The air in the forest was thick, charged with an almost palpable tension. Crouched among the rocks, Naruto and Sakura held their breath. Every rustle of a leaf, every distant bird call, sounded like a thunderclap in the silence. The plan was set, the pieces in place. They just needed the right moment to start the show.

“Well?” Naruto whispered, impatience vibrating in every syllable. “I’m gonna turn into a fossil here. When do we start the tactical retreat?”

“When I say so,” Sakura hissed back, not taking her eyes off the small portion of the clearing she could see through the leaves. “Kakashi-sensei hasn’t moved. He’s still reading that stupid book. He’s waiting for us to make a mistake, for one of us to get nervous and give away our position.”

“Well, it’s working,” Naruto grumbled. “My nerves are about to make a shadow clone and run off on their own.”

Sakura ignored him; her concentration was absolute. She analyzed Kakashi’s posture, the way the wind moved the leaves around him, the position of the sun. Everything was a variable in an equation she had to solve. Her trap near the river was rudimentary; it would only work if the target was led to it unsuspectingly and at the precise moment. She needed the perfect distraction.

What she didn’t know was that the distraction was about to arrive, just not in the way she had planned.

On the branch of a towering oak tree, on the opposite side of the field, Sasuke Uchiha observed the same scene, but with a completely different interpretation. Where Sakura saw a game of patience, he saw an opening. An offense. Kakashi wasn’t taking them seriously. He was reading. He was so sure of his superiority that he didn’t even deign to look for them. For Sasuke, whose entire world had been built on the foundation of strength and recognition, that was an intolerable insult.

He thinks we’re kids playing ninja, he thought, his fingers tightening around a kunai. He thinks he can just sit there while we tire ourselves out. He doesn’t see me. He doesn’t consider me a threat. I’m going to show him what a threat is.

Naruto and Sakura’s plan seemed pathetic to him. Cooperation? Strategy? That was for the weak who needed to rely on others. Not him. He was an Uchiha. The elite. He just needed one opportunity, one instant of hesitation, and those bells would be his. He would prove his worth, not just to that arrogant jōnin, but to himself. It was one more step on the path to avenging his clan.

He saw Kakashi turn a page in his book. That was the moment. The subtle instant of distraction.

With a fluid and silent motion, Sasuke dropped from the branch. He landed on the ground without a single sound, a shadow among shadows. He moved with a speed that would have surprised anyone his age, flanking the clearing and always staying in Kakashi’s blind spot.

From her hiding place, Sakura noticed a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye.

“Wait… what is he doing?” she whispered, more to herself than to Naruto.

Naruto peeked out carefully. “It’s Sasuke! That idiot is gonna do it alone!”

Sasuke’s plan was simple and direct: first, a diversionary attack to force a reaction. He threw three shuriken simultaneously. They flew through the air, whistling, on a perfect trajectory to converge on the exact spot where Kakashi stood.

Without looking up from his book, Kakashi tilted his head a couple of inches to the left. The three shuriken whizzed past where his temple had been and embedded themselves deep in the trunk of a tree behind him.

Sasuke was already moving.

“Katon: Gōkakyū no Jutsu!” he yelled.

He inhaled deeply; his lungs filled with air and his chakra turned to heat. He exhaled a sphere of orange flames that roared across the clearing, scorching the grass in its path. It was an impressive jutsu for a genin, a display of power that should have forced any opponent to jump and dodge.

Kakashi didn’t jump. He simply closed his book, tucked it into his vest, and, at the last second, vanished.

The fireball slammed into the ground where he had been, kicking up a cloud of dirt and smoke. Sasuke smirked, believing he had seized the initiative. He landed where Kakashi had been, looking for his next move.

“Looking for someone?” a bored voice sounded from directly beneath him.

Sasuke’s eyes widened. He looked down. The grass and dirt at his feet weren’t solid—they were Kakashi’s arms.

“Doton: Shinjū Zanshu no Jutsu!” the voice exclaimed.

Kakashi’s hands clamped around Sasuke’s ankles and pulled with irresistible force. Sasuke’s world flipped upside down. He was dragged underground in a fraction of a second, until only his head stuck out of the ground like some macabre plant. He was completely immobilized, unable to move a single muscle. Panic, an emotion he rarely felt, began to bubble in his chest.

Kakashi emerged from the earth a few feet away, brushing the dust from his shoulders.

“Nice try with the fireball,” he said casually, his visible eye curving into a mocking smile. “But you should never announce your jutsu. It takes all the fun out of the surprise. And never, ever lose sight of your opponent, not even for a second.”

He crouched in front of Sasuke’s head.

“You stay here for a while and think about the importance of not underestimating your enemy. Lesson number one.”

From the rocks, Naruto and Sakura watched with their mouths agape. It had all happened in less than ten seconds. The speed, the precision, the absolute ease with which Kakashi had neutralized the supposed best of their class… it was terrifying.

“He… he buried him,” Naruto stammered.

