Will of Foxfire 14

Chapter 14
Into the Forest

Hinata was a failure.  She was a disappointment.  She was worthless.

So why had he done that?

She'd noticed him before.  Two years ago, when he'd first been introduced to the class as a new kid (something quite unheard of) he'd been very conspicuous.  But, instead of blending cleanly into the rest of the class, he'd kept doing things that stuck out.  There were his attempts at catching up to his peers and all his spectacular failures at doing so.  There were all his loud boasts and ridiculous declarations.  There were his paint bombs and--

"Hey, Hinata, come on!" Kiba called, making her jump.

The room was emptying of the genin that were advancing to the next stage and Hinata hurriedly got up and joined her two teammates: Kiba and Shino.

She admired her teammates.  Kiba was strong and his teamwork with his puppy, Akamaru, was amazing to watch.  Shino was clever and his subtle use of insects made him a dangerous opponent.  Even though they butted heads, they were excellent young shinobi with bright futures...and she felt so bad that she was always weighing them down.

I don't understand why father doesn't just seal me into the Branch Family and name Hanabi the heir to the clan, she thought as she followed her teammates out of the Academy and towards the next trial.  The Branch Family is where I belong.  Everyone knows it.  It is my fate, as Neji-nii-san would say.

Hinata grasped at her right hand with her left, where Naruto-san had touched her to prevent her from withdrawing.

He's a failure like me (only he was bright and loud where she was dark and quiet) so why does he still try?

***

Sakura was elated.  The first trial had been a breeze!  The genjutsu had been fairly obvious and she'd had no doubt that Sasuke-kun would've figured it out too, even if he didn't have his Sharingan.  Naruto had been her only worry, but he'd pulled through.  She could've done without his outburst at the end, but it was all in the past now.

I wonder what the next trial will be...  Sakura brushed aside some long strands of her pink hair as she and her teammates followed all of the other genin.  It shouldn't be too much harder than the first one.  I'm sure that whole "Forest of Death" thing was just to scare us.

The line of genin trekked farther and farther away from the Academy building, and the village itself.  They passed training ground after training ground.  And then after over an hour of jogging, they came to a fenced-off section of forest that had several different gates that she could see.

"Here we are!" Anko, the new proctor, cried gleefully.  "Welcome to the infamous training ground 44!"  She pointed over to a table set up off to the side and manned by some chuunin.  "Hurry up and sign your waivers and collect your boxes so that I can explain what you maggots are supposed to be doing!"

Waivers?  Sakura frowned.  We've already gotten our parents to sign permission slips.  What do we need waivers for?

Some genin from Kusa actually piped up and asked that question.

"The Forest of Death is a dangerous place and some of you will probably die," Anko shrugged casually.  "These waivers are so that your villages or your families can't throw a fit if they get a corpse back after the Trials."

That killed all the whispers in the crowd of genin as they dutifully signed their waivers and then each team received a small wooden box.

"Everybody got their boxes?  Break up into your teams!"  Once Anko saw that all the genin were clumped in their teams and listening, she smirked.  "Alright, this is a test of survival!  At the heart of this training ground is a tower.  You have five days to get your whole team there.  Each team starts with a box given out at random.  There are two kinds of boxes, and to gain entry to the tower a team needs to have one of each.  So that means..." The young female proctor grinned ferally.  "...You'll have to get the box that you don't have from some other team."

Sakura glanced down at their team's box.  It was made of wood and painted gray, except for a black dot on the lid.  The box wasn't very big--it was a little larger than her palm, but flat and light.  She thought about opening it, but the lid was taped to the box with seal-covered papers.

"Now, if the five days pass and you don't make it to the tower: you fail.  If you lose your box, or don't get the other box and go to the tower anyway: you fail.  If you open any of the boxes: you fail.  If you don't make it to the tower with the two boxes with your whole team: you fail.  If you die: you fail."  Anko put her hands on her hips and sneered at them.  "Any questions?"

"What are we supposed to do for food?" Chouji asked urgently.

