no fluff—two clever tricks on trap-disarm questions.
• Daichi wrote like he fought: plain, honest, correct where it counted.
• Riku chewed the end of his brush, finished on time, barely.
A ridge above Kumo, clouds snagged on black stone. Proctors set the rules:
• Two hours.
• Flag caches scattered through ravines and pines.
• No lethal tech; disabling traps allowed.
• Solo movement—no declared teams. (What you do in the shadows is your problem.)
Thunder rolled. "Begin."
Reina moved like a knife through cloth. She didn't sprint; she starved the course—tripping snares from the side, baiting a perimeter bell so a proctor pivoted the wrong way, then slipping in to take two flags while the sound still rang. Twice she left faux footprints to send someone into a bramble field. Predator work.
Samui chose the fog line. She never touched a trap head-on—cut anchor lines, bled tension from deadfalls, palmed bells so gently they never chimed. A clean, patient harvest: fewer flags than Reina, but zero wasted motion, zero penalties.
Raizen breathed the mountain. He spotted a buried tripwire by how the moss bent, burned a single sealing tag to jam a clacker at the moment he crossed, and used a low-power body-flicker only when the terrain offered cover. In the ravine, he read the wind and gravel like a script—someone had passed three minutes ago; he went the other way and found a fresh cache. Disciplined, smart, contained.
Omoi mapped as he moved—counting paces, marking trees with thumb nicks you'd miss unless you were looking. He lost time debating which ridge gave better line-of-sight… then chose right, but two indecisions cost him a tie for second.
Tetsuo forced paths the course didn't grant—shoulder-checked a sapling to bridge a gap, cut through a thorn wall rather than detour. He gathered enough flags to stay in the top half, but bled minutes resetting traps he'd brute-forced open.
Karui ran hot. Early haul looked strong—until a bell web sang and three proctors changed lanes. She recovered with sheer athleticism, but the tally dipped.
General side, the ridge became a different story.
Daichi was the mule that refuses to quit. He didn't sprint—he arrived: steady climbs, clever detours, a brutal scramble up a scree slope to steal a cache no one else wanted to pay for. Twice he let another student trigger a trap and learned from the mistake without sneering. When a gust scattered dust, he squinted, smiled, and found a hidden flag tucked under a stone lip. First to return; last to brag.
Mizue treated the exam like a live patrol: marked quiet routes with thread-thin shavings on bark, skirted a proctor's sightline by crawling a culvert, and stole a bonus flag by stacking stones into a step-ladder no one noticed.
Atsuro read terrain naturally and sniffed out insect-sign to avoid a nasty nest (and a thirty-second penalty). Solid, efficient.
Aika moved in bursts, took a hit from a clacker, swore, then cooled off and finished clean.
Kaien lost a minute helping Riku untangle a line from his ankle; it cost him rank, not respect.
When the horn blew, sweat turned to steam in mountain wind. Kanzō looked pleased in that quiet way that makes everyone stand straighter.
⸻
⸻
Kanzō read the tallies without flourish. No fireworks. Just the weight of effort measured and named. The students didn't cheer; they exhaled. Storm over—for now.
Reina didn't smile. Samui didn't frown. Omoi finally stopped doing math in the margins of his mind.
Raizen touched the sealing tag pouch at his hip and kept his breath steady.
Daichi bumped Mizue's shoulder; she bumped his back, both pretending it was an accident.
Thunder rolled farther off, like Kumo itself nodding once.
The courtyard no longer roared. It breathed. Students stood in orderly rows, uniforms damp with sweat and bloodstains from battles still fresh in memory. The dust of the arena had settled, and Kanzō stood at its heart, hands clasped behind his back, the final tallies resting on a single parchment at his side.
His gaze cut across the Elite first, then the General class.
"You have fought. You have endured. You have written your will on paper and tested it in the mountains." His voice rolled like distant thunder. "Now you will hear what that will has earned."
A hush tightened the courtyard.
Kanzō unrolled the parchment. "Elite Class—" his eyes swept them once, "—the winner, with thirty-four points: Reina."
Murmurs rippled. Karui scowled but said nothing, fists clenched. Omoi and Samui both accepted the result with steady nods, though the tension in their shoulders showed how close the margin had been. Reina herself didn't bow, didn't preen. She simply lifted her chin, predator calm, as if the victory was always hers.
Kanzō shifted to the other side.
"General Class—the winner, with thirty-eight points: Mizue."
Gasps broke through the general ranks. Mizue's calm expression barely moved, but Daichi grinned wide beside her, bumping her shoulder. Kaien's jaw clenched, Atsuro sighed through his nose, and Riku looked like he hadn't heard right at all. But the score was undeniable: Mizue had carved her name at the top.
Kanzō rolled the parchment closed. His voice hardened.
"You have proven yourselves before your peers and this village. You have shown discipline under pressure. For that, you will receive not just recognition—but a choice."
The students straightened instinctively. Even the crowd leaned closer.
"Tomorrow," Kanzō continued, "the Raikage himself will hear the top names from each class. Mizue. Reina. You will stand before him and speak your reward." His gaze sharpened, daring either of them to treat this lightly. "What you ask will say as much about you as any exam."
Reina's lips curled faintly at the corner. Mizue's eyes narrowed in thought, a flicker of calculation.
Kanzō stepped back, voice final.
"Tell me. What will you ask of the Raikage?"
The courtyard held its breath as both girls drew in theirs—about to speak.