I decided the Forest of Death had been misbranded.
Sure, there were murder trees and flesh-eating bugs and the constant chance of getting your throat slit by a kid with better grades, but mostly?
It was boring.
The same huge roots, the same moss-slick bark, the same smell of wet dirt and old leaves. If I stared too long, the whole place blurred into one big green smear.
"We should've looted something cooler," Naruto complained as he hopped over a fallen trunk. "Like, I dunno, a big sword. Or a treasure chest."
I made a tired noise. "You stole their smoke bomb."
"That's one smoke bomb," he said. "I want treasure. Sparkly. Dramatic. Something that says, 'You beat up other ninja in a murder forest, congratulations.'"
"Your prize is 'not dead,'" I said. "Market value: priceless."
Sasuke, jogging a little off to Naruto's left, didn't bother looking over. "We're in an exam, not a fairy tale."
"An exam could have treasure," Naruto argued. "Like, whoever gets the most scrolls gets a bonus sword. That would be great motivation."
"Or bait," I muttered.
We moved through another stand of trees. The roots knotted together like a frozen wave, forcing us to step high, balance, duck. The light above was dimmer now, the canopy hanging heavy. Shadows clung to the branches.
Naruto kept squinting up at them like the branches were about to personally start something. To be fair, they might.
"Hold up," I said, throat tightening with that now-familiar static behind my eyes.
I scrambled up onto one of the thicker roots, toes digging in, scanning the trunks like I was choosing which one to blame for my anxiety. One felt right—angle, sightline, likely path of pursuit. I flexed my fingers and jumped.
Catch, scramble, cling. Bark rough under my palms, ink-stained nails scraping. In a few seconds I was ten meters up, thighs wrapped around the trunk, one arm hooked while the other pulled out brush and ink.
"You're doing the tree graffiti thing again," Naruto called, craning his head back.
"Correct," I called down. "Please continue complaining. It fuels me."
"We don't have time to turn the forest into your sketchbook," Sasuke said, but it didn't have much bite. His chakra had that flat, watchful feel; he'd already slowed to give me room.
I didn't answer right away. My hand moved in quick, practiced strokes, the pattern already assembled in the back of my brain. Line, curve, anchor, directional sigil. No hesitation, no flourishes. Each stroke pulled a thin thread of chakra out of me; with every completed loop, the seal shivered against my skin like biting tinfoil.
"Flash trap," I announced after a few seconds. I pressed my palm flat to the fresh ink and pushed. The seal pulsed once and sank into the tree, vanishing from sight but not from my sense.
Naruto's chakra brightened below. "Flash like boom or flash like 'I can see sounds now'?"
"Flash like 'if you are chasing us in that direction, enjoy having your retinas set on fire,'" I said, dropping to a lower branch and then down to the ground. I landed with a grunt. "Directional. So if you stand on the wrong side, that's on you."
"That sounds awesome," he said immediately. "I kinda wanna see it."
"Please do not test it on purpose," I said. "I like you, but not enough to walk you around by the hand while you're blind."
Naruto pouted. "You're no fun."
"I'm the only reason you're still alive," I shot back, dusting off my hands. "Fun is something we get to schedule later, after we are not in the murder woods."
We settled back into our now-standard formation: Naruto in the lead, because of ego and also because it made a weird amount of tactical sense to let the walking siren be the first thing enemies saw. Sasuke just behind and to his left, watching everything. Me in the back, glancing behind us every few seconds, veering off sometimes to paint another quick seal on a trunk or rock.
Every so often I'd close the distance and tap Naruto on the wrist or elbow, right where I'd tucked marks earlier.
The little seal under his skin warmed each time, a tiny static buzz against my fingertip. Not loud, not obvious. Just enough to answer roll call.
"Quit poking me," he grumbled the third time I did it in ten minutes.
"I'm recalibrating," I said. "The forest's chakra is messing with the signal. If I don't check, I start getting false pings and then I have three overlapping heart attacks when you trip."
"That sounds like a you problem," he said.
