The Demon Desert was trying to kill them.
It had been trying since they stepped through the gate. The heat was a disgusting weight that pressed against their skin and squeezed the moisture out of them with every breath. Then the terrain, cracked hardpan that shifted to loose sand that shifted to jagged rock formations that tore at their sandals. Then the wildlife, sand vipers that struck from beneath the surface, ant lions whose pit traps dotted the landscape like open mouths in the earth.
None of it slowed them down.
Mai spotted the vipers through her glasses before they were within striking distance. She called them out and the team skirted around them without breaking stride. The ant lion pits were visible from above, funnel-shaped depressions in the sand that Mai flagged from fifty meters out. The heat was brutal but Karura had water sealed in her storage scrolls, along with cactus fruit that cooled the body and replenished what the desert took.
"Food ahead," Mai said, pointing northwest. "Some kind of lizard colony near those rocks. Big ones. Enough meat for a week if we wanted it."
"We don't need a week, idiot." Pakura said. "We're finishing this today."
"I'm just saying. If anyone wants fresh-grilled lizard..."
"Nobody but you wants fresh-grilled lizard, Mai."
"Karura, do you want fresh-grilled lizard?"
"I have honey rolls, sorry…" Karura said.
"Honey rolls beat lizards, I guess." Mai sadly conceded.
They moved fast. Mai's glasses gave them a straight line to the tower, no guesswork, no wrong turns, no wasted energy on detours. While other teams were navigating by the sun and the stars and their best guess at cardinal directions, Team Ebizo was running on a direct heading with perfect intelligence.
By the afternoon of the first day, they'd covered eight of the fifteen kilometers. At this pace, they'd reach the tower by morning. Ahead of schedule. Ahead of everyone.
Then the sandstorm approached.
Mai saw it coming. A wall of brown and red on the western horizon, stretching from the ground to the sky, moving east at a speed that turned the air in front of it into a howling vacuum.
"Sandstorm!" Mai shouted over the growing wind. "Big one! Coming from the west! We've got maybe three minutes!"
Pakura looked around. Flat desert in every direction. No rock formations. No canyons. No natural shelter of any kind. Just open sand and the approaching wall of red that was going to strip their skin off if they stood in it.
"There's nowhere to hide!" Pakura shouted.
Karura pulled Million's scroll from her hip and unsealed the puppet. It appeared in a puff of smoke, four arms spread, grinning face aimed at the approaching storm.
"Get close to me," Karura said. "Both of you. Tight."
"What are you doing?" Pakura asked.
"Trust me."
Mai didn't hesitate. She pressed against Karura's side. Pakura hesitated for exactly one second before the wind screamed louder and she pressed in from the other side.
Karura's fingers moved. Million's four arms rose and its wrappings unfurled, thick bands of treated cloth that stretched outward from its torso like the petals of a flower opening in reverse. The wrappings extended, lengthened, layered over each other, and then closed around the three of them and the puppet itself in a sealed cocoon.
Darkness. The wrappings sealed over their heads, locking into a dome of overlapping layers with Million's frame acting as the skeleton that held the structure rigid. The puppet's four arms were braced outward, pressing against the wrappings from inside, keeping the cocoon from collapsing inward. Its grinning face was six inches from Pakura's nose.
"This is literally the worst thing ever…" Pakura commented.
"I think it's better than the sandstorm." Karura said.
"Is it?"
The storm hit.
The sound was immense. Sand hammered the wrappings like a thousand fists, the wind screaming against the layered cloth, trying to find a gap, trying to tear it open. The cocoon shuddered. Million's frame creaked. Karura fed chakra into the puppet and the bandages, reinforcing them.
Inside, three genin sat in the dark, pressed shoulder to shoulder.
"Is it just me or does it feel like we're inside his stomach?" Mai asked.
"Please stop talking with your hot breath." Pakura demanded.
"I'm just saying. We're literally wrapped inside a puppet. Karura, is this what Million feels like on the inside?"
"He's never had anyone inside him before," Karura said. "This is new for him."
"It's my first time being inside a puppet too, so I guess we have something in common, huh?"
Mai shifted her weight and her elbow pressed into Pakura's ribs. Pakura shoved back. Mai's foot ended up on Karura's lap. Karura politely moved it.
"Get your nasty feet away from me," Pakura demanded, pushing Mai's other foot away from her leg.
