Yo!
Back again! If you're looking for more details as to why there wasn't a chapter last week, then check the Author's note at the end of the chapter for that!
Other than that, Without further ado, I suppose we'd better get right into it!
Chapter 53: Sakura's Thoughts
"–And so then, we used my super good idea, followed Sasuke's blood trail, and found the base!"
"So… technically it was my 'super cool idea', then, since I left the trail behind so you'd use it."
"No, because you were kidnapped at that point."
"I fail to see how that's at all relevant."
"It means I get credit for all of your ideas."
"…Under what metrics? Because at the moment, I'm not seeing them."
Sakura felt a tiny blossom of mirth in her chest, but it was quickly consumed by the negativity flying around inside her head.
She ignored it as best she could, trying to focus not on what she could not control for the moment, but on what she could deal with now. Namely, she could listen more closely to her two friends' stories, trying to forget her cares in their words.
It wasn't working too terribly well, all things considered.
Her curse marks new presence was something she could feel even when it was inactivate. That wasn't exactly new, given she'd been able to feel a small prickling in the back of her neck whenever her emotions got too heated previously, but now it was constant. Constant, and far more extreme as well.
She bit down on her bottom lip, much harder than she perhaps should've, and drew a droplet of blood that flowed down her chin. Without even thinking, she stuck her tongue out and lapped it up. She didn't want Naruto and Sasuke to see it and worry.
That was the last thing she wanted.
A moment or two later, her lip was already fixed. She had no idea why, but ever since she'd been given this transformation, her body's natural healing had been increased by quite a bit. It wasn't near the level of Naruto's Nine-Tails, but it was similar in that it worked without any thought from her, and that she was positive such an effect was far more insidious than it seemed.
She choked back a gasp as a horrendous pain carved at her shoulder blades. Luckily, it seemed like no one in their group had noticed, and so she reached into her shirt as stealthily as she could, feeling around the area the ache originated from and wincing silently.
There were still bumps from where the twin hand-wing-things had cut their way out of her skin. It hadn't been anything she'd been able to experience at the time, given that she'd been under the influence of the curse marks' second level, but once she'd finally been able to deactivate it…
The agony had come hard and fast. She was just lucky Anko and Naruto hadn't heard her scream. She was fairly sure they wouldn't have gotten over that enough to not swamp her with questions, and that would slow them down…
Which was something they absolutely couldn't afford. Not stuck in Orochimaru's base of all places.
She zoned back into Naruto and Sasuke's conversation, trying to hang onto the sounds of their voices, but was quickly brought back into her headspace by her curse mark flaring up once more. She'd thought about it before, but now she was almost certain the mark had a malevolent will. Now that it had progressed into its second form, that will was only growing more powerful, and harder to resist.
She looked up at the sound of Kiba calling out to them, though what exactly he'd said she couldn't quite work out. Everything was just a bit too fuzzy. From the way Naruto and Sasuke turned to her and smiled, however, she assumed it must've been something good.
Hopefully, it was a way out of here.
She got her wish a second later, but it wasn't exactly what she'd been pining for.
Their group looked out upon the same chasm she and Sasuke had arrived at earlier. They stood in a slightly different spot this time, from what Sakura could see from just a few feet from the entrance. They hid just out of sight for the man flying above them, who, luckily, didn't seem to have any abilities that let him see through walls.
Which would've been problematic, and not even sort of the weirdest thing she'd seen that week.
Still, he'd been able to see them from what had to be nearly 50 meters up, which meant either that his eyes were far better than most, or he had some way of enhancing his vision beyond its normal means.
Anko waved her and Sasuke forward, and they stepped up. She missed some of what the woman said, but caught what she thought were the important parts.
Namely, a question.
"What can you tell me about this guy?"
Luckily for Sakura, Sasuke took the question for her, which helped a ton given that she really hadn't seen much before being blown to high heaven. Added onto that was the fact that she wasn't entirely cognizant at that moment.
Anko rubbed her chin with one hand, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth.
"Sucks that Zabuza and Haku aren't here." She spoke under her breath, careful not to let her voice echo into the man-made canyon beyond them, on the off chance the Akatsuki above them had sensory abilities that'd let him pick such a thing up. "The boy's ice and the assassin's mist would make good tools for taking that guy out of the sky before he even saw us."
Sakura could agree with that, finding her thoughts growing less and less muddied the more they thought about the situation before them. It seemed like her minds processes were far clearer when she was being presented with an actual problem, one she had to solve, rather than just walking from place to place.
