By the time my brain caught up, the world was Naruto.
Naruto in the trees, Naruto on the rocks, Naruto on the riverbank. Naruto splashing through shallow water, Naruto tripping over a root, Naruto swinging kunai, Naruto arguing with—another Naruto.
"I told you that one was fake, dattebayo!"
"You're fake!"
"I'm the real one!"
I pinched the bridge of my nose, which did absolutely nothing because there were six of them shouting in stereo.
The mist was thicker down here by the river, cold and clinging. It crawled into my lungs, into my clothes. Under it, the genjutsu hummed like a bad fluorescent light. Every time I tried to pin a chakra source, it blurred sideways.
Great. Hallucination soup.
"Stay tight," Kabuto called from somewhere behind me. "They're using the low visibility to—"
A kunai whined past his head and thunked into a tree, vibrating.
"—to do that," he finished mildly.
Naruto lunged at the nearest copy of himself, fist cocked back. His punch connected with a face that dissolved in a puff of smoke.
"HA!" he crowed. "See? Fake!"
Three more Narutos sprang out of the bushes and dogpiled him.
"GAAH—"
Yeah. This was going great.
Sasuke stood just ahead of me, knife-outlines of tension all through his shoulders. His eyes were narrowed, tracking movement, but I could feel his chakra stutter every time the fog thickened, like the genjutsu was catching his focus and tugging it sideways.
The mark on his neck stayed quiet under the bandage.
For now.
I pressed my hand flat to the nearest tree, bracing. "Okay," I muttered. "Think."
Thinking was hard when the battlefield was a Naruto infestation and my own reserves were hanging by a thread, but I'd spent too many nights in Konoha staring up at the orphanage ceiling trying to quiet my brain. It liked puzzles. It just hated dying during them.
I shut my eyes.
The visual noise dropped away.
Underneath the genjutsu, chakra moved.
Most of it was faint, smearing around the edges like someone had dragged a gray brush over the world. The clone illusions, probably—surface-level lies, maintained across the battlefield.
Beneath that, stronger threads.
Naruto burned loud as ever: a thick, vibrant orange with little white sparks popping off him, like static. He wasn't lying about being everywhere; his clones were real enough chakra-wise. Each one had a little slice of that bright orange stuffed into it, skittering around like hyperactive fireflies.
But—
There.
One line was brighter. Thicker. A solid column, not a smear. A lighthouse-orange that cut through the mist like it wasn't there.
The real him.
I let out the breath I'd been holding and let the awareness widen, just a hair. Sasuke: dark steel-blue, coiled tight, little ugly bruise-colored motes flickering around his collar like gnats. Kabuto: that smooth gray surface again, too even, too calm, like a pond with a lid screwed on.
And past them—
Three signatures that didn't match the crowd of Narutos at all. One elastic, snapping in and out of the edges of my range. One thin and sharp. One dull, steady.
"Hiding," I muttered. "Of course you are."
Another kunai storm came in low. Sasuke flicked his wrist and batted two away; the third clipped my sleeve. It snagged pink mesh and left a hot line on my skin.
"Okay," I said, louder. "New rule. No more getting stabbed."
Naruto grunted from somewhere in the pile. "Kinda—busy—here!"
I yanked my tag pouch open with my teeth.
The paper inside was damp and wrinkled, ink lines bleeding at the edges. My hands still hurt from the last round of overusing them, the chakra-burn cracks along my fingers protesting as I shuffled through the stack.
Flash. Sticky. Trip.
There. Plain rectangles, marked with a circular design that looked, if you squinted, like a water ripple.
Unfinished, really. Simple anchor seals hooked to a basic chakra pulse. I'd doodled the concept on scrap days ago and inked a handful on instinct before we entered the Forest, figuring if the exam had genjutsu, random bursts of chakra static might help.
Or give us brain damage. Fifty-fifty.
"Stay close," I told Sasuke. "If this backfires, I want us all suffering together."
He gave me a sidelong look that said I am absolutely not reassured but didn't argue.
I slapped the first tag to the ground by his foot and pushed a trickle of chakra into it.
The ink flared, then sank.
A beat later, the seal discharged—boof—a tiny, invisible shockwave of chakra that rolled out in a two-meter ring. The air around us felt like it had hiccupped. The mist wobbled.
Narutos flickered.
Half a dozen of the ones closest to us shivered like bad radio reception, then blinked out entirely.
Naruto shouted. "Hey! Where'd my handsome backup go?!"
"Those were illusions," I yelled back. "You're welcome!"
"I liked them!"
"Focus," Sasuke snapped.
I slapped down a second tag on the other side of him and triggered it.
Another pulse. This one made my teeth buzz. More clones around us fizzled.
Good. It wasn't a fix, but it was punching little holes in the genjutsu field, places where the lie had to work harder to survive.
My head pounded in time with my heartbeat. Chakra usage tallied itself in the back of my mind like a miser counting coins.
One more.
I knelt and threw the third ripple tag further ahead, into a knot of fighting Narutos. It landed with a soft thump, stuck to wet dirt, and went off.
