The little clash between Obito Uchiha and Longjian Senju quietly faded away, the quarrel between the boys dissolving in the cool sweetness of ice pops.
The blazing summer ended as the cicadas fell silent. Autumn came and winter passed, spring departed and summer returned.
As days and nights rolled endlessly on, graduation finally arrived for Longjian's class.
"You can do it, Obito!"
Rin Nohara pumped her fist at the visibly nervous Obito Uchiha to cheer him on, and Obito nodded solemnly.
He had gotten up early for today's Genin exam and hadn't arrived late.
In fact, ever since he and Shisui Uchiha had started accompanying Longjian Senju to school, he had rarely been late.
He was still the same softhearted boy who loved helping others, and he still stepped in whenever he encountered something on the way to school that he couldn't ignore. But three people could always get things done more efficiently than one.
Of course, something occasionally held them up, leaving all three of them late together.
But Longjian Senju was someone the Konoha High Command absolutely cherished, so naturally no teacher said much. At worst, all three were made to stay behind for cleaning duty.
And cleaning duty wasn't much of a hardship. There wasn't much cleaning to do at the Ninja Academy to begin with. The three of them had used the classroom's brooms and mops as weapons in their scuffles countless times, breaking the joints at the ends of the brooms several times before finding ways to secretly repair them.
The real trouble was the writing high up on the blackboard. The Ninja Academy's desks and chairs were fixed in place and couldn't be moved, so the three boys, who weren't tall enough, could only form a human tower to erase the writing at the