The smoke bomb went off before anyone was fully seated.
It detonated somewhere near the front of the room and the grey-white cloud that rolled from it crossed the desks in under two seconds, thick enough to sting the eyes of the genin closest to it. Several people covered their faces. Others straightened in their chairs and went for weapons they were not going to draw, because drawing weapons in a room full of exam proctors on the first day of the Chunin Exams was a decision that would end a career before it started. The smarter ones simply waited.
The smoke settled.
In its place stood several high-ranked shinobi in a line, and at the center of the line, a large man with a scarred face stared at them.
"Thanks for waiting." He greeted. "I am Morino Ibiki, the examiner for the Chunin Selection Exam's first test."
His eyes moved to the sound ninjas. "Hidden Sound. Stop doing as you please before the exam starts. Do you want to fail before it begins?"
"I apologize." The leader of the group responded. "This is our first time. We got carried away."
"Bah." Ibiki did not appear interested in the apology. He turned back to the room. "Here's a good opportunity to establish this while everyone is paying attention. There will be no fighting without permission from the examiner. Even with permission, killing your opponent will not be tolerated. Anyone who disobeys me fails immediately." His eyes moved across the rows of desks. "Is that clear?"
A murmur ran through the room. Somewhere behind Lee, someone said quietly that the exam was sounding easy. They were distributed to classrooms and reassigned to seats. The proctors moved throughout the classroom. Lee found his assigned seat, sat down, and straightened the test paper placed in front of him without turning it over.
"Do not turn your tests over." Ibiki moved to the front of the room. "Listen to what I'm about to say. There are important rules for this first test. I'll write them on the board while I explain, but questions will not be permitted, so pay attention now."
He picked up a piece of chalk.
"The first rule. You will all start with ten points. The test is made up of ten questions. Each question is worth one point. This test uses a subtraction system. If you answer correctly, you keep the point. If you miss three questions, you lose three points and finish with seven."
"The second rule. This is a team test. Whether you pass or not will be determined by the combined score of your teammates. Each three-person team competes to preserve as many of their initial thirty combined points as possible."
"Wait a second!" Sakura's hand shot up from somewhere in the middle of the room. "I understand the points system, but why is it a team test?!"
Ibiki looked at her with the patience of a mountain looking at weather.
"Shut up, you don't have the right to question me. There is a reason for this, be quiet and listen."
Sakura placed her hand back down.
"The third rule." Ibiki smiled for the first time. It was not a warm smile. "It is the most important one. During the exam, anyone caught by the proctors engaged in sneaky activities, specifically cheating, will have two points deducted per offense."
"Those who lose all their initial points during the exam will be asked to leave." Ibiki's eyes were still moving. "We will be watching you."
Several of the chunin proctors leaned against the wall with malicious grins on their faces.
"And the final rule. Those who lose all initial points during the test, and those who answer no questions correctly, will fail, along with their two teammates."
Everyone took in the rules as the test began.
Lee turned his test over.
The first question was a cryptogram. He read it twice, identified the cipher pattern in the second pass, and decoded it with a pencil and margin space in three minutes. He moved on. The second question required field knowledge that the Academy's standard curriculum did not cover, which told him what the test was actually assessing. Not what you had memorized in a classroom, but what you had been paying attention to out in the world, on missions, in situations where the information mattered. He answered it from the Sugi village mission and the river encounter and every after-action conversation Guy-sensei had run with them since graduation.
Third question. Fourth.
The chunin were watching them like hawks. Adding extra pressure on them to either be completely confident in their method of cheating or to prevent them from even trying in the first place and to fail in silence. These questions were indeed very difficult. If you didn't have much field experience as a shinobi and paid attention in the Academy, it was pretty much impossible.
Lee wasn't really concerned about the first exam. Both Tenten and Neji were incredibly smart! He himself wasn't a slouch either. As a man who vowed to reach the pinnacle of Taijutsu and as a shinobi, Lee couldn't allow himself to slack mentally either. All, in all, he doubted his teammates would struggle with this test. He finished it after a couple of minutes without even needing to set up some elaborate scheme to cheat without getting caught like everyone else seemed to be doing.