"If you want it to stay a me problem and not become a 'Naruto is lost in the woods because I couldn't tell he was missing' problem, hold still," I replied.
He grunted, but he didn't pull his arm away.
Sasuke offered his own wrist without being asked. He kept his eyes on the trees while I brushed my thumb over the spot, but his shoulders tightened for a heartbeat.
He hated being touched. Everyone in class had figured that out. He let me get away with it because the seals worked. His jaw still clenched every time.
I noticed. I always noticed.
"Still alive," I murmured. "Very impressive."
"Hn," he said.
Naruto rolled his eyes so aggressively I could practically hear it. "You two and your seal-language. 'Recalibrating.' 'Signal.' 'Ambient interference.' I see trees and bugs. You see…math."
"Correct," I said. "You're the field test. We're the design team."
He thought about flipping me off, I could tell. His hand half-twitched, then dropped. He settled for a loud, dramatic sigh instead.
The forest pressed harder against my skin as we went. When we first entered, it had just been creepy—too many shadows, air too wet, insect noise too loud. Now there was a weight behind my eyes. Not pain, exactly. Just pressure. Like someone was gently pushing from inside my skull, testing, looking for weak spots.
Naruto shook his head like he could rattle it loose.
"Head okay?" I asked quietly.
"Fine," he said. "Just thinking."
"Dangerous," Sasuke said.
Naruto scowled at him. "I can think."
"Sometimes you shouldn't," Sasuke replied.
I huffed once, a laugh that didn't have enough oxygen behind it. My eyes skimmed the branches again. The Squad Marks on my wrist itched. Every time I blinked, my brain tried to trick me into believing one of the warm little points had vanished.
They hadn't. Yet.
I also noticed how often Naruto kept glancing back, shoulders twitching like someone was breathing on his neck.
He wasn't wrong. The whole forest felt like it was looking at us.
High above them, a pale shape slid along the branches like smoke wearing a human outline.
Orochimaru moved easily through the canopy, light enough that the leaves hardly stirred under his weight. The forest was familiar under his hands. Old chakra clung to the bark and soil, some of it his, most of it Konoha's. Layered protections, traps, habits.
Below, three genin wound their way through the roots.
The Uchiha boy was easy to read: all guarded sharpness and ruthless little calculations. His chakra coiled firmly in his center, controlled to an extent that did not belong in someone that age. It burned with that particular hunger Orochimaru knew so well—the need to fill a void with power until the emptiness shut up.
The blond jinchūriki was the opposite—chakra leaking out of him with every breath. Orange and bright, flickering constantly, like a bonfire someone had tried to put a lid on and failed.
Underneath that unruly surface was another presence. Older. Heavier. Red, resentful, caged.
Kurama.
Orochimaru's tongue flicked out unconsciously, tasting the air. The seal around that chakra—Sarutobi's seal—was still holding, but sloppily. Cracks already showed where the fox pressed hardest. Flaws meant possibilities.
Then his attention slid to the third one.
The girl did not carry a clan crest. Her clothes were mismatched, slightly too large, orphanage-standard. She did not move with the drilled precision of Hyūga or Aburame or Uchiha; she watched the ground and the trees like someone who had learned to be cautious the hard way.
Ink stained her fingers. Every few minutes, she veered off to tag a trunk or stone, leaving behind a faint shiver of fuinjutsu. Crude, but not without thought. Directional traps, tuned to angles and lines of approach. Not pulled from a standard scroll.
More interesting than the seals she placed on the environment were the ones she had laid on her teammates.
He could see them—not with his eyes, but in the way chakra flared and dimmed where her fingers pressed. Invisible marks humming on their wrists, hips, shoulders. Little anchors tying them together through the ambient soup of the forest.
Primitive work, but the concept…
Someone had taught her the basics, but this particular configuration? The way she kept adjusting for interference, for distance?
No.
That smelled like a mind worrying at a problem in the quiet hours.
A mind that might, given the right pushes, reproduce techniques that had been deliberately erased from Konoha's libraries decades ago.
