The second day of S Class made it clear the village was done pretending children were all built the same.
Kuma-sensei had us in the yard early again, though this time the place looked less like a training ground and more like somebody had taken apart a bunch of different professions and laid the pieces out in rows to see which children drifted toward what.
Weapons tables under the eaves. Filled with more variety than I knew the name of.
Target stands at different ranges.
Posts wrapped for striking.
Obstacle lanes.
A section of disturbed earth and marked brush for tracking.
Three long tables covered in papers, coded strips, seal forms, and enough brushes and ink to paint the Academy.
Further back there was a little mock village street built out of screens, crates, laundry lines, and doors that led nowhere.
Choza stood beside me, his shoulders tight. "This seems like overkill."
"The best kind of kill," I murmured.
"That is not very comforting, Tai."
Kuma-sensei stepped into the center of the yard and let us settle.
"Today," he said, "we stop asking whether you are talented and start asking what kind of talent you actually have."
That got everyone's attention.
"For those of you already enrolled in electives these tests will show us if you are meant to be there. I know this looks intimidating. If it doesn't it should. Most of you will have never touched the majority of things we are going to ask you to do today. It is okay to fail. It is not however acceptable to half ass any exercise asked of you. We are trying to build the road to the strongest version of yourself, but that will require honesty in your actions here today."
He gestured to the stations around us.
"You will rotate through compatibility trials. These are not final placements. They are measurements. Some of you are already imagining yourselves as swordsmen, trackers, diplomats, seal masters, infiltrators, or great ninjutsu users because the words sound impressive in your own head."
His gaze moved across the class and rested, for just a breath, on three or four children who deserved it.
"Today we compare imagination to evidence."
I liked that sentence enough to remember it.
One of the other instructors, a narrow-faced woman with the sort of calm that usually meant competence, stepped up beside him.
"Three specializations will eventually be assigned to you by the village," she said. "Those will reflect your aptitude, your team value, and the village's needs. Two may be chosen by you, subject to instructor approval."
That caused a visible ripple through the class.
Children will accept many injustices. Being told their choices are subject to approval always lands badly.
The woman ignored it and went on. "If you have no aptitude in an area, you will not be placed there because you think it sounds romantic. However even the slightest aptitude will be taken into account, so do not fear if you are not the best. Hard work and passion is a talent all on its own."
Shikaku, standing a little ahead and to my left, sighed like a boy already disappointed in several hypothetical futures.
Kuma-sensei split us into rotating groups.
Mine started at weapons.
The racks were laid out in neat order. Kunai. Shuriken. Short staff. Wooden sword. Training tanto. Weighted wire rings. A heavier club for the bigger children. Chain and sickle. Even a few less common pieces off to the side for later testing. Hell they had what looked to be a halberd meant for Lu Bu down on the end.
The instructor there was a broad-shouldered Jonin with old hand scars and the kind of voice that sounded like he'd been shouting over steel since before most of us were born.
"You will pick the weapon up and follow the instructor through a slow kata," he said. "Once you are finished with the kata you will tell the instructor how it felt in your hands. Honesty is the best policy here children. The sensei is an expert at the weapon and will be able to tell if you are lying. Your future self will thank you for telling the truth."
We were called one by one to sample basic grips, movements, and simple combinations.
The Hyūga twins were annoyingly clean with almost everything but clearly most comfortable empty-handed. Their bodies wanted direct lines and disciplined center control. No surprise there.
One of the older boys I didn't know took to the sword immediately and then ruined the impression by trying too hard to look like he had taken to the sword immediately.
Inoichi surprised me. He was not the strongest, not the fastest, but his hands were quick and curious. He adapted well. Not married to one answer it seemed like he was adaptable enough to use all the weapons. Though I don't know enough about weapons to say he would be a master.
Shikaku looked bored until the wire rings came out. Then, his eyes sharpened. He handled them with a look of mild inconvenience masking a secret, intense interest.
