The Chunin Exams, Prologue

Three weeks had passed since Coren learned to push away the Cursed Seal, and they were rather tedious. Thankfully, the tedium gave him time to set up a new persona to walk around in.
Another set of missions had just been completed; Tora was recovered, the local minefield was cleaned, the Inuzuka dogs were walked, and there was no litter on the river-bank or surrounding areas.
And so, on such an average of days, Kuroi speaks.
"I'm signing you three up for the Chunin Exams."
And that was the tale of how Coren Keitaro had a heart attack.
"WHAT!?"
Coren completely dropped his meticulously planned out mask, opting instead to wtf his way to victory.
"...I said 'I'm signing you three'-"
"I heard what you said!" he responded harshly.
Blinking once, he realized he should calm down.
"...What I meant was, why do you think we're ready for something like that?" Coren ran his hand over his own shoulder. "I mean, we royally fobbed up our C-Rank mission, and I don't really think we're good enough. No offense, Hanako," he said to his blond teammate.
"...What about Jacob?"
"Total offense meant to him, of course," he responded, leaving said Hyuuga fuming. "Anyway, are you sure?"
"Yeah; I mean, what's the worst that could happen?"
Coren's eyebrow twitched.
"Maintain the persona, maintain the persona, maintain the persona... IT'S NOT WORKING!"
Glaring at the man, he simply said
"We could die."
"...Pssh, like that'd happen. Anyway, later; I'm off to sign you three up."
And so, that was the story of how Coren had a brain aneurysm.
"...You two, what do you think of this?"
Hanako shrugged.
"Meh, I think we'll be fine. I mean, if we can survive our C-Rank, I think we'll survive this."
"And you, Jacob?" Coren asked. "What do you think of our idiot teacher signing us up for it?"

"I'm pretty sure that it couldn't possibly turn out any worse than our last mission did," I said jokingly. "To be serious, though, I'm pretty sure that we could do it... Or at least survive long enough for a stupid sensei to come save us."

"...Majority rules, I guess," Coren said with a sigh. "Whatever; I suppose you two have a point. At the very least, we'll survive."
He looked over at his team before shaking his head.
"Let's get to Training Ground 7. We'll need to work on our skills if we want to survive something like the Chunin Exams."
And from then on, their training began.

Cue incredibly segue into a time-skip up there ^