Bonus Scene: [Back when Kakashi showed Sakura his Sharingan's special abilities first the first time]
Sakura peered uneasily at the gaping tear in space, which seemed to be filled with a profound sort of blackness. "So where does it go?" she asked.
Senpai shrugged, saying wryly, "It didn't exactly come with an instruction manual, Sakura."
That caused her frown to deepen. "But what if it actually does lead somewhere? Say you shove an S-class nin through it and it leads to some alternative world where they don't have chakra and that shinobi goes on to conquer the world."
Kakashi-senpai's brows shifted into an expression of clear skepticism.
"Or," Sakura theorized as she edged closer to the opening, "what if it's not a nice and pretty world on the other side. What if there's some thousand-tentacle god-monster waiting over there and if you feed it often enough, it'll come through?"
"I think," Kakashi-senpai drawled, "that you and the ninken need fewer horror movie nights. Besides, it's much more likely that there's actually nothing on the other side and if I lose control of the technique, the universe inverts and collapses."
"…you know it's a bad day when you're hoping for the tentacle monster," Sakura muttered.
Kill Your Heroes
Chapter Fifty-Six
Sugkunegousin (Part II)
Sakura sat on the edge of the great wall that the First had raised against the world, the scent of Pakkun's fur in her nose and her forehead pressed against the space between his shoulders. It was hard to remember, most times, that he was so small—that his ribcage was no bigger than her hands, shifting beneath her palms as he breathed.
She knew that this couldn't be particularly comfortable for him, but he didn't struggle and didn't protest. Sakura tugged at his ears gently in apology as she settled him on her lap. She'd had a Bad Night last night and what sleep she'd gotten had been disturbed and disturbing. Sometimes the vivid imagination of a genjutsu specialist wasn't something to be envied.
She'd gotten spoiled, traveling with senpai for so long. Sakura wished she was someone who cared less about what people thought—she'd get a place of her own and ask Kakashi-senpai and all his rabble to move in with her in a heartbeat.
It wasn't that she felt physically crowded by the parents she hardly ever saw, nor was there anything wrong with the attractive house in the quiet neighborhood that had been built by her grandfather; it was more the psychological pressure of performing Sakura-who-was-fine-and-living-well rather than the Sakura who'd spent so many nights sleeping in the well-lit sanctuary of the bath and flinching at things half-glimpsed from the corner of her eye. It wasn't like that all the time nowadays—if it was, she'd have gotten herself killed, killed herself, or killed someone else by now. But it had been like that and that time would always be with her, waiting like some ambush predator in the back of her mind for the right combination of stress, exhaustion, and external triggers.
She didn't want to show her parents that Sakura, because that Sakura was not their fault and sharing that Sakura with them would be like passing them a little piece of her hell. She wanted to protect them from that, as much as she could, but she was also ashamed of that little girl afraid of the dark, ashamed of those moments when she wondered if blood and breeding and boyhood really mattered more than she wanted to think.
She slept easier and felt safer with Kakashi-senpai nearby and on the nights and during the days when even that wasn't enough, he didn't ask her awkward, probing questions, demand she talk even when talking was the last thing she wanted, or watch her helplessly in a way that burdened her with guilt for being broken. He was just there, unobtrusively reading his novel, nonjudgmental about her nightmares and her coping methods.
They never talked about senpai's own experiences with combat fatigue; he belonged firmly to the time wherein there were some scars you never revealed. No one from the previous generation talked much about the wars and what it had cost them to survive them; combat fatigue had been so endemic that it had been standard operating procedure in hospitals during the last war to assign shinobi to each room for "fire watch." It was still regarded as something just as normal for field jounin as joint wear or broken bones; it was only after this long stretch of peace and with new medics entering the field that it was beginning to be regarded that something that could be treated, just like any other illness.
Sakura had not been overly impressed by the field still in its infancy, back when she'd been scrambling desperately to learn how to cope; some of the side-effects of the experimental treatments they'd been using to manage anxiety and regulate sleep had been just as bad as anything she'd experienced without them. Genjutsu would have been more effective, in her opinion, but she'd never read anything that indicated they were even considering it as an option. Which, to be fair, was likely because most of the genjutsu they'd be aware of would have been the level taught at the Academy—genjutsu types were rare to begin with and rarer still would be a genjutsu-type trained as a medic, who was also interested in treating phycological disorders.
