The plateau sat at the top of a canyon switchback that had taken Tenten four hours to climb, and when she pulled herself over the lip of it she understood immediately why Stone had chosen this place.
It was a shelf of flat rock the size of a training ground, carved into the mountainside at an elevation where the wind was constant and the air was thin and the sky above was gray nothing. At the far end, three Iwa proctors sat behind a stone table with a ledger and expressions that suggested they had been watching genin crawl over that lip for the better part of a day and had stopped being impressed around hour six. Behind them, carved into the mountain wall, was a gate. The objective.
Between Tenten and the gate were twenty-three genin.
They stood in loose clusters across the plateau, grouped by village or alliance or simply proximity. Stone genin in their red and brown. A squad of Mist, dressed in grey, watching everything from the northern edge. Cloud, three of them, sitting against the rock wall looking tense. Rain nin. A few she couldn't place by uniform, smaller villages.
Tenten, as the only Leaf-nin, walked onto the plateau with her scroll on her back and several extra scrolls in her pouch, and she felt the attention shift to her instantly. Heads turned. People started whispering. Eyes found her headband and then looked at her bulging pouch.
She found a spot near the eastern edge, set her scroll down, and waited.
Over the next two hours, six more arrived. Twenty-nine total, plus Tenten. Thirty genin on a plateau with a gate that was not opening.
Then the lead proctor stood.
He was a thick man with a jaw like a brick and arms crossed over his chest, and when he spoke his voice carried across the plateau easily.
"Congratulations on arriving. The second stage of the Gauntlet is complete." He paused. "However. The finals of these Chunin Exams will be a tournament held before the Tsuchikage, the Earth Daimyo, and invited dignitaries from across the continent. They are not here yet. When they arrive, they expect to see fights worth watching." Another pause. "There are thirty of you. The finals will feature eight."
The plateau went quiet.
"You have until I say stop to decide among yourselves who those eight are."
He sat back down.
Nobody forfeited.
For a long stretched moment, thirty genin stood on a plateau in the thin cold air and looked at each other. Twenty-two people needed to not be standing when this was over. Alliances shifted in real time, eyes cutting sideways, hands drifting toward weapons pouches, the whole plateau wondering who was weak and who was strong and who could be taken first.
And every single person arrived at the same answer.
Tenten felt the killing intent hit her from every direction at once.
It came from Stone and Cloud mostly. The others caught on to the others staring at the Leaf girl and turned their attention to her as well. After all, hostility aimed elsewhere was better than hostility aimed at one's self. A wave of hostile focus that pressed against her skin like heat from an open furnace. Twenty-nine people on this plateau, and she was the only one wearing a Leaf headband, and the girl standing on this rock with buns in her hair was the closest thing to payback any Stone and Cloud shinobi would ever get.
Lee, Tenten thought, and couldn't decide whether to curse him or thank him. You strong idiot. You went to Sand and kicked half the continent in the teeth, and now I'm standing on a mountain in Stone Country and every genin from here to Cloud wants my head because of you.
So thanks for that. And also damn you for that.
She took a breath. Let it out.
But also, thanks for helping me become strong enough to handle it.
She made the first move.
Tenten's hands came together and the two scrolls at her sides hit the ground in the same motion, upright, already spinning, and the hand signs completed before the first Stone genin finished drawing his kunai.
"Twin Rising Dragons!"
The scrolls shot upward, spiraling around each other in twin columns of smoke shaped like coiling serpents, and Tenten leaped between them and the sky above the plateau turned to steel.
Weapons poured out of the scrolls in a torrent. Kunai, shuriken, senbon, axes, swords, sickles, chains, weighted darts, everything she owned and everything she had ever sealed, a downpour of sharpened metal that covered the entire plateau in overlapping fields of death. Her hands moved in a blur, each finger sending a weapon on its trajectory, some straight, some arcing, some trailing wire for redirection, and the sheer volume of it turned the air into something no one could stand in.
The first wave of genin who had been moving toward her caught the full of it. A Stone genin took a kunai through the shoulder and a senbon through the thigh and went down screaming. A Rain nin deflected two shuriken with his own blade and the third one he didn't see took him in the side. A Mist kunoichi threw up a water wall and caught a dozen blades in it, but the axe that came through the gap beside the wall buried itself in her teammate's chest and dropped him on his back.