When Choza stepped up, he fumbled the lighter blades, trying to imitate the smaller kids. But when he gripped the staff, the world shifted. His center lowered. Block, leverage, drive, recover. It wasn't flashy; it was the beginning of a style that would one day crush mountains.
"Again," the instructor grunted, and Choza brightened as if he'd been handed a medal.
Mikoto's turn came a little later.
She touched the sword, the knife, the wire. Then the shuriken.
That was where she stopped looking like a child trying equipment and started looking like herself.
Like all the other aspects of her life I had witnessed she was precise. She held them properly almost at once, listened once, adjusted once, and began putting them where they were supposed to go. Not with blistering power. With clean release and attention.
The instructor had her throw again from a slightly longer distance.
Then again under a little movement.
Then with her non-dominant hand.
By the end of it he had written a mark beside her name that looked interested. He turned to her and said "aim small, miss small."
She saw me watching and gave me a tiny, satisfied look she would never have risked last year.
Good for her.
When my turn came, I ignored the sword. I felt like a mans romance but I liked the viceral feeling of something crushing beneath my fists. I touched the staff only long enough to confirm what I already knew. The weight I actually liked came from my own body. Dad's training had made that answer too obvious to pretend otherwise.
The instructor gave me the bo staff first anyway.
I moved through the basic strikes and checks the way I'd been shown.
"Again," he said.
Then he took it away and sent me to the wrapped post.
That told me enough.
"Three strikes," he said. "Scaled higher in power. I don't want you to go all out, just enough to let me see how your body reacts under different tension."
I settled into my stance and gave him what he asked for. Three different levels.
He watched my hips, not my hands.
When I finished, he mumbled as he wrote, "Taijutsu first. Body weapons before metal weapons. Keep him away from anything that teaches reach dependency too early."
He then called over one of the instructors standing off to the side and asked him to fetch some knuckle knives. They returned and passed them to me. The first instructor said " Put these on your hands and tell me how they feel."
Wearing the knuckle blades was interesting. I liked the extra weight immediately, I wasn't so sure about having blades sticking out the bottom of them. Felt like it could be a hazard if I moved wrong.
The instructor had me strike the post again. The first strike hit too hard and the wrapped post snapped. I didn't get the chance to strike again as the instructor has seen what he needed to and made some notes.
I tried all of the next weapons. If the weapon was too far from the center of my body, I was not very good at using it. I liked using the hammer and the polearms but I would require a lot of training time to get them to where they were useful for me.
From weapons we rotated to tracking.
That station sorted people even harder.
The instructor there had laid out a series of disturbed paths through dirt, brush, and shallow water. Prints, breaks, false sign, drag marks, hidden markers, scent prompts, and enough nonsense to make city-raised children realize the ground had been talking this whole time without their permission.
Shibi was eerie—calm and correct, noticing disturbances with a certainty that suggested he'd been taught never to confuse stillness with emptiness. Mikoto, too, was impressive. She didn't rush. She noticed patterns, likely a result of Uchiha police training by osmosis.
Then there was Shikaku. He barely glanced at the ground before pointing out a false trail.
"How?" the instructor demanded.
Shikaku shrugged. "If I were trying to hide, I'd want you to feel clever right before I sent you the wrong way."
Kuma-sensei stared at him a second longer than usual after that. It was a "troublesome" answer for a six-year-old.
My turn felt unfair. Ground is ground. Soil is soil. I went through the exercise so fast they made me do the "hard" line with overlapping tracks. It took longer, but compared to tracking cattle through a desert on horseback, this was a Tuesday.
The instructor's note was blunt: "Strong environmental tracking. Weak on the human element." It was a fair critique. I understood dirt better than people.
From there we moved to the tables.
This was where children who had been feeling proud of their bodies remembered the village also expected their brains to show up.
Code strips first. Simple substitution, pattern completion, memory chains. Then logistics problems. Load routes, rationing, terrain delays, medical prioritization. Then basic seal-copying and symbol discipline, which was less full fūinjutsu and more seeing who had the patience and fine control to one day survive fūinjutsu without setting their sleeves on fire.