In another life, perhaps that could have been Sakura; in this life, Sakura could only think that it was already enough to wade through her own hardships. She didn't have right combination of compassion, emotional fortitude, and clinical detachment required in order not to drown in other peoples' hell. She didn't even have the confidence to treat herself.
Pakkun's ears pricked up even as Sakura sensed the approach of a chakra signature she recognized—once you knew what you were searching for, an Aburame who wasn't using their swarm to disperse their chakra signature was unmistakable. She silently wondered at the men and women who married into that clan and shared their bed with half a million other inhabitants; even just feeling the crawling, creeping of his chakra and allowing her vivid imagination to fill in the hollows beneath his flesh was enough to make her want to shudder.
But she didn't, because while her senses had grown more acute while she was away, she hadn't lost her respect for Shino as a person and as a shinobi.
"Shino-san," she greeted as she dropped lightly back onto the walkway, placing Pakkun at her feet.
"Sakura-san," he murmured courteously back at her from behind the barrier of clothing even more concealing than what he'd worn in the Academy. "You've arrived early."
"I went for an early morning run to warm up and clear my mind," she admitted.
Though as she was more than capable of running and worrying, it had been the visit to the Hyūga graveyard and then Gozen-san's house afterwards that had helped to settle her rioting emotions. Their current mission was S-ranked and therefore confidential, but Sakura had confessed her worries about her long-range capabilities and gotten a scathing look and a Don't be stupid in return, which had been followed by a very condescending explanation of projectile weapons, such as kunai, and how they might reasonably be used by someone with chakra-enhanced strength.
Gozen-san had also given her some frank and disturbing advice on Danzō-san and the subordinates he'd raised—completely unprompted and confirming either that she really could read minds or that her information network was well and alive—but Sakura would think on her opinion of his very pragmatic wartime ethics when her mind wasn't full of recently reviewed data on explosives. What he'd done was neither better nor worse than some of the things that the regular ANBU had been asked to do—it had been done with the Second's and the Third's knowledge and the village's funding; the only difference was that his social experiment had been conducted on their own people.
"Pakkun and the other ninken were keeping me company earlier, but when we'd finished the run everyone else went to hunt down senpai. There was a midnight release on the newest Icha Icha novel and no one has seen him since we received our orders, so…" Whatever her opinion on his books, she couldn't help but be somewhat impressed that Jiraiya-sama could so deftly manage spy networks, conduct his own investigations, and meet publishing deadlines all with his characteristic good humor; the briefing had been the first time she'd seem him so grim for so long a stretch.
Shino chuckled. "Hatake-senpai never changes. I noticed he'd assigned himself an evening departure."
Though it was unlikely that any of their targets were the type to go to ground if they realized they were being hunted, no one had felt the need to put out an announcement and give S-class marks any advantage. The deployment of the squads was being staggered and even the individual members of the squads themselves had been given different exit orders; she shared an early morning slot with Shino and Neji. They would rendezvous with the rest of their team outside. Kakashi-senpai, of course, would be leaving at the absolute last moment by himself.
"Ah, speaking of senpai. I meant to ask last time. I was surprised not to see Yūhi-senpai at the briefing. Your team's specialization was pursuit, wasn't it?" 'Surprised' was probably overstating things a little, given that Yūhei-san had been so quickly shunted into mentorship after promotion—or had chosen to apply for a genin team rather than garnering experience in her own career, but Sakura was willing to give her face in front of her student.
She was also genuinely curious about whether or not that group had stayed close after Shino had made jounin, while the other two remained in the mid-ranks—unlike Ino's squad, which would likely raise their own children in the expectation of following in their parents footsteps, the squad under Yūhei-senpai had always had a limited lifespan unless Hinata was relieved of her position as heiress of her family or the other two were willing to operate within the constraints put forth by the Hyūga.