Orochimaru slid a little farther along the branch, keeping pace without effort.
The Uchiha looked up once, sharp eyes scanning. They swept past him, saw nothing, moved on.
Almost.
The static in Naruto's chakra went from "annoying background fizz" to "someone scraping a fork along my nerves."
He kept glancing over his shoulder.
Nothing obvious was there. Just more trees. More roots. A curtain of vines that could have been a person-shaped shadow if you stared long enough and let your survival instincts hallucinate for fun.
"You're doing that thing," Sasuke said, not bothering to look away from the path ahead.
"What thing?" Naruto asked.
"The twitchy thing," Sasuke said. "You've looked behind us six times in the last minute."
"Yeah, because something's back there," Naruto said. "Duh."
"Nothing is there," Sasuke said flatly.
"That's not what it feels like," Naruto muttered.
I'd been half listening, half counting my own heartbeat and the ones humming through the Squad Marks. The word feels snagged my attention. I glanced back over my shoulder, then forward again.
"You're picking up the ambient chakra pressure," I said. "Congratulations, you're a sensitive little antenna."
"I don't want to be an antenna," he said. "I want to be Hokage."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive," I said. "Being able to tell when a place wants to eat you is a useful leadership trait."
He made a face at me. "You're not helping."
"The exam is supposed to freak you out," I said. "The forest has a lot of chakra. It's like being in a crowded room, except the crowd is trees and bugs and murder. Your brain's just yelling about it."
"That's a very normal explanation for why it feels like my skull's full of bees," Naruto said.
"Mhm," I said. I tapped the mark on my own wrist with my thumb, grounding myself on that little loop of ink and chakra. "Occam's razor says anxiety."
Naruto blinked. "Who's Razor?"
"Guy with a knife," I said. "Cuts down complicated explanations until only the simple one's left."
"Sounds like a terrible ninja name," he said.
"You'd like him."
He opened his mouth to argue, then seemed to decide I had a point and shut it again.
We walked on.
Ten minutes later, the sense of being watched had not gone away. It hadn't sharpened into something I could point to in chakra-space—no spike, no specific direction. Just pressure. Just weight. The forest sitting heavy on the back of my teeth.
Naruto's fingers kept flexing like he wanted to punch the feeling itself. I sympathized.
"We need a break," I said finally. My voice came out steady enough. My hands were starting to shake.
Naruto almost sagged. "Finally."
Sasuke scanned the area slowly, eyes and chakra both sweeping. Then he jerked his chin toward a wedge of space between a toppled trunk and a rock outcrop. "There," he said. "Ten minutes. No more."
Naruto flopped down on the log like gravity had won a long argument. I slid into the gap between wood and stone, sitting with my back braced and knees pulled up where I could rest my arms on them. Sasuke stayed half-standing, propped against the rock where he could see in three directions at once.
The air was cooler here, but just as thick. It sat in my lungs like wet wool.
Naruto tipped his head back until it bumped the trunk and stared up at the canopy. The leaves barely moved.
"What's the plan?" he asked the sky. "Besides 'don't die'?"
"Get an Earth scroll," Sasuke said. "Get to the tower."
Naruto groaned. "I meant a good plan. With details. And, like, a secret password."
"'Don't die' is a good plan," I said. "Password is 'Naruto doesn't run off alone.'"
"I didn't run off," he said. "I had to pee."
"That counts," I said. "Rules of the murder exam: if your hands are busy, you are 'off alone.'"
He scowled, then winced. The bruise on his temple pulsed in the same slow rhythm as the forest's pressure. His chakra stuttered, just a little, around it.
I saw it. I felt it. My stomach dropped.
I leaned forward automatically, hand already reaching for his head. "Let me check—"
"I'm fine," he said quickly, jerking his hand up to cover the spot.
"Stop saying that when you're not," I said, way more irritated than I meant to sound. "You got knocked out. That's brain stuff. Brain stuff is important."
"Your brain's the one doing the goldfish thing," he shot back.
