About five or six days before the Chunin Exam, Konoha's Genin delegation, led by Utatane Koharu and Torifu Akimichi, set out for the Land of Rivers.
The most outstanding members of the Genin delegation were not Hoshi and the others, but several fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boys from the Hyuga and Uchiha Clan. They were Konoha's publicly displayed main force.
Over the past year, their instructors had led them through several difficult C-rank and B-rank missions, and the village had heavily promoted their talent.
Even they themselves did not know that they were actually just tools meant to conceal Hoshi and the others.
Every one of them now believed himself to be the top figure of the younger generation, strutting around with an air that said he recognized no one.
Compared to those famous "geniuses," Hoshi and his group of six, whose ages had been altered to "eleven," looked like they were merely there to make up the numbers.
Changing their ages was naturally necessary. If Hoshi and the others had put down their actual age of nine when registering, Kumogakure would have had its eyes on them the moment they entered Hidden Hot Spring Village.
Although the participating Genin were supposed to be under fifteen, no one would send freshly graduated nine-year-olds into an exam destined to become a bloodbath.
There were only two possible explanations for doing so: either the leader of that ninja village was brain-dead, or there was something unusual about those nine-year-olds. There could not possibly be a third explanation.
Therefore, altering Hoshi and the others' ages was necessary.
Once their ages were changed to eleven, their true strength immediately became much harder to gauge.
There was another reason as well. Under normal circumstances, children entered puberty at around twelve and began growing rapidly. Before then,