The southern gate was a stone arch carved into the canyon wall at the edge of the world.
Beyond it, the Demon Desert stretched to the horizon. A flat, cracked expanse of hardpan and dark sand that shimmered under the afternoon sun, broken by formations of red and black rock that jutted from the earth like the bones of something enormous buried just beneath the surface. The air coming through the arch was dry and hot and carried the faint smell of sulfur. The type of heat that cooked you from the outside in.
Twenty-one genin stood in front of the arch. Seven teams. Some of them looked nervous. Some of them looked sick. No one in their right mind traveled through the Demon Desert. It was suicidal. It was idiotic. It was crazy.
Team Ebizo stood near the center of the group. Mai was squinting through her glasses at the desert beyond the arch. Pakura had her arms folded. Karura's scarf was pulled up against the heat, her indigo eyes taking in the landscape.
"It's not as bad as they say it is," Mai shared. "It's pretty calming and relaxing once you get used to something trying to kill you every few minutes."
"Your lack of common sense is quite stunning." Pakura said.
"Common sense. Bommon dense." Mai mocked.
A woman stepped through the arch from inside the desert.
She was short and sun-darkened, with deep lines around her eyes and mouth that came from decades of squinting against sand and wind. Her hair was grey-brown and cropped close to her skull. She wore a standard Suna flak jacket, closed and fitted, with a long desert cloak draped over her shoulders that was so faded it was almost the same color as the sand. A headband was tied around her left bicep.
She looked at the twenty-one genin like pieces of meat.
"My name is Chiasa," she said. Her voice was low and rough. "I'm the proctor for the second stage of your Chunin Exams. You're about to enter the Demon Desert. Most of you already know what that means. For those who don't, let me make it simple."
She turned and gestured at the expanse behind her.
"The Demon Desert is the single most hostile environment in the Land of Wind. Giant creatures bigger than your homes. Venomous creatures that'll shut your body down in minutes. Ant lions that dig pit traps wide enough to swallow a building. Wasp swarms that paralyze you and drag you back to their nests while you're still conscious. Sandstorms that strip skin off bone. Quicksand that looks exactly like solid ground until you're waist-deep and sinking."
She turned back to them.
"And that's just the desert. You'll also be dealing with each other."
She pulled a map from inside her cloak and held it up. A rough sketch of the Demon Desert, circular, with a point marked at the center.
"This is the central tower. It's located at the exact center of the desert, approximately fifteen kilometers from any point on the perimeter. Your objective is to reach it. You have three days. Any team that does not arrive at the tower within seventy-two hours of entering the desert is eliminated from the Chunin Exams."
She folded the map and put it away.
"There are no other rules. How you get to the tower is your business. You can fight every team you encounter. You can avoid them. You can ambush, negotiate, run, hide, or crawl. You can work together or tear each other apart. Whatever gets you to the tower in one piece."
Her eyes swept the group.
"A word of advice from someone who's lived in this desert longer than most of you have been alive. Winning a fight does not guarantee you advance. Losing a fight does not guarantee you're eliminated. Your performance in the desert as a whole will be evaluated. So think carefully about your actions going forward."
A few genin exchanged nervous glances. Goza from the veteran team scowled. The puppet team's leader, Jomae, gripped his scroll tighter.
"Now. Before we begin." Chiasa's expression didn't change, but something in her voice shifted. Harder. Colder. "One team has been exempted from the second stage and will proceed directly to the tower."
The silence that followed was the kind that preceded either a question or a riot.
"Team One. The Third Kazekage's squad. Step forward."
Rasa stepped forward. Shigezane followed. Toma trailed behind them, his eyes on the ground.
The noise that erupted from the remaining genin was immediate and ugly.
"Are you serious?!" Goza was the first to shout, his painted face twisted with fury. "They get a free pass?! What, because their sensei is the Kazekage? That's bull crap!"
"Unbelievable," Nagi from the puppet team muttered. Her arms were crossed and her red hair seemed to bristle. "We all had to take the written exam. Now they just skip the desert?"
