Taylor pulsed chakra to her feet, allowing her shard to take control of her body. The tree branch creaked slightly, being just slightly too small to properly support her weight properly. Hinata, Kiba, and Akamaru were outside the (all told, rather pitiful) radius of her chakra sensing ability, but well within the range to be detected by her bugs.

She mentally reviewed the data she had gathered.

Gaara: Jinchūriki of the Sand. Effectively a high tier shaker, with his sand armour, and a very high tier brute when transformed into the one tails bijuu.
Temari: Wind type jutsu, with a mover component. Mid to low tier blaster, mover 2 to 5.
Kankuro: Mid level master/low level tinker. High control over his puppets, but quite honestly not that dangerous.

She smiled to herself, recalling how the precautions the foreign villages had taken against kidaichū had been completely ineffective agains her regular insects spying on them.

'Not long now.'

She spared the barest fraction of her processing power to double check whether her team's scroll was safe with her bugs. It was.

Finally, she began to put her plan into motion.

Around the three sand genin, a veritable wall of insects rose up, a furiously buzzing mass of flying arthropods. Some were all but microscopic, others as long as her forearm, all deadly specimens released into the Forest of Death specifically for the chuunin exam.

Taylor slowed, allowing her footsteps to become more audible, before making herself known by somersaulting off a tree branch, and onto the ground, twenty feet below. At the sand siblings' unamused looks, she suppressed a mild sense of peevishness; had she done that move back on earth, they would be gaping at her. Here, it was no big deal.

Still, she gave them a confident look (more difficult that you'd expect, given that she was wearing dark glasses and a jacket that obscured most of her face), before bringing her hands together in a fake handseal and yelling "Swarm Clone Jutsu!" As she commanded her bugs to form into vaguely person-like silhouettes, Temari decided to take action.

"Wind Release: Wind Cutter Technique!"

Taylor felt her bugs closest to the fan die, as an extremely high pressure zone of air and wind chakra tore through them. Thinking quickly, (when did she not?) Taylor used a substitution jutsu to swap with a portion of her swarm. Through her insects' eyes, she noted Temari's look of surprise, likely because the substitution jutsu only worked on pre-prepared substances totally devoid of chakra. Taylor was rarely lucky, but she was immensely glad she had discovered how to drain her insects of chakra with her kidaichū, then orient them into the proper seals to work as targets for the substitution jutsu.

She waited for a little while, as Temari and Kankuro looked around in bewilderment, trying to spot her. Gaara looked around impassively. Then, placing the nastiest, most obnoxious smirk she could muster on her face, she again made herself known.

"You'll have to be faster than that if you want to catch me."

Temari grimaced, and again swept out her fan. "Sickle Weasel Technique!"

In tandem, her brother Kankuro activated his puppet, chakra strings manipulating its movements.

Again, Taylor swapped herself with a far-away swarm clone, out of range from Temari's and Kankuro's attacks.

This pattern repeated itself, with the sand siblings growing continuously more frustrated.

"I've broken wind with more force than your jutsu."

"Control your puppets? You look like you can barely control your bladder."

The clearing steadily grew more and more damaged. Trees teetered from their damaged root systems, and and Taylor was forced to jump over deep furrows cut into the ground by Temari's jutsu. Kankuro's puppet killed her swarm en masse, poison gas damaging the nervous systems of her bugs beyond her ability to control. 'Fucking Tinkers.'

Still, Taylor made no direct attacks on the Sunagakure siblings, with her bugs or otherwise.

As the killing intent from the youngest genin grew to a crescendo, Taylor made her move. Ignoring her own self-loathing at the bullying she planned, she looked directly at Gaara and spoke a single line.

"Your mother never loved you."

He exploded, figuratively and literally. As his cry of unfiltered rage assaulted her eardrums, acres of sand rose up and assaulted her swarm. His body bulged somewhat ominously as the one tails bijuu began assuming control.

She sent the signal to her teammates.

"Fang over Fang!"

"Eight Trigrams: Sixteen Palms!"

Distracted by Gaara's bloodlust and taken unexpectedly from behind* Temari and Kankuro were unable to defend themselves from the sudden assault by Taylor's teammates.

Taylor took advantage of the confusion to orient her faster fliers into an array for a sedation seal, then pumped chakra into them. With Gaara's insane chakra levels, it wouldn't be nearly enough to knock him out, but with Taylor's massive overabundance of spiritual chakra due to the mismatch between her actual age and her physical age, she was more than capable of suppressing the one-tails long enough for her team to grab the earth scroll and escape as quickly as possible.

As they left the battlefield, Taylor noted with some pleasure that the time spent with his chakra suppressed had allowed Gaara to reassert control over the one-tails bijuu, so he was unlikely to accidentally kill his siblings.

She had resigned herself to being a ninja, but Taylor had no intention of killing kids, if at all possible.

~oOo~

As her team relaxed in the Forest of Death's central tower, Taylor allowed herself a smile. Not a smirk, or a fake, but a genuine sign of her joy. Quite honestly, she was dead tired- she was definitely suffering from mild chakra exhaustion, and had she not devolved control over her body to her shard, she would inevitably have collapsed by now. Still, her team had pulled through with no casualties, or even injuries, and thier objective completed: an above average outcome for a job, even by the standards she had held as an undersider.

"Alright leader, what now?" Akamaru woofed in tandem with his master's words.

"We open the scrolls, of course."

But before completing the second phase of the chuunin exam, Taylor couldn't help but take a proud look at her teammates- through her eyes, and not through her bugs.

Hinata, bullied (by her family,) but learning to fight back, not entirely unlike her.

Kiba, more dog that human, sometimes. Bitch, but friendlier.

Herself, the know-it-all, the Tattletale of the group.

Yeah, she missed her old world, but she cherished the relationships she made in this one all the same.

~oOo~

A/N: This will not be continued. It's something I wrote over a year ago, that I figured I might as well post here.

In response to the reviews: nope, still not being continued My main focus is Horizon Breach. This *is* up for adoption though; credit me or don't, I won't care.