Then suddenly he heard her voice, barely. A breath more than a whisper. Tenten knew his hearing well enough by now to use it. He kept his pencil moving and listened.
She needed one answer. She could reach him, she told him, if he adjusted his headband. Lee wrapped his headband from his waist and tied it over his forehead before shifting the metal plate fractionally. She whispered a thank you and he grinned, stopping himself from throwing a thumbs up in her direction. He knew that she would help him out of course if he ever needed her help.
A kunai hit a test paper three rows back.
"Number twenty-three, fail!" The proctor's voice shocked some of the genin. The genin who had been caught looked at the kunai pinning his paper to the desk with despair. "Thirty-one, fail!"
Names and numbers came steadily across the next hour.
A genin two rows to Lee's right came to his feet suddenly, his chair scraping back.
"Do you have proof that I cheated five times?! Are you watching all-"
The chunin proctor nearest to him moved. It was not a long movement. The genin's back hit the wall, the proctor's forearm across his chest, and the proctor said very quietly into the noise the impact had made: "Among chunin, we are the elite assembled to watch over this exam. We have not missed anything you have done." A pause. "This strength is our proof."
The genin was escorted out with his teammates.
"Okay." Ibiki moved to the front again. The room's attention contracted toward him. "We will now move to the tenth question."
Confused noise from twenty directions at once.
"Before we get to it, I have added rules for this question." He let that sit for a moment. "The rules of desperation." Another pause. "For the tenth question, you must first decide whether you will take it."
"Choose?!" A girl near the front. "What happens if we don't?!"
"If you choose not to, your points go to zero. You fail, along with your teammates."
"Then obviously we'll take it!" Someone from the back.
"And the second added rule." Ibiki's smile returned. "If you choose to take the tenth question and answer incorrectly, that person loses the right to take the Chunin Exam again. Ever."
The room went somewhere that silence alone could not describe.
"What kind of rule is that?!" The voice was sharp and young and genuinely outraged. "There are people here who have taken this before! You're telling me they could be banned permanently?!"
"You were unlucky." Ibiki looked at the speaker without apology. "This year the rules are mine." He looked back at the room. "But I am giving you an out. Those who are not confident can choose not to take the tenth question and try again next year." He spread his hands. "Now. Those who do not wish to take the tenth question, raise your hand. Once your number is confirmed, you and your teammates are free to leave."
The first hand went up almost immediately. A genin near the window, perhaps sixteen, with the look of someone who had thought carefully and arrived at the conclusion that a guaranteed chance next year was worth more than a permanent ban now. Lee didn't blame him. Perhaps if he lacked confidence in himself, maybe he would've chosen the same in another life.
He had not trained for as long as he did. He had not gone on missions and studied and pushed himself past every limit he knew just to give up at a question. A simple question of all things. Whatever was at the end of this test had not tried to kill him yet.
"I won't take it!" Another hand. Another team's worth of points disappearing from the room. "I'm sorry, Genhai, Inoho..."
"Number fifty, fail! One-thirty, one-eleven — fail!"
The departures came in clusters, the anxiety of watching others leave feeding the anxiety of those who stayed. Lee watched the room thin and thought it was better that those type of ninjas left. Every team that left was a team that was certainly not ready. It also helped eliminate any challenges going forward.
"Me too."
"And me."
"Sorry, guys—"
"DON'T UNDERESTIMATE ME!"
The desk that Naruto's palm hit rang across the room.
"I will not run!" He was on his feet, his orange presence impossible to miss in the thinning crowd, his blue eyes meeting Ibiki. "I'll take it! Even if I'm a genin forever! I'll will my way to becoming Hokage regardless, so I don't care about some exam! I am not afraid!"
Lee could respect that type of thinking. He was no different during his academy days. If the academy didn't make him a genin, he'd become an academy student so splendid that the hokage would have no other choice but to make him a ninja.
Ibiki looked at Naruto.
"I will ask you once more. Your life is riding on this decision. This is your last chance to quit."
Naruto stared back at him with utter knuckleheadedness.
"I never go back on my words," he said. "That's my ninja way."