Shikaku stopped pretending to be tired the moment the logistics board came out.
It was honestly offensive.
He leaned over the route map once, pushed two markers aside, and said, "This wagon never makes it there on time unless you split the loads before the river crossing."
The proctor blinked. "Why?"
"Because if it rains, that road turns to sludge."
"You weren't given weather."
"No," Shikaku said, already annoyed at having to explain himself. "But if you're not planning for the rain you're planning wrong."
That one earned him a note.
Inoichi surprised me more here than at weapons. He wasn't as sharp as Shikaku on pure route efficiency, but he was much better at reading the human part of a problem. Messenger fatigue. Morale. Where misunderstandings would cost more than speed. He kept noticing the people in the system, not just the pieces.
Choza, to the surprise of nobody who knew him, did very well on ration planning.
It wasn't just because he liked food, though that helped. It was because children who grow up in households where meals matter and shortages are remembered often develop a brutal respect for supply. The Akimichi clan was also one of the major food suppliers in the village, being the clan heir he had started training for the role and had something he could fall back on. He counted well and prioritized where he should.
The proctor looked at his paper, then at him.
"Have you done this before?"
Choza straightened. "I help at home."
Mikoto was neat with the seal-copying. Very neat. Better than me, certainly. Better than most. Not because she understood the deeper theory yet. Because her hands obeyed her and her mind didn't get sloppy the moment something required care.
I did well enough on the just logistics board to satisfy myself and no better than that.
I am not above admitting that sealing was completely out of my wheelhouse. I was interested in what they could do for me, I don't have the mind to make them.
Still, there is only so much one can do when a problem is obviously stupid. If a supply route makes no allowance for fatigue, weather, pack-animal loss, or the fact that wounded men bleed whether the schedule respects it or not, I will notice. So I noticed. Apparently more than I meant to.
The proctor read my recommendations, reread them, and then asked, "How old are you?"
"That seems unrelated."
"Humor me."
"Six"I told him.
He grunted. "Logistics and sustainment. Strong. Very strong."
Then came ninjutsu.
That changed the mood of the yard more than anything else had.
Weapons excited children. Tracking irritated them. Logistics humbled them in quieter ways. Ninjutsu got into their heads. It was the art most likely to match whatever grand and idiotic story a child had already told himself about what being a shinobi meant.
The instructors there seemed accustomed to that.
This was not a full release exercise. We were too young, and the Academy was not about to let a yard full of gifted children set fire to half its own infrastructure just because someone's father could breathe katon. What they wanted instead was foundation data. Affinity. Output. Internal and external resonance. Shape control. Stability. Whether your chakra wanted to leave the body at all, and what it seemed happiest doing when it did.
That last part interested me immediately.
The first test used chakra paper.
That got everyone's attention fast.
One strip first. Small pulse. No forcing. No dramatics.
The Hyūga twins went first near me. One split his paper. The other dampened his. Wind and water, if memory served me right.
One older boy singed his and tried very hard not to look pleased with himself.
Shikaku's wrinkled, then tore lightly. He looked at it like the paper had interrupted a better thought.
Inoichi's dampened at one edge after a slight hesitation. The proctor made a note.
Then Choza.
He took the strip between two thick fingers, frowned, and gave it chakra.
The paper sagged wet almost immediately.
He blinked. "That looks bad."
"It looks like water affinity," the proctor said.
"That still looks bad."
The man gave him a second strip. "Again, but cleaner."
Choza did.
This time the paper dampened evenly and held.
The proctor nodded. "Good. Strong response."
Then he looked a little closer and added, "Dense chakra too."
Choza frowned. "What does that mean?"
The man looked him over. "For your age? Your Yang is packed unusually tight."
Choza thought about that. "Is that good?"
"Yes."
"Alright."
The proctor still looked at him another moment, then muttered to the assistant beside him, "About as dense as you'll ever see in this age group."