"This is favoritism," Kazane from the fan team said. Her voice was quieter than Goza's but carried further. "Everyone can see it."
Even Torune from Team 6, who rarely spoke louder than a murmur, shook his head.
Rasa stood at the front of the group with his back to the complaints. His jaw was tight. His fists were at his sides. He didn't turn around. He hadn't asked for this. This wasn't his choice. This was the Third Kazekage's choice, made for reasons that had nothing to do with what Rasa wanted and everything to do with what the village's strongest shinobi decided.
Toma stood behind Rasa with his head down. He was used to being hated. This was just a different side of it.
Shigezane looked at nobody and said nothing.
"Enough." Chiasa's voice cut through the noise like a blade through cloth. "The exemption was decided above my rank. If you have complaints, take them to the Kazekage's office after the exam. Right now, you have a desert to survive."
She produced a set of colored markers from her cloak. Small wooden tokens, each painted a different color.
"Each team will draw a marker. The color corresponds to your entry point on the perimeter. The entry points are spaced evenly around the desert's edge. You will not know which teams enter from which points. You will not know who is ahead of you or behind you or beside you until you encounter them."
She held out the markers. One by one, the team leaders stepped forward and drew.
Team Ebizo drew red.
"Red is the southeastern gate," Chiasa said. "Follow the canyon south for three hundred meters. You'll see the marker."
Team by team, the genin received their assignments and began to disperse.
"Three days," Chiasa said to the remaining teams. "The clock starts when you pass through your gate. Try not to die. We need as many able-bodied shinobi as we can keep."
She turned and walked back into the desert, her faded cloak trailing behind her, and within thirty seconds the sand and heat haze swallowed her completely.
The genin stood at the edge of the Demon Desert. Six teams. Eighteen kids. Three days.
Mai looked at Karura. Karura looked at Pakura. Pakura looked at the desert.
"Let's get going." Pakura said.
They followed the canyon south toward their gate. The red marker was exactly where Chiasa said it would be, a painted stone set into the canyon wall beside a narrow passage that opened onto the desert floor. Beyond it, the Demon Desert waited, full of things that wanted to kill them.
Karura stepped through the gate.
The heat hit her like a wall. The air inside the canyon had been warm. The air on the desert floor was alive, a pressing, physical weight that sat on her shoulders and squeezed the moisture from her skin within seconds.
Mai stepped through behind her. Then Pakura.
The three of them stood on the edge of the Demon Desert, the canyon at their backs and fifteen kilometers of hell between them and the central tower.
"Three days, huh?" Mai pushed her glasses up and grinned. "We'll be there by tomorrow."
"Tch, do you plan on slowing us down? We should reach there by the end of the night." Pakura said. But she was smiling too.
"With Mai leading us, we shouldn't run into any danger." Karura added.
"Haha! Just trust me! With my glasses, nothing can escape my sight!"
She adjusted her scarf, checked the scrolls at her hip, and they started running.
The Demon Desert closed around them like a jaw.
Kazane heard the hissing before she saw it.
A dry hiss, scales against hardpan, coming from beneath the cracked earth two feet to her left. She didn't think. Her fan was off her back and swung down, blowing the ground apart in a spray of red sand and exposed the coiled body beneath.
The viper struck. Fast, head snapping upward from the broken earth, fangs aimed at her thigh.
Itsuki was faster. His right hand fan swept across his body in a tight arc and a blade of compressed wind the width of a ribbon sliced the viper's head from its body. The headless body thrashed once in the dirt and went still.
"That's three since we entered…" Suzume said from behind them. She hadn't moved. Her large fan rested across her shoulders and her black hair hung in her face, full of sand. "They're getting more frequent."
"We're getting closer to the center, I guess." Kazane said. She folded her fan and strapped it to her back. "The deeper you go, the worse the wildlife gets."
"Great, I was worried this would be boring." Itsuki flicked the viper's blood off his hand fan and grinned at it. The chipped tooth caught the light.
"It's not supposed to be fun, Itsuki."
