70 Naruto : Chapter 70

Orochimaru didn't know whether to be annoyed or amused. He hadn't managed to find team seven to test Sasuke like he had planned. But what he found were several beaten teams, some dead, some barely alive and some simply knocked out.

They all had lost their scrolls and the traces of the fights indicated a vastly superior team taking them out in quick fashion.

As the trail of beaten teams was the same as team seven's he could safely assume that Sasuke was more than worthy to get his cursed seal.

The interesting part was that each time when a team was beaten many trails left from the position so it made it more difficult to find the real team. If only he could catch the boy. But the team moved incredibly fast for genin.

It was difficult to keep following them as he had to avoid using too much of his chakra and alerting the proctors to him.

He had infiltrated the exams with a lot of trouble and had only managed to sneak in because one of his hidden entrances was outside the newer barrier. He was sure that he could solve that problem until the planned invasion now that he was aware of it.

It was exciting. It was much more enjoyable than he had thought chunin exams could be for him. It was so much more rewarding to fight worthy prey. Because that was what Sasuke was to him; prey. He wanted Sasuke's body to get his sharingan.

But for the boy to come to him, he would need to place the curse seal on him. After all, he was a known traitor to Konoha and without an incentive it would be too far-fetched to get Sasuke to comply.

And the information his spy Kabuto had given him on Sasuke told him that Sasuke's ultimate goal was getting revenge for the Uchiha massacre by killing his brother Itachi. Now there was only the problem of finding the boy.

...

"We are being followed by a Kusa kunoichi." Naruto informed his teammates.

"Why would someone from Kusa try to get to us?" Sakura asked.

"No idea. But something is off. We should distract her and get a good distance between us." Naruto said.

"I agree. How about you make some shadow clones again and let them transform to look like our team? Let her think that we simply employ our normal tactic of spying ahead to find teams to take out and then beating them in a quick fight.

Nobody would be able to distinguish them from us at a distance. And once they are all taken out we can be far enough away. Perhaps even at the tower." Sasuke suggested.

"I mean, we have now collected about seven scrolls, five of them are heaven scrolls like our own. That means that from the ten scrolls of heaven we have six.

That reduces the number of teams that can pass down to five overall. And a little bit of fighting would be nice. After all, our promotions depend on showing off our skills to the proctors."

"Alright. I guess that would be the best course of action. Shadow Clone jutsu." Naruto said and fourteen teams of clones appeared. Two of each team transformed into Sasuke and Sakura and then they took off in different directions.

The original team took a detour to the tower to not tip off their pursuer of the real team. If all went as planned they would be safely at the tower before the Kusa kunoichi could determine which team seven was the real one.

...

Orochimaru was getting frustrated. He had finally caught up to Sasuke's team and involved them in a fight, only to find out after five minutes of fighting that he had been fooled by shadow clones. All three were clones.

But thanks to the clones being really good at dodging and ranged attacks it had taken him too long to realize that.

The team was really good. From one point he had seen that they had split into many teams, probably all but one being shadow clones.

Sadly you couldn't say which team was a decoy team. So he had followed one that was going in the direction of the tower while sending two earth clones out after two other trails. This was costing too much time.

But it still was intriguing how well the clones fought. Just who was the creator of them? Sasuke, the blond boy Naruto or the girl Sakura? He suspected Naruto as he was rumoured to have the biggest chakra reserves in his class, but Kabuto had been unable to procure much information after the Sandaime had tightened security in the village.

And most of his other spies had been caught before. Kabuto had to lie low for a while to not compromise his position and his ability to fulfil his duty in the planned invasion.

So the main idea was having Kabuto collect more information during the exams to give to him, but from the looks of it the last information that Kabuto had been able to send out, which had been directly after the confirmation which teams had passed the real genin tests, were massively outdated concerning team seven.

He also wondered who had been chosen to succeed his old sensei as Hokage. He didn't think that Jiraiya wanted the job and Tsunade had left the village years ago and didn't want to come back at all.