He paused.
"Not counting Hashirama."
Choza, hearing only tone and not history, looked very pleased with himself.
Then Mikoto's paper burned. Aneat darkening at the corner and a curl of smoke. Clean and controlled. Very Uchiha.
The proctor wrote a longer note beside her name and did not bother pretending he wasn't interested.
When I took the strip, I tried to keep the yin from interfering with the results. The paper reacted strangely and split. The instructor handed me a second sheet. I tried again; it dampened and browned. The proctor handed me a third strip.
"Again. Properly."
I gave in trying to hold the Yin from influencing the result. The strip held for a second, then gave that subtle, "wrong" answer that high-Yin chakra produces. Part of it crumbled into earth and part soaked into water.
"Well," the proctor said. "There's your problem. You were shading your first pulse."
"Maybe the paper was being dramatic."
"Try that answer again when you're older and attractive," he deadpanned.
A few of the children laughed. Mikoto did not. She was watching the strips with the sort of attention that meant she'd be remembering this later.
The proctor held the paper up between two fingers. "Strong water. Strong earth. Significant Yin expression." He paused. "Very significant."
Then we moved to resonance testing.
This part I liked immediately.
Three phases. External shaping. Internal reinforcement. Then integrated application.
That last one had my full attention.
The external test used candles, a water basin, weighted streamers, and a tray of loose earth. We were supposed to influence them with controlled chakra output. Not produce real techniques. Just show what our chakra wanted to do once it left the body.
This sorted people harder than they expected.
Some children with strong affinity had poor control. Some with mediocre response had very good discipline.
Choza did better than most.
Once he stopped getting excited every time the basin answered him, his water response was strong and stable. More interesting still was how dense his chakra felt once he engaged with the work. It did not spread thin the way most children's did. It sat heavy.
The same proctor who had noted his paper watched him a second time and said quietly to the assistant, "That Yang density is absurd."
I caught Choza trying not to smile.
Good for him.
Mikoto was cleaner than strong here, which suited her. The candle, streamer answered with repeatable control. The instructors cared about that more than spectacle, which meant at least one adult in the village was logical.
Then my turn.
I stopped trying to control the level of my output.
The proctor had already seen enough to know I was softening answers. Once someone competent calls you on that, continuing only becomes a different form of stupidity.
So I touched the water basin first.
The surface rolled under my chakra in a low, smooth wave that made the nearest instructor focus.
Then the earth tray.
That answered even harder. The soil packed and shifted under the pressure of my chakra in a way that made my own pulse jump. Not a technique. But enough to make the affinity plain.
The proctor grunted. "There it is."
My external output was still normal for a 10 year old, which put me ahead of kids my age. It was good, healthy, strong enough to notice, but not absurd. The real difference was the clarity of earth and water once I tried my hardest.
Then came internal resonance.
That was where things stopped being subtle.
Strike without chakra.
Strike with reinforcement.
Weighted movement.
Pulse under load.
Short channeling through the limbs.
The moment they switched the test inward, the whole station changed around me.
I hit the block once without chakra.
Then again with a pulse through shoulder, back, and fist.
The difference was ugly.
My body and chakra locked together like they had been waiting for permission to act as one thing.
The instructor stepped closer.
"Again."
I did.
Then with a step.
Then with a movement chain.
By the third repetition he had stopped writing and was simply watching.
Another instructor came over. "What?"
The first pointed at my sheet, then at me. "External resistance is fine. He's got strong affinities. Above normal range for his age." He shook his head once. "Internal resonance? He is a monster."
I heard that and chose not to react.
Then he made a heavier note beneath the last line.
Nintaijutsu: Strongly Recommend. Anticipate extraordinary success.
That one I allowed myself a little satisfaction over.
Because yes. That was exactly right.
My earth and water were abnormally strong. My external work was healthy and promising. But the place where my chakra and body truly stopped being separate things was in applied movement. The sort of work that would let ninjutsu live inside taijutsu instead of beside it.