"My feet aren't even near you anymore! That was Karura!"
"Sorry..." Karura apologized.
"Don't apologize for her, Karura." Pakura focused her rage at Mai. "This is her fault anyway!"
"How is this my fault? Karura's the one who put us in the puppet!"
"You're the reason everything goes wrong!"
"That doesn't even make sense!"
Karura sat between them, hands together, feeding chakra to Million's frame, smiling behind her scarf. "You two realize we're stuck in here until the storm passes, right?"
"I don't even know why I engage with this meat head..." Pakura sighed.
"Because you love me." Mai made a kissy noise in the dark. Pakura couldn't see it but she could hear it and that was worse.
Pakura growled in irritation.
The storm raged for forty minutes. When it passed, Karura released Million's wrappings and they unfurled outward, letting in a rush of cool air and late afternoon light. The three of them spilled out of the cocoon like seeds from a pod, sand-dusted and stiff and blinking.
Million stood in the sand, wrappings twirling back around its arms, grinning at nothing. It was covered in a layer of red sand but otherwise undamaged. Karura brushed it off and patted its head.
"Good job, Million."
Million leaned into the pat, seemingly pleased at the contact.
"That's so weird." Pakura said.
"It's my first-born."
"That does not help your case…"
"He has feelings too, you know?"
"It absolutely does not."
Mai was laughing. "All puppeteers talk to their puppets like that."
Karura sealed Million back into the scroll.
"Never again." Pakura promised, brushing sand out of her hair.
"It worked, didn't it?" Karura said.
"Never. Again."
They ran even faster to make up for lost time.
The terrain after the storm was different. The sand had been redistributed, dunes shifted, landmarks erased. But Mai's glasses didn't care about landmarks. She locked onto the tower's position and they adjusted course without stopping.
On the way, there were some vultures circling them.
Mai spotted them first, obviously. Dark shapes circling overhead, riding the thermals that rose from the cooling sand. Big ones. Wingspans wider than a person was tall, with hooked beaks and talons that looked capable of carrying off a small deer.
"We're not dead yet!" Mai said, looking up at them. "Do they not know that?"
The first one dove, not caring about that in the slightest.
It came screaming down from the thermal, wings folded, talons extended, aimed at Pakura's head. Pakura didn't even look up. A Scorch orb the size of an apple left her hand and hit the vulture in the chest. The bird vaporized mid-dive, leaving a puff of feathers and the smell of burnt meat.
The second vulture banked away from its dead companion's remains and circled wider.
The third one was braver. It dove at Mai.
Mai caught it.
She leaped straight up, met the vulture at the apex of its dive, grabbed it by the throat with one hand, and landed with it pinned against the sand. It thrashed, wings beating, talons scraping at her arms. She held it at arm's length and looked at it with genuine curiosity.
"These things are huge! Should we eat it?"
"No." Pakura and Karura said simultaneously.
Karura then added, "Vultures should not be eaten under any circumstance. Even if you were starving to death, you'd be better off trying to eat sand. It'd be way safer and cleaner."
Mai shrugged and threw the vulture. It tumbled through the air, righted itself with a furious screech, and flew away. The remaining circling vultures took the hint and dispersed.
"The wildlife here is so dumb sometimes." Mai said.
They walked on. The tower grew closer. The sun dropped. The desert cooled.
Then Mai stopped.
Her head turned sharply to the southwest. Through the glasses, three chakra signatures were moving toward the tower on a converging path. Close. Maybe half a kilometer away.
"There's a team ahead," Mai said. "Three of them. Southwest. They're heading for the tower too."
"Can you tell who they are?" Karura asked.
"One of them has a puppet scroll. One has a fan. The third I got nothing on them." Mai said.
"Well it doesn't matter. Let's continue to the tower and get out of this desert." Pakura said.
"Ehh..." Mai didn't sound like she was on board with that idea.
They looked at each other. Pakura glared at Mai. Mai gave a cheeky grin. They were close to the tower. They didn't need to fight. But the proctor had said performance would be evaluated, and reaching the tower without a single fight might not demonstrate what the evaluators wanted to see.
"Let me fight them. I'll be quick!" Mai said without asking for her team's permission. She was already running toward three enemy combatants half a kilometer away, alone, with her fists wrapped and her glasses glinting.