"Everything's supposed to be fun. That's the point of being alive."
Kazane didn't respond. She started walking again, her pace steady, her dark skin gleaming with sweat under the afternoon sun. Her white hair was tied back tight and her tall frame cut a sharp silhouette against the red landscape. Behind her, Itsuki fell in on her right and Suzume on her left, the formation drilled into them by their sensei.
They'd been in the desert for six hours. The sun was dropping toward the western horizon and the temperature was beginning its nightly plunge. In another hour it would go from scorching to freezing, because the Demon Desert didn't believe in moderation.
"How far to the tower?" Itsuki asked.
"About ten kilometers," Kazane said. "If we maintain this pace, we'll reach it by mid-morning tomorrow."
"We could push through the night."
"No. The desert is more dangerous after dark. The big predators hunt at night. Giant scorpions, sand lions, things we don't want to fight tired and blind." Kazane's eyes scanned the terrain ahead. Flat hardpan giving way to a stretch of rocky formations, tall pillars of eroded sandstone that created a maze of narrow passages and blind corners. "We'll find shelter in those rocks, rest until dawn, and push for the tower at first light."
"What about other teams?" Suzume asked.
"We avoid them if we can. Fight them if we have to." Kazane glanced over her shoulder. "The proctor said winning doesn't guarantee advancement. That means reaching the tower matters more than wasting our energy on useless battles."
"Unless it involves Team Ebizo. Then I'm fighting." Itsuki said.
"We're not fighting Team Ebizo."
"Why not? They're genin. We're genin. Fair game."
"Because they've completed A-rank missions, Itsuki. That puppet girl has been training under Lady Chiyo. Pakura has a kekkei genkai that's never been seen before. And the cripple..." Kazane paused. "She wasn't much in the academy. Decent in taijutsu but mostly useless everywhere else."
"They can't be that far ahead of the rest of us." Itsuki said.
"Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, we don't seek them out. If they find us, we handle it. But we don't go hunting the most dangerous team in the exam when our goal is to reach the tower."
"Kazane's right," Suzume said. "We don't need to beat everyone. We just need to perform well enough to advance."
Itsuki kicked a stone across the hardpan. "You two are no fun at all."
"Passing is more important than having fun."
They entered the rock formations as the sun touched the horizon. The pillars rose around them, ten and fifteen meters tall, casting long shadows that turned the narrow passages between them into corridors of cool shade. The ground shifted from flat hardpan to uneven stone, loose gravel crunching under their sandals.
"This is good," Kazane said. "We'll camp in one of the wider clearings. Suzume, set up booby traps. If anything approaches, we'll know it."
"On it." Suzume started pulling out tools from her ninja pouch.
They ate from their rations. Dried meat, salt pills, a small canteen of water each. They'd packed light on purpose, combat gear over provisions, counting on speed to get them to the tower before the food ran out.
"We need to find water tomorrow," Suzume said. "We've got enough for maybe another day if we're careful."
"There are underground springs near the center," Kazane said. "My grandmother told me about them. She patrolled this desert when she was active."
"Your grandmother patrolled the Demon Desert?" Itsuki raised an eyebrow.
"Three generations of fan users, Itsuki. We didn't get this good by staying inside the village walls."
They settled in. Itsuki took first watch. Suzume lay with her back against a rock pillar, her fan across her lap, and closed her eyes. Kazane sat cross-legged, her war fan propped beside her, and stared at the stars.
"Kazane…" Suzume murmured. Half asleep already.
"Hm?"
"Do you think we'll pass?"
Kazane was quiet for a moment. "We'll find out."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I can give ya, loser."
Suzume smiled faintly and drifted off. The desert settled into its nighttime silence, broken only by the wind threading through the rock pillars and, somewhere in the distance, the chitinous clicking of something large moving through the dark.
Tatewaki held up a fist. Mizu and Ganshi stopped.
They were in the rock formations, moving through the narrow passages between the sandstone pillars, heading southwest toward the center. They'd entered from the east gate six hours ago and made good time, the rocky terrain suiting their close-quarters fighting style better than the open flats.
