Chūnin Exams (VI).

One of the boy's teammates, a girl, screamed bloody murder at him while raising her hands to use hand seals, but she was interrupted by half a dozen kunai before she could do anything. Neither she nor her last remaining teammate had enough time to do much more than take a few steps back before the smoke bombs attached to the weapons exploded, filling their sight with purple smoke.

The first one who managed to get out of the cloud of smoke was the boy, who then instantly found himself blown away by a flying boulder that came from Yukio's direction.

The girl, who was the last remaining member of her team that wasn't taken out yet, walked out a few seconds later, her eyes instantly going wide when she came face to face with Anko.

"If that didn't work like a charm, then I don't know either," she said casually instead of attacking, choosing to just stand there with one hand on her hip and a wide smile on her face. "Damn, I love it when a plan plays out perfectly like this!"

"You-" the girl started before a coughing fit interrupted her no doubt creative insult.

"Don't bother," Anko said, satisfaction thick in her voice. "I mixed some paralytic poison into my smoke bombs, you see. You don't need to worry, it's nothing lethal, but don't expect to do anything other than lying in your bed for the rest of the week. Honestly, how careless of you to breath that stuff in."

The girl managed to glare at her for a few moments before she finally succumbed to unconsciousness.

"Well," Yukio said as the two of them appeared besides Anko, "that worked out even better than expected. Can't say I thought this would go as smoothly as it did, but I'm not complaining."

Of course, the moment he finished his sentence was exactly the moment the loud cawing of a crow alerted them to the presence of new people.

Neither of them bothered to turn around when their instincts suddenly screamed at them to get away before jumping out of the way of the wave of mud that would have buried them alive had they been a little bit slower.

Fortunately, the three people that arrived on the scene were no instructors, meaning they would not be disqualified. Unfortunately, they were now forced to fight another team. That was bad not only because the additional attention could lead an instructor to them, but also because they hadn't had the advantage of surprise on their side this time.

He trusted his team, of course, and they were definitively much stronger than the average Genin team, but it was always dangerous to underestimate an enemy. Also, the fact that they managed to get this close to them without being noticed meant that they weren't average either.

It made sense that they managed to get closer to them unnoticed during the short fight as their attention was elsewhere during that time, but neither he nor his teammates, not even his crows, had known they were close be even before that. They had chosen to attack this team because there hadn't been any other team close by that could bother them, after all. This meant that these newcomers were either exceptionally fast or somehow managed to successfully hide themselves.

Even so, he was confident that they could handle them. The question was whether or not they could do so quick enough to avoid and incoming instructors, as well as without wasting so much chakra that they would have problems during the second exam that would start as soon as the first one was over.

It would be really annoying if they were forced to retreat without a scroll.

This new team, which considered of Genin from Iwa just like the last one, didn't give them any time to reform. They had just managed to avoid their last attack as the second, a combination of one water and one earth technique from two of their enemies respectably, was already on its way. Unfortunately, unlike the first time, her team didn't manage to escape in the same direction, effectively cutting them off from each other as she and Yukio jumped to the right while Itachi jumped to the left.

She cursed under her breath. "We need a plan!"

Her teammate didn't immediately reply, too busy defending himself from his opponent -a girl with a katana in her hands- to do more than block and dodge her attacks to do anything else. Not that she had any right to complain as she herself had her own enemy to deal with.

'Of course it's I who gets the bulky dude that doesn't even blink when I hit him.' she complained in her mind. While she couldn't outright overwhelm him, it would be obvious for every observer that she was the superior fighter. The problem was that none of her hits and kicks did more than momentarily slowing him down.

Half the time he didn't even bother stopping her attack, simply bulldozing forward and thus forcing her to retreat backwards. The only attacks he blocked were the slashes of her kunai, which was a shame because she had doused them in poison as she did with all her weapons and even a persistent enemy like this one would succumb to it in a matter of minutes.

"Anko!" Yukio screamed once he managed to gain some space to breathe. "Combination two!"

A small smirk appeared on her face as she called her agreement while simultaneously dodging another devastating kick that would have broken her neck had it connected with her head as intended.

Their enemies wouldn't just sit back and wait to be defeated by whatever strategy they came up with, especially not when they were forced to scream at each other to be heard and thus giving away that they had a plan in the first place, so it didn't come entirely as a surprise when both their attacker suddenly stopped their offensive and jumped back. Even knowing that, she was still unbalanced when her foe, who until that point hadn't backed down even once, did just disappear. Expecting to hit resistance, she kicked with as much power as she could, so when there was no resistance at all, she barely managed to stop herself from tripping over.

"Anko, look out!"

Alerted by Yukio's cry, she jerked her head around, just in time to see the Genin she had fought till now opening a scroll and the resulting explosion of white smoke as dozens of shuriken and kunai were summoned.

Scrolls could hold an ungodly number of weapons, which made it all the more surprising that the amount that flew towards her was more or less manageable. Even with the short delay in her reaction, she was more than capable to dodge the knives with relative ease. Unfortunately, busy as she was, she had no time to wonder why there weren't as many weapons flying towards her as there could be.

The reason became apparent when the Yukio's former foe suddenly threw several kunai of her own into the fray. That wouldn't have been a problem if she threw them directly at her as the few additional weapons wouldn't make such a big difference in the great scheme of things, but she didn't; rather, she aimed her kunai at the already flying projectiles, changing their curse and thus making dodging suddenly almost impossible.

Then she noticed the explosion tags.

She instinctively pulled her arms up to protect herself from the incoming explosion as much as she could, knowing she wouldn't be fast enough to escape it even if she tried, while also ignoring the many small cuts she suffered. The tags were far enough away to not be lethal, she thought, but they would probably still do enough damage to kick her out of the exams. She didn't want it to be true, didn't want to accept that all her hard work until this moment would have been useless if she lost to some slightly above average Genin of all things, only to be pulled out of it when the ground beneath her cracked.

A moment later, an earth pillar pushed her towards the sky and out of reach of the explosion that followed hardly two seconds later.

"Anko, now!"

She didn't allow herself more than a heartbeat to thank Yukio in the privacy of her mind for saving her before she fell back into fighting mode, concentrating fully on the ongoing confrontation rather than on how close that had been.

She went through the necessary hand seals as fast as she could:

"Katon: Ryūka no Jutsu!" (Fire Release: Dragon Fire Technique)

"Doton: Doro Hōshi!" (Earth Release: Mud Spore)

Her fire technique collided with the mud river which in turn was filled with several small containers of easily flammable oils, setting the entire river of mud on fire. Surprised as they were at suddenly being on the defensive, their two enemies barely managed it to avoid being hit by jumping into the air. They were so focused on avoiding the flames, however, that they didn't notice the two presences that appeared behind them, meaning there was nothing they could do to avoid the two kicks that sent their heads crashing against each other.

A few seconds later, she and Yukio stood above the two limps forms on the ground while trying to catch their breaths.

"We have no time to rest," she said, still breathing harder than she would like. "We need to see if Itachi-"

"Good job you two." Anko and Yukio jumped around, already falling into a fighting stance and prepared to defend themselves, only to find their aforementioned teammate calmly standing there with the third Iwa Genin standing at his side, his eyes glazed over. "As you can see, I have managed to cast a Genjutsu on him. Mission success."

She blinked, still surprised by the turn of events before she realized that he had probably watched them fight for a while now.

Oh, that little piece of shit!