Sakura sensed she'd made a mistake when Shino lapsed into an awkward silence, but before she could think of a way to extricate herself, he made a very quiet reply. "Kurenai-sensei is pregnant."
Sakura blinked, quickly reviewing the latest gossip that Ino had forwarded; births, marriages, and deaths of people they knew all merited special mention. It had been a while, however, and it was just within the realm of possibility that Yūhei-senpai had gotten herself married and pregnant since the last letter. "I hadn't heard she'd gotten married."
"…she's not."
And now she understood the awkward note in Shino's voice.
Even if she thought the timing was less than ideal—and she could see how it would probably always be less than ideal—Sakura could guess at the pressure a newlywed wife might face to quickly bear a child when the chances were high that either she or her husband might die in the coming conflicts with Akatsuki. Clans especially were insistent on every branch bearing fruit, not only because that was the only way to maintain their influence and position—every child increasing the likelihood that some extraordinary talent might appear—but also because they were very realistic about how many of these children would survive long enough to reproduce when most of them entered the battlefield before they entered puberty.
These were the things that Sakura had learned from observation and from Ino; these were acceptable reasons to take yourself out of the field.
Kunoichi weren't civilian women. From the moment they entered puberty, their menstruation was suppressed and managed by well-tested medical jutsu for a host of very practical reasons. It had, in fact, been the development of this range of jutsu that had revolutionized the role and position of women on the battlefield—with chakra and projectile weapons rendering null and void most arguments about physical strength and without the biological rhythms of their bodies to provide an excuse for their male counterparts to restrict them "for their own good," kunoichi like Gozen-san had demanded that they be given the same opportunities and held to the same standards as shinobi. That was a work in progress that continued to Sakura's day; the jutsu, however, wasn't.
There was no such thing as an "accidental" pregnancy for a kunoichi.
Sakura was young enough—and occasionally romantic enough, as well as otherwise well-occupied trying not to die on missions and cooperating with deep-cover spies—to have mixed feelings about sex, dating, and marriage. She knew the kind of "dating" that Kakashi-senpai did wasn't for her; she hadn't made any firm decisions about bedroom sports with long-term boyfriends and it had never become a pressing issue because the boy she was seeing wasn't usually in the same country. She did know that she thought real commitment should end in marriage; she also thought real commitment should precede children.
She also thought that this was a damned bad time to try and trap a man who wouldn't commit, if that was what Yūhei-senpai was doing; if her partner had asked her bear him children without the benefit of marriage and she'd agreed, Sakura's opinion of her judgment was still pretty poor. Yūhei-senpai was beautiful, talented, and from a reputable clan—barring deeply hidden defects in her personality, there was nothing about her that should make a partner balk.
Sakura, who'd learned a lot of lessons about self-worth since the days when she'd shaped herself around Uchiha Sasuke, felt that any man you had to try that desperately to keep wasn't a man worth keeping.
"Oh," was the only thing she said aloud, her internal disapproval left unexpressed. Though his clothing made Shino very difficult to read, from his hesitation earlier she though he'd probably already received more than his full share of other people's opinions. "How are your parents?" she asked
They made the polite conversation of long-separated former classmates as they made their way off the battlements and down to the gate, where they waited for Neji to arrive before they began the always-tedious process of filing their orders with the gatekeepers, which hadn't been an aspect of Konoha she'd missed while away. This was worse than tedious, though, passing straight through to grim.
The chūnin on gate duty were looking at them like their instructors had the day they'd filled out the paperwork that made their parents or guardians their official beneficiaries. The date of expected return field had been left blank and they weren't logging a travel path. Their mission was designated only with the special seal used for S-class ops.
She wished that they didn't look like they were saying good-bye to dead men.
Once it would have unnerved her; now the weight of her flak jacket was a reassuring one, her boots were well broke in, and the knives strapped to her thighs were as much a part of her person as her hands or her feet. She wouldn't go far as to say that she was leaving with confidence—confidence meant you slept easy and she certainly hadn't done that—but she trusted this team and the judgment of her Kage.
