I do not own Naruto. I do own my very own laptop though!

Battle to the Pein.

Panting, Naruto clutched his bleeding shoulder. He glared at his opponents. "Pein, you sarden bastard, give up now and I won't have to kill you."
His opponents simply rolled their eyes. "I refuse. It is my destiny to triumph. You cannot give orders to a god. This shall be a battle to the death. "
Naruto giggled incongruously. "No, it shall be a battle to the pein."
Sakura groaned. What was Naruto doing, making jokes at a time like this?
Strangely, Pein seemed to not mind the pun. You wouldn't think that a guy with a god complex would have a sense of humor, but he had gone to some trouble to preserve his. "Never mind the puns, let's get to it."
"Alright, that's fine with me, "Naruto replied, secretly worried. He had hoped that Pein would monologue as a response to his pun so that he would have enough time for the fox to heal some of his severed muscles. But he shrugged, philosophical now that he had the Sage power, and prepared for battle. Taking a deep breath, 'Pranking experience don't fail me now!', he proceeded to attack. "Hey Sakura, would you mind lending me about seven aspirin?"
Confused, she replied, "Sure, but what do you need them for? Doesn't the fox render all drugs useless?"
"They're pein killers right? Might as well tr..." He was cut off by Sakura, who slapped him on the head. "You idiot! This is no time to be making jokes!"
"Despite your rank as Chunin, Sakura, that jutsu is definitely an S-class technique!" Naruto complained, holding his head. 'If it weren't for the fuzz ball that would have left a bruise!'

A sudden burst of laughter caught their attention. One of the Pein, Naruto thought it was the Animal Pein, was rolling on the ground laughing. Naruto grinned. His plan was working. Encouraged, he continued speaking. "Hey Sakura, since you're a medicnin, you should know this! Is it true? "
Bemused yet resigned to being Naruto's straight man, she asked, "Is what true?"
"That you can laugh away the pein!" Another Pein went down, this time it was the Human Pein.

Enlightened now that the phenomena had repeated, Sakura now saw what Naruto's plan was. Smiling she said, "Nope, it isn't true, especially for peins in the ass." Naruto snorted, and the Outer path succumbed to laughter, rolling around on the ground, which looked severely weird with it's black flames licking at it. Sakura felt tempted to laugh as it looked like it was doing the standard Stop-Drop-and Roll for putting out the flames.

Buoyed by their successes, as three of the seven peins were down for the count so to speak, Naruto continued with his master plan. "Hey Sakura hand me those torture instruments would you?"
Sakura asked the inevitable question. "What do you want them for?"
"Well if I had a mother, I'm sure she would have said no pein, no gain!" This time it was the Deva Pein that began to convulse with laughter. Sakura merely raised an eyebrow at that one, being used to Naruto's playfulness.

Now convinced that his plan would work, she carelessly tossed the gruesome instruments to the side.
"Hey don't do that! I went to pein's to get them!" Now the Asura Pein gave in, laughing so hard he was having a hard time breathing. In fact, he laughed so hard that he suffocated from lack of oxygen.

Now feeling confidant, Naruto and Sakura faced the two remaining Pein confidently. Sakura now had a predatory smile on her face. Finally she wasn't just a burden. Finally she was really helping, more than even Sasuke ever could. She certainly couldn't see Sasuke drop his precious dignity (although, was there really much of it left after wearing a gross pimp shirt?) and playing any sort of role in this playful plot, which might be the only one that could work.

After all, Pein's sense of humor was an exploitable weak spot, which she was determined to take advantage of. If this could defeat Pein without them getting hurt further, she was all for it. If only all ninja fought this way, she wouldn't have nearly as much work to do.

"Hey Naruto, you're lucky you have a high pein tolerance," Sakura taunted. "I'm not nearly so lucky. " The Prata Pein dropped like a fly, so that they now only faced the Naraka Pein. Winking at each other, they continued their assault on the funny-bone. Naruto declared triumphantly, "You're right Sakura; I guess I'm just used to it since the villagers went out of their way to express their ingratitude. But I'll show them by killing the ones that they hate even more presently, those that have inspired such pein that that the villagers hate them even more than me!" And with that the last Pein expired.
Naruto dusted off his hands in satisfaction. Grinning ear from ear, he bounced over to where Sakura was now sitting on a log. Looking shocked she muttered, "I can't believe we just did that. How could we have just killed seven S-rank ninja without even drawing a kunai?" She jumped up from her seat and grabbed Naruto by the ears.
"How did we just do that?" she demanded to know.
Squirming out of her grip, Naruto replied "I put a genjutsu on them. Remember the "Battle to the Pein" that I said, that was the cue for the genjutsu to start. I set it up while he was being 'I'm so superior to you'. "
Disbelieving, Sakura stuttered, "B…but… genjutsu requires good chakra control! "
"Well I invented a genjutsu that could handle a lot of chakra poured into it. It required a lot of chakra anyway to fool Pein. And the other two requirements, that is imagination and attention to details, I already had, you can tell that from my pranks. I just don't have good chakra control but with this genjutsu, it doesn't need it!"
Sakura refused to believe it. Besides just the chakra control… "I didn't see you making hand signs!"
"Well duh, if Pein saw me making hand signs, he would be more guarded and attentive. So I just practiced until I could do it without hand signs!" He shrugged. "It actually wasn't that hard." Stunned, she thought back to Pein's over-the-top reactions. "So it made them react out of proportion to the actual funniness?" She guessed.
"I suppose," he rubbed the back of his head sheepishly. "I'd never actually used it before today."
There was silence in the wrecked clearing. "You mean to tell me," Sakura said carefully, "That you were trusting in a genjutsu that you had never actually used before, in unfavorable circumstances, with unfriendly ninja!"
"Heh, um… yeah." He quickly defended himself from Sakura's incoming punches. "Hey, I couldn't test it out on a friend and we didn't have any captives to experiment on! I didn't want to accidentally make someone we know laugh to death!"
Sakura successfully landed a single blow on him and stopped attacking. She gave a little smile. "You idiot, this is why we think that you're just a dumb-lucky fool. If you had explained what you were going to do before the battle, I could have helped you more! "
"Huh, how?" Naruto asked in an excited tone.
"I could have gotten you access to laughing gas! Then you wouldn't have had to hope that they didn't detect the jutsu!"
"Ooops! I didn't think of that." Naruto pouted, unhappy that he once again had been scolded.
Sakura shook her head and smiled. "Shouldn't we go find Nagato now that we've dealt with the Peins?"
"Naw, I constructed the jutsu so that if he was watching the battle through one of their eyes, he would have been affected too. "
Sakura gasped. "Naruto, that shouldn't be possible. "
"Well if you want proof, he should be nearby and as high as possible. Since the highest point around is the water tower, which is only about a minute away, he should be there."
Slightly impressed by the knowledge that Naruto had shown, Sakura followed him as he bounded off to the east, where the point of the water tower was visible. As they got closer, they could hear shrieks of laughter. When they arrived at the top of the water tower, Nagato was visible in his mechanical spider. It was jerking, with sparks dancing on its shell and rocking back and forth on the pavement. Naruto approached and gave the machine a good kick. It stopped moving.
"This is why villains surgically remove their sense of humor," he offered as a final epithet. He turned away. "Come on Sakura-chan, let's go. " He glanced over when she didn't immediately follow. He watched as she took off her cloak and spread it over the dead man.
When he looked at her quizzically, she replied, "Even if we don't like how he went about it, he had a worthy dream."
He nodded in understanding and they both started to run back to their village.

Credit for this goes to my sister. Despite my never having watched the Pein arc, she guided me through the glut of information.