Kill Your Heroes

-Chapter Twenty-three-

Aichmophobia (Part II)

Her heartbeat slowed, her fingers relaxed, the muscles in her chest unclenched. Sakura slumped back in her seat, subsumed by a warm, drowsy wave. She felt safe and very sleepy.

It was that feeling of absolute, cradled-in-her-mother's-arms safety that made the world feel wrong. Sakura didn't feel safe even in dreams; there was no reason for it now, not when she was almost certain she was about to discover if all Sasuke's blood ran as red as the liquid dripping from his knuckles.

Genjutsu, she thought, reflexively stopped the flow of chakra in her nervous system. And just like that, the drowsiness vanished, replaced with a tension that had her strung as tight as a koto. She was almost surprised she wasn't vibrating like a plucked string, but she forced herself to let her head loll gracelessly to one side, hands dropping to her lap.

Closer to her knives.

Sakura's quickly decided her field of vision was too limited, her hair prickling with unease at the thought of pretending to be asleep when she could hear the distinctive sound of kunai striking kunai in the stands around her.

Her fingers twisted in a familiar gesture and she slipped out of the "shell", her clone remaining slumped in her seat. Crouched on her hands and knees, Sakura took in chaos even down the valley formed by the seats, ninja from the village fighting a war above, around, and between the bodies of civilians and shinobi still caught in the genjutsu. It wasn't until one of their opponents toppled into her space that she caught sight of a too-familiar forehead protector.

That single musical note told her everything. And nothing.

The nothing could wait, because the ninja wasn't dead.

Sakura pounced, powerful leg muscles driving the motion smoothly forward, and before the ninja had recovered his balance one of her hands had seized his jaw and she slammed his head against the concrete. Her control over her chakra-enhanced strength had improved over the course of a month—when his jaw snapped and splayed and his head impacted with enough force to kill, it was on purpose.

She was a long way from shattering boulders and cracking concrete, and she'd fractured her radius in two places during that month in practice, but humans were a lot more fragile than rocks. Especially when it involved blunt force trauma to the head.

A jounin, who'd apparently been charging to her rescue or maybe he'd just to finish what he'd started, stared incredulously down at her for a moment and then was gone again without a word.

Sakura considered falling back to her original position, but a glance back at Kakashi-sensei and Might Guy revealed two jounin intentionally making targets of themselves and she wanted no part of that action. She thought about sheltering in place, pretending to be dead, and waiting for it all to be over, but that was only that small, frightened self that had never stopped running from that first ninja with quicksilver eyes.

The rest of her was calculating how to keep her head down and still contribute to the battle. Better control of her chakra-enhanced strength or not, one-on-one tutoring with her knife skills or not, training in the shunshin or not, she was one genin. In the stories, Orochimaru was a lot of things, but an idiot wasn't one of them. If she had to invade a foreign village with a limited force, her infiltrators were all going to be jounin. And against a jounin, she had exactly one weapon. Surprise.

And if that failed, well, they were going to be mailing her to her mother in a box.

It was a good thing she had slender shoulders and a child's small body. Otherwise she really wouldn't have been able to squeeze between the feet and seatbacks without leaving a tell-tale trail of shifting bodies.

Sakura could swear she could feel her heart thudding against the back wall of her throat as she scurried along between the seats, heading toward a battle that she could hear but couldn't see without raising her head above the safety of her trench. The sheer number of feet she had to skirt made her uneasy—who was powerful enough to lock down this many ninja in a genjutsu? Was this Orochimaru himself? Some part of her hoped so, because if this wasn't Orochimaru, it meant he had a subordinate capable of this. And that was bad.

She tried to shove the thought that the enemy could slaughter the sleeping ninja like cattle under a mental rock, but it was cockroach-persistent. Could she wake them? Should she wake them? Or would that just cause more chaos?

Sakura reached the battle before she had to come to any decision and she went to her belly, crawling almost entirely beneath one of the seats and watching the footwork of two jounin as they grappled in the narrow aisle. She was lucky—they were talking and the Oto-nin was female, with slender ankles and painted toes. She had to wait for the sneering Oto-nin to come within reach, but when she did her hand shot forward like a snake striking and when it closed around the enemy kunoichi's ankle she jerked it toward herself with all her might.