Eventually they were released into the wild, where she had a moment to study her teammates. They weren't traveling as civilians, which would have curtailed their movement speed unacceptably, but some of their most easily distinguished features had been concealed from casual scrutiny. For Shino, this had simply meant putting on a different coat than usual, but Neji and Sakura had dyed their hair and both were wearing uncomfortable cosmetic contacts.
Neji's long hair had been bleached and dyed silver, while his telltale opalescent eyes were currently a striking shade of green with a lighter corona of silver around his iris. Sakura suspected he'd gotten some "helpful" and doubtless enthusiastic advice from the stylists who'd handled his transformation. His usual outfit had been replaced one with more body armor, though the shirt he wore beneath his flak jacket was more traditionally styled than the standard jounin uniform.
Sakura's extremely distinctive hair had been dyed black. She didn't know whether it had been the dye they'd used or some strange interaction with her natural color, but it had a glossy, almost green sheen like the tailfeathers of a rooster. Unlike Neji, she didn't have a kekkei genkai to conceal, but they'd still asked her to wear contacts, which she really could have done without.
Though with bronze eyes and black hair, she looked sufficiently unlike herself to risk a crimson shemagh even though it was too make a part of her usual silhouette—alongside her tall boots and her knives—for real covertness. Witch's most infamous accessory, however, was undoubtedly Kakashi-senpai. Sakura didn't think she'd be recognized on her own.
"We have two days before we're scheduled to rendezvous and cross the border," Neji—who'd won the round of janken that had decided their lead—said quietly as Sakura and Shino moved to flank him. "It'll be an easy run."
[Kill Your Heroes]
The run was easy—and it stayed easy, because it was no good to catch their prey while they were ragged with exhaustion.
The anticipation was harder as the days of their hunt became weeks; Deidara might be loud and flashy, but he wasn't stupid and his habit of moving from place to place atop a giant clay bird meant that he could cover ground in a way they'd be hard-pressed to match. It also made him harder to track, as fewer people made note of sky traffic than they would a stranger passing through their streets.
It did give them time to practice with Sai's constructs, among other things.
It was always eagles and falcons for her, proud wings brushing up against the underside of her breasts and lethal beaks plunging down her thighs, feathers like sleeves down her arms. None of the others except Neji could take so many without chakra burns and Neji found them cumbersome in combination with his chakra release.
It was dragons for Neji, clouds for Kama, and Kakashi-senpai had learned to ride on jagged lightning bolts through the sky, though they'd hit an unexpected obstacle with Shino. Even overlooking Aburame body taboos, layering unfamiliar chakra and blood on his skin would only cause his beetles to swarm. She distinctly remembered the clan laws that had prevented Tsunade-sama from addressing the issue of Kakashi-senpai's transplanted Sharingan; she now learned that it was difficult enough to treat an adult host that the Aburame were actively encouraged to marry medical talent the way some families married money or status. The kikaichū weren't like Soudai or the ninken; they could be directed or controlled, but they couldn't be reasoned with.
Especially when it came to the state of the hive.
However, while he couldn't directly participate in an aerial battle, Shino had full confidence in his ability to contribute from the ground.
Senpai had made a wry comment that if the Deidara assignment didn't work out, the rest of them could become yakuza and form their own "ninkyou dantai".
Sakura also had time to discover exactly how hard and how fast she could throw a kunai when she was using her chakra-enhanced strength—the answer was something that had to be measured in meters per second and destroyed the kunai. Well-balanced kunai weren't inexpensive, but Sakura—who'd, perhaps bizarrely considering her personality, come to specialize in close-distance combat—thought that she could very much come to like throwing things at people from very far away.
"Those boys," Michi said dismissively from where she was perched on Sakura's arm, feathers ruffled in scornful indignation. "Your blond is impulsive and he lets resentment make him stupid. As if Ataksuki would recruit an idiot. The dark-haired one is over-playing it, though. As you asked, Yoko has been feeding information to the team tracking him. Tobi goaded Deidara into an argument earlier this morning, at the end of which Deidara stormed off. It's likely that Tobi wanted him out of the way for his own reasons—almost as soon as Deidara was out of range, he used an unfamiliar teleportation jutsu. This is going to be your best opportunity—your target might not take notice of little details like us, but the other one is going to notice." She clacked her beak sharply.