I blinked. "…The what now."
"The thing where you keep going quiet and then jumping like somebody tapped the bowl," he said. "You look like a startled fish."
"Wow," I said. "Thank you for that mental image."
He shrugged, looking smug for about half a second. "You're the one who keeps slapping your own arm. Are the marks freaking out?"
"Kind of," I admitted. I rubbed at my wrist, thumb worrying the skin where ink had soaked in over the last few days. "They keep stuttering. I think the forest's chakra is messing with the signal. I'll think one of you just dropped and then it…fizzes out. My brain doesn't like that."
"Can you fix it?" he asked.
"I can keep poking you," I said. "I can't make the trees shut up."
I reached over anyway, catching his wrist before he could yank it away.
The seal warmed under my touch, his chakra answering the little test pulse with its usual loud, stubborn flare. I watched his face while I did it—not just the way his eyes tracked me, but how his mouth tried not to twitch when I leaned closer. His shoulders didn't relax, even when I let go.
"Still alive," I said. "Regrettably."
He snorted. "Glad I disappoint you."
"Constantly," I said.
I crawled the short distance to Sasuke and held out a hand. "Yours."
He sighed through his nose in that "you're annoying but useful" way and extended his wrist.
I tuned his mark too, in quick, precise pulses. His chakra was smooth and sharp as ever, warping a little where the forest pressed. His jaw clenched once; he pretended it hadn't happened.
"Functional?" I asked.
"Yes," he said.
"Excellent," I said. "Now I'm only panicking about the forest instead of also panicking about you."
Naruto nudged my foot with his own. "You don't have to panic about us, y'know."
"You keep almost dying in new and exciting ways," I said. "I feel like not panicking would be irresponsible."
He opened his mouth, closed it again, visibly caught between arguing and…not.
"Fine," he muttered. "But if my head explodes, I get to say 'told you so.'"
I gave him my flattest look. "If your head explodes, I will be very impressed and then extremely traumatized, in that order."
He laughed. It came out thinner than usual, but it was still a laugh, and his chakra eased a fraction.
Somewhere out in the trees, something cracked.
All three of us went still.
Sasuke's hand found a kunai without thinking. Naruto's fingers brushed his pouch. My head snapped up, eyes unfocusing for a heartbeat as I shoved my senses outward, combing for a spike, a direction, anything.
Nothing moved.
The crack didn't repeat.
"Branch," Sasuke said after a long moment. "Or an animal."
"Or a sadistic proctor throwing rocks," I muttered.
I tried to unclench my shoulders. The forest did not help.
The little break was enough for him.
From his vantage point, Orochimaru watched how they reacted to the single sound he'd allowed to escape. The tension. The way they triangulated without speaking. The way their chakras spiked and then slowly settled.
Not bad, for children.
He eased back a fraction, lowering his killing intent to a thin whisper.
Even that was enough to thicken the air by degrees.
The jinchūriki shivered and shook his head like a wet dog. Somewhere under the boy's heart, the sealed beast twitched. A low, familiar malice pressed against its cage, murmuring disgust.
Kurama knew him.
Orochimaru's smile thinned.
Good.
He let his gaze slide over the other two again.
The Uchiha had noticed the wrongness in the wind—that was interesting. He'd always liked perceptive ones.
The girl's seals continued to jitter, short pulses of chakra trying to find purchase in an environment he'd tilted a few degrees off true. She slapped her own arm in irritation.
There. Imperfect as it was, that web she was spinning between her team and the environment hummed with old potential.
If given the right hints, she could rediscover things Konoha's elders thought buried.
He catalogued that. Filed it away.
There would be time for experiments later.
For now, he slid along the branch and followed as they got to their feet and moved on, deeper into his playground.
My legs were starting to complain.
Naruto was still bouncing off roots like a particularly determined rubber ball, but even he had lost some spring. Sasuke kept the same steady pace, controlled and maddening.
