“…uck is a bell test anyway?”

“It’s like a-oh! I think she’s waking up!

Fuuka’s eyes flickered open, revealing an unfamiliar ceiling. It was painted beige, in a way that made it hard to tell if it had faded over time or if it was supposed to like that and the paint was marred by thin, spidery cracks here and there.

Fuuka’s view of the ceiling was obstructed as Kaoru thrust his head into her line of sight, smiling down at her.

Fuuka flinched and the slight movement sent a spasm of pain rippling along her abdomen.

“Owww,” Fuuka said, wincing as Kaoru frowned.

“You’ll want to go a little slower, I think you got the most banged up out of all of us,”

Fuuka realised suddenly that, behind his round, wire glasses Kaoru was cheerfully sporting a moderately sized black eye. Kaoru drew back from leaning over her and Fuuka took the opportunity to gingerly prop herself up, her elbows digging through the thin layer of straw inside the mattress and making the springs underneath creak.

Kaoru had been sitting right next to her bed on a simple, wooden chair. Aside from his black eye Kaoru looked mostly unharmed, although now that Fuuka was more awake it seemed like he was wearing a different set of glasses to the ones he had started the day with.

“Of course she did, neither of us got knocked out,” said Nagisa. The blonde girl had scooted her chair into the corner of the room a few metres away and was carefully rewrapping her prosthetic arm with bandages. Nagisa’s natural arm sported a bandage as well, a cotton medical one wrapped around her bicep. She was dressed in a plain set of black fatigues that chunin and jonin often wore under their coats, with the sleeves and pant legs rolled up to fit her frame, her hair also looked damp. Nagisa turned up and noticed Fuuka studying her condition and she flashed a savage grin, the first time Fuuke recalled seeing her smile.

“I got one of em, but she turned into water or some shit and then another one of them snuck up behind me,” Nagisa said and then jerked suddenly as a pencil bounced off her head.

“Hey!” Nagisa snarled, snatching the pencil out of the air after its ricochet and hurling it back in the direction it had come, where Shimamura sensei caught it easily.

“What you ‘got’ was about a dozen buckets worth of water to the face,” said the woman dryly. “Which is what generally happens when you stab a water clone. Some of the more advanced ones will do much worse than that. Still that was a cute trick, I wasn’t expecting there to be three separate weapons crammed into that thing,”

Their sensei looked the least weathered out of the four of them, although Fuuka noted the cuts on her face glistened slightly, probably having been treated with some kind of ointment to prevent infections. She was carrying a brown paper bag with twine handles as well.

Nagisa’s face twisted into a complicated expression, as though she had started to scowl and then been taken aback by the compliment. Fuuka took advantage of the brief lull in the conversation to probe her own condition, finding that her injuries had been treated as well. The burn on Fuuka’s hip had been patched with cotton and tape and when she poked it there was a greasy layer that was probably some kind of burn cream. A few loops of bandages around her midsection had sealed away the shallow stab wound there but nothing had really been done about her bruises, which had darkened magnificently and started to become very stiff after her brief bout of rest. Getting out of this bed was going to suck.

“If you three are done comparing battle scars like old veterans maybe we can debrief?” Shimamura Sensei said with a snort, putting her bag down on a folding table and pulling out a chair of her own to sit down on.

“What’s that?” Nagisa asked, sounding openly suspicious of the prospect.

“It’s a discussion or session of questioning that takes place after something like a mission,” supplied Kaoru, scooting his chair around to face Shimamura instead of Fuuka, who made a second, more cautious and more successful attempt at propping herself up against the headboard of her bed, setting the springs to creaking noisily.

“That sounds dumb, we were all there, we know what happened,” said Nagisa.

“It’s mostly so that I can write my report,” Shimamura Sensei said, pulling out a stubby pencil and a small, battered notebook from her pocket. “If you ever make jonin you’ll be horrified to learn how much paperwork it involves. But debriefing can also be useful from a self improvement perspective. You can analyse your decisions and performance and pin down what you need to improve for future operations,”

“Hmmm,” Said Nagisa, a bit more thoughtfully.

“Let’s begin when you arrived at 382 Jinshouji street, the address indicated in your summons,” Shimamura Sensei said briskly, opening her notebook and folding one leg over the other. “All three of you arrived more or less on time and, after introducing yourselves and chatting you decided to enter the premises. Explain your reasoning,”

“It was Nagisa chan who first pointed out that you were late,” said Kaoru and Fuuka nodded, hoping they were giving her credit instead of trying to pin blame, this kind of questioning always made her nervous but she didn’t want to shift her shortcomings onto her new teammates .”We thought it unlikely a jonin would be ten minutes late to a meeting they scheduled outside their own house so we tried the door. When it was unlocked we became concerned.”