"Good work," Sakura murmured, half-turning to look at senpai.
Kakashi-senpai nodded, eyes narrowing before he tilted his head up slightly to look at the sky. His silver hair had also been dyed black, though his hadn't taken on the green sheen, and his normally dark eyes were crimson. Combined with his present seriousness, it lent him an intensity that he didn't usually possess and Sakura felt a shiver sweep up her spine and crest atop her head.
Some small corner of her mind wondered what the response would be to this Witch and Hound, who didn't look much like shinobi of Konohagakure, even disregarding the fact that they'd all cached their hitai-ate and other identifying markers as they'd crossed the borders into Kaminari no Kuni in direct violation of the treaty. Sakura's slickly green-black hair was roughly twisted up and back, with dark make-up generously framing her eyes. She wasn't the only one—it wasn't a fashion statement so much as an attempt to cut down on the sun-glare that they'd anticipated might be a problem if Deidara took their battle to the sky. As part of their prepwork, they had all acquired lightly tinted combat glasses, not only because of the sun but also because there was something very undignified about dying in battle because you'd intercepted a bug with your eye.
It didn't look like they had to worry today, though, as the sky was darkly overcast and tinted faintly green. The breeze had stopped some time ago and left them with a muggy stillness that heralded an awful storm.
"If we hurry," Kakashi-senpai said at last, "we can have him dead before cloudburst."
They'd run endless scenarios since the orders had been issued; no one was in any doubt of their opening roles. Michi fluttered to her shoulder as Sakura slipped on her combat glasses and the others did the same, the combat glasses being followed up by gas masks whose filters would keep them from inhaling particulates. It took a bit of fiddling to situate it comfortable with her headset and to keep the microphone from transmitting the sound of her breathing.
There was that peculiar rippling sensation between her skin and her clothes as one of the tattoos beneath quivered to life. Sai's chakra was practically buzzing against her skin.
Black wings were soon bearing her aloft, up where the air was thin and cold enough that she had to circulate her chakra to keep her skin from being frostbitten or her lungs from being damaged, her mount's wings sweeping through the trailing fringes of the clouds. Even then, it still burned in her nose and in her throat and drawing breath required a careful shaping of the air that had taken her three days and loss of consciousness and nearly falling out of the sky to master.
She could feel the ionization in the air and hear the low groaning of a sky full to bursting.
Of course our opportunity would come in Kaminari no Kuni during the monsoon season, Sakura thought darkly.
Flooding her eyes with chakra, Sakura perched high on the neck of her eagle, peering down through the stomach-churning expanse that separated her from the ground.
She saw movement first, then the bright speck of blond far below that marked her target. He was well beyond the recommended range of engagement and outside the conventional range of danger. Sakura fetched a wrapped packet from her kit, unfolding the oilcloth on the head of the eagle and aligning the kunai within into a neat row.
She could wish for calmer winds, but that wouldn't make it so; she'd compensate with a calmer heart and steadier hands instead.
One by one, with the kind of force that could shatter steel, she flung them down like they were lightning released from Raijin's hand. And when there were no more kunai left on the paper, she reached into a different pouch and withdrew one more knife, this one a black steel custom cast and sent it hurtling below. She only had one legacy jutsu, but she didn't think the Hiraishin an inferior inheritance to the Rasengan or Chidori.
Like she was diving off a tall rock rather than plunging into empty space, Sakura took a deep breath and shoved herself into the sky.
It was less than ten seconds from the moment she threw the first kunai to the instant where she unfolded herself out of somewhere neither here nor there. One of her hands was empty, one was filled with a hilt more familiar than the shape of her mother's eyes.
Either her calculations or her aim had been insufficient; one of her kunai had caught him in the shoulder instead of in the head and he'd used the momentum from the impact to throw himself clear of the rest of the tightly clustered barrage. His visible eye was wide and startled, but his uncrippled hand was already deep in the depths of a large pouch hanging at his side.