The kunoichi had all her weight braced against her opponent, was using chakra to help her keep her footing, but Sakura was the straw that broke the camel's back. The kunoichi went down hard as her opponent capitalized on her sudden weakness and her leg slid beneath the seat where Sakura was lurking. It would have been a bad position to recover from regardless, lunging directly upward likely to dislocate a hip or break her leg and her opponent wasn't about to give her more space, but Sakura didn't take the chance that one of Orochimaru's people wouldn't bend in places humans couldn't.

Modern shinobi were lightly armored as a rule. They were stealth troops, not samurai shock forces, though their ninjutsu made that a possibility.

The kunoichi was true to that rule, so it was only fabric and flesh that provided a barrier to her knife.

And Sakura kept her knives very sharp.

The spout of blood from her femoral artery caught Sakura in the face, startling her, and she smacked her head hard against the underside of the seat. Her backwards scrabble was ungraceful, but she managed to get the blood out of her eyes and wasn't attacked in the interim, so it was a victory.

"You okay?" the jounin that she'd just assisted asked her, glancing down at her only briefly before launching a kunai at an opponent.

"Provided she doesn't do something stupid like bleed acid," Sakura said, resisting the urge to use her shemagh to mop her face. "Sir," she added belatedly.

That earned her a harsh chuckle. "You'll be fine. Good assist."

"Thanks. Good idea or bad idea to try to wake some of our people?" Sakura asked, the feeling of blood on her face overwhelmed by the relief at being able to ask an adult what she should be doing. Even a total stranger. That way, if she woke someone up and they died because of it, it wouldn't be her fault. She was learning to live with the reality of her own mortality and the blood already soaking her hands.

She wasn't yet strong enough to bear the deaths of her fellow soldiers, not when it was her decision that brought them there.

"If you can bring some of the chunin up, do it," was his response. "Leave the genin under."

"Yes, sir," Sakura said. She'd crawled beneath a chunin's seat to get at the Oto-kunoichi, now she dragged the chunin down into her trench. She didn't need him standing up in surprise only to catch a kunai to the back of the head. Sakura was less practiced at breaking others out of genjutsu than she was at freeing herself, but seconds later she had a very confused chunin staring up at her.

"Wha—?"

"We're being invaded by Oto forces," Sakura said curtly. "How good are you at breaking genjutsu?"

As it turned out, he wasn't, but he was perfectly willing to drag another chunin to her. Sakura was soon surrounded by enough chunin to form two combat squads, which almost emptied her row of those who'd thought to wear their distinctive flak jackets. There were probably more chunin among them, but they left those in their civvies asleep.

One squad covered their advance as they switched rows, a kunoichi wearing Inuzuka clan markings now helping Sakura to break the genjutsu. It was frustratingly slow, because unlike casting a genjutsu, breaking it required physical contact for someone with her skills. And she was getting quickly tired of explaining that yes, there was an invasion and no, she was not going to play twenty questions under fire.

It was a very different sort of thing to the fights she'd been in before. This was a battle where killing one or two people almost didn't matter. It wouldn't be over quickly, wouldn't be finished cleanly. They hit patches where the infiltrators had killed their people before a jounin could challenge them, they lost members of their squad as the Oto-nin tried to stop their forward progress.

Unlike the jounin, the chunnin formed squads to combat the Oto shinobi, three teams remaining in orbit around Sakura and the growing compliment of genjutsu-capable ninja.

"I think we've got enough people to break into squads," the Inuzuka kunoichi working next to Sakura said. "Two to break the genjutsu, two combat squads to cover them?"

Why are you asking me?! some part of Sakura screeched, because the kunoichi was at least four years older than Sakura, but she nodded.

The Inuzuka kunoichi bared her teeth in a fierce smile before she relayed instructions along the line. She took with her a cluster of Aburame chunin they'd recently woken and a gangly, nervous chunin who was in his first stage of medic-nin training. Sakura didn't recognize the clan affiliations of any of the chunin who were suddenly falling in around her, but she thought that her partner in breaking the genjutsu was a Yamanaka.