The crowd shimmered—and in the middle of all the orange chaos, my senses tagged the lighthouse-color again.
"There you are," I breathed.
I dug into my pouch for two narrower strips of paper, each one marked with a small spiral and a dot in the center. These ones were almost stupidly simple.
Pulse tags.
One-use pings.
"Oi!" I called. "Naruto! Heads up!"
He fought his way half-free of a clone pile long enough to look at me. "Kinda drowning in myself right now!"
"Yeah, yeah." I flicked one tag at him. It slapped against the sleeve of his jacket and stuck.
The moment it touched his chakra, the seal lit. My Mark on my own wrist twinged in answer, the ink warming, then cooling.
A matching pulse. A heartbeat outside my body.
I turned and smacked the other strip against Sasuke's shoulder before he could dodge. He scowled at me.
"What was that for?"
"Later," I said. "Don't die."
"Not planning to."
I closed my eyes again.
Now the colors had anchors. Naruto's presence wasn't just a wash of orange; it had a precise, rhythmic pulse, like a beacon ping. The tag on Sasuke did the same, a cool blue thump-thump in my awareness.
Everything else was…background.
"Okay," I said to myself. "Okay. This I can work with."
The fear that had been wrapping around my ribs loosened, just a bit. Not because we were safe, but because the inside of my head had found a pattern to chew.
The genjutsu wanted me overwhelmed. Wanted me to see thirty moving threats and panic.
My brain would do that later, probably at three in the morning when I was trying to sleep.
Right now?
Right now, I could feel one Naruto cut through the lie like a knife.
"Real one is north-northeast!" I shouted. "Ten meters! The one with the ripped right sleeve!"
"How do you even know that?!" Naruto yelled back.
"I'm very annoying!"
He accepted this and rolled with it.
The real Naruto—the one my senses locked onto—broke out of his immediate tangle, shoved a clone off, and sprinted exactly where I'd pointed. Five other Narutos peeled off with him, but to my awareness only one left that bright trail.
He hit something I couldn't see.
There was a wet grunt. The mist twitched.
One of the foreign chakra signatures flared, elastic and thin—then stuttered.
"Got one!" Naruto crowed.
Sasuke surged forward to capitalize, Sharingan spinning to track the ripples. The red in his eyes cut clean lines through the fog, seeing breaks in the genjutsu my tags had made. He darted through the gap like a knife sliding into an unguarded seam.
A kunai flew toward his face. His hand snapped up, deflected it, stepped in—
—and his image warped.
For one horrible second, my senses reported two Sasukes, overlapping: one blue, one…empty. Like someone had cut him out of the world and left an outline.
My stomach lurched.
I slammed my palm onto the last ripple tag in my pouch—had I grabbed it? When?—and shoved chakra into it harder than I should've.
The tag overloaded with a sharp pop, the ink burning away all at once. The chakra pulse it spat out was big enough to make my vision white at the edges.
The mist convulsed.
For a heartbeat, I saw them.
Three forms in Oboro's team: one half-buried in the dirt, one perched up in a tree, one crouched near the river rocks. All wearing the same tan rain cloaks, headbands gleaming with the Hidden Rain symbol. Their features blurred, unremarkable.
The one underground winced, hands locked in a seal. The one in the tree snapped her head toward me.
Then the world tried to snap back into lie, genjutsu stitching over my perception like a bad patch job.
"Nope," I snarled.
I grabbed the thin thread of the underground chakra signature in my mind and refused to let it slip.
That's not how sensing worked. I knew that. I didn't care. My brain had decided that chakra was a color and colors didn't just vanish because some asshole told them to.
Bright lighthouse-orange cut through the middle of it like a sunbeam.
Naruto, real Naruto, barreled straight toward where my awareness said the underground one was.
"Down!" I screamed. "He's under you, two steps left, now!"
To his credit, Naruto didn't argue.
He planted his foot, pivoted, and slammed both fists down into the soft, wet ground.
"UzuMAKI NARUTO BUNKEN PUNCH THING—"
The name was nonsense, but the impact wasn't. The earth shook. Mud exploded. Something under the surface yelped.
A Rain genin erupted from the ground in a shower of dirt and broken genjutsu, clutching his bruised face.
"Naru—" he started.
Four Naruto clones tackled him mid-air, dogpiling him with glee.
"I found one!" Naruto shouted.
"Two more," Kabuto called, voice calm. "Careful—they're skilled with hiding techniques. Their specialty is confusing the enemy to avoid direct confrontation."
"Yeah, we noticed," I muttered.
My vision swam. My fingers trembled. The burn scars along my palms throbbed hot and cold every time I channeled even a little chakra through them.
"Out of these tags already," I said, mostly to myself. "Brilliant resource management as always."
Sasuke glanced back at me. His eyes, still red, flicked over my hands, my sway.
"Stop pushing," he said. "You're going to collapse."
"Strong words from Mr. 'stabbed my own hand to prove a point,'" I shot back, because I was exhausted and scared and being mean was easier than admitting I was edging toward burnout.
He didn't rise to it. That worried me more than if he'd snapped.
"Look," he said instead, chin jerking toward Naruto.
