Being shit at writing action scenes, I had a feeling that this chapter would be a pain in the ass to write, not to mention crappy as hell, but I think it didn't turn out too bad. Keep in mind that I only began writing it today because a) I concentrated on another fic before and b) I was kinda afraid of writing this and disappointing everyone or something. Stupid, I know, but that's how it was. Anyway, I hope you'll enjoy this.
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Madara jumped out of the way when a volley of shuriken flew at him and retaliated with giant fireballs. Sakura jumped backward, landing on top of the water, already preparing her next move. With his sharingan, Madara could copy her jutsu, so she would have to either use techniques he wouldn't have enough chakra for or use her unique powers against him. Fortunately, she had already prepared a few things before his arrival. A smirk grew on her face.
Madara parried a blow to his shoulder. The demoness had not moved, so it must have been a clone that had delivered the blow. Yet, as he turned around to eliminate it, he almost stumbled as his mind went blank for a moment.
Taking advantage of the opening, the other male slashed at him, and he only escaped by using his sharingan to teleport on the beach. Still, as his sharingan rove the man's body, he could only admit that he was not dead as presumed.
"What the hell? How are you not dead, Orochimaru? That's impossible!"
The snake Sannin smirked.
"Stranger things have happened, like living far longer than normal humans, ne?"
Madara ignored the barb and parried another blow while trying to figure out how such an impossible thing could have happened. Yet with his sharingan, it could not be a genjutsu and he could see the chakra in the Sannin's body.
Frowning, he erected a wall of flames around the too-pale man to gain some time, but a new volley of senbon at his feet forced him backward. Yet his feet would not move. Glancing down, he saw that they were encased in sand and snorted. Once more, he used his sharingan and teleported away, this time landing on the surface of the lake. Remembering Sakura, he turned around, only barely escaping the tanto that would have pierced his chest.
"You think you can kill me with such a pathetic scheme? What do you plan to do, now that I am here, on the lake?" he jeered.
Sakura smirked widely.
"Why, Madara, I plan to kill you, of course, now that I have you exactly where I want you. As of right now, you're unable to use you sharingan to teleport away, which makes it so much easier to kill you, and I've placed a seal on you that is steadily sucking away your chakra. Of course, you know that chakra exhaustion can lead to death, so I don't have to remind you of that."
Madara snorted and engaged in a taijutsu battle with the demoness. The woman parried his blows, countering with her own chakra-laden fists, but he could predict her moves and evaded her each time, occasionally landing a hit on her.
"Getting tired?" he sneered. "Looks like you were wrong and I still have the advantage."
Sakura could not stop herself from snorting.
"Yeah, right. Don't count your wins yet."
A swish of clothes warned Madara that Orochimaru was once again behind him and he used his sharingan to teleport, only to find it impossible and, taken by surprise, sustained a deep slash on his side. He jumped away, a hand on his side to keep the blood from flowing down. His eyes were wide in shock and surprise when he looked at the white-haired woman.
"What is this? What have you done to me?" he yelled, fear creeping just barely noticeably in his voice.
"Like I said," gloated Sakura, "I've kept you from using your evolved sharingan. Can you feel your chakra seeping away yet?"
With a growl, Madara sent rays of lightning at her, all of them falling from the sky to hit the water around her. With a curse on her tongue, Sakura leapt away, watching as Orochimaru was caught in a ray and electrocuted, the unmistakable odour of burnt flesh wafting to her. Just as she landed further away, a shock rippled through her and she lost consciousness for a moment, only barely registering that Madara had electrified the surface of the lake at the exact same moment she had landed on it.
She came to in the water and quickly swam to the surface, ignoring the twinges of pain that brought her, her lungs screaming for air. However, Madara would not let it go that easily, she knew, and prepared a jutsu while she was still in the dark water and he could not see her.
A water dragon shot out of the depths of the lake and slammed into Madara, sending him flying. As he did a cartwheel to land on his feet, a chakra-laden fist smashed his sternum; blood pooled in his mouth as he panted for breath and crashed on the once again smooth surface of the lake, a feminine hand clutching the collar of his shirt to keep him from sinking down below.
"You're dead, Madara."
The hostile whisper was the last thing he heard before a veil of black fell on his world.
The forest was a complete mess when Minato and his companions appeared, just in time to see a man they recognized as an elder Uchiha get knocked on his ass by a silver-haired man who, while covered in blood, was smiling widely like crazy.
"Come on! Can't you fucking do more than that? I had hoped that an Uchiha would be able to inflict me some sweet pain. I'm kinda fucked to see that you're that pathetic! And Sakura-chan had promised me you would be fun to fight with!"
He ranted some more, grumbling, as he stepped down from his perch on a branch and tied the clearly unconscious Uchiha up solidly.
"Damn. Shoulda totally asked Sakura to give me a lashing beforehand to make this worth it. Can't believe the geezer was supposed to be strong."
The Konoha nin were startled by the appearance of a long-haired teen next to them.
"Itachi-kun? What are you doing here?" asked Rin, surprised.
"This is my family. I want to see that the rotten part is taken care of properly."
Rin stared at him strangely.
"Not all Uchiha want to overthrow the Hokage. I have made subtle comments about how that could be nefarious for us and the Uchiha clan is divided. I believe those who wanted to rebel have all been taken care of."
A voice behind them took them by surprise, making them whirl around to see a blond man with two Uchiha on his shoulders.
"Damn right, un. Hey, Itachi junior, you should tell your older counterpart to listen to Sakura more often, like you did. Maybe he'd be less prissy about everything, un."
The silver-haired man snorted, landing next to them with the Uchiha in his grasp bumping painfully on a nearby rock, which didn't seem to faze the nuke-nin in the slightest.