It made sense. She had an actual reason to focus.
"So… what's the plan, snake lady?" Naruto asked Anko, crouching down and just barely getting a sight line on the giant white bird above them. "Are we going to try running from him, or beating the crap out of him, or…?"
"Well let's start by not giving me a cute nickname." Anko corrected the boy with a glare. "But I don't really know. Unfortunately, we don't really have any Jutsu that'd let us close the distance. This would be a great time for a perfected Striking from Shadows, but whenever I use it, it roots me in place inside the wall."
"No iterating on the spot, then?" Sasuke asked unexpectantly.
"Can't say you should expect it, no."
"Well, if we wanted, we could try distracting him?" Naruto brought up, standing from where he was and sidling along the walls of the exit around them, until he was only barely out of sight of the man above them. "I could run out, and thanks to the Nine-Tails' healing, I'd be fine to-"
"To get exploded?" Anko cocked an eyebrow. "I don't think you come back from having your entire body reduced to a pile of pulp, but maybe I'm wrong."
"Hmm…" Naruto seemed to consider that for a moment, going silent and placing his right hand over his stomach. A moment later, his eyes widened, and he grew a slightly worried look on his face. "So, uh… yeah, I don't survive if my body gets blown up."
"Good to know."
"Actually…"
Sakura turned to where Dosu had spoken up, raising his hand a bit lazily and shuffling towards them on his knees.
"We three," He gestured back to where Zaku and Kin were. "Might be able to do something about him."
"We're midrange fighters all around," Zaku picked up after the boy had finished. "But we can protect the group with our Wind and Sound Jutsus."
"Well, more us, since Zaku's wind-tunnels have gone kaput." Kin brought up. "But yeah, what he said."
Zaku grumbled something under his breath but didn't speak up.
"It's a shame, really. Zaku's tunnels would've been the most helpful out of all of them. He could've deflected that guy's explosions at long range with a blast of air, and maybe even knock him off his bird." Dosu muttered disappointedly. "Still, I know a wind-based Jutsu that can basically do what his tunnels could, even if it's a hell of a lot less chakra efficient."
"And, well, I've been practicing with some different kinds of Genjutsu, but one of the ones I'm better at should be able to mask any sounds we make." Kin looked confident, even if there was just a touch of nervous energy hanging off of her. "We can wait for that guy to look somewhere else, then sneak out using it, and nail him with a wind Jutsu. Hopefully, we send him spiraling off his little bird before he even knows what hit him!"
Anko took in the sound trio's information, rubbing her chin with one hand absent-mindedly. She considered the plan for another few seconds, before nodding to the three of them.
"Alright, for lack of any better options, we'll go with that."
Everyone acknowledged the woman's orders, turning towards the exit to their little cavern and preparing to breach. They'd be jumping a few feet into the chasm below, which would've, under normal circumstances, echoed loudly across the ruptured earth, alerting the Akatsuki above. According to Kin, however, the girl's bells, which she was still tuning and passing around, would mask those sounds and prevent them from traveling… even if Sakura wasn't entirely sure how that was going to work.
Naruto had volunteered to go first, as he normally did. He took one of the girl's bells in his left hand and charged out of the hole, landing some fifteen feet below and rolling as he did.
There was no noise, and Kin gave a silent pump of her fist, seemingly rather proud of herself. Sakura couldn't begrudge the girl, since she'd done similar things in the past.
Immediately, Naruto took cover behind a larger outcropping of rocks that would, theoretically, block him from view. He looked back towards them, and gave them a subtle thumbs up.
It was time for the rest of them to join him.
They waited for the bird to take another pass over, and then followed him. Anko went next, followed closely by Sasuke, and then Sakura herself was up. Upon landing, she discovered that the sound wasn't actually muted. In fact, it wasn't even dimmed by all that much. Instead, it was as if the loud noise of their collision with the rocks below them simply… stopped after ten or so feet. The sound didn't carry any further than that.
She was quite impressed with Kin, offering the girl a simple fist bump as she landed beside her that was returned a second later.
Anko gave a few hand signals as they ducked behind the large rock Naruto had taken cover behind. It wasn't a foolproof plan, that much Sakura could tell, even in her slightly addled state. If the man above them could see past this rock at all…
Then they would be getting exploded. A lot.