Sakura swallowed hard, her heart hammering in her chest. Fear was a cold, heavy thing in her stomach, but her analytical mind was already at work, processing the new information. Kakashi had moved. He had left his post. Sasuke, in his arrogant failure, had given them exactly what they needed.

She turned to Naruto, her green eyes shining with a feverish determination.

“Naruto, now!” she hissed. “It’s the distraction we didn’t ask for, but it’s the one we’ve got! Kakashi is focused on Sasuke! Execute the plan! Now!”

Naruto looked at her. The fear inside him warred with Sakura’s command. Seeing Sasuke defeated so easily had chilled him to the bone. But then he saw the confidence in her eyes—a confidence that wasn’t just in her plan, but in him. He nodded, a tense, determined grin on his face.

“You got it, Captain Sakura-chan!”

He brought his hands together in a cross-shaped seal he knew as well as his own name.

“Tajū Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!”

The air around the rocks exploded in a series of white smoke clouds. Poof! Poof! Poof! One, two, ten, fifty, a hundred clouds of smoke dissipated to reveal a sea of orange jackets. A hundred identical Narutos filled the edge of the forest, all wearing the same defiant grin.

Kakashi, who had been about to pull his book out again, paused. He raised an eyebrow, genuinely surprised for an instant. Not by the jutsu itself, but by the sheer number. A hundred clones. A newly graduated genin shouldn’t be able to create so many.

“Hey, you, weird-haired sensei!” the hundred Narutos shouted in unison, their voices creating a chaotic chorus. “Don’t forget about us!”

And then, the orange army charged.

The clearing became a madhouse. A hundred Narutos ran, jumped, and screamed, converging on Kakashi from all directions. The ground trembled beneath their feet.

“Well, well,” Kakashi muttered to himself, a hint of amusement in his voice. “This is a little more than I expected.”

The first wave of clones arrived. Kakashi moved like a ghost. He dodged a punch, blocked a kick, used one clone as a springboard to leap over another, and dispelled it with a swift chop to the back of the neck. He moved with a fluid grace amidst the orange hurricane. Every movement was efficient, precise, and lethal to the clones. Poof! Poof! Two clones vanished in clouds of smoke.

But for every clone he took down, two more took its place.

“Not so fast!” shouted a clone, lunging from the right.

“Take this!” shrieked another from the left.

Naruto, the real one, moved through the trees, staying hidden on the periphery. He coordinated the assault, not with words, but with instinct. He had spent countless hours training with his clones; he knew how they thought, how they moved. They were an extension of himself.

Pressure him from the left! Force him back toward the river! he thought, sending the intent to his creations.

A group of twenty clones focused their attack on Kakashi’s left flank. They didn’t attack randomly: five went low, forcing him to jump; ten attacked him in mid-air, forcing him to block and evade; and the last five were already waiting where he was going to land. It was a surprisingly sophisticated team effort, executed by a single individual.

Kakashi landed and spun, his leg sweeping in an arc that dispelled all five clones at once. Poof! Poof! Poof! Poof! Poof!

“Not bad,” Kakashi admitted, as he dodged a kunai thrown by another clone. “Using superior numbers to limit my movement options… It’s a textbook tactic.”

Despite his words, his tone remained relaxed. It was still a game to him; a slightly more complicated game, but a game nonetheless.

Meanwhile, Sakura moved like a snake through the undergrowth along the riverbank. Her hands moved quickly and surely, checking the knots of her traps. The nearly invisible metal wire was strung between two trees, connected to a hidden net in the branches above and a series of strategically placed kunai in a fallen log. Everything depended on Kakashi stepping in the exact right spot.

She could hear the shouts and sounds of battle behind her. The roar of Naruto’s clones was the perfect cover. Her heart ached for him; she knew how much chakra he must be burning through. She couldn’t let his sacrifice be in vain.

Just a little closer, Naruto… push him just ten more meters south.

On the battlefield, the number of clones had dwindled by half. About fifty remained, but they continued to fight with the same ferocity. Naruto was beginning to feel the strain. It was getting hard to breathe, and every clone that dispelled felt like a small physical and mental blow.

I can’t hold on much longer! the real Naruto thought, crouched behind a bush. It has to work now!

Kakashi, sensing the tide of clones was receding, decided to end the game. He performed a rapid sequence of hand seals.

“Playtime’s over, Naruto.”

He gathered a crackling ball of electrical chakra in his hand. The current sparked and buzzed, illuminating his face. But just as he was about to unleash his attack, a Naruto clone did something unexpected: instead of attacking, it tripped and fell flat on its face, directly in Kakashi’s path.

Kakashi hesitated. He couldn’t use a jutsu of that caliber on a clone that was on the ground; it would be a waste. And in that split second of hesitation, three other clones tackled him from behind, grabbing onto his legs and arms.

“We got you!” they shouted in unison.

“No, you don’t,” Kakashi said calmly.

He shrugged them off with a simple flex of his muscles, sending them flying. But they had served their purpose. They had forced him to take three steps back to regain his balance; three steps that put him directly in the zone of Sakura’s trap.