"I doubt it. He's got a stick so far up his fucking ass that I doubt anyone could get it out."
He observed the Konoha nin and smirked.
"Guess you wanna see Sakura, eh? She should be fighting that fucking Madara right about now. Wanna go?" he asked with a large smirk.
Without waiting for an answer, the two nuke-nin took off and Minato and his companions followed them without even concerting the Hokage. Everyone wanted to see the elusive white-haired kunoichi and hoped that she was alright.
Along the way, they encountered others from the Akatsuki, all of them holding one or more Uchiha. The last one to join them was the older Itachi, who looked impassively at his younger self and murmured a soft "Hn, you did well" to him.
They all stopped at the beach, just in time to see a drenched and burned Sakura slit Madara's throat with a kunai. Her head snapped up in their direction at their approach and the smile she sent their way was positively heavenly. She threw Madara's body to them, the once proud Uchiha landing unceremoniously on the beach like a dismantled puppet.
While they looked at the body, she pressed a hand against her temple and let her medical chakra heal her eye, then took off her blindfold in a wide movement and let it float away in the wind, yelling ecstatically: "At long last! Freedom!"
She slowly walked up to the group, smiling like no weight was on her mind, only to be engulfed in a group hug.
"Ah, it's so good to finally see you guys!" exclaimed the female demon happily.
At long last, after effusions of happiness and inquiries of "How have you been?" and "I've missed you so much!", Minato pondered, "It's almost anti-climatic. I thought that Uchiha Madara would be much harder to kill…"
Sakura shrugged, explaining, "We've worked on a plan to bring him down for years. I knew that once I got him on the lake, I had him."
Obito still didn't understand.
"How come? Because water is the opposite of fire, which is the main element of all Uchiha? Somehow, that doesn't seem to be enough."
The white-haired kunoichi laughed happily.
"Of course that's not enough. That's not why I got him there. You see, I was fully aware of how dangerous he was and I knew that genjutsu would never fool him–and you all know that genjutsu is my specialty–and that he could read all my moves with his sharingan. Plus he could teleport. I couldn't disable his sharingan, but I could seal away any way to open a portal to teleport in a specific location if I used a seal large enough. Only, knowing him, he would spot it right away because it had to be drawn in blood. So I had Kisame here help me with that. He is very good with water jutsu, so I had him stop the water from reaching small portions of the lake at times so I could draw seals on the bottom of the lake. As long as Madara was above the lake, he could not teleport. Just to be certain that he would not be a problem if ever he escaped, I added a second seal, below the lake, to suck away the chakra of the first human who used chakra in the area above the seal."
Her smile turned into a feral smirk, her eyes sparkling.
"As soon as I stepped on the shore, I activated the seals, and as you know, I am not human."
She nearly whistled innocently at the looks on the faces of her old teammates.
"What can I say? Foxes are tricksters. Of course, just to have more fun with him, since he did ruin my life to a point, I unearthed Orochimaru's body and had a shadow clone control him. I simply had to control his muscles and pour chakra in his body to make him act normally. Nothing I'd never done before. It sometimes pays to be a medic-nin. And I hid the chakra strings and the clone under a layer of fox illusions. I knew, by experimenting with Itachi, that the sharingan could not see through them. As I've said, foxes are tricksters. We specialize in illusions."
Her ears twitched happily on top of her head and she hugged Kakashi close to her body, nearly purring.
Minato smiled at the scene, happy for the both of them.
"Well, now that you killed Madara and cleaned the Uchiha clan, what do you inted to do? Will you come back to Konoha?"
Sakura looked at him, a more serious look on her face.
"Iie. I thought about it, and I know you would accept me and the guys, but your village never would."
Minato opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off swiftly.
"I know that you think the villagers would be open-minded, but in my time, my best friend was ostracized for only harbouring a demon in his stomach. What do you think would be their reactions to three free demons and a handful of nuke-nin?" she asked rhetorically, shaking her head. "Iie, Minato-san, I can't come back. However, I'll take on missions as long as I'm listed as a freelance kunoichi. We've talked about it. The guys would be willing to do that too. We just want to be a group with no affiliation to any village. If it was known that Konoha had three demons working for her, it would not end well. Other villages would try to capture other demons, and we demons have to stay neutral. However, that being said, we are willing to help you when you need us, just as we will help other people if we judge them worthy. Would that be alright with you?"
The Hokage nodded, eyes moist.
"Hai. Hai, of course. And you're welcome in Konoha whenever you want to visit. I know a few geisha and their adopted children who would love it if she came by."
Sakura nodded with a smile, nearly dragging Kakashi with her.
"Come one, Kakashi-kun. Let's go see them. And then I'll show you how sensitive men get when I stroke them with chakra-laced fingers. I'm sure you'll find that very interesting. And I'll have to have you meet my kids. Yours looks just like you, you know…"
As their voices faded in the distance, Obito looked at the Akatsuki and said, "You guys are so whipped. You'd so do anything for Sakura-san!"
Kyuubi raised an eyebrow and snorted. Jeering, he taunted the young Uchiha.
"I don't see you not following Time's footsteps, gaki."
Cries of outrage at the name erupted in the forest, but everyone only laughed at the pouting teenager.
"I'M NO GAKI, KUSO!"
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Well, guys, here it is. This fic is finally completed. I hope the ending did not disappoint you and I'll see you next week for the one-shot sequel, which is a HP/Naruto crossover.
No promises or anything, but if I did a short fic about Sakura's time as a spy in the Akatsuki, would any of you be interested?
Also, I don't remember if I answered that question or not, but someone asked me what was a nuke-nin. Obviously, that's a missing-nin. And a gaki is a brat.
Kudos, everyone. Hope you'll read more of my stories.
