The empty classroom had an extra chair.
It was not one of the low wooden chairs usually found in the Ninja Academy. Its back was taller, its legs newer, and it stood by the window as if waiting for one particular person to sit down.
As Che passed by, he saw Mizuki wiping down a desk.
"Changed careers to furniture management, teacher?"
Mizuki looked up with an easy smile. "I'm giving a few students individual practice this afternoon. The empty classroom has good light. After the mirror exercise, the children need to see what they look like sitting down."
"Who's coming?"
"Not decided yet."
He said it too quickly.
Che carried his workbooks back to the classroom and looked straight at Naruto. Naruto kept turning Mizuki's practice advice over and over, until the edges of the paper had gone soft. He no longer treated it like a treasure, but he had not thrown it away either. For Naruto, words that acknowledged his progress were hard to let go of completely.
In the first lesson, Iruka announced the rules for the combined test: state an observation, judge a suggestion, then perform a brief transformation. As an assistant teacher, Mizuki could take notes, but he could not change the groups on his own.
That was a firm line.
Several children did not understand it, but Mizuki did. Seated by the window, he paused his pen for a moment, then went on writing.
The combined test began. Rina drew a female apprentice from the Medical Hall. She identified the medicine bag and the cord at her cuff, then judged "she's very gentle" to be an evaluation. Morita Yu drew a shopkeeper and judged "he'll haggle" to be an evaluation too. Kiyo drew a cat and painfully admitted that "it should reflect on its