Then came genjutsu.
And once again, I was in trouble.
Formal genjutsu and what Dad had taught me were not the same thing. I knew that. One was crafted illusion. The other was emotional leakage guided into something almost gentle. Still, they lived near enough to one another that I did not enjoy being examined there in public.
The genjutsu instructor was a woman with a soft voice and predatory patience.
"This is not about pretty illusions," she said. "It is about perception, sensory layering, insertion, emotional control, and the ability to know what a mind will accept."
That was a very fair sentence.
The first tests were receptive.
Wrong shadows. False sounds. Scent cues out of order. Small emotional mismatches in a staged setting. Who noticed. Who rationalized. Who felt the lie before they could name it.
Mikoto was extraordinary.
Not simply gifted. Supreme.
She caught a shifted reflection in glass before the instructor finished asking the question. Identified a false warmth cue because the sunlight was falling on the wrong side of the chair. Picked apart a layered sound test that fooled two older students. She didn't merely notice. She noticed what shape reality ought to have been taking if it were honest.
I watched her and thought, with no small satisfaction, that Itachi had to get it from somewhere.
It wasn't just Uchiha blood. It was temperament. Watching. Holding steady. Respecting the fine edges of things.
That kind of child becomes dangerous in genjutsu.
Inoichi did well too, though more on emotional tone than sensory exactness.
Shikaku was infuriating as usual. Hard to fool, quick to read the structure of the lie, and lazy-looking while doing it.
Choza resisted better than he cast. Once he knew he was being tricked, he became stubborn in exactly the right way. He was never going to be a supreme illusionist, but he would not be easy prey either.
Then came casting.
Mikoto was even better there.
Not just stronger than everyone. Cleaner.
She laid a false auditory cue over a target so gently the receiving student barely understood he'd been touched. Then she placed a visual misdirection just enough to skew distance and withdrew it without leaving noise behind.
The instructor wrote a note so long I briefly wondered if Mikoto had just been adopted by the genjutsu department.
Then it was my turn.
The instructor had clearly watched the ninjutsu station.
"You were hiding over there."
That was getting tiresome.
"I am modest."
"You are dishonest."
That got a laugh from a nearby chūnin.
She stepped closer. "Try honestly this time."
There was no point resisting.
So I did.
I let the first auditory displacement land cleanly.
Then a warmth cue.
Then a minor visual shift over a target marker.
I stopped treating the exercise like something to survive and instead gave it the same honest effort I had given the ninjutsu station after being called out.
The result was immediate.
Not Uchiha-clean. Not Mikoto's blade-fine precision. Mine came in broader, heavier, stranger. The image landed with weight behind it. The warmth cue did not merely register as warmth; it carried the feeling of sun on stone. The visual shift didn't just blur the target. It made it feel half a breath farther away than it really was.
The instructor's eyes sharpened.
"Again."
I did.
This time scent and sound together.
Not elegant. But powerful enough that the receiving student turned his head with real conviction toward a corner of the yard that had never held what he thought he heard.
The children nearby had stopped pretending not to watch.
The instructor was writing quickly now.
"Large Yin," she murmured, more to herself than to me. "Very large. Strong insertion. Image carries emotional weight."
There it was.
That was the difference.
Mikoto was finer. Cleaner. The sort of talent that would become surgical.
Mine carried force in the mind. Not clumsy. Not uncontrolled. But broader, more immersive, and fed by that oversized Yin current in a way that made even simple exercises land bigger than they ought to.
I disliked how much the instructor liked that.
She had me do resistance after that, and there I did even better.
Because yes, I could place illusion well enough. But I could also feel when the world bent wrong. False notes stood out more clearly once I stopped pretending I didn't hear them.
By the end of the station, the broad shape of things was obvious.
Mikoto: supreme genjutsu talent.
Inoichi: strong emotional perception and deceptive softness.
Shikaku: difficult to fool and structurally troublesome.
Choza: good resistance, strong elemental compatibility, Yang density obscene for his age.
