Tetsuya smiled as he watched the excited trio.
"Hey, you three, don't celebrate just yet."
At Tetsuya's words, the three immediately calmed down. Had something changed?
They looked nervously at Tetsuya, who was still smiling. Then he spoke.
"The real reason to celebrate is still coming. Since all three of you passed the test, I've decided to give you prizes to celebrate."
The three, who had been terribly nervous a moment earlier, froze, then jumped for joy.
"Yay!"
"We get rewards too!"
"That's great! I thought we might fail because the three of us worked together."
"Why would you? This is business. Working together is how you make your business bigger and bigger."
Tetsuya took three scrolls out of his sleeve.
"All right, it's reward time. Come collect your prizes."
The three stared excitedly at the scrolls in Tetsuya's hands, curious about what they contained.
"These three scrolls contain three extremely powerful forbidden techniques. Once you learn them, you mustn't use them lightly unless it's absolutely necessary. Understood?"
"Understood!" all three replied.
Nagato and the others took their respective scrolls and eagerly opened them to read.
"Teacher, why does my scroll seem to be missing a section?"
The impatient Yahiko unrolled his entire scroll and discovered that a section really was missing.
Hearing that, Nagato and Konan unrolled their scrolls completely too.
They found that theirs were intact, with no sections missing like Yahiko's.
"Yours? Your ninjutsu is rather special. It's divided into several stages, and the final stage is far too dangerous. You can't handle it as you are now, so I cut it off. But don't worry. Once you've grown stronger, I'll give you that last section."
Tetsuya patted Yahiko on the shoulder as he earnestly explained.
"Besides, even without that last section, your technique's power won't suffer