"Mai, you idiot! The mission was to reach the tower! Not waste time with losers!" Pakura shouted after her before stifling an enraged shout. Her frustrated gaze turned toward Karura. "Do you think we'll fail if we reach the tower without her?"
"We should wait for her to return." Karura had a helpless smile on her face. "It wouldn't look good on us to be the first team to arrive and then we're missing a teammate…"
Karura watched Mai's silhouette shrink against the desert floor. She thought it was risky. Recklessness and a lack of information were two key things that got shinobi killed. Weren't they evaluating if they had what it took to become Chunin? Karura didn't think Chunin ran toward enemies without knowing their capabilities. Especially if they didn't have to engage with them either…
Torune saw her coming from two hundred meters out.
A single figure, small, moving across the open sand toward their position at a fast pace. No teammates visible behind her. Just a girl with bandaged fists and glasses that caught the last light of the setting sun.
"One person," he said. "Approaching from the east."
Ryusa looked up from the canteen she'd been drinking from. Her ponytail was caked with sand and her freckles were buried under a layer of sunburn. "Just one?"
"Just one."
"That's weird. Are they stupid or is it a distraction?"
Hayate adjusted his glasses and squinted at the approaching figure. "It's a girl. Maybe she's coming to talk. There was that one team who traded supplies with us. Maybe she wants to do the same."
"I can see that. But still who approaches a three-man team alone? And why is she running at us?"
Torune studied the figure. Small. Young. Bandaged fists. No visible weapons besides a pouch on her hip.
"It's one of Team Ebizo's members," Torune said. "The taijutsu girl."
Ryusa's expression changed. "The one who can't use ninjutsu?"
"That's her."
"Then why is smiling at us like that?"
"I don't know. But stay ready in case she isn't friendly."
They formed up. Torune moved to the center, his puppet scroll in hand. Ryusa took the forward position, her fan already off her back and unfolding. Hayate stood behind them, his hands loose at his sides, ready to weave signs.
Mai stopped fifty meters away. She looked at the three of them. The fan user in front. The puppeteer in the middle. The wind user in the back. A balanced squad designed to handle threats at every range.
She cracked her neck.
"Hey," she said. "We can do this the hard way or the easy way. Your choice."
Ryusa looked back at Torune. Torune shook his head. They weren't surrendering to a single genin.
"You don't know how happy I am to see that." Mai grinned.
She charged.
Ryusa was ready. Her fan swept open to full spread and she swung. One moon. A blast of concentrated wind that ripped across the sand toward Mai, tearing a furrow in the desert floor. The air screamed.
Mai sidestepped it. A dodge that put her exactly outside the blast's path while maintaining her forward momentum.
Ryusa swung again. Two moons. Wider, more powerful, a crescent of wind that covered a ten-meter spread. This one, she shouldn't be able to dodge by luck.
Mai flipped. Her body arced sideways through the air, tucking and spinning, her trajectory carrying her through the narrow gap between the crescent's edge and the ground. The wind blades screamed past her, one above, one below, close enough to pull at her shirt.
Ryusa's eyes went wide. She swung again. Three moons. Full power. A wall of cutting wind that covered the entire width of the approach, ground to sky, left to right.
Mai didn't dodge this one.
She ran straight into it.
Her right hand came up, fingers extended, knife-edge forward. Chakra pushed from every point in her palm as she thrust her hand into the wall of wind.
The wind split.
It parted around her palm like cloth being cut by a razor. The deadly crescent divided into two halves that screamed past her on either side, the cutting edges deflected. Sand erupted behind her in twin lines where the divided wind hit the ground.
Ryusa stumbled backward. "She, she cut through it?!"
Mai was through. Fifty meters closed to twenty. To ten.
Torune's puppet appeared. It burst from its scroll in a cloud of smoke, angular and armed with retractable blades. It lunged at Mai, two arms extending poisoned spike-tipped forearms aimed at her chest.
Mai didn't engage it. She planted her left foot and launched upward, flipping over the puppet's lunging body, her legs clearing the bladed arms by inches. The puppet's momentum carried it forward beneath her and she landed behind it.
Hayate was directly ahead. He'd been weaving through hand signs since Mai started her charge, a wind jutsu that he was seconds from completing. His hands came together for the final seal.
Mai's foot hit him in the chest.
It was a flying kick, launched from the flip's landing, her entire body's momentum channeled through her heel. But it wasn't just force. Chakra pulsed from the tenketsu in her foot on contact, piercing through Hayate's chest into the pathway system beneath.