Though as the minutes ticked by, and they hadn't been exploded, Sakura began to grow more and more relaxed. Anko drew her hands together and formed a few quick seals, before letting a snake slide out of the sleeves of her trench coat. It slithered along the rocky terrain until Sakura could no longer see it, but she still heard the light hiss it gave off, though it wasn't as if she understood it.
"Alright." Her teacher's voice, much like their earlier landings, was obscured after a certain point. "Sound guys, if you're making a move, you'd best do it in about ten seconds. He'll be turning his back on us for a brief moment."
Dosu nodded, before signalling Kin and Zaku forward.
Sakura watched as they vaulted the stone above them, and peaked her head around the corner to continue following them. They made it another twenty or so feet before Dosu began to create signs with his hands, presumably for the wind-based Jutsu he'd said he possessed earlier.
He removed the bandages around his mouth for what Sakura realized was the first time she'd ever seen. His face looked… normal. Surprisingly normal for someone who kept it covered almost every hour of the day.
"Wind Release: Great Breakthrough!"
A lacerating wind flew out from the man's lips, propelled by what Sakura could only assume was a staggering amount of Chakra. It flew towards the man above them at a decent speed, though Sakura had no illusions about the fact that if the man had been looking at them, it wouldn't have hit him.
Luckily for them, he hadn't been.
The breakthrough struck his bird from the side, instantly flipping the beast over and sending the man atop it spiraling off. Sakura couldn't quite see his expression, but from the way he looked around wildly, it seemed to her he was trying to both right himself, and see just what the hell had done that to him.
His eyes locked onto Kin, Dosu, and Zaku a second later, and he instantly shot a hand out, even whilst falling through the sky, and fired… something out of it.
He disappeared beyond the lip of the canyon a second later, and hopefully, he'd landed wrong, and wasn't going to be coming back. Unfortunately for them, they still had to deal with the oncoming objects.
Sakura didn't immediately recognize what it was were coming towards them, though she noted they had wings and seemed to maneuver like real creatures. She at first thought them summons, though her opinion changed a moment later as they dodged around Dosu's next Breakthrough, and blitzed forward, almost dive-bombing towards the trio in an effort to…
Oh shit!
Sakura felt her transformation take over her body without really meaning to, dashing past the rocky outcropping she'd been behind and directly in front of the sound trio. She briefly noticed the panicked expressions on their faces, but ignored them. She had to focus on something more important first.
Namely, what exactly she was supposed to do now. It was great and all that she was here, standing in front of her friends and protecting them, but the problems came in when she thought about what she could actually do for them.
It wasn't much. She had a few Jutsu that could defend against explosions, but…
She didn't really know all that much about the Jutsu before her. From up close, she could tell now that the pure white blobs flying towards her resembled insects more than anything. Dragonflies that were perhaps eight or nine inches across. How powerful they would be, on the other hand, was a total mystery.
Still, that didn't mean she couldn't try. She brought chakra up from out of her belly and focused it in the back of her throat, quickly forming the signs for her Water Bullet. She shot the high-pressure stream of water out of her mouth, trying to destroy the oncoming bombs before they could reach her.
Just like with Dosu, however, the white insects merely dodged around her Jutsu, weaving through it with little to no effort whatsoever. She felt a modicum of panic rise in her chest as they went from being a good fifty feet away to perhaps only twenty-five
She focused her chakra into her hands then, bringing more than she thought she'd need, and slammed them into the ripped-up earth beneath her.
"Earth Style: Mud Wall!"
A barrier made of soil and earth burst from the rocks, growing to a height of around eight feet. It was a bit larger, and, more importantly, a bit thicker than one she would've normally created, however, and so she could only hope it'd stand up against the Akatsuki's Jutsu.
She'd timed it so that by the time the wall was up, hopefully the insects wouldn't be able to dodge around it. They'd had less than a half-second to move around it, so she could only hope they couldn't resist their own momentum.
She received her answer only a moment later, as she felt a minuscule, almost negligible shaking in her hands…
Before the world went white.
…What…
The first thing Sakura thought to do was see if she was alive. A quick pat on her shoulder, and a cry of agony from her arm as she moved it confirmed that she was still kickin' it. She turned back towards Dosu, Zaku, and Kin, and saw the latter two huddled around someone on the ground.
Oh.
That's probably not good.