And me—
Strong earth and water.
Very large Yin.
External ninjutsu healthy and above standard, but internal resonance monstrous.
Nintaijutsu a clear success.
Genjutsu not elegant, not Uchiha-fine, but powerful in a way that made instructors write longer than usual.
After that came the social compatibility trials.
That was not the official name. The official name was something like diplomatic aptitude and controlled interaction. What it actually meant was that they put children in little mock scenarios and watched who lied well, who read lies well, who escalated, who calmed, who negotiated, who froze, and who accidentally insulted everyone present because they mistook bluntness for virtue.
In other words, a trap.
Mikoto was very good at it.
That did not surprise me at all.
At school she held herself together like porcelain. At home she laughed more, yes, but she still knew how rooms worked. She watched before speaking. Chose words with care. In one scenario she had to extract information about a stolen scroll from an instructor pretending to be a difficult merchant. She did it in half the time most of us took and never once let him dictate the tone.
Inoichi was good too, though in a different way. Softer. More fluid. He got people to tell him things because they kept forgetting he was gathering them.
Shikaku was, naturally, a menace.
He solved one scenario by refusing the premises, insulting the setup, and then correctly identifying which "civilian" in the mock tea shop was actually the planted watcher.
The instructor sighed as though this happened to him more often than any profession should allow.
Choza was decent where honesty and goodwill were enough, poor where manipulation was required. He just wasn't built that way.
My own performance was mixed.
I do not lie elegantly.
On the other hand, I do read people well enough when they are being foolish in practical ways. So I did fine in the scenario where the answer was recognizing who in the room was underfed, scared, or trying too hard to look unimportant. I did badly in the one where I was apparently expected to flatter a pretend official into giving me access to a warehouse manifest. I got impatient and told him his teeth would look better on the ground and I had the dental skill available to help him with that.
The instructor wrote something down without looking at me.
Probably a warning.
By the end of the day, the picture was beginning to form.
Nothing official yet. That would come later, once all the measurements had been pulled together. But children are excellent at listening when it concerns them.
Shikaku was shaping toward tactics, sabotage, and code work, whether he liked the words for it or not.
Inoichi had a head for diplomacy, information, and the human side of systems.
Mikoto was beginning to look like a girl built for shuriken, genjutsu, and any field requiring observation and control.
Choza had better logistics sense than anyone had expected, and a natural honesty of body that made staff work and direct support styles fit him better than flash.
The Hyūga twins were exactly the sort of infuriatingly complete children their clan usually produced: clean chakra, clean taijutsu, strong tracking.
The Aburame boy was born to make other people uncomfortable from a professionally useful distance.
And me.
Well.
Taijutsu. Obviously. Knuckle dusters with blades as a weapon. Maybe they will let me pick up a halberd I can call Sky Piercer and I can get a horse and name him Red Hair.
Tracking, with training on how to read humans.
Logistics and sustainment more strongly than I would have preferred the village notice.
When we were finally dismissed, we did not spill out of the yard the way first-year children would have. We came apart slower. Thoughtfully. Tired in the head as much as the legs.
Choza walked beside me and Mikoto joined us at the road.
She was carrying herself with her usual calm, but there was brightness in her eyes that hadn't been there that morning.
"You liked it," I said.
She gave me a sidelong look. "So did you."
"Yes," I said. "But I don't think Choza did."
Choza made a noise into his sleeve.
Mikoto ignored him. "I liked that they were trying to see where we really fit."
"That is a sensible thing to like."
"That sounded dangerously close to approval."
I just gasped in mock offence.
She smiled at that.
At the fork in the road, we split toward our respective homes.
I went back to Brindle, because some priorities are holy.
Brindle came to the fence at once.
I rubbed the white patch on her forehead and thought about sorted children, specialist tracks, village investment, and the dangerous feeling of being understood a little too accurately by institutions.
The calf pushed her nose harder into my palm.
That, at least, was simple.
Good.
I had a feeling the rest of the year would not be.