Press him to death had been her directive and her foot came down not with feather lightness, but with enough force to shake the earth as she launched herself toward him. But even though the ground shuddered like a horse trying to shake off a fly, Deidara rode the quake with contemptuous ease, flinging a handful of crudely shaped sparrows at her.
Rather than retreating, Sakura clenched her teeth and flashed forward, not-thinking very hard on everything except the negative space between.
"Wrong choice, yeah," her opponent snarled at her and she could see his lips creasing into a satisfied syllable. "Ba—."
Something caught her hard about the waist and Sakura didn't struggle as Neji swept them both into a rotation. The force of his chakra impacted with the concussive force of the explosives in an ear-splitting crack that raised a curtain of dust, the blowback sending their opponent flying.
There was a moment's brief satisfaction as Kakashi-senpai's Kuroimon technique opened up behind Deidara and then she had to curse the gods that favored the enemy, because he must have caught some glimpse of it. A smaller, more controlled explosion allowed him to change direction in midair, ripping out the kunai embedded in his shoulder as he did so, droplets of blood arcing through the air. It had gone deep enough that in the normal course of things yanking it out like that was incredibly stupid—what if she'd missed the subclavian artery and carelessly pulling it free finished her work for her? But the bleeding seemed to stop when he slapped a generous handful over clay over it, even as he twisted agilely out of the way of Kama's red-fletched arrows.
He wasn't smiling anymore.
As their rotation ended—practice had proven that a second person destabilized it badly—Neji released her in such a way he was almost throwing her toward their objective, himself following only seconds after. As they closed in and Kakashi-senpai erupted up out of the earth beneath Deidara's feet, Kama ceased fire and ceded distance combat to Sai, whose ink-and-air creatures concealed thousands of guests.
Perhaps they were preventing him from creating larger creatures, but Deidara didn't seem to need much time to manufacture smaller ones. And once this second wave—hornets this time—detonated and forced them to retreat and knocked several blades in mid-flight askew, he reached into a difference pouch and retrieved a scroll, which disgorged several large shapes under the care of his blood-soaked hands.
But from beneath his coat and beneath his flesh, Shino's swarm was now in full flight and they descended upon the constructs like locusts on a freshly planted field. Without chakra, they weren't much more than clay statues and the look on Deidara's face was truly ugly as his oppressors scattered to avoid being crushed by the weight of the falling creatures.
Whatever fit of temper he was building up to, they didn't give him time to indulge it as senpai ripped open a whole array of gates, set in a complicated array. He couldn't open them too wide or set them too close, as there was a strange resonance between the gates, and neither he nor Sakura thought the results would be pretty if he lost control of the jutsu. Sakura also knew what using it cost him, not in terms of chakra, but in long-term effects upon his brain. The Mangekyo bent the laws of heaven and earth and in doing so damaged the brain in ways whose long-term effects included paranoia, obsessive-compulsive behavior, and if history was any judge compulsive stupidity.
She swathed the location of the gates in subtle layers of genjutsu, but as she'd suspected, Deidara had trained himself to break the Tsukiyomi. Her Kanashibari was exceptional, but even it had its limitations.
Using a series of flattened clay disks like steps, Deidara vaulted free of the array, the hems of his Akatsuki robe flaring like the petals of a flower. The clay he'd slapped on his injury earlier had been seeping down his arm and as he landed, shifting his feet in such a way that left them spread wide and his palms flat on the ground, it was obvious that it acted as a kind of framework that allowed him to manipulate his arm.
"Eat shit, yeah?" he suggested as the ground swelled.
"Minefield!" Neji shouted in warning, a dragon already curling at his feet, which surged forward to collect Shino as well before sharply banking upward. Like lightning striking from the ground into the sky, Kakashi-senpai was carried aloft and Kama had never descended. Sakura soon had a second eagle bearing her up and she saw Sai following, though he was slower than the rest of them as he was producing a whole menagerie in an attempt to clear the field.
"No, there's something wr—!" Neji didn't get to finish his sentence before the earth erupted.
Sakura's eagle bucked beneath her as she struggled to