She forced herself up, finding her bones creaking like an old, rusted fence. They didn't quite give out, but if they had, well… she wouldn't have exactly been surprised. She found the aches and pains in her body growing more negligible by the second, like her body was silently repairing itself, or, perhaps more disconcertingly, her curse mark was phasing the pain out of her thought process, letting her forget it was even there.
She stood over Dosu's bleeding body with an almost apathetic expression. Zaku and Kin weren't grieving, but they were trying to rouse the boy. It was clear from the way the barely conscious Dosu gripped onto Zaku's shirt that he was in some pretty immense pain. Sakura couldn't see the leader of the Sound trio admitting even a hint of his weaknesses if he weren't in serious trouble.
Anko, Naruto, Sasuke and Kiba practically flew over, the former-most member immediately checking Sakura. The woman's face seemed locked into a stunned expression, although Sakura herself couldn't quite see what the problem was.
"What's the matter, Sensei?"
Her teacher silently grabbed onto Sakura's left arm, which gave a silent scream of protest to the movement. She looked down, trying to see what Anko was getting at–
Oh. Sakura realized as she looked down at her own limb. There's a hole in my arm.
Around the middle of her bicep, just a tad bit to the left, an entire chunk of her arm seemed to have been eviscerated. If she had to guess, it had happened thanks to one of the insects exploding, and launching a rock her way at several hundred miles an hour. It made sense, really, when she broke it down like that. In fact, she was lucky it hadn't been her head.
I have to thank my curse mark for once. Sakura thought to herself, feeling not an ounce of fear, or panic, or terror seep into her veins. It's keeping me awfully calm.
"It's fine, Sensei." Sakura smiled at her, trying to keep the woman beside her from freaking out. "I don't even feel it, so-"
"How the hell is it fine!?"
Her eyes shot open, and before she could protest, Naruto and Sasuke had grabbed onto her, holding her in place, and Anko had already gone about wrapping her arm with a roll of gauze. It hurt just a bit, likely due to her curse mark's influence fading slightly with the people most important to her all surrounding her.
Dosu let out an ear-piercing yell, and Sakura turned towards him to see just what was the matter. Kin and Dosu had tried to get the boy to stand, but unfortunately, his right leg had buckled beneath him.
"Shit!" Zaku cursed, carrying the boy alongside Kin as they walked him over to the remainder of the group. "He's got a pieces of shrapnel stuck in his right leg, and one in his left shoulder."
That explains the blood all over him.
"I'm fine." Dosu hissed out between his teeth, barely managing to stand on his own in what Sakura could only imagine was torture. "Stop panicking like a bunch of fucking children. We're ninja."
Zaku and Kin stepped back from Dosu, giving him a bit of space. Evidently, they'd been rather perturbed by his words. Sakura herself could see the value in being able to ignore her emotions, as Dosu had always seemed able to do, though she definitely felt he could've handled that a bit better. Though, given that he currently had a half-dozen new holes all over his body, she was willing to forgive a bit of crassness on his part.
She hadn't even noticed that Sasuke and Naruto were talking to her until the latter teammate tapped her on her uninjured shoulder. She turned towards him inquisitively, feeling a bit bad that she'd basically zoned out the entirety of his monologue.
"Uhm, sorry, what did you need, Naruto?"
"I was asking if you were okay." The knucklehead repeated. "You've been staring over at those three for the past, like, two minutes without blinking."
"So?"
Naruto opened his mouth to speak again, but only a sigh escaped before he closed it once more.
"Nothing. We should probably get climbing, anyways." Naruto looked back to where the man they'd knocked away earlier had fallen to. "Besides, if that guy really was a member of the Akatsuki… I have the sneaking suspicion he's probably both fine and angry."
Sakura agreed with that, at least. She felt her transformation begin to fade ever so slightly as she tried to force her chakra to surround the curse mark. Her old method of closing the infernal power had grown… not ineffective, but severely dampened in use thanks to its evolution.
She felt the wings retreat into her back as they made it to the canyon wall. She placed a hand on the rocky surface before her and flooded it with just enough chakra to create a small layer on the front of it. With that, she began to ascend the wall.
"Uhm, Sakura?"
She looked back behind her, where everyone else was still standing solidly on terra firma. They were huddling around Dosu, who wore an angry expression as everyone surrounded him, seemingly questioning whether or not he could make it up the cliff-face before him.
Though judging by the way he averted his eyes from theirs, Sakura was fairly confident in saying he couldn't.