"It's a survival test, kid," Anko snorted.  "There's plenty of stuff to hunt down and eat in there...berries, roots, critters, mushrooms...just watch out for the poisonous stuff.  Now any other stupid questions?"

There were none.

"Okay!" Anko pumped her fist.  "Each team will be escorted to a gate.  At the signal, the gates will open, you little snots will go inside, and the test will start.  Okay chuunin-helpers, start escorting!"

Within ten minutes, Team 7 was following some twenty-something chuunin towards their assigned gate.  Sasuke looked intensely focused as they neared their entry point, and it made Sakura's heart flutter a bit.  Naruto seemed a bit more subdued than she would've expected, with his eyes flicking towards the high wooden fence that sealed off the testing ground every few minutes, but when he caught her glancing at him the blond boy flashed her his stupid foxy grin so she knew he was really okay.

And then, when they reached their gate, Sakura blinked to find Kakashi-sensei standing nearby.

"Oh," the masked jounin blinked his one eye as he peered up from his little orange book.  "So you survived the first phase.  Good for you."

"Kakashi-sensei!"  Sakura eyed the jounin curiously.  "What are you doing here?"

"How'd you get here on time?" Naruto wanted to know.

"Just wishing you luck," Kakashi said, half-closing his book.  "And I can be on time when I want to be.  Considering the difficulty of this test...if I was late, I might never see you again."

Sakura shivered.  "This place isn't that bad...is it?"

"Of course it is," the chuunin that had escorted them snorted and gestured towards the fence that surrounded the special training ground.  "That's not meant to keep things out, it's meant to keep them in."

The pink-haired girl clutched their team's box with white knuckles.

I guess that kunoichi wasn't exaggerating when she called this place the "Forest of Death"...

"Remember Nami no Kuni and you should do fine," Kakashi-sensei advised them cheerfully.

And then a horn sounded, the chuunin opened their gate, and the test was on.

Naruto dashed into the training area first.  Sasuke was hot on his heels.  Sakura stumbled after them on wooden legs.

If this place is anything like Wave Country, we're going to die!

***

A trio of young adult Kusa-nin darted through the immense trees of the infamous Forest of Death.  And then there were only two.  When the two boys realized that their icy female comrade had vanished (it would take a while, they weren't terribly friendly with each other), they looked for her as they couldn't advance through the Trials a teammate short.

They had no idea that she was already dead.

Something that appeared to be their lost teammate stealthily slipped through the training ground.  When it was in a quiet patch of forest, the figure stopped and removed a container from its loose, pale robes.  The thing removed the numerous seal papers from the clay jar, opened the lid, and then poured out the contents onto the earthen ground.

It looked like shiny black tar, but it quivered like gelatin.  Then the slimy thing divided itself into small, slug-like shapes.  And the black chunks of slime slowly slithered off in all directions.

The thing that had been the Kusa kunoichi smiled wicked and licked its lips with an overly-long tongue.

"Excellent..."

With that little task completed, the "Kusa-nin" strolled off deeper into the forest without a care in the world.  It hadn't come here to compete in the Trials, so it wasn't terribly concerned with this part of the tests.  It was far more interested in testing the current crop of genin and visiting a notable landmark or two before it had to leave.

Konoha would eventually search for the lost Kusa kunoichi, even if it was just to return a corpse to Kusa no Kuni.  But they wouldn't find anything.  And it wouldn't be all that unusual.  Every few years a genin vanished in this place without any trace.

The Leaf Village would just think that this was more of the same and never consider that the girl had died before ever having walked through the village gates so that a snake could wear her skin...

***

Jiraiya sat on the docks of the port village nearest to Uzugakure and watched the seagulls wheel and cry overhead as he ate his lunch.  He hadn't gained entry to the Uzu-nin stronghold yet.  Every possible entry point that he'd found was either watched or well-secured against intrusion.  He had a plan for slipping through, but that had been put on hold until recently.