Well, he would find out during the finals. No matter whom the old fool had chosen, he wouldn't be a match for him.

...

Naruto, Sasuke and Sakura reached the tower having to fight one team that had set up an ambush, getting another earth scroll, and entered. They had only spent about a day in the forest and had surely decimated the competition.

Twenty teams had passed the first round; five at most could pass the second one thanks to them collecting so many heaven scrolls. It would be four interesting days in the forest. After all, by limiting the scrolls, they would put other teams under more pressure.

And to be honest, the teams that they had taken out weren't anything impressive. An Ame team had tried to fool them with illusionary clones, but Sasuke had easily seen through them and Naruto was completely immune to genjutsu on that level.

Sakura had simply dispelled it as genjutsu was one of her strengths. He also had easily sensed where the real ones were hidden underground. By flooding the clearing they were fighting in Naruto had the perfect base to send lightning into the ground, driving the three out for Sasuke and Sakura to knock them out.

An older Konoha team was embarrassingly easy to knock out with a genjutsu by Sakura. They simply fell asleep and team seven took their scroll. Now they found themselves in a room with some kind of poem hanging high on one wall.

After deducing that they had to open the heaven and earth scrolls now, they took two and Naruto immediately recognized a summoning array in them. They threw them away and were ready to take on whoever was summoned if that was part of the test as well.

Thankfully it turned out to be Kotetsu who was greeting them to tell them that they had passed their test. His face when they handed over two more earth scrolls and five more heaven scrolls was priceless.

"How the hell did you collect so many scrolls in such a short time?" He exclaimed shocked.

"The competition consisted of wimps." Sasuke simply stated getting a nod from Naruto. "It was too easy to take them out.

We had perhaps one interesting fight for a scroll among the eight teams we beat. One from Taki had a few interesting techniques. But we still had them beaten in two minutes."

"But the one Kusa team had an interesting collection of poisons with them that I took for studying them. Next to a few weapons I liked." Naruto stated.

"Yes, we would have been here even faster if you and your clones hadn't robbed all teams we came across blind." Sakura commented.

"There is no reason to leave your enemy with anything that you could use much better than them. And dead ninjas have no need for weapons, scrolls and money." Naruto declared. "And there are no rules in this round. I can do whatever I want in the forest."

"I guess you have a point there. Did you by chance come across some medical scrolls?" She admitted.

"Don't know. I haven't had a closer look. If I find one you can have a copy." Naruto agreed.

"Thanks. Studying more about techniques that other village might know could be interesting." She said happily.

Kotetsu sweat-dropped. Kakashi sure had a weird team.

...

Naruto continued to write down all information that his listening seal gave him. So he overheard the Oto team complaining about being unable to find team seven to kill Sasuke as Orochimaru of all people had ordered them to do.

The Kusa kunoichi turned out to be Orochimaru and fought against Anko Mitarashi, the proctor for this round. He immediately sent a clone transformed into a bird to the Hokage to tell him about it so that Anko could get backup.

Kabuto was a spy he found out when he met with Orochimaru in a deserted part of the forest and got new instructions. It seemed that they had messed up some plans by taking so many scrolls and reaching the tower early on. Something about a curse seal.

He would have to investigate that more. Otherwise there were some intense fights going on. The team of Gai, Kakashi sensei's self-proclaimed eternal rival, had problems finding a heaven scroll.

At the moment there were three teams already at the tower. Team eight had trapped another team using Shino's connection to insects, in this case giant leeches, to get an earth scroll.

They had come in after the Suna team with Gaara on it that had broken the previous record. So now only two more teams could pass.

So the teams that got a heaven scroll at the beginning would be the ones that most likely made it through if they didn't get caught by stronger teams.

Well, he could probably send a group of his clones into the forest again after the round was over. With so many teams being desperate for a scroll there would be heavy fights and many deaths, which again meant that he could collect a lot of useful things afterwards.

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Hey guys I really need some power stones to Elevate the ranking :)

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