Several down in her first move. Some dead, some injured, some crawling for the edge of the plateau with steel in places steel should not be.
The ones who survived the initial rain were the ones who were fast enough to scatter or skilled enough to block. They fanned out across the plateau, and Tenten landed in the center of the space they'd vacated, her scrolls still orbiting her in slow spirals.
A group of Stone genin, six of them, reformed to her left. A Mist swordsman circled her right. The Cloud trio held the far edge, waiting, watching, letting others test her first.
One of the Stone genin, a big one with earth-dark skin, pointed at her.
"She's one girl! Rush her and it's over!"
Four of them charged.
Tenten pulled a fuma shuriken from her scroll and threw it. The four Stone genin saw it coming and two of them dodged and two of them raised guards because a single shuriken was not enough to stop them.
Tenten made three hand signs.
The shuriken tripled in size.
It went from big to giant and it hit the two who had raised their guards and did not stop. The first one it caught across the torso at waist height and the blade went through him and kept spinning and the second one behind him died the same way, the shuriken carrying enough force and mass to bisect both of them before it buried itself in the rock wall at the plateau's edge with a sound like a thunderclap.
The two who had dodged stopped running. They looked at what was left of their comrades on the stone. One of them vomited. The other turned and sprinted for the edge of the plateau and threw himself off it, choosing the canyon over the leaf girl.
The Mist swordsman suddenly came in from her right, an overhead slash aimed to split her in half. Tenten sidestepped it by a hand's width, let the blade pass her ear, and caught his sword arm with a length of ninja wire she'd planted since the Twin Rising Dragons. The wire wrapped his wrist once, twice, and she yanked him off balance and past her, and while he stumbled she put a kunai through the base of his skull from behind, dropping him.
"Get her!" someone screamed from the Stone clusters. "All of you! She's one person!"
A dozen, maybe more, everyone who was left except the Cloud trio and a handful who had pressed themselves against the mountain wall and decided they wanted no part of this.
Three of the Stone genin, the ones who had survived the weapon rain, landed together and their hands moved through signs in unison. Earth chakra surged through their bodies, and the rock below responded. Three massive dragon heads erupted from the stone, jaws open, roaring forward in a combined jutsu that none of them could have performed alone but together created a wall of living stone screaming toward Tenten from three angles at once.
Tenten pulled an empty scroll from her pouch, unrolled it in a single snap of her wrist, and held it in front of her with both hands.
"Enclosing Jutsu!"
The three stone dragons hit the scroll and vanished into it. The paper glowed, the ink flared, and all three dragons, their momentum, their mass, their chakra, sealed into the parchment in an instant. The scroll bulged and Tenten spun on her heel and aimed it back at the three genin who had created it.
"Release!"
The dragons came back out.
All three of them, still roaring, still charging, pointed directly at the people who had made them. The three Stone genin had no time to dodge their own jutsu. The first dragon hit the leftmost genin and drove him across the plateau and off the edge. The second caught the middle one in the chest and crushed him into the rock beneath it. The third one the last genin managed to partially dodge, but the dragon's jaw clipped his leg and spun him across the stone and into the wall with a crack that meant he wasn't getting up.
The plateau was getting quieter. Fewer people standing. Fewer people willing to try.
But the ones still coming were angrier.
A mixed group, Stone and Rain and a few she couldn't identify, maybe eight of them, spread wide and came from every direction at once. They'd learned. No bunching. No straight charges. They came in pairs from four angles, some with jutsu building, some with blades, trying to overwhelm her through coverage.
Tenten unsealed a kanabo. It came out of the scroll already in her hands, a spiked iron war club as long as she was tall and three times as heavy as any weapon a girl her size should be able to lift. But Tenten had trained under Might Guy. Tenten had trained under and with Rock Lee. Tenten had spent years building the kind of deceptive strength that made people underestimate her.
She planted her feet, gripped the kanabo with both hands, and swung like a top.
The first pair came from her left. The kanabo caught the lead one across the ribs. He left his feet and flew sideways into his partner and the two of them hit the plateau like thrown sandbags, the front one's chest caved, the second one's arm broke beneath both their weights.
The kanabo came back around from the right and a Rain nin who had been mid-lunge caught the spiked head across his shoulder and collarbone and he came apart in a spray of red and went down in pieces.