Rumors of civilians disappearing had reached his ears and he'd looked into it, thinking there might be some human traffickers preying on the island nation.  But that wasn't what he'd glimpsed a few nights back.  That night he'd happened to spy Shadows, Uzu's version of ANBU, gathering up a few drunken civilians wandering around the fringes of town and forcing them into a boat.  Jiraiya had followed them by demon toad until the Shadows' boat passed through a barrier set up around a small, rocky, offshore islet where Jiraiya couldn't follow.  Those intoxicated young men had yet to be seen again.

Now the Toad Sage really had to get inside Uzugakure and find out just what the hell was going on behind their walls.

Uzu's weak point was food.  The village residents needed to eat and since they didn't grow many vegetables or fish, they had to buy it from the surrounding civilian villages.  Carts carrying food would travel to Uzugakure every morning, Uzu-nin would briefly take control of the horse-drawn carts to bring the goods within the walls and unload them, and then the carts would be given back to their owners and the civilians would leave.

That's the way in, Jiraiya nodded to himself.  They search those carts for stowaways, but they won't care about a little toad.  I just need to find one small enough and ordinary-looking enough...

***

Sasuke chased after the idiot, Naruto, who was running headlong into the Forest of Death with no direction and no plan.  He glared at the moron's predominantly orange attire and wished that Naruto had decided to wear something less eye-catching for once.  With a flashy idiot and an annoying, weak fangirl Sasuke knew that it wouldn't be long before some other team tried to prey on them for their box.

His unhappy mood was further soured by Kakashi-sensei's little send-off.  Seeing the silver-haired jounin reminded him of what he'd learned about Team 7's entry into the Trials.  Just thinking about it made him grind his teeth.

"Sasuke," Kakashi-sensei said as he pulled the boy aside after handing out the permission slips.  "Should your father gloat when he sees you have this form, kindly inform him that his attempts to pressure me into entering Team 7 had no influence over my decision."

To hear that his father had felt the need to try and help him get into the Trials was humiliating.  His father had so little faith in his ability to impress his own sensei that his father had gone out of his way to try and twist Kakashi's arm.  It undermined all of Sasuke's efforts to impress his dad and prove his worth.

This fact, and Kakashi-sensei's unwitting reminder of this fact, made Sasuke very, very irritable.

The second that Sasuke got ahead of Naruto, he took the orange-clad morons legs out and brought their run to an abrupt halt.

"What the hell?!" Naruto squawked indignantly from his sprawled position on the dirt.

"Shut up!" Sasuke snapped.  "Enough running around; we need a plan so that we can advance to the final trial so that I can get promoted and get away from you."

Naruto was taken aback by his statement, but only for a moment.  "There's nothing wrong with me or Sakura-chan!" the blond insisted, leaping to his feet.  "And even if you get promoted, who's to say it'll get you away from us, huh?"

"It will, and there's a lot wrong with you," Sasuke retorted.  "Now, we need to--"

"Who said you were the boss?" Naruto angrily demanded.

"Without Kakashi-sensei here, I'm the only one at all qualified to make decisions," Sasuke snorted.

"I'm not that stupid!" Naruto insisted.  "And Sakura-chan's as smart as you are!"

"So?" Sasuke sneered.  "She'll go along with whatever I want."  She's a fangirl, she'll do whatever she thinks will please me.

"Bastard!" Naruto snarled, obviously not having any better comeback.

"You know, a bastard technically is a child born out of wedlock or a child of questionable parentage," Sasuke blandly replied.  "My parents are married and there's no doubt that they are my parents.  What about you?"

Naruto was rendered speechless for a blissful few minutes while the boy glared and trembled.

"Now that you've shut up," Sasuke grumbled, "we need to find some advantageous position where we can ambush other teams.  Picking a spot near the tower would be best, it's a choke point.  Any team that heads for the central tower is likely to have both of the required boxes and--"

The dark-haired boy had to cut himself off as he dodged from Naruto's angry swing.

"You think you're so great because you're an Uchiha!" Naruto hissed.  "Because you have those fancy eyes that let you learn jutsu and kick-ass in a snap!  But really...you're just a spoiled brat!  You have everything and you're still not happy!"