Naruto had moved on from punching the ground to punching every clone in arm's reach. Most of them were fake, evaporating in puffs of smoke and offended shouting when he touched them.
But he didn't slow down.
"Left!" I called when my senses tugged at the beacon again.
He jerked his head and clotheslined a Rain genin illusion that popped.
"Right! No, other right!"
He spun, cracking a clone of himself in the jaw.
Kabuto's teammates had spread out—Yoroi hanging back, Misumi nearer to me than I liked—but Kabuto himself stayed relatively close, watching. His glasses glinted, hiding his eyes.
"Interesting method," he said lightly. "Brute-forcing the pattern."
"It's Naruto," I said. "Thinking around the problem was never on the table."
His lips twitched. "Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most effective."
Underneath the words, that smooth gray chakra rippled—just once—then leveled again.
I tried not to shiver.
Another shuriken volley came in from nowhere. Sasuke deflected two, Naruto twisted to let one slam into a clone instead. The hit one poofed on impact.
"I'm over this!" Naruto yelled, chest heaving. "Why do these guys get to hide while we do all the work?!"
"Because that's their entire strategy," Kabuto said. "Confuse, exhaust, pick off."
"BORING!" Naruto roared.
He threw his hands into the familiar cross seal.
"Shadow Clone Jutsu!"
The air filled with Narutos.
For a second, my senses overloaded, orange flares blooming everywhere. It felt like watching someone drop a firecracker box into a paint bucket.
But the pulse tag on the original still held.
There, in the mess. One beat that hit harder. One presence the clones all whispered around, but never quite matched.
"He's three bodies behind you!" I yelled. "Slightly shorter, hair is—"
Why was I describing hair? He couldn't see that through fog.
"—uh, just punch anything that doesn't flinch the right way!"
"What does that even mean?!"
"Trust me!"
"I am!"
He did, too.
Naruto waded into his own clone swarm like a wrecking ball, fists and feet flying. The clones copied him, their movements echoing his in a chaotic, off-sync chorus. Every time my senses tugged—there—he was already moving.
Real Naruto slammed a fist into a shape that didn't respond like a clone.
There was a crunch. The Rain genin in the tree I'd felt earlier toppled out of the branches, face-first into the water, his illusion-shrouded perch cracking under the force.
He didn't get back up right away.
"Two!" Naruto yelled, breathless and grinning even as sweat dripped down his face. "C'mon, show yourself, you cowardly mole guy!"
The last chakra signature—the thin, sharp one—flickered.
Then it dove.
Not toward Naruto.
Toward Sasuke.
My stomach dropped.
"Sasuke—!" I started.
The ground bulged.
Sasuke's Sharingan spun, tracking something I couldn't fully see. He shifted his stance half a beat before the earth under him exploded outward.
A figure lunged up out of the mud like a spear, kunai leading, aimed straight at Sasuke's bandaged neck.
Sasuke's body moved on instinct.
He twisted, knocked the kunai aside with a brutal parry that sent it spinning, and slammed his knee into the attacker's ribs, hard enough that I heard something give.
The Rain genin gasped. Sand and mud flaked off his cloak. His eyes went wide as they met Sasuke's.
"You picked the wrong target," Sasuke said softly.
His chakra sharpened, blue edges honed to a lethal line.
The curse mark stayed asleep.
Relief hit me so hard my knees nearly buckled.
Around us, Naruto's clone army started to thin as he dismissed them, panting. The mist, shredded by my pulse tags and the constant movement, was having trouble reasserting itself; the genjutsu felt…frayed. Oboro's remaining illusions stuttered at the edges of my perception, the lie losing power as their team took real hits.
Kabuto adjusted his glasses, watching Sasuke with a thoughtful tilt to his head.
"Looks like they won't be hiding much longer," he said. "You three can handle the rest, yes?"
Naruto straightened, bristling. "Like you even have to ask!"
"Yes," I said at the same time, equally automatic.
My whole body ached. My chakra reserves felt like someone had wrung them out and hung them up to dry. But the tag on Sasuke's sleeve still pulsed steady. The one on Naruto buzzed like an overexcited wasp.
We were banged up, low on tricks, and down to stubbornness and habit.
Which—if I was being honest—was where we lived most of the time anyway.
"Then I'll let you finish this," Kabuto said.
He stepped back, out of the immediate engagement zone, his gray chakra folding politely in on itself.
Sasuke didn't look away from the Rain genin in front of him.
Naruto wiped blood from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand, grinning a fox-sharp grin.
I exhaled, slow, and let my back hit the nearest tree.
"Okay," I whispered to my own bones. "Okay. Tags are done. Brain is soup. Let him have this one."
My eyes drifted to Sasuke again.
The Sharingan glowed dull red. His expression was flat, all the chaos from earlier fights locked away behind that cool, brittle calm.
He shifted his weight, left foot sliding forward in a stance I'd seen a hundred times in training—basic, solid, nothing flashy.
No mark. No borrowed monster power.
Just Sasuke.
The genjutsu field shivered one last time and then, finally, started to crack for good.
I let myself smile, just a little.
"Your turn," I murmured.
He moved.