Chuunin Exams: Exam 2

It may have been impossible for the woman to escape, had she been real. As you throw your weapons at her, the image of the lady flickers, then fades. You realize she was part of the genjutsu. Should you still be trapped in the Genjutsu, all you'll see is a dead end and a feeling of hopelessness will overcome you, forcing you to your knees.

Should you realize and fight the genjutsu, you will feel your body energized slowly and see another fork in the path ahead. Choose left or right to advance.

Komon blinked in despair as the elderly woman flickered out of existence, surely that would be impossible in any real world, his reaction time was not unimpressive, and the lady had been extremely old, to move so fast as for Komon to not be able to track her would put much too much strain on her elderly body. No.. this couldn’t be real, and Komon was quickly learning it, as the pieces began to fall into place in his head he began to think.

A disgusting smell

Exhaustion

Immobility

Vanishing women

The symptoms were to diverse to be the effects of a poison, and thinking back to his genjutsu training with the jounin Tayo he recalled something he had once told him. “To fight a genjutsu you have to be aware you're in one, you can do this by spotting abnormalities.” Komon had placed four together, and had decided it was time to break out of this. Hoping he was right he rose his left arm and formed the tiger seal. “RELEASE” He’d shout, as he disrupted his own flow of chakra. As he did so he would hopefully feel the effects of the genjutsu begin to weaken, and the dead end in front of him would begin to turn into a narrow hallway again.

Choose a path. The left leads you to an empty room like the one you saw when you first entered. The right leads you down a dark hallway and uncertainty.

As the genjutsu lifted Komon felt his body become stronger, the illusion had passed and his abilities where returning to him. With the illusion gone so to was the wall. In front of him stood a fork in the road, that left him with two option. He looked to his left and then to his right, taking note of the possiblities of each route.

The first option placed walking down a dark hallway, although the darkness wasn’t much to him, his byakugan could see chakra, so if anything the hallway would give him an advantage. The darnkess wouldn’t conceal his enemies from him, unless they where suppressing their chakra, which in this exam was a high probability. He sighed as he turned to the left, thinking maybe it would be more clear to him.

As his eyes landed to the left he took note of the door that lay ahead of him. Behind it layed uncertainty, either direction he went he would be susceptible to a trap, so he decided that he would just chose one, his body shifted to the right in the direction of the dark hallway, he was ready to continue.

As you walk down the dark path, you see and sense nothing despite your dojutsu. The path is narrow, just three feet by three feet and the longer you walk on it, the more narrow it becomes. After ten minutes, the area is still pitch black and now starting to feel like a coffin, as though the walls are closing in. You literally have to bend down to keep walking as the roof steadily becomes lower.

Finally, you reach what appears to be... a dead end.

"Boo!" a voice speaks softly from two feet behind you as the silhouette of a humanoid shape appears, previously hidden via chakra suppression.

The silhouette is armed with a greatsword and sporting sharp knuckle dusters that smell faintly of dried blood. It is too dark and the figure too androgynous to identify as male or female.

As he continued walking down the dark and empty hallway he began to note that the already narrow walls seemed to be pushing closer and closer together. Like they were actively trying to sandwich him the further he got. After what seemed like several minutes of walking he even had to crouch just to fit in the hallway, but never the less he continued on, he had chosen this path for himself and he was going to stick to it. Or at least he thought he would before his face ran into the stone wall in front of him. “A dead end?” he thought to himself before hearing something that made his heart skip a beat.

“Boo”

His opponent had been confident enough in its own abilities to make itself known to Komon before attacking him, Komon couldn’t tell if his opponent was a boy or a girl based on the voice and he couldn’t even face him in the narrow hallway, at least not fast enough to deflect whatever attack the unseeable opponent was sending his way. With that in mind he quickly utilized his byakugan’s 360 degree vision to get the general location and distance of his opponent, confirming his theory that he was in striking range.

As he registered it his body was already instinctively moving into an attack, he had dropped his legs out from underneath him and was falling towards the ground, at an alarming speed, as he fell he would catch himself on his hands keeping his upper body suspended in air as he used the momentum to send a kick to the opponent’s shin from near ground level, hoping the strike would cause the prisoner to lose his/her balance or at the very least force him to dodge Komon was already pressing off the ground with one arm to flip himself over and onto his feet so he would now be facing the ninja while reaching into the weapons pouch with the other free arm, drawing a single kunai and now readying himself to face the opponent now in front of him.

The tripping works and your opponent loses their footing just long enough for you to gain yours. As your opponent reaches to strike you, you feel several tiny wires nearly shred your clothing and skin.

You realize that though this enemy is alive and in control of personal faculties, razor sharp threads are attached to the criminals limbs, making the assailant a living, willing puppet.

Whats more worrying is that there is no sign of a puppet master.

As Komon landed successfully on his feet he turned to face the gruesome sight in front of him, the man was alive, covered in harshly sharpened wire. This of course had to be causing the man immense pain, and Komon couldn’t help but wonder why someone would allow this to happen to himself. The unnatural movements that would put strain on or even injure a normal human quickly gave Komon the idea that the man was being controlled like a puppet, much like the gennin max he had sparred with just recently.

What he found particularly odd however was that the puppet user was nowhere in sight, he had always assumed that the puppeteers had to be within a certain range of their puppets, perhaps this was some kind of advanced puppetry technique, that even max had not learned. Frustrated he decided that he would have to deal with the human puppet first, and then find and deal with the sick person who thought this was ok. Komon would take note of the razor sharp threads as he jolted forward while activating lightning javelin, then using body flicker to move at an alarming speed of 205 to get behind the puppet and sever all major threads with his kunai with 107 sharpness.

If that would succeed he would then charge forwards at his mutilated opponent with kunai still in hand, intending to stab the man through the back and out the chest with a lightning javelin enhanced strike from behind. And finally put this man out of his misery, it would be a quick and painless death if all went according to plan.

Once completing his fight with the puppet he would turn down the hallway, with a dead end and enclosed walls the puppeteer could only be in one direction, that direction being the dark ominous hall he had just made his way down. The puppeteer would no doubt be his last opponent and he was growing impatient, the shinobi was sick, attaching razor sharp wire to a living mans skin just to gain a combat advantage, Komon was going to make this right, he was going to end him.

“Wherever you are, come on out! Lets end this!” He’d say hearing his own voice echo down the vacant hallway.

You succeed in taking down the puppet but no one else is in sight. As you yell around the hallway, you only hear yourself... And a slight rustling.

From the back of the now dead puppet, a small pack slides off, the flap opening to reveal what can only be resembled as a malformed baby. The heavily scarred infant's fingers are wrapped in more of the razor sharp wires that controlled the puppet.

You realize the puppet was the infant's only form of defense, in order to complete your mission, you will have to kill the baby.

Komon looked in horror at the infant, surely this was some kind of test, the raikage surely wouldn’t want him to murder a baby. Frustrated he’d say aloud “Is this some kind of sick joke?” and of course hearing no response, he turned back to face the harsh reality in front of him. In order to become a chuunin of the hidden cloud, he would have to kill this baby, the very thought of it sickened him to his stomach.
Frustrated he would ensure he was a safe distance from the child, before he tried to talk to it, he knew that all the prisoners he had fought where on death row and found it hard to believe that a mere infant could have ended up in this situation. But then he remembered what it had done, the pain on the razor wired man’s face. It had been truly sadistic, and he suspected it had been the child’s doing, despite its age, it was evil in nature.

Frustrated he would use the eye mind reading technique, hopefully the babies past would give him more insight onto why he had earned such a fate as this.