She hopped the twenty or so feet she'd climbed back down to the ground, taking the initial impact in her ankles and rolling when she hit the ground to diffuse the rest. Everyone was speaking to one another, seemingly trying to come up with a way to get Dosu up.
She thought for a minute about what could be done, before, with a sigh, she turned herself around, and let her curse marks evolved state take back over her body.
"On my back." She ordered the boy. "It'll be easier that way."
There was a palpable silence that did nothing more than annoy her, and as she turned back around to see just what the hell was taking Dosu so long, it was actually Anko's face that met her own.
"You realize I'm a Jonin, right?" The woman opened with a single raised eyebrow. "I can carry him up without issue."
"Yeah, but then if that guy were to reappear, you wouldn't be able to defend us." Sakura explained calmly, signaling once more for Dosu to get on her back. "Now come on, we don't have all day."
Another moment of silence followed, during which Sakura felt herself begin to sigh, before she felt a sudden weight settling on her back and pushing her towards the earth below. She smiled as she looked back, seeing an embarrassed Dosu hanging onto her shoulders, and crossing his legs around her midsection.
"Good. Glad we got that sorted." Sakura smiled. "Hang on."
"Thinking I'm just going to let go willy-nilly?"
"I guess that's a fair point."
She scaled the wall slowly, letting the rest of the group take point and find the more easy-to-grip-to spots. Their climb was slow going, and it took them a good five minutes to even make it up half of the hundred or so feet they needed to climb. It would've taken far less time, but they were trying to conserve as much chakra as possible, which meant a bit of actual rock-climbing added to their normal abilities.
They were about three fourths of the way up around three minutes later when their plan went haywire.
"Ah, you did climb up! Just like I'd thought, hn!"
A blonde figure poked his head out from the lip of the chasm above them. He wore an odd sort of hat with what she could only assume was a bell strung onto it, given the light ringing noise that emanated from him every time he moved. He stuck both of his hands over the edge of the ridge, and he gave them a manic smile.
"Art is…"
To Sakura's immense disgust, the man's palms opened up, revealing tongues a good three or four inches in length that spat out… something from inside of them. A moment later, when said objects began flying at them at high speeds, she realized they were the same white bombs he'd given life to earlier, and she also realized that they were probably screwed.
"An explosion!"
Really? A more cynical section of Sakura's mind seemed to call out annoyedly. This is how I die? A twink throwing a dragonfly at my face?
Before the lifeless insects truly could blow them up, they were intercepted by a few dozen senbon, which cut into them from the side, and stuck them to the canyon wall. They seemed to struggle for a moment, before exploding on the rock.
Sakura watched attentively, silently wishing she could pay attention to whomever had just saved their lives, but knowing she needed to be on alert, in case any larger rocks fell on her. After all, she may have survived such a fall, but she had a feeling the boy grabbing onto her back wouldn't. One particularly nasty looking boulder was shaken off by the blast, and so Sakura prepared to dodge the projectile.
She unlatched from the wall with her left hand, using the momentum to dodge the rock that fell just off to her left side, and plummeted to the chasm's floor some seventy feet below her. She gulped at seeing the drop and heard Dosu on her back give off a similar noise of discomfort, and she honestly couldn't blame him.
Finally, she looked backwards, seeing if the person who'd arrived truly was who she was hoping to see.
She let out a rasping breath of relief as a new figure gripped onto the wall just in front of her, having, apparently, run up the entire surface in the span of a few moments. Evidently, some people were doing better on chakra than they were.
"Sorry we're late, everyone!" Haku called to them, smiling genially down at the rest of them. "Continue climbing, we'll provide support!"
"Well, you heard the boy!" Anko called, letting her arms fall off of the wall and connecting to it purely with her feet. "Let's move! Protect Sakura and Dosu!"
"Right!"
"Got it!"
"Yeah!"
She appreciated the sentiment, but it wasn't like the rest of them, perhaps sans Anko, were in any real position to be protecting anyone but themselves. Sakura and Sasuke had been kidnapped after a mission, already exhausted and given no time to rest, and then fought Kabuto. Sasuke had been given perhaps a day or two to cool down during the time she was being experimented on, but other than that, they'd been launched straight back into their escape the moment that had ended.
And from what she'd heard, the rest of the group had been fighting for well over a day now. Presumably, nearly every member of their party was running close to empty. Even Anko, with Jonin reserves, seemed to be struggling a bit to make her way to the lip of the chasm, where Haku, and Zabuza, who she'd only just noticed, were locked in combat with the blonde Akatsuki from before.