Sasuke sneered at the idiot.  

He was most certainly not a spoiled brat.  He didn't wear fancy clothes or live in an enormous mansion or spend money like water.  He was never left wanting, but he had never been overindulged by his parents.

And he most certainly didn't have everything.  He didn't yet have the skill and strength to surpass his older brother.  Nor did he have his father's respect and love.  The way things were going, it felt like he would achieve the former long before the latter.

"What makes you think I have everything?" Sasuke challenged.  "What would you know about my family?"

"You were born in this village, you have a clan, you have a family, you have an older brother, and you have a mother that loves you," Naruto listed without hesitation.  "What else could you possibly need to be happy?"

"My father doesn't think much of me," Sasuke bitterly admitted.  "I'm just a useless second son after my genius brother.  I need to earn his respect."

"From what I've heard about him, your dad sounds like an asshole," Naruto remarked.  "You'd probably do better without him."

Sasuke saw red.  In a flash he had Naruto by the collar of his garish orange coat and slammed the idiot's back up against the trunk of a gargantuan tree. He glared at the blond with the full force of his unbalanced Sharingan.

"Don't you dare insult my father!  He's the greatest man that I know!  To make him proud of me is my greatest dream!"

"Yeah, yeah," Naruto grunted and tried to wriggle free from Sasuke's grip.  "That's what you said when Kakashi-sensei had us introduce ourselves on day one."

"Hn," Sasuke growled as he kept on glaring.  And then a thought occurred to him.  "You're just jealous that I have a dad and you don't!"

Naruto blinked...and then he laughed.

"...What's so funny?" the Uchiha demanded.

"Why the hell would I be jealous?!" the blond sniggered.  "I don't need a dad.  I don't want a dad.  Ever.  If I could've been born without one, I would."

Such a way of thinking was unfathomable to Sasuke.  What boy didn't want an awesome father to look up to and seek to impress?  The only reason he could see for such a dismissive attitude towards fathers was...

"Just because your mom slept around too much to be able to say who your father was doesn't mean--"

Naruto's hand was around his throat and Sasuke couldn't breathe, let alone finish his sentence, and the blond's eyes...the pupils were slitted like a snake's or a cat's.

"Don't you dare say anything about my mom ever again you rotten bastard!"

His eyes...that's no genjutsu...my Sharingan would see through it...

Sasuke let go of Naruto's jacket and tried to pry the hand off his throat, but that only encouraged the other boy to squeeze tighter--

Whump!

Naruto went sailing to the left from a fist to his jaw--

Whack!

Sasuke dropped to the dirt, gasping for air and clutching at the back of his head.

"Stop fighting!" Sakura demanded in a quavering voice.  "Just stop it!"

The Uchiha peered up at the trembling kunoichi, dazed.

She...hit me?!  She actually hit me?!  ...Could she be some imposter?

"Ever since we made it back to the village after Wave Country you've been fighting," the pink-haired girl claimed.  "And...and from what I've seen...it's mostly Sasuke-kun's fault," Sakura admitted with shame, as if it was somehow her fault that her idol failed to live up to her fantasy.  "It's tearing us apart!  We were a team in Wave, and that's part of how we made it out alive.  Kakashi-sensei said that we have to be like that again if we want a chance of making it through here to the next trial.  So both of you, stop it!"

Sasuke just stared at her with his Sharingan trying to see through the henge because this couldn't be Sakura because that annoying girl would never hit him.

"...So long as the bastard behaves himself, I won't fight with him, Sakura-chan," Naruto promised.

The girl sighed at his answer and turned to the Uchiha.  "Sasuke-kun...what about you?"

"...I suppose I can hold off kicking the dead-last's ass until later," Sasuke grunted as he massaged his throat.

"Sasuke-kun..."  Sakura shook her head and pulled the box out of her kunai pouch.  "Did either of you see the other teams' boxes?"

"No," Naruto said sheepishly.