Two more from behind. Tenten spun the kanabo overhead like it weighed nothing, brought it down in a vertical backward arc, and the impact crater it left in the plateau where the two had been standing was a foot deep. They had dodged, barely, throwing themselves sideways. One rolled to her feet and started to form hand signs. Tenten closed the distance in two steps, dropping her weapon and driving her elbow into the girl's stomach and then struck with a spinning windmill kick that sent her flying up and away.
The last one of the eight looked at Tenten and then looked at the plateau now littered with his allies, and reasonably decided that this Leaf girl was out of his league.
"I forfeit…" He said, walking away with his hands raised.
The Cloud trio hadn't moved from the far wall. They had watched the entire thing with the understanding that fighting Tenten right now would cost them at minimum two of their three, and the Cloud genin were not going to chance that.
"ENOUGH!"
The lead proctor was on his feet. His face was red and his voice hit the plateau like a hammer.
"ENOUGH! STOP!"
Tenten stopped. She stood in the center of the plateau with a bloodied halberd and longaxe in her hand. Her hair slightly loose from the buns, sweat on her brow and her neck, her breathing elevated but controlled. Covered in blood but none of it her own.
The proctor looked at the plateau. He counted. What had been thirty genin was now a field of casualties. Bodies broken, bleeding, unconscious, dead. The ones still standing were pressed against the walls or had forfeited or who had been smart enough not to engage.
"Preliminary matches," the proctor said through his teeth. "We will hold preliminary matches to determine the eight finalists. This free-for-all is concluded." He looked directly at Tenten and the look was pure venom. "All genin will stand down immediately."
Tenten began walking around picking up her tools. There was no point leaving free weapons for enemies to use. She had quite a few glares and hostile looks aimed at herself but she had enough tact to ignore them.
She walked across the plateau, through the scattered bodies and the groaning wounded and the corpses, and she walked to where Kakashi was leaning against the mountain wall just beyond the plateau's edge with his hands in his pockets and his headband still covering his left eye.
She stopped in front of him, put one hand on her hip, tilted her head, and flashed him a V-sign with her free hand.
"How was that?" she asked, smiling brightly.
Kakashi looked at her. He looked at the plateau behind her. He looked at the bodies. He looked at the proctor, who was currently screaming at his subordinates to organize medical response. He looked back at Tenten's beaming face.
He covered his own face with one hand.
"You know," he said, muffled by his palm, "when Guy asked me to escort you, he told me you were the cutest one on his team."
"I am the cute one especially when compared to Lee and Neji."
"The cute one is no less scary than the others it seems."
"They started it. I just finished it." She was still smiling.
Kakashi dropped his hand and sighed. Even the most innocent-looking one was a terror. Guy didn't raise students. He raised monsters.
Behind Tenten, across the plateau, the surviving genin and their jonin escorts who had gathered at the edges were glaring at her. At the Leaf girl who had just gone through their students like it was nothing, who was standing in front of a Konoha jonin doing a peace sign like she'd won a prize at a festival.
Hands drifted toward weapons. Killing intent began building from multiple directions, the accumulated fury of multiple villages who had just watched a single Leaf kunoichi kill their students and loved ones.
Kakashi felt it, the atmosphere around him changing instantly to something serious.
He reached up and lifted his headband.
The Sharingan stared out across the plateau. Three tomoe, spinning lazily, and Kakashi's posture did not change, his hands did not leave his pockets, but the eye moved across the gathered jonin and genin one by one and the message was as clear as anything he had ever communicated without speaking.
Decide if this is worth it.
The killing intent guttered. Hands moved away from weapons. Eyes dropped. One by one, the jonin escorts turned away, pulled their surviving genin closer, and focused on the proctors who were now barking orders about preliminary brackets and medical teams and a timeline for the finals.
Kakashi lowered his headband back over the Sharingan.
"You did well. Guy would be proud." He told Tenten.
Tenten's smile softened. The V-sign came down.
"I still have a lot of tricks left." she said. "It was a piece of cake."
"I noticed." Kakashi's eye curved. "That's the smartest thing you did today."
The proctors finished their count. Medical teams moved across the plateau. The mountain wind picked up and carried the smell of blood and dust south toward the valleys.
The second stage of Iwagakure's Chunin Exams was over, and Tenten of Konohagakure, had passed flawlessly.