The lead of her combined combat team was a shinobi with long white hair, fine as spidersilk, and a kodachi that flowed like water.

Sakura almost headbutted Kakashi-sensei, who was suddenly crouching in front of her as she moved toward her next chunin. "When you're done leading the resistance," Kakashi-sensei said dryly, "I have a mission for you."

Sakura stared at blankly at him for a long moment, her brain readjusting to the idea that there was a world beyond the next chunin. Then she nodded, glancing up at the lead of her team, who obligingly pulled his blade from the gut of an Oto shinobi and sidled closer.

"I'm borrowing my student," Kakashi told him before Sakura herself could say anything.

"Understood, sir," her lead said and Sakura tried to fix his appearance in her mind. There was a gaping, freely bleeding wound high on his side, which he'd taken when a pair of Suna kunoichi had tried to rush Sakura. He'd killed the first, taken the wound, killed the second almost before it had sunk in that Suna had betrayed them, was collaborating with Oto for the invasion. She didn't even know his name and that didn't seem right. When this was over, she'd ask.

She rose from her crouch, knees protesting, and then hesitated before following Kakashi. When this was over, there might not be any opportunities for asking. "Thank you," she blurted, making him look back at her. "I'm Haruno Sakura."

"Sakuya. Uematsu Sakuya."

"I'll let Sasuke know you were having an affair while he was off chasing down Gaara," Kakashi-sensei murmured as he tucked her beneath one arm and flickered to the top level of the stadium, where Naruto crouched and Shikamaru sprawled.

"Sakura-chan, are you alright?" Naruto asked her worriedly and it to a moment to remember there was blood, dried and flaking, on her face. There'd been other worries.

"It's not mine," she replied. "Did you say Sasuke was chasing Gaara?" Sakura asked Kakashi-sensei.

"His team retrieved him and removed him. And Sasuke decided he'd take the initiative and follow," Kakashi-sensei replied. "Which is where you all come in. It'll be the first A-rank mission since Wave." His voice was light, but his single visible eye wasn't laughing.

Naruto seemed excited by the prospect of being able to do something, but Sakura's hands tightened into fists. From here, out of the worst of the battle, she could hear the sound of fighting in the streets beyond the stadium. Stupid, some part of her mind said, of course that wasn't all their forces.

And there would be others, in the forest. Out there, there wouldn't be a combat squad supporting her, covering her flanks and keeping her from harm.

Sakura watched in silence as Kakashi-sensei explained their mission, summoned the ninken, and sent them on their way.

There was almost a sense of inevitability as Pakkun alerted them to the fact that they'd picked up a tail. A large group, eight ninja, two chunin-level combat squads. She listened as Shikamaru condemned himself, volunteered to be the one left behind, to set the ambush so they could go ahead.

She could have let him.

Not too long ago, she would have let him. He'd have been right, because that Sakura didn't have the necessary skills, but more than that, that Sakura wouldn't have had the requisite courage.

She was not that Sakura.

She took some small comfort in the fact that Kakashi-sensei seemed to have anticipated this, sending the whole pack and not just Pakkun.

"No," she said firmly, earning her a surprised glance. "Your chakra reserves haven't recovered from your match with Temari. You're more clever than I am, Shikamaru, but you can't outwit chakra exhaustion. Take Pakkun with you and catch up to Sasuke, before he gets himself hurt. The pack and I—we'll take care of it."

Someone—she didn't look down to discover who, but the fur felt like Shiba or maybe Akino—brushed beneath her hand in a gesture of silent comfort.

"Are you sure?" Naruto blurted.

"Yes." The word wasn't as firm as she wanted, so she cleared her throat and tried again. "Yes. It's—well, it's not fine, but none of this is," she said, jerking her chin back toward where smoke was blackening the sky above the village. "Just...get Sasuke. Please." If she explained any further, tried to say anything more, she was going to lose her nerve, she clenched her teeth tight to prevent any more words from escaping.

She expected Naruto to argue, but he was giving her a very strange look. And then he nodded solemnly. "Okay," he said, voice raspy. "Okay. We'll be back to pick you up before you know it. And then we'll give 'em what for together."

And then they were gone.