The First Record

Mission update is live.

Get comfortable. The village is watching.

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Kakashi had left the square marked ready blank.

The evaluation sheet gave him room for a pass or a failure, then a second square for independent field readiness. Someone at the mission desk had printed the two decisions close together. It would be easy to let the mark in the first box stand for both.

He put his pencil down. The light through the office window was still gray. In an hour, the three children would meet him at Training Ground Three for the eleven minutes he had managed to keep clear before their first assignment. Eleven minutes was enough to give an order. It was not enough to repair everything the bells had shown him.

He checked the first box. Passed.

The second stayed empty.

The blank was not a punishment for failing to take the bells. Nobody had taken them. If the test had ended there, he would have sent all three back. Then Sasuke had held out fish to a teammate who could barely stand, Sakura had fed him despite the order, and Naruto had let them choose without putting the answer in their mouths. Kakashi had seen those things. They were grounds for keeping a team together, not evidence that it could yet complete a mission without someone watching.

Below the boxes, the form asked for observed failures.

Naruto had sent a copy straight at him, close enough for Kakashi to catch its wrist without looking up from the book. Later, with Sasuke and Sakura moving at the same time, Naruto had reached the bell and left no way out of the space beside Kakashi's hand. He had been tied to a post before the ringing stopped.

Kakashi wrote both moments. He did not write that Naruto was reckless. A label could be copied onto the next form without anyone having to remember the field.

Sakura had paused in open ground when the test began, long enough to give away where she would move. Later she had thrown at Kakashi's possible landing places and turned toward his voice when he praised the angle. Her shoulder shifted. He had used that opening. She had come out of the genjutsu pale and still on her feet.

Two failures. Not a verdict on her courage.

Sasuke had disappeared into cover without giving either teammate a position or a signal. His fireball had made Sakura duck out of its line. It had missed Kakashi. The space it crossed still belonged to a teammate.

Kakashi started to write a third line about Sasuke's expression when the bells stayed at his waist. He crossed it out. He had seen a second attack after the first failed. He had not seen what Sasuke felt about it.

The sheet did not ask what the children had done well. Kakashi turned it over and made three narrow columns on the back. The mistake would be to call each failure a lesson and leave the students to guess what a better attempt looked like.

He wrote tasks he could check during whatever work the mission office assigned. No new jutsu. No contest to erase yesterday's result.

For Naruto: one copy at a time for an ordinary task. Say when it appears and when it is dismissed; wait ten breaths before starting another. Before reaching past an opponent or an obstacle, name a route out. Kakashi could judge the first target on a quiet job. The second would have to wait for a safe demonstration. He would not invent one between breakfast and the mission desk.

For Sakura: identify the edge of her assigned area before starting and check it once more before calling it clear. If a voice or a correction pulled her attention away, look back at the work before moving. She had found good angles yesterday. She had also lost one.

For Sasuke: give a visible signal before changing position in another person's working line. Check where both teammates were before an attack or a fast movement. Neither target required him to ask permission to think.

The pencil stopped at the bottom of the third column. This was a plan for observing them, not a certification that they would do any of it. He copied the targets onto three smaller slips and kept the evaluation sheet separate.

A clerk came through the door with a stack of assignments under one arm. Her eyes went to the empty readiness square.

"You left that one," she said.

"I did."

"The Hokage's office will ask."

"Then they can ask me."

She set the stack on the counter. "They will ask the desk first. We have to tell the next clerk whether your team needs direct supervision."

"It does."

"That is a different square."

Kakashi found it lower on the page and marked it. The clerk watched his pencil, not his face.

"You passed them," she said.

"I passed a team test."

"And you want a supervised assignment."

"Yes."

She drew a small line beside his mark. "I can send it up. I can't approve your targets for the office."

"I'm not asking you to."

"Someone will want to know why you spent a page on three genin who passed."

"They can read the page."

The clerk gave him the look reserved for jonin who mistook a written report for the end of a conversation. She took the evaluation but left the three slips on his side of the counter.

"If the reviewer wants it changed, you'll be called back," she said.

Kakashi put the slips inside his book. He had made himself answerable in ink for a pass he could have recorded in a single stroke. The eleven minutes waiting outside were now nine.

Training Ground Three smelled of damp rope and trampled grass. Someone had cleared away the lunch boxes, but the post still bore a pale scrape where Naruto's restraint had rubbed it. Kakashi arrived before the students. That was a choice he expected nobody to believe.