The light had faded from sick green to sick green plus gray. We still hadn't seen another team. No scrolls. No obvious ambushes. Just the constant feeling of the forest breathing slowly around us and the Heaven scroll thumping lightly against Naruto's lower back with each step: half done, not enough.
"We need that second scroll," Naruto said for at least the fifth time.
"Everyone in the forest needs a second scroll," Sasuke answered. "That's why no one's being careless."
"If we don't find someone soon, I'm starting a rumor that we already have both," Naruto said. "Make them come to us."
"That's actually not the worst idea you've had," I said, almost absently. I was tracing possible ambush paths in my head and overlaying them with where I'd already placed seals.
Naruto beamed. "See? Genius."
"Except for the part where it paints a target on our backs in neon," I added. "But points for creativity."
We walked a little farther. My calves burned. My ink was running low. The static behind my eyes wouldn't shut up.
"Ten more minutes," Sasuke said finally. "Then we find a place to sleep."
Naruto made a face. "You mean 'a place to pretend to sleep and then jolt awake every time a twig snaps.'"
"Yes," Sasuke said.
"Accurate," I said.
"Can we not sleep on the ground?" Naruto asked. He shuddered a little. "I've had enough of the ground today."
"Trees," I said immediately. "Please trees."
Sasuke didn't argue. "Trees," he agreed. "Somewhere we can all see each other. And we trap the base."
That was already my plan, but hearing him say it out loud helped. If Sasuke Uchiha agreed with my paranoia, it meant I wasn't overreacting. Probably.
Eventually we found a cluster of trunks that had grown close together, branches tangling to make something like a platform high up.
Sasuke went up first, moving with that stupid catlike ease, then offered a hand down to me. Pride wanted me to refuse. Common sense reminded me I was tired, my hands were starting to shake, and falling out of a tree in the Forest of Death would be an extremely embarrassing way to die.
I grabbed his wrist and let him haul me the last bit.
Naruto followed under his own power, deliberately overshooting the branch and landing with a little extra flourish like he was auditioning for "flashy target" of the year.
Nobody commented. It was almost comforting, how rude we all were by default.
We settled in. Naruto wedged himself into a crook where he could wrap arms and legs around something solid. I sat with my back to the thickest part of the trunk, knees up, a branch under my feet like a makeshift footrest. Sasuke chose a spot where he had line of sight on both of us and as much of the forest floor as possible.
"Watches?" I asked.
"I'll take third," Sasuke said immediately.
"That's the worst watch," Naruto said. "You barely get any actual sleep."
"I wasn't asking for your health report," Sasuke said.
"I'm first," I decided before Naruto could launch into a speech. "You two have been knocked out today. I haven't. Yet."
Naruto bristled. "I can stay awake."
"You can dream with your eyes open," I said. "That's not the same thing."
"I'm fine," he insisted.
Sasuke snorted softly. "You were wobbling ten minutes ago."
"I was not—"
The whole tree rocked slightly as whatever passed for wind here pushed at the canopy. The small shift made Naruto very aware of how high up we were. I watched his throat bob.
He shut his mouth.
I watched his expression for another second, then gave him the kind of look I usually reserved for people trying to walk on broken ankles.
"Second watch," I said. "You can be noble then. Sleep now."
He scowled. "If anything happens and I'm not awake—"
"We'll wake you," I said. "That's the point of watch. It's not 'sit quietly while your friends die.'"
"Could be," he muttered, but the fight was leaking out of him.
His eyelids were heavy. His chakra buzz had dropped from "shouting" to "hoarse muttering."
He grumbled something indistinct and shifted until the rough bark pressed into his cheek. The branch creaked under his weight and then held.
Across from me, Sasuke settled into the kind of coiled stillness that looked like rest and definitely wasn't. I adjusted my glasses, set my ink and tools within easy reach, and stared out into the dark.
The feeling of being watched did not disappear.
It sat above us and around us, patient and hungry. The Squad Marks on my skin hummed, three warm points in a forest that wanted to smear us into the background.
Somewhere above, in the layered shadows of the canopy, something smiled and waited.