He went sliding across the sand, ten meters, fifteen, his arms dropping to his sides. The jutsu died. His hands fell from the seal position and hung limp. He hit the ground on his back and stared at the sky with an expression of total incomprehension.
His chakra wasn't responding. The pathway that connected his core to his hands had been disrupted. He could feel his body but he couldn't make it do what he wanted.
"I can't use my jutsu!" Hayate shouted. His voice cracked with panic. "Don't let her touch you!"
"What?!" Ryusa cried out in shock. She turned to look at Hayate, her fan still raised, her attention pulled away from Mai for one fatal second.
Mai was already behind her.
The low kick swept Ryusa's legs out from under her. The fan user fell to the sand with a startled cry, her fan slipping from her grip, and Mai was past her before she hit the ground.
Torune's puppet came screaming back. The puppeteer had redirected it the moment Mai flipped over it, and now the puppet was bearing down on her from behind, a poisoned metal spike extending from its right forearm, aimed at Mai's spine.
Mai spun. Her hand caught the puppet's forearm and pushed it sideways, deflecting the spike's trajectory. Her foot came up and drove into the puppet's torso, launching it backward through the air toward its owner.
Torune abandoned his threads and dove sideways as his own puppet sailed past him. He rolled to his feet, grabbed Ryusa by the arm, and pulled her up. The two of them ran to Hayate, who was sitting in the sand trying to make his hands work.
Three genin. One with a slightly damaged chakra network. One with her fan on the ground ten meters away. One without a puppet.
They looked at Mai. She stood between them and their scattered equipment, barely breathing hard, her glasses catching the last of the sunset.
The girl who couldn't use ninjutsu or genjutsu. The one everyone called the cripple. The hanger-on. The weakest link of Team Ebizo.
She'd dismantled their entire team in about fifteen seconds.
Torune's jaw tightened. He looked at Ryusa. At Hayate. At the gap between what they'd expected and what they'd received. He understood what they needed to do.
"We're getting out of here." he said.
"But..." Ryusa started.
"Now."
He pulled Hayate's arm over his shoulder. Ryusa grabbed the other side. Together, they hauled their teammate to his feet and ran. South, away from the tower, away from Team Ebizo's position, away from the girl standing in the sand who'd just shown them that the gap between genin wasn't measured in rank.
It was measured in everything else.
Mai walked back to her team with a grin that could have lit the desert at midnight.
Karura and Pakura stood where she'd left them, watching her approach. Karura's hands were clasped together. Pakura's arms were folded.
"Piece of cake, baby." Mai flashed a peace sign.
"Thanks for wasting our time on a meaningless fight that did absolutely nothing." Pakura refused to look impressed.
"I needed that little stretch. We've been doing nothing but running through the desert this whole time and I haven't punched anything!"
"If you needed a punch, I could've helped you at any time." Pakura told her.
"We both know that's not what I meant."
"I'm glad you're unharmed." Karura interrupted the two.
"Of course I'm unharmed. Do you know who you're talking to, Puppet Gal?" Mai struck a pose, one foot forward, fist raised, glasses gleaming. "The Sand's Most Dangerous Devil!"
"That's the title you want?" Pakura scoffed.
"It's a hundred times better than anything you could come up with."
"Ha!" Pakura sarcastically laughed. "My title will be a thousand times better than yours."
"Oh yeah, what is it then? Sand Cactus?! Cactus-headed Scorch Girl?"
"You wanna go, four-eyes?! I'll put you in the sand where you belong!" Pakura exploded.
"Anytime! I never back down from a challenge!" Mai glared at her, ready to fight.
"Girls, please. We have an exam to finish. Let's save it for later, okay?" Karura politely requested.
They both looked at her. At the gentle smile. At the younger girl who was far scarier than she acted. If it weren't for the fact that both of them knew that Karura could definitely stop them both, they would've certainly come to blows at this very moment.
"Fine." Pakura scoffed..
"Fine." Mai did the same.
"Thank you…" Karura said.
They turned north toward the tower and ran. The tower rose against the stars, a dark pillar at the center of the wasteland, and they reached it before midnight.
Three genin. One day. Fifteen kilometers of the most hostile terrain in the Land of Wind.
They walked through the tower's entrance and didn't look back.