Sasuke came first and stopped where he could see both the path and the posts. Sakura arrived carrying a small bag and a water flask. Naruto followed them in with food wrapped in paper, chewing the last bite as he walked.

Kakashi noticed the food. He did not know who had told whom to bring it. Yesterday had given him enough evidence to keep them. It had not made him a witness to whatever they had said after he left.

"We have nine minutes," he said.

Sakura looked at the empty clearing. "For another test?"

"For the results of the first."

Naruto swallowed. "I liked the first result."

"You can keep it."

Kakashi handed each of them a slip. Sasuke read his without moving his face. Sakura read hers twice. Naruto turned his over before looking at the front, as if expecting a trick on the back.

"These aren't grades," Kakashi said. "They're things I'll check on our first assignment."

"You wrote down that I stopped in the open," Sakura said.

"You did."

"I moved to cover."

"You did that too. The pause came first."

She held the paper between two fingers. "You gave me a compliment. Then you attacked."

"I did."

"So the failure was listening to you?"

"The failure was moving your attention off the field because I spoke. You can listen and keep the field."

Sakura's lips pressed together. He had not given her a method in those words, only a distinction. She looked down at the slip, then at the empty ground.

"Mark an edge," he said, pointing to the first line on her slip. "Before any task, tell me where your section ends. Before you say you're finished, check that edge. I can count whether you do it."

She looked back at the paper. "And if the task doesn't have an edge?"

"Then tell me what you will use as one."

That answer cost another minute. It was worth it because she had found the weakness before he had to invent an example.

Sasuke lifted his slip. "I did not hit her."

"She ducked."

"You would have dodged the fire either way."

"That was my problem. Her position was yours to know before you released it."

Sasuke's eyes narrowed. "If I signal every move, you read it."

"A signal to a teammate doesn't have to be a speech to an opponent. Show me one she can see. Then see whether she sees it."

"Yesterday we didn't have time."

"Yesterday she had to duck."

Sasuke looked at Sakura. She did not rescue him by saying it had been easy. Kakashi had seen her drop under the fire.

"I can do it without warning you," Sasuke said.

"Then we will see whether you can do it with one."

The slip stayed in Sasuke's hand. He had not agreed. Kakashi had not needed him to agree that the fire crossed the line.

Naruto was reading his own paper with an expression too still to be a joke. "One clone?"

"For an ordinary job. One at a time."

"I used three yesterday."

"The first one reached me alone. You sent another to test my movement. Then you changed the field with your teammates. I'm not asking which number sounds impressive. I want to see what one copy does while the rest of you can still account for it."

"Why ten breaths after it's gone?"

Kakashi had seen Naruto flinch when a copy broke, then hurry into the next movement. He had no way to name what returned to the boy, or even whether it always did. He could ask for a pause without pretending to know.

"Because I saw you move before you had settled," he said. "If ten breaths aren't enough, say so."

Naruto looked down at the second line. "You want an exit route before I touch a bell I never got."

"Before you reach for anything you might have to leave quickly."

"That could take all morning."

"Then start with one route."

Sakura glanced from Naruto's slip to her own. Sasuke folded his once, sharply. The three had different work. None could finish another's line for them.

Kakashi closed his book. He had meant to spend a minute explaining how the mission office counted completion. That minute was gone. The feedback had taken the time and left the administrative lesson for later.

"Report to the assignment office," he said. "I'll meet you outside."

"At what time?" Sakura asked.

He looked at the clock set above the far gate. "Nine."

"You mean nine," she said.

"I do."

Naruto made a doubtful sound. Kakashi let it stand.

At the office, the clerk had set his evaluation on a tray marked for the Hokage. A blank line beneath his supervision mark waited for a reviewing signature. No one had signed it. Kakashi placed the field copy beside it and wrote that the targets were provisional until observed on assignment.

The clerk checked the time. "Your team is waiting."

"I know."

"They were told nine."

"I know that too."

He had used the walk back to decide whether to soften one sentence about Sasuke's fire. He left it. The report belonged to whoever would review it, and a reviewer could challenge the pass, the supervision, or the measures. That was the price of writing what he had seen instead of turning three children into a single neat result.

Kakashi picked up his book and went toward the office courtyard. The slips were with the students. The assessment was still waiting for a superior's name. Neither one made them ready. Both would give him something to check when the first task began.

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