“A reasonable assumption,” said Shimamura Sensei. “Although that isn’t actually my house as it happens,”

“What?” Fuuka asked, before she could stop herself.

“It’s a safe house owned by the jonin association,” said Shimamura with a shrug. “They’re dotted all over the city and used for various purposes. I sure as hell wasn’t going to lay out a dead body in my own house and then let you little goblins wreck my furniture if you decided to fight it out in the house,”

“That explains why the furniture was so bare,” Kaoru said, smiling. “I’m relieved to know Sensei’s off duty life isn’t quite as spartan as that.”

Shimamura sensei narrowed her eyes. “I didn’t realise genin were so well versed in interior design these days,”

“Mother says it's important to be well rounded,” Kaoru said, with an innocent shrug.

“True enough I suppose. It is possible to be rounded enough that you have no edge though,” Shimamura said. “Now if nobody else has any more commentary on my living arrangements?”

“Wait, I want to know about the body,” said Nagisa suddenly. “I thought it would have been like, one of those clone things again, but the way you said you didn’t want one in your house…”

Makes it sound like it was a real dead body Fuuka finished in her mind, feeling a tinge of unease at the thought.

“It’s not a real body that I made up to look like me or something, if that’s what you’re wondering” Shimamura said with a snort. “It is a clone… of a sort, it's a kind of detailed corpse replica made of chakra and other materials intended to be used for faking deaths,”

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“How does that work?” asked Kaoru, sounding curious.

“I… don’t actually know,” Shimaura admitted, sounding slightly annoyed. “A colleague of mine makes them for me, charges an arm and a leg for the damn things too. They are effective though. The process of making them has something to do with building up layers of earth, water and lightning chakra to somehow mimic the structure of human flesh. The result has fooled some pretty experienced shinobi, so don’t feel too bad for falling for it,”

Fuuka wondered when exactly their sensei had had occasion to use such a technique. Faking death was an integral part of a shinobi’s arsenal: the basic substitution jutsu Fuuka had learned in the academy was for exactly that purpose after all. But that was a simple trick relying on sleight of hand, Shimamura Sensei’s replica was far more elaborate by comparison and by the sounds of it, expensive to boot.

“Getting back to the matter at hand,” Shimamura said firmly. “After waiting for about ten minutes, All three of you enter the house, with weapons drawn after beginning to suspect something is wrong,” Shimamura paused thoughtfully. “This is broadly… pretty sensible reasoning. It is unusual for a jonin to be ten minutes late to a meeting outside their front door and as shinobi it’s your duty to investigate if you reasonably suspect a comrade might be in trouble. This was the first point at which you could have failed this little test but this was a pretty acceptable decision. However this wasn’t the only correct answer. What other options did you have available to you?”

Silence ruled for a few seconds as the three genin considered.

“We…could have gone and got somebody?” Fuuka asked, timidly raising her hand. “There’s the listening post we were aiming for,”

“You…don’t need to raise your hand, you aren’t in class anymore,” Shimamura said, dryly, but not totally unkindly. “You could have done that though, yes. Successfully alerting someone experienced enough to deal with the situation would have been a way to pass this test. However, do you think whoever was on duty at the listening post would have been terribly impressed if all you had to report was that your sensei was ten minutes late to a meeting?”

Fuuka felt her cheeks heat up as she averted her eyes. “No,” she muttered softly.

“Probably not, no,” said Shimamura, sounding faintly amused. “I certainly would not have been if it was me. You would have needed more information about what was going on to really raise the alarm in a timely fashion,”

“I could have sent in a shadow rat to scout out,” supplied Kaoru. “They would have seen the body and we could have gone and reported at that point,”

“Good idea,” said Shimamura, nodding. “You would have circumvented most of my test at that point which would have been annoying but I would have to count it as a win. In a real battle you can’t let your enemy control the flow of events, if you can act outside of their expectations you can win even when outmatched. Sometimes anyway,”

Shimamura Sensei looked distant for a moment, before refocusing her attention on Nagisa. “What about you Hanamachi? Any ideas?”

Nagisa hummed. “I don’t know, not really? I think going in was the right call but I guess we could have cased the place more carefully first, checked the windows and stuff,”

“Fair enough,” said Shimamura, writing something in her notebook. “It’s good to think outside the box but a simpler plan has fewer things that can go wrong. And things will always go wrong. Let’s move on then. You three moved into the house and came across what you believed to be the dead body of your murdered sensei and then encountered what was likely to be a highly dangerous enemy operative. You make a…limited attempt to verbally question the operative and when, instead of responding they begin to approach, you open hostilities with a concealed crossbow. Interesting bit of kit that,”

Nagisa stiffened subtly at that last point, although Fuuka couldn’t really read what emotion was behind the reaction.

“That proves ineffective and the operative continues to approach and retrieves a scroll from the dead body then closes in on you three. Kurokawa deploys a combination of smoke and explosive tags in a rather daring fashion-”

The burn on Fuuka’s hip throbbed painfully and she felt her cheeks redden again.

