Overall.
More than eighty percent of the members of the three great ninja clans who took part in this graduation assessment had successfully completed their assignments. Only a handful had been less fortunate and failed.
The Yuki Clan, to which Kei belonged, had the most participants, a full fifteen. It also had the highest failure rate, with six people failing the assessment.
Among them were Minazuki Ranne and Minazuki Shinya, who was in Kei's class and likewise came from the clan's main branch. This unlucky boy's assignment had also been to collect other examinees' nameplates. As luck would have it, he had run into Heiji Kaguya midway through, whose assignment was identical and who had gone straight into berserk mode after Kei had just toyed with him.
After a fierce battle, not only had Shinya been seriously injured by Heiji, but every nameplate he had collected earlier had also been seized. He had truly suffered a double loss, leaving him with no choice but to withdraw early and declare his failure in this year's graduation assessment.
Still, that was already a relatively decent outcome. Shinya had to count himself lucky that he came from the Yuki Clan's main branch, and that there had been other "special spectators" around during his battle with Heiji.
Thus, Heiji had ultimately kept his emotions in check and refrained from striking to kill. Otherwise, Shinya might very well never have made it out of that primeval forest.
This was also an unspoken rule tacitly accepted by all three great ninja clans. They could not actually kill the core members of one another's next generation in such a semipublic setting. Would that not be forcing the three great ninja clans into conflict?
Not only would the members of the three great ninja clans never do such a thing, but successive Mizukage and Kirigakure's higher-ups had also been unwilling to see the three great ninja clans truly locked in a fight to the death.
For Kirigakure, that would bring nothing but harm.
It was acceptable to weaken and control the three great ninja clans to a certain extent.
But they absolutely could not allow problems involving the three great ninja clans to exceed certain limits.
In the original story, it had only happened because Karatachi Yagura was being controlled by Obito. Otherwise, there was no way the Yuki Clan and the Kaguya Clan would have been allowed to head straight down the road to destruction like that. It had dealt a devastating blow to all of Kirigakure too!!
Not everyone was an idiot like Konoha's F4.
In a sense, those four old fellows could be considered reverse SSR-tier existences.
That sort of maneuver truly was not something the leaders of other ninja villages could replicate, or even imagine.
Thus, keeping the three great ninja clans in a delicate balance was what successive generations of Kirigakure's leadership had most wanted to see, and what they were most inclined to work toward.
The same held true even for something as basic as the village's graduation assessment. Its supposed bloodiness and cruelty were mostly directed at children from the lowest ranks of civilians or from small ninja clans.
Members of the three great ninja clans rarely died in the graduation assessment. Generally speaking, withdrawing with serious injuries was the standard outcome for members of those three clans.
The few members of the Yuki Clan who had failed the assessment had all managed to withdraw safely. They would recover fully after resting at home for a while. As for the Kaguya Clan and the Hozuki Clan, only two members from each had failed, while the rest had completed their assignments with ease.
Proportionally speaking, the Yuki Clan had come off worse in this graduation assessment. But none of that had anything to do with Kei. As mentioned before, all he cared about now was his final team assignment.
And by the time Kei arrived at the Ninja Academy.
Most of this year's graduates had already arrived. Even though there was still more than an hour before the graduation ceremony officially began, most of these examinees, who longed for their upcoming lives as official ninja and held varying degrees of anticipation for their team assignments, had been unable to contain their excitement and arrived early.
Of the nearly two hundred graduates who had passed the assessment, most were eleven- and twelve-year-olds graduating on schedule.
A small portion were students who had failed last year and taken the graduation assessment again this year. Aside from them, the rest were those who had applied for early graduation, such as Kei, Mei Terumi, Kisame Hoshigaki, and Hozuki Shingetsu.
As for why so few took the assessment three times, the reason was simple. Under Kirigakure's graduation assessment system, those who still failed on their second attempt almost never had a third. They either died during the assessment or lost their nerve and gave up on becoming ninja!
These nearly two hundred examinees had also been divided into three groups and sent to three different large lecture halls to await their final team assignments.
When Kei reached the classroom assigned to him.
Most of the figures that greeted his eyes were unfamiliar.
There were only a handful of familiar faces. Somewhat unexpectedly, Mei Terumi and Kisame Hoshigaki were both in this classroom too.
Surely I won't end up on the same team as those two?
The thought had barely flashed through Kei's mind before he shook his head in amusement and pushed it aside. He did not believe such a coincidence would actually happen.
Kei's arrival also clearly caused a slight stir in the classroom. Although completing the assessment early did not truly represent an individual's strength.
It necessarily took a considerable amount of luck as well.
Yet throughout the years, students who could complete the graduation assessment before nightfall on the first day had always been in the minority!
Among the graduates taking this assessment, excluding those who had failed and withdrawn early, only fifteen had completed their assignments before night fell on the first day!
That figure already said a great deal.
Kei had even placed fifth among those fifteen examinees. Although that was not an absolute measure, it was still highly telling.
While the Ninja Academy had not officially announced the order in which examinees had finished this assessment, it was not difficult for anyone with a certain amount of family background to find out!
Naturally, it was easy for them to pay a certain amount of attention to fellow graduates who could, for the time being, be considered among the front-runners, and even develop a considerable sense of rivalry toward them.
Of course, they were equally unlikely to admit that those people were better than them. Most simply believed that luck had not been on their side.
Most people, however, only paid him a little attention. At the end of the day, it was only a graduation assessment. The only two who truly paid attention to Kei were Mei Terumi and Kisame Hoshigaki. If Heiji Kaguya had been in this classroom, he would likewise have watched Kei with particular interest!
After all, those three had fought Kei during the assessment.
Take that shark-faced classmate, for instance. Almost the very instant he caught sight of Kei, a sharp glint appeared in his eyes.
"Minazuki Kei!"
The words he murmured under his breath.
Carried a faint chill.
After all, he had been the loser in their battle during the assessment. Naturally, Kisame Hoshigaki still brooded over it!
Whatever Kisame Hoshigaki's personality had been in the original story, right now he was still only a boy just past ten.