"Hear that?" Tatewaki whispered.
They listened. Faint, carried through the stone corridors, bouncing off the pillar walls. Voices.
Ganshi grunted. His heavy chopping blade was already in his hand.
Tatewaki drew his curved desert blade and held it low against his thigh. He moved forward, slow and quiet, following the sound through the narrow passages. The voices grew clearer as they closed the distance. Two girls and a boy. Something about water supplies. Something about a grandmother.
He found a gap between two pillars and looked down. Below them, in a wide clearing between the rock formations, three genin were camped. Moonlight lit the clearing well enough to see the details. Three large folding fans, one propped against a rock, two strapped to their owners' backs. A girl with white hair sitting cross-legged. A girl with black hair dozing against a pillar. A boy with messy brown hair sitting on a ledge with two small hand fans in his lap, keeping watch but looking at the sky instead of the approaches.
Fan users. All three of them.
He scanned the approaches below. Thin wires glinted across the ground-level corridors, connected to tagged stones. Booby traps on every path in. Whoever set them knew what they were doing.
He pulled back and found his teammates in the corridor.
"Three fan users," he whispered. "Camped in a clearing below us. One on watch but he's not paying attention. They've got the ground trapped, but nothing above."
Mizu grinned. "You want to jump them?"
"I want to win. If we meet them in the open, three fan users against three swordsmen, they beat us. But here, in these rocks, at night, with them resting and us above them..." He studied the corridor ahead. "We hit them before they can get their fans up and it's our fight."
"That's totally messed up!" Mizu said. She sounded delighted.
Ganshi grunted in approval.
"Mizu, you take the right. Circle around and come in from the right, above the traps. Ganshi take the left. There's a wide crack in the pillar wall over there, I saw it from above. You can come through it. I'll drop straight down from the south ledge. I go first. When they react to me, you two hit them from the sides."
"You're using yourself as bait?" Mizu raised an eyebrow.
"I'm using myself as a distraction. There's a difference."
"Not much of one."
"Enough questioning my decisions, woman! Go."
"I'd pop you in the mouth if we weren't in a hurry." Mizu reminded him.
Tatewaki chuckled as they split.
Mizu moved right, circling through the corridors, her steps light on the stone. Her katana rested against her back and her bright eyes tracked the rock walls for the gap Tatewaki had described.
Ganshi moved left. For a boy his size, he was quiet when he wanted to be. His feet found the solid stone beneath the gravel and he walked on rock instead of sand. The chopping blade hung from his right hand.
Tatewaki waited. He counted to sixty in his head, giving his teammates time to get into position, and then he dropped.
He came off the ledge feet-first, his sandals hitting the clearing floor with a crunch of gravel that shattered the silence. His blade caught starlight. His silhouette stood framed between two pillars at the south end of the clearing.
Itsuki saw him first. The boy scrambled off his ledge, hand fans snapping open, his eyes wide. "Enemies! South side!"
Suzume was up a heartbeat later. Her fan was in her hands before her back left the rock pillar.
Kazane was already moving. Her war fan snapped open, her body pivoting toward the south corridor, and the first crescent of cutting wind tore down the passage before Tatewaki had finished straightening from the drop.
He threw himself left. The crescent carved a foot-deep gouge in the pillar where he'd been standing. Stone chips peppered his face.
Kazane formed a second crescent, wider, sweeping the corridor wall to wall so there was nowhere to dodge. Tatewaki's blade came up with wind chakra along its edge. The attack was split in two, the two halves screaming past him on either side.
"Just one," Kazane called over her shoulder. "Suzume, cover my back. Itsuki, watch the sides."
Tatewaki backed up a step. Then another. Drawing her deeper into the south corridor, away from the clearing. She didn't follow, her war fan pulling back for a third swing, her focus narrowing onto the swordsman retreating in front of her.
That was when Mizu hit.
She came through the east gap above the traps, body angled sideways, landing soft on the gravel with her katana already drawn. Itsuki spun toward the sound and his right hand fan whipped out a blade of compressed wind, aimed at her chest.