Her mentor hopped over the edge, and the sounds of combat only grew louder.
She grunted as she began hauling herself up faster, though because of her body having trouble adapting to her curse marks new transformation, her chakra was stunted in the ways it could travel. Sakura could safely say she wasn't used to having problems controlling her chakra, but it certainly wasn't coming easily to her fingers and palms like it used to.
She took a foothold with her right leg and pushed off of it. It proved to be a near deadly mistake, for just as she placed her weight upon it, the rock gave way to the pit below, and she was only barely capable of holding onto the outcroppings before her with her right hand. Dosu swore up something fierce on her backside, but a quick growl from her shut him up in half a second. She couldn't have him distracting her, not if they were going to survive.
She found new purchase, silently prayed this one wouldn't give quite as easily, and pushed up. Luckily for her, it held, and she now was only five or so feet from the top of the chasm. Sakura looked upwards, and her eyes widened as she saw Naruto hanging over the edge rather precariously, offering her his hand.
She took it with a smile, letting the boy pull on her arm a bit helplessly for a moment, before she realized he couldn't exactly support both her and Dosu's weight, which was awkward, given that she'd sort of placed all her weight on him. Luckily, Sasuke came in for the assist a second later, tensing his expression as he and his best friend dragged the two of them up the cliff face, and safe upon the ground once more.
Sakura felt like she could kiss the earth but refrained from doing so. Not for fear of being judged by the others, for she didn't particularly care at that moment what they thought of her, but for fear of taking her eyes off the new figures standing just twenty-five or so feet away.
Standing alongside the new arrivals was the same blonde Akatsuki they'd been dealing with on their way up the chasm. He wasn't badly injured, a few scratches across his entire body, and a few senbon sticking out of him in places, but he didn't exactly look happy, either, and Sakura was pretty sure they had Haku and Zabuza to thank for that. The new figures, on the other hand…
They were familiar in a scary sort of way. Sakura had seen someone who looked just like them for approximately twenty seconds before she'd merged his head with a wall. Still, the color of their hair, a vivid orange, and their eyes, violet and ringed, gave away that something was off about them.
And that was foregoing mentioning the piercings.
Still, there were four of them. One had a fatter face, and a chubbier overall figure, with his hair slicked back. Another long hair that stretched to his chest. The next had hair covering half of his face, and a ponytail that hung behind him, and the final one had a simple spiked haircut, easily the most normal of all the figures Sakura had seen that day.
"Ninjas of the Leaf Village." The normal looking one spoke up, stepping forward with an apathetic confidence, as if sure he could've taken every single one of them, but also not particularly caring about that fact. "I will give you a single opportunity. Surrender the Nine-Tailed Fox, and you may leave with your lives."
"No." Sasuke answered without missing a beat.
Sakura, despite the lapses in her control over herself, and her overall shitty day, couldn't help but laugh slightly at the small shocked expression on the Akatsuki's face before them. If Sakura had to guess, he wasn't shocked about the outcome at all, but more about how the Uchiha hadn't deliberated, even for a moment.
"Hah, what he said." Anko rubbed the back of her neck, before drawing a new kunai out from her bag. "Though, c'mon kid, you couldn't have given us a few seconds to breathe while we pretended to think about it?"
Sasuke coughed awkwardly.
"Eh, not like it would've mattered." Zabuza stepped up, drawing his Executioner's blade from across his back, and holding it outwards at an angle that Sakura could only imagine was hell on his arm. "We just need to kill these freaks. Sooner the better."
"You guys have pretty good timing!" Naruto called amiably at both Haku and Zabuza. "I kind of figured we'd be on our own. How'd you find us?"
"Heard an explosion, just sort of assumed that if something was exploding, it was probably you all." Zabuza shrugged. "Don't take it personally, but you guys have an inordinate ability to get yourselves into trouble, so…"
"No." Naruto sighed out, looking back towards their opponents. "You're… not wrong."
There was a standstill for the next five or so seconds, neither side, the five Akatsuki, nor the ten of them, wanted to make a move first, and risk compromising their positions. In the end, it was, a bit shockingly, Haku who acted first.