Sakura didn’t hesitate. She yanked hard on the tripwire in her hand.

The effect was instantaneous. The main wire, hidden in the grass, snapped taut around Kakashi’s ankles. At the same time, the net dropped from the trees, entangling him. And from the fallen log, the kunai shot out, not at him, but at the net, pinning it to the ground around him to anchor it securely.

For the first time all day, Kakashi’s expression shifted from bored amusement to genuine astonishment. He was caught. It would only be for a few seconds—a shinobi of his level could break free easily—but in a battle, a few seconds were an eternity.

“A trap?” he said, looking at the wires with newfound respect. “Coordinated with the distraction?”

Sasuke’s buried head watched it all in disbelief. Sakura? The girl who only cared about her hair had set a trap that actually worked? And Naruto? The class clown was fighting a battle that had managed to corner a jōnin? It was impossible. It made no sense.

Naruto’s remaining clones, seeing their chance, launched one last desperate attack, not to defeat Kakashi, but to keep his attention fixed.

And that’s when Sakura made her move.

She shot out from her hiding spot by the river. She didn’t run through the center of the clearing, but along the edge, using every tree and shadow as cover. She moved with a silence and grace that neither Naruto nor Sasuke knew she possessed. Her heart was pounding, but her movements were precise and economical. It wasn’t Naruto’s desperate charge or Sasuke’s flashy assault. These were the movements of a hunter.

Kakashi saw her coming. His eyes narrowed. He was tangled in the net, with half a dozen Naruto clones on top of him, but he was still an elite jōnin. He could break free and stop her. And yet, his own arrogance, that assumption that she posed no real threat, was his undoing.

The girl? he thought. She’s the weakest. She doesn’t have Naruto’s strength or Sasuke’s technique. What’s she going to do? Punch me?

Sakura didn’t stop to attack. She didn’t prepare any jutsu. Her sole objective was the two small, silver objects hanging from his belt. She slipped under a clone’s arm, leaped over another’s leg, and, with surprising agility, found herself right beside Kakashi’s hip.

Her hand shot out like a flash. Her fingers closed around the bells.

Jingle.

The soft chime was the loudest sound in the entire training ground.

There was a moment of absolute silence. The remaining Naruto clones stopped, dumbfounded. Sasuke, from the ground, couldn’t believe his eyes.

Sakura landed a few feet away, breathing heavily, her hand clenched in a fist. She slowly opened her fingers. In her palm, shining in the midday sun, rested the two bells.

Kakashi, still entangled, stared at her. The laziness was completely gone from his eye; it was replaced by something cold, sharp, and dangerous.

“Impressive,” he said, and his voice was no longer drawn out or bored. It was the voice of a predator. “Truly impressive.”

With a single motion, he tore the net as if it were tissue paper and dispelled the remaining clones with a wave of chakra. He stood up, and his posture changed. He was no longer slouched and relaxed. Now he was tense, ready for action, radiating a power that made the air turn cold.

“The test was to take the bells from me,” he said, his gaze fixed on Sakura. “But I never said you could keep them.”

He was going to move. Sakura saw it in his eyes. He was going to cross the distance between them in less than a blink, and all their effort would have been for nothing. He was about to show them the difference between a genin and an elite jōnin.

But just as his muscles tensed to spring, an orange whirlwind slammed into him.

“DON’T YOU DARE!” Naruto yelled.

It wasn’t a clone. It was the original, who had burst from his hiding spot in a final, desperate act. He didn’t punch him. He didn’t try a technique. He simply threw himself at Kakashi and clung to his torso with his arms and legs, like a monkey to a tree.

“RUN, SAKURA-CHAN!” he shouted, using all his weight to anchor the jōnin.

Kakashi stumbled from the surprise of the impact. Naruto’s weight was negligible; he could throw him off with a mere shrug. But, again, it was the unexpected tactic that stopped him. The sacrifice. Naruto wasn’t trying to win; he was making sure his teammate didn’t lose.

“Let go of me, you brat!” Kakashi growled, trying to shake him off.

“NOT UNTIL SAKURA’S SAFE!” Naruto yelled back, squeezing tighter, his face pressed against the back of Kakashi’s vest.

That struggle, which lasted no more than three seconds, was all the time Sakura needed. She ran to the far end of the clearing, putting a safe distance between herself and her sensei.

At that exact moment, a sharp, shrill beep echoed through the air.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The alarm clock on the wooden post went off, marking twelve o’clock.

Time was up.

Silence fell over Training Ground 3 once more. Naruto slowly let go of Kakashi and backed away, panting but with a triumphant look in his eyes. Sakura stood her ground, holding the bells high, her chest rising and falling with adrenaline. Sasuke was still buried up to his neck, his face a complex mixture of humiliation and astonishment.

Kakashi stood still in the center of it all, looking at the three of them. A slow smile formed under his mask.

His own lesson, his own test, had been turned against him. His defeat was not from a lack of skill, but from an excess of pride.

He had underestimated the brats.