“Then under the cover of smoke Nagisa retrieves her while Kaoru replaces the scroll with a- a shadow rat?” Shimamura asks, looking up at Kaoru questioningly, who nods. “Alright, a shadow rat, who assumes the form of the scroll while you three evacuate the house with the real one. Right, there’s some good and bad here, mostly good but we’ll start with the bad,” Shimamura Sensei looked up from her notepad and regarded them all with a stern expression. “You all hesitated. A lot. In the face of someone who was pretty clearly your enemy. There are a lot of people out there who could have killed you three in the time it took for you to react. Kurokawa, you’re the only one here who has experience as a genin, including combat experience, but you froze up along with your completely fresh teammates.

Fuuka dropped her head, her fingers tightening around a handful of the sheet on her bed. Shimamura Sensei was right, she was pathetic. Yuna, or even Haru would never have frozen up like that.

“However, a certain amount of hesitation was what I expected,” Shimamura continued evenly. “I engineered the situation you stumbled upon to be distressing, even to someone who had some experience. You could even argue that Kurokawa was the only one equipped to realise exactly how dire the situation was and how scared you all should have been. Beyond that, most importantly, none of you three stayed frozen forever. In a terrifying situation, facing seemingly insurmountable odds all three of you acted to protect each other and the security of the village. Even if you accomplished nothing else, that much would have given you a pass for this exercise,”

Fuuka blinked. That didn’t sound like they had done too badly? She looked up and her teammates seemed to be sitting a little straighter. Kaoru was smiling and Nagisa… was maybe frowning a bit less intensely? Maybe?

“But that doesn’t mean there isn’t more from us to learn here,” Shimamura said. “When we analyse your opening moves here it starts pretty badly. When faced with an enemy you believe to be more capable than you and you have the upper hand you need to strike hard, fast and in a coordinated fashion. Even experienced shinobi can be overwhelmed by a rapid barrage of varied attacks. Instead what we saw was a panicked opening shot by one person-”

Oh, Nagisa’s frown was firmly back in place now.

“-Followed up by…I’m not sure actually, a daring gambit? A clumsy accident? Trying to access your pouch without appearing to move was a reasonable approach, but if your intention was only to use your smoke tags then you need to learn your equipment better: Smoke tags don’t instantly deliver their entire payload, they emit a thick stream over time, they probably wouldn’t have obscured you before the enemy could close in in that situation,”

Fuuka nodded numbly, trying to focus on the substance of what Shimamura Sensei was saying instead of the tumultuous emotions the swift oscillations between praise and criticism were eliciting.

“So accidentally triggering your explosives as well probably saved you, within the context of the exercise, because I certainly wasn’t expecting that,” continued Shimamura dryly. “Ultimately your gambit made the situation fluid which your teammates were able to capitalise on. The next few seconds were probably the highlight of the whole exercise, in a few rapid moves you recover your injured teammate, what you could reasonably believe to be an important mission objective and evacuate, leaving behind a clever decoy that could very plausibly have seen you escape scot free. Then instead of letting her guard down Kurokawa spots a renewed pursuit and you all split up, forcing your singular opponent to choose between you,”

“Until you cheated with those clone things,” Nagisa interjected, not quite sulkily “The clone jutsu we learned in the academy doesn’t do anything like that!”

Shimamura rolled her eyes. “There are a lot of clone jutsus out there and, taken as a whole, they are relatively common so you’ll need to learn how to deal with them. That being said, I did expand the parameters of the exercise here a little: it seemed like a good opportunity to test you three individually. The results of which-”

Shimamura Sensei broke off as she was suddenly interrupted by a gentle, tapping, scratching noise. Four pairs of eyes swivelled over to the window to see a Shinizumi clan rat tapping at the window with a scroll in its messenger pouch.

Shimamura Sensei sighed and stood up, rolling her shoulders and eliciting some unpleasant cracking noises. She walked over to the table where she set down her paper bag and withdrew something wrapped in white grease paper that looked like a sandwich to Fuuka and then carried her prize over to the window.

“Let’s see what it is this time?” Shimamura Sensei muttered darkly, pulling the window up and accepting the little scroll from the rat. Shimamura read the scroll, bit her lower lip and exhaled a hissing breath through her upper teeth.

“Looks like I’ll have to cut this short,” Shimamura said, absently unwrapping her sandwich and tearing a corner of the bread off, handing the morself over to the rat who devoured it eagerly. “I have enough for my report anyway. The rest of the sandwiches in the bag are for you three to share, after that you can have the day to yourselves. I’ll contact you the usual way when I have something for you,”

WIth that Shimamura Sensei climbed onto the window sill and then leaped away, disappearing in a flicker of motion.