Mizu's katana came up, water already coursing along the steel. The wind blade hit the water and dispersed into the liquid instead of cutting through, spraying outward in a hiss of mist. She slid back half a meter but kept moving forward.
"Two!" Itsuki shouted. "East side!"
Kazane's head twitched. Just a fraction, just the instinct to check her teammate, and Tatewaki lunged.
His blade came from a low angle, and Kazane had to abort the glance and swing her fan down to blast him back. The gust caught Tatewaki in the chest and threw him against the corridor wall. He hit the stone hard enough to crack it, slid to the ground, and got up.
He was smiling.
She understood then. He wasn't trying to beat her. He was keeping her here. Every feint, every retreat, every attack she had to answer was a second her teammates fought without her.
"Itsuki, fall back to me!" Kazane shouted.
Ganshi came through the west wall.
His earth-reinforced blade hit the sandstone pillar at full swing. The stone disintegrated into a spray of fragments that peppered the entire clearing like shrapnel. Suzume threw up a wall of wind that caught most of the debris, chunks of rock spinning away from her in a tight arc, but the blast knocked loose gravel into Itsuki's eyes from across the clearing. He flinched. Just a blink.
Mizu closed the distance in that blink. Her blade came across his ribs, flat side, the water-hardened edge hitting him like a plank of wood. He staggered, one fan dropping from his hand, and his back hit a rock pillar.
He brought his remaining fan up and swung. A ribbon of wind, thin as a razor, that should have opened Mizu's shoulder. She leaned under it, the blade shearing a lock of hair off her head, and kicked his planted knee. His leg buckled. He caught himself on the pillar with one hand, still swinging the fan with the other, and she had to hop back from a wild slash that would have split her nose if it connected.
"You're not going down easy, huh?" Mizu said.
"You'd have to kill me first." Itsuki's grin was bloody where he'd bitten his tongue on impact.
Suzume had turned to face Ganshi, and the size of him filled her vision. He was taller than anyone in the exam, wider, and the chopping blade in his hand looked like it had been forged for splitting stone. He swung again, and she caught it on a gust that screamed against the steel.
Then he did something she hadn't expected. He drove his blade point-first into the stone floor, dropped one hand off the grip, and ran through seals quickly.
The stone beneath Suzume's feet heaved. Slabs of rock buckled upward in jagged spikes, the solid ground she'd been bracing against splitting apart like something underneath it was trying to crawl out. Her footing shattered. One sandal caught between two rising edges and her ankle twisted, her stance collapsing sideways.
She tried to reform the barrier from one knee. Wind gathered around her fan, layering, building the wall she needed. Ganshi didn't give her the time. He closed the gap in two strides and brought the blade down in an overhead chop that she caught on the iron spine of her fan.
The impact drove her down to both knees. Her arms buckled. The fan's spine bent and the wind she'd been gathering collapsed around her in a burst that kicked sand into both their faces.
Ganshi didn't care about sand. He swung again, a lateral sweep at her exposed side, and Suzume rolled under it, coming up behind him, trying to create space. But the clearing was small and every direction she moved put her closer to someone else's fight. She bumped into Itsuki's back, both of them stumbling, and for a second the two of them were tangled together between Mizu and Ganshi and a ring of stone pillars.
In the south corridor, Kazane heard it all. The shockwave. The crack of stone. Suzume's barrier collapsing. Itsuki swearing through blood. She couldn't see any of it because Tatewaki was in front of her and the corridor was narrow and every time she tried to disengage he pressed forward just enough to keep her here.
She sent a crescent down the corridor. Tatewaki split it with his wind-edged blade, the halves spraying sparks off the stone walls, and stepped closer. She sent two, staggered, the second arriving where his blade would be after splitting the first. The second crescent caught his forearm and opened a cut from elbow to wrist. Blood ran down his blade hand.
He switched the sword to his left hand and kept coming.
"Just go down already!" Kazane said.