Sasuke studied the gray box with the black circle painted on the lid as he deactivated his Sharingan to preserve his chakra.  "...Some of the other boxes being handed out had white circles."

"So we're seeking a white box," the girl nodded to herself.  "This test is like a mission, and our objective is to obtain a white box without losing our black box within the five day time limit."

"Hn," Sasuke grunted.  Why must she restate the obvious?  For the dead-last's benefit perhaps?

"Sasuke-kun, your strategy for getting the white box is a good one, but to maximize our chances of success I think we need to be flexible," Sakura said, her voice gaining some strength.  "We need a fallback plan if there's no good place left by the tower to set up an ambush, or if time is running out and we haven't snared anyone."

"That's a great idea, Sakura-chan!" Naruto grinned.

Sasuke rolled his eyes.  "We could use Naruto as bait to draw in other teams.  Who wouldn't want to take on an idiot that wears orange all the time?  He's an easy target."

"Bastard!" Naruto hissed.

"Shut up before I hit you both again!" Sakura threatened, cracking her knuckles.  "That sounds like a last resort tactic, Sasuke-kun.  Another Plan B would be better.  And what are we going to do about food and water?  If we end up spending most of the five days out here we'll need to have something to eat and drink."

She had good points, thought Sasuke wasn't about to admit it and give her the mistaken idea that he was complimenting her.  If she thought he was complimenting her, it might fuel her vain hope that he might magically fall in love with her, which would never happen.  So he got up, dusted himself off, and started walking deeper into the forested training field.

"Let's discuss this as we walk," the Uchiha grunted.  "The longer we just sit out here arguing, the more we look like targets..."

***

Naruto tried not to fidget as he and his team crept through the Forest of Death.  They'd been scouting around for a good place to camp and ambush for a couple of hours already.  Aside from a few close calls with teams that they weren't ready to engage yet and a few minor run-ins with oversized wildlife, they hadn't done much else.

This forest wasn't at all like the forests he was used to.  The trees were incredibly massive.  There were bugs crawling around that were the size of cats and dogs.  And the air…there was something about the air--how it tasted, how it smelled, how it felt on his skin--that unnerved him.

I don't like it in here, he decided.  It's creepy as hell...

To try and distract himself from the general creepiness of the place, Naruto glowered at the red and white uchiwa fan stitched on the back of Sasuke's shirt.  He really didn't like Sasuke right now.  The spoiled brat had pushed all his buttons and Naruto had almost given himself away.  Naruto really couldn't understand why the Uchiha wasn't at all grateful for what he had.

I don't see what the big deal is about dads, Naruto scowled.  Sasuke has a mom and a big brother.  He shouldn't need anything else.

Mothers were vitally important.  They grew and gave birth to children, took care of them, raised them up, loved them, and protected them.  Fathers, in contrast, were only needed to get the mothers pregnant in the first place, and then could just disappear with no harm done.

If I were Sasuke, I'd just worry about making my mom happy with me.  His dad's an asshole so I'd just forget about him.  And his brother...it would be nice to have a brother.

Naruto had met all sorts of people between the time with his mother and the time he'd lived in Konoha.  He hadn't encountered many shining examples of parents in the homes that he'd stayed in.  But he'd met other foster kids, some of them with siblings, and he had a good idea of how their relationships worked.

Sometimes they'd annoy each other or beat each other up.  But most of the time siblings would look out for each other; defend each other if they could.  Brothers and sisters were there for each other, especially when it counted the most.

He wished he had that.

A brother would've been nice.  Naruto tore his glare away from Sasuke's back to stare at the dirt under his blue sandals.  Or even a sister.

But he didn't have siblings.  All he had was his mother.  And he needed to get strong enough to save her.

I need to focus, he reminded himself sternly.  I need to pass these trials and become a chuunin.  I need to be stronger, and if becoming a chuunin gets me away from Sasuke and his bastard-y-ness, all the better!

And then Naruto crashed into Sakura's back.

"Hey, what the--"

Then he saw the thing that had stopped Sasuke and Sakura in their tracks, and his jaw hit the ground.

What the hell?!