The boy drew senbon into his hands and launched them at the figures in front of them, forcing the Akatsuki to scatter, lest their movements be impaired. In that time, the rest of the group sort of silently divvied themselves up. Zabuza and Anko each took one of the weird Orange haired men, the long haired one and the chubbier one, respectively, while she, Naruto, and Sasuke took the normal-looking one, who seemed to regard them with the same casual air he'd been giving them all before.
Off to her left, Sakura watched as the remaining members split down the middle, with Haku and Kiba taking the last of the weird orange dudes, ponytail boy, while Zaku and Kin focused their sights on the Blonde explosives expert. Dosu was sat off to the side, doing his best to recuperate from his injuries.
She focused in on their opponent, watching the way he subtly took a step back, controlling the distance between them. Before he could do anymore than that, Sakura charged in, relying on her curse marks strength to, hopefully, obliterate this guy before he could an attack off.
Such a nice future would obviously not come to pass, for she was blown back by a strange power. She spiraled in midair and realized with no shortage of panic that she was currently barreling towards a giant, hundred or so foot deep hole. She barely managed to grab onto the edge of the chasm with her left hand, though she still slammed into the wall as her momentum was halted.
She coughed, seeing a bit of blood land on the rocks before her, and run down their surfaces.
"SAKURA!" Naruto's voice screamed out in a horrified mess. "YOU OKAY!?"
"I'm fine!" She lied, trying to ignore the fact that she was pretty sure a few of her ribs were very definitely broken. "Give me one second, I'll be right back."
She heard the sounds of combat continue, before forcing her muscles to carry her up the remainder of the cliff face. Luckily, her curse mark was doing a good enough job of blocking out the pain, for she was pretty sure extending her arms, and using her chest and stomach muscles to help lift herself, would've been an abnormally painful thing to do with broken ribs.
She mamaged to get to the top of the cliff once more, and was almost immediately met with the sight of Naruto flying straight toward her. She dashed forward and caught him mid-air, which was, once more, quite uncomfortable, before she looked back towards Sasuke, who was still engaged with their opponent.
Normally, in a hand-to-hand combat scenario, Sasuke would've been able to hold his own against even some Jonin thanks to the Sharingan's enhanced sight. Even now, that was still sort of holding true, but…
It seemed like Sasuke just couldn't shake the man's eyes.
Every time he ducked behind the orange-haired man, trying to land a hit on his backside, he simply blocked the attack without even seeing it.
It's like he has a set of eyes in the back of his head.
"You alright, Naruto?" She addressed the boy in her grip.
"Yeah, yeah I'm fine." The boy seemed to be being a bit facetious, but she wouldn't call him on it, given she'd been exactly the same way not a minute prior. "C'mon, we've gotta go help Sasuke!"
"Right!"
The fight wasn't exactly terrible, but it wasn't grand either. They were going even, Sakura could say with fair confidence, only due to the fact that they had double the members of the Akatsuki, and even then, something felt off.
It was like the person they were fighting was purposefully going easy. That, or they really were just worse than Sakura had assumed they would be. In theory, three Genin, well, two Genin and a Chuunin, should've been nowhere near enough to match an S-ranked criminal, but…
Well, they sort of were matching him.
Though, there was a problem with that hypothesis… Namely that they hadn't wounded the man. They hadn't landed even a single scratch on his body, which lead Sakura to think that he may've been toying with them.
But why!? She questioned in her mind's eye. Why would he toy with us? The Nine-Tails is right in front of him, and he already expressed an interest in obtaining it, so why!?
Her answer came in the form of a singular click. It sounded out from behind her, and she had just enough time to think 'Oh shit' before she was blasted backwards by another freaking explosion.'
I hate every damned member of this god forsaken group.
She landed hard on her left side, rolling as she landed and trying not to scream as a sharp, knife-like pain shot up her already-damaged limb. She looked over in concern and saw that both Naruto and Sasuke had managed to avoid being flung back, but neither looked to be in their best condition. The former, especially, had black burn marks all over his clothes. It was more likely that he'd taken the brunt of an explosion, and simply used the Nine-Tails' regeneration to ignore it.
The rest of the group seemed to have suffered similar experiences. Zabuza and Anko had avoided the blasts, but, seeing a likely standstill in the combat as a chance to rest, had done just that. The other Genin besides them had taken the hits, but luckily, none seemed terribly fatal. Even Dosu looked to have been left largely alone, leaning against the remains of a nearby building.
Still, the new arrival was someone she'd never expected to see again.