Tatewaki shook his head. His right arm hung bleeding and his left hand held the blade incorrectly. He was slower now. Sloppier. She could end this in two more swings.
Behind her, Suzume screamed.
And it broke Kazane's composure in a way that no attack from Tatewaki could have.
She turned.
She turned because she was the leader and her team was dying behind her and she couldn't stand here trading wind crescents with a bleeding boy while the sounds behind her got worse.
Tatewaki's blade caught her across the back of her calf.
It was enough to make her stumble, enough to make the leg she pivoted on buckle for half a second. She spun back toward him, fan rising, and he was already inside her reach. His left-handed grip was awkward and weak but the blade tip was at her throat, two inches from skin, and from that distance it didn't matter which hand held it.
"Don't bother, it's over." he said quietly.
Kazane's fan was still raised. One swing and he was dead. But his blade was at her throat and they'd kill each other, and behind her everything was wrong.
She looked past him. Through the corridor gap she could see the clearing now.
Itsuki was on his knees, both fans on the ground beside him, Mizu's katana resting against his collarbone. Blood ran from his mouth where he'd bitten his tongue. One of his eyes was swollen shut from where his head had hit the pillar. He was still grinning, because Itsuki would grin at his own funeral, but his hands were flat on the ground in front of him and they weren't reaching for anything.
Suzume was flat on her back. Ganshi stood over her with one boot on her fan, pinning it to the ground, his blade pointed at her chest. Her arms were shaking so hard the tremor was visible from twenty meters away. She'd fought him to a standstill three times and lost ground every time and finally lost.
Kazane looked at the clearing. At her team, beaten, held at blade point, bruised and bleeding and done. She looked at Tatewaki, his sword at her throat, his right arm soaking red into the gravel, his face calm.
She looked at the gap between his blade and her neck and thought about swinging the fan anyway. One clean hit and he was gone. But Mizu would hear his body fall and draw that blade across Itsuki's throat before Kazane cleared the corridor.
She closed the fan. The metal segments folded with a series of clicks that sounded like bones breaking in the quiet.
Tatewaki lowered his blade.
"So you actually do have a brain in that big head of yours." He sneered.
Kazane didn't answer. She walked past him into the clearing, her cut leg leaving a thin line of blood on the stone. She went to Itsuki first. Mizu stepped back and let her through. Kazane knelt beside him and looked at his swollen eye, his bloody mouth, his hands that were still shaking with adrenaline he had nowhere to put.
"Sorry, Captain." Itsuki said. The grin was still there but it definitely wasn't the same as it was earlier.
She put her hand on his shoulder. Then she went to Suzume. Ganshi had already stepped off the fan and moved back, his expression blank, his blade hanging at his side. Suzume lay on her back looking at the stars, breathing in short, ragged pulls, her arms still trembling.
"Can you walk?" Kazane asked.
"Give me a minute."
The swordsmen gathered at the clearing's edge. Tatewaki was wrapping his forearm with a strip of cloth torn from his sleeve, his jaw tight, the wound worse than he'd let on during the fight. Mizu wiped her blade on her pant leg. Ganshi stood behind them, already looking northwest.
"Good luck next time, losers." Tatewaki waved as the three of them moved out through the corridor without looking back.
The clearing was quiet.
Kazane sat between her teammates in the dark, her cut leg throbbing, her war fan across her knees, and stared at the south corridor where she'd been winning a fight that didn't matter while her team lost the only one that did.
Itsuki leaned against his pillar and spat blood into the sand. "Next time I'm keeping watch, I'm actually watching."
Nobody laughed.
They gathered their things slowly. Sealed their fans. Checked for injuries. Itsuki's ribs were bruised to the bone where Mizu's flat blade had hit it, and his left eye wouldn't open all the way for the rest of the exam. Suzume's arms were so weak from blocking Ganshi's strikes that she couldn't lift her fan above her waist. Kazane's calf bled through two wrappings before it stopped.
They climbed out of the clearing and continued northwest toward the tower.
Nobody spoke for a long time.