Strolling Amongst Stalactites

Jingle Hell

Last Time:

(That's right ... we all spread out so how could we find each other so easily? An imposter?) Naruko glanced at Clara who crawled down on the sleeping bag to quietly converse with Tina and Nina. The blonde slept with her spiders watching out for her and with a kunai in the sleeping bag ...

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"So you got one too, Haru? I'm glad I wasn't the only one." Naruko pouted cutely as she tickled the death mark on Haru's left side. (She acts like Haru.) She thought as she heard Haru laugh. "What about you, Sana?"

"Whether I did or not doesn't matter. I'll pass just fine." Sana said evasively.

Naruko sweat dropped, (That's exactly what Sana says when she did screw up and refuses to admit it.)

"Hey Naruko ... I need some ointment." Sana said as she pointed to the shoulder she was favoring. "I can't reach that part so could you help?"

"Of course. You should've told me yesterday that you were hurt." Naruko said as she unsealed her own handmade ointment mixed with special antiseptics only her spiders' saliva could make. It has strong healing effects on many surface injuries.

"I iced it down after the rounds changed just before I ran into you guys so it was fine, but the swelling is bothering me again." Sana said as she lifted her shirt to show the purpling bruise on her back just under her shoulder blade.

Naruko smiled and started gently spreading some of the distinctive smelling ointment on the wound. "This doesn't look too bad." Naruko commented absentmindedly as she gently rubbed the ointment in. She smiled softly as she saw the edge of a death mark peeking up from below the hem of Sana's pants on her hips, but when she glanced up and saw Sana looking at her she noticed something odd. It wasn't the fact that her raven haired friend blushed and looked away. That seemed like something Sana would do when she knew she was caught with something like said mark. (Was she smelling the ointment?) She thought as she closed her ointment jar. If Sana was looking for an imposter too then that would be a good place to start. Only Naruko has this ointment and no one would dare try to befriend spiders like the ones Naruko has. It would be too dangerous, but then her spider familiars are usually curled up as jewelry so fakes can be made and a sample of the ointment could be stolen so it wasn't a concrete give away, which she knew Sana would be smart enough to figure out. A part of her did suspect Sana because anyone can pretend to be suspicious, but now it was a little less, (but how can I find out for sure?) She pondered and another thing puzzled her. Why isn't Sana using her Sharingan?

"So, which direction should we go? I saw a dummy head northwest when the rounds changed." Haru offered.

"I saw two move southeast. What about you, Naruko?" Sana asked.

"The one that got me headed southeast." Naruko said as she studied her friends.

"So we know more than one headed southeast. We'd better our chances of finding one if we head southeast." Sana concluded and waited for her teammates' input.

Haru frowned, "True, but we would have an increased chance of running into other teams and we can't afford to lose track of the dummies."

Sana twitched as she pondered those words, "The proctor said not to fight over the dummies." She said glancing at Naruko to see if there was an equal amount of suspicion, but she found none.

The blonde looked at Sana with a smile, "Technically, the proctor said there were plenty of dummies so we won't need to fight over them, but just because she said don't fight over them doesn't mean there's a rule against it. The first part of her speech did say they want to know how we'd react. In real life we'd have to fight other teams for a similar goal. Our goal happens to run very fast and there's a time limit plus no one said anything about stealing the dummies' from another team if a dummy can't be found so we need to be careful because some teams will think it's easier to fight a human than a dummy." Naruko explained making Sana twitch. Naruko wondered if Sana thought it would really be that easy to get someone trained to slip up. Sure this was a test, but it had to be as real as possible and they had to know how to smoke a fake. Suddenly Naruko was struck with an epiphany, "Why don't we decide which direction to go by playing our game?" She said as she unsealed a chess board with multiple full sets of chocolate pieces that were shaped like the pieces from a chess set. A candy layer made one half of the pieces look with while the others looked black. The candy coating also kept them from melting.