Nothing happened.

“Were there supposed to be explosions?” Ryouma inquired. “I was looking forward to explosions.”

Kakashi looked back at him, six feet away. Beneath the water-logged curtain of rain-grey hair his single visible eye curved in a less than believable smile.

And he shredded apart, dust on the wind.

Beyond him, half-shrouded in rain, Hideo and Ayane crumbled like so much dried sand. Across the field, the ANBU commander and vice-commander and the proctors were already gone.

Ryouma scowled. “I expected more,” he said, and gathered his chakra. “Kai!”

Fire exploded in the center of the field, leaping skyward into the rain, blasting out over the field of mud. Heat hit him like a slap in the face, and was gone.

The ground was faintly steaming. And Kakashi stood quietly at the vice-commander’s shoulder, hands in his pockets, close enough to kill.

The owl mask turned belatedly. One hand twitched for the ninjato slung from the back of his belt, before he caught himself.

No one laughed. Kakashi stood still, waiting.

"Thank you, Hatake," the vice-commander said coldly. "Dismissed."

Kakashi came slogging back through mud and rain, hands still crammed in his pockets, shoulders slouched. A thin buzz of conversation sprang up in his wake, and refused to die even when the vice-commander shouted another name.

Ryouma waited until Kakashi had settled down again, still upwind. "Ninjutsu?"

It could be a genjutsu. It looked like a genjutsu. But the wider an area-effect genjutsu was, the more people it covered, the weaker it had to be, the less it could change in the minds of everyone it touched. Kakashi had covered an open training field and the trees around it, had affected upwards of sixty shinobi. And he hadn’t just convinced them he’d vanished in mist and rain; he’d made everyone vanish, followed it up with a fireball that boiled water out of mud, and used it all to make the ANBU vice-commander look foolish.

Kinda weird, people said. Mostly rude.

Scary as hell.

Interesting, Ryouma thought.