It was the bald-headed cyborg they'd killed before, the same absent smile stuck upon his face. Beside it hopped out from the abyss another man, who had the same orange haircut and piercings all over his body.
But… We…
"We destroyed that guy!" Naruto shouted, pointing at the explosive-ridden cyborg with one hand, seemingly offended. "What the hell!?"
"Pain is absolute." The normal-looking guy they'd been fighting spoke up, and walked towards them, outstretching his hand. "You cannot destroy pain, nor can you escape from it."
She growled, forcing herself to her feet and disregarding the agonizing pain screaming out from her midsection.
That explains what the man apparently named 'Pain' had been holding back for. Why waste ones time with a battle they had a 95% chance of winning, when one could simply stall for a minute, and suddenly have a battle that they have a 100% chance of winning.
Now, it seemed as if Pain would no longer be holding back. His many look-alikes stepped forward along with him, forming an intimidating sort of line that looked like they shouldn't be trifled with.
"Come," The main 'Pain' spoke out. "Nine-Tails."
Without warning, Naruto was pulled forward by some strange phenomena. Despite the boy's audible protests to it, his body was flying towards Pain's outstretched hand, waiting to catch him in his clutches, and, presumably, rip the demon from his body.
Sakura stepped forward, ignoring the pain in her stomach and left arm and preparing to blitz into the enemies formation, wreaking as much havoc as she could. Sasuke looked much the same, already running forward with his Sharingan drawn. Still, their efforts would be unnecessary, given that before the orange-haired man could grab their teammate, a large pile of sand came in between the two of them, catching Naruto in mid-air, and then dragging him back to the rest of the group.
Wait… what!?
She recognized the technique, and if she was right, then things had just gotten a lot more complicated.
Another Pain stepped up, this one with his hair drawn back, and a bit of a chubby figure, and stood before the other pains. He held his hands out, and as a blast of wind coursed across the battlefield, he absorbed the ability at the end of it's life, simply taking in the chakra with some odd sort of barrier.
"Tch!" Sakura heard a girl click her tongue from behind her, before stepping up to be just off to her left. "I didn't realize they could absorb Jutsu."
"Heh, guess we'll have to be more careful than we'd thought."
A red-haired boy kneeled down beside their teammate, offering the Jinchuuriki a hand and helping him to his feet.
"Are you alright, Naruto?"
"Y-yeah." The Uzumaki seemed terribly confused, which, to be fair to him, seemed to be a constant among the rest of the group. "Uhm, if I might ask, why are you guys here?"
"Heh," An older teen in a black outfit stepped forward, drawing a few scrolls off of his back and unleashing them. "We got called in by your Hokage."
"Besides, we owed you all one anyways," The young woman beside Sakura turned to her and smiled. "Couldn't go letting you die before we could pay you back."
"Oh?" Pain spoke out, stepping up with a bored look on his face. "And who might you be?"
The three ninja who'd only just showed up all took up confident poses. The eldest drew her fan across her back, holding it behind herself and looking poised to strike at a moments notice. The middle child sent strands of blue energy to his newly summoned puppets, making them move in aggressively in front of him, ready to fly into battle at a moments notice.
The youngest stood in front of both, but the sand floating above him, threatening to encroach upon their enemies position at any time, immediately labeled him as the most threatening of the three.
"We are Sand Shinobi." Gaara uttered with an easy smile.
"Allies of the Leaf."
End Chapter 53
Yo!
On the lack of a chapter last week, despite me saying there would be one:
Unfortunately, two weeks ago, literally the day after I posted the last chapter, my family and I received the news that our Dog's cancer had relapsed. It had made it to his jaw, and unfortunately, that's a fatal diagnosis. We had to put him down only a few days later, and I can admit truthfully that this story was just about the last thing on my mind at the time.
I'm still a bit sad, but I've dealt with my grief on the matter, and I wanted to at the very least address the lack of an update last week.
So yeah, I wrote half of this chapter two weeks ago, and then basically didn't touch it for an entire week, so my thoughts were jumbled, and kind of sporadic. This is probably the worst chapter of the fic, honestly? Eh, I needed to release something, so, y'know, here you go.
So yeah, we're returning to weekly updates now. T-minus... Let's say four weeks til the end of this arc, and then we'll be going on Hiatus for a bit. Not like a year or anything, more like a few weeks to a month. Still, it could end up being longer than that until we get to the Hiatus, this arc could end up taking five or six more chapters, so who knows.
Anyways, see you all (probably) next week!