Lee smiled at the desk in front of him. He had never thought much of Naruto Uzumaki. But he could certainly respect him as a shinobi and as a person.
"To everyone remaining-" Ibiki looked around the room at the seventy-eight genin still seated. His expression had changed. "-congratulations. You have passed the first test."
The noise that erupted was not a cheer. It was the sound of a room full of people who were very confused.
"Wait-" Sakura's hand was up again. "We pass? What about the tenth question? It didn't even-"
"There never was such a thing." Ibiki answered. "Or you could say the two choices were the tenth question."
"Then what were the first nine for?!"
This came from the sand village's direction, the girl with the fan, her voice sharp with relieved frustration.
"They were not pointless. They served their intended purpose." Ibiki clasped his hands behind his back. "They tested your individual information-gathering ability. Think about the structure of it. This was a team test, which meant every mistake had consequences for your teammates as well as yourself. That pressure existed to make each of you feel what it costs when the person beside you fails. As for the questions themselves, they were not the kind a standard genin could answer from Academy material alone. Most of you arrived at the obvious conclusion: you had to cheat." He looked out over the room. "That was the premise. Two chunin who knew all the answers were seeded in the crowd as your targets."
"Man, it was hard finding them," someone said.
"I saw right through it," Naruto announced.
Several people looked at him. Nobody said anything.
"Those who cheated poorly failed," Ibiki began to untie his headband before revealing his horribly scarred, burnt, and drilled scalp. This drew several gasps and horrified looks among the genin. "Because information is sometimes worth more than a life, and on real missions, shinobi risk everything to obtain it. If the enemy notices you gathering it, you cannot trust that what you gathered is accurate. The ability to gather information without being detected, to confirm the reliability of what you find, is a skill we needed to test. This is how we tested it."
He turned back to the room.
"The tenth question, however, was different. It was the true purpose of this test. Those two choices, take it or don't take it, were the hardest choices in this room." He let his eyes move across the faces of the genin who had stayed. "Imagine you are a chunin captain. Your mission is to steal a classified document. You do not know the number of guards, their skill levels, the traps, or the risk. You are told to go. Do you go?"
Silence.
"The answer," Ibiki said, "is that you go. Because there are missions you cannot refuse regardless of what you don't know. The ability to commit to something uncertain, to put everything on the line without a guarantee, that is what a chunin captain is asked to do every time a mission comes down from the Hokage." He looked at the row where several genin had departed. "Those who left because there is always next year made the choice that kept them safe. They made the choice that protects themselves. And that choice is the wrong one for someone who is going to lead other shinobi through situations where there is no safe option."
He looked at Naruto briefly.
"Those of you who chose to stay answered the tenth question correctly." He bowed his head slightly. "You have cleared the entrance. The first test of the Chunin Exam is finished. I wish you luck."
"Hell yeah!" Naruto had both arms in the air. "Wish us-"
The window exploded inward.
Violently, glass shard flying through the window. A figure landed in the resulting silence with a banner unfurling before her like a flag being planted in conquered ground.
She looked around the room with the expression of someone who had been looking forward to this.
"You!" Her voice had a quality that suggested she was genuinely thrilled about being in this room with these people, which was an unusual quality for a person to have about a room of armed strangers. "No time for celebrating! I am the examiner for the second test!" Her purple hair caught the light from the open window behind her. "Mitarashi Anko! Now let's go! Follow me!"
Ibiki looked at her with the expression of a man who had worked with her before.
"Bad timing," he said.
Anko's gaze swept the room, counting quickly.
"Seventy-eight?!" She turned on Ibiki with an accusation already assembled. "You left twenty-six teams?! The test was too easy this time!"
"There are a lot of outstanding ones this year," Ibiki replied, without inflection.
"Bah." She looked at the room again. The delight had returned, sharpened slightly by the new information. "Fine. I'll cut them in half in the second test." She turned back to the door, her hand raised in a follow-me gesture that left no room for interpretation. "I'll explain everything once we've changed locations. Move!"
Lee was already pushing back his chair.
Whatever she was about to show them, he was ready for it. He had been ready since the exam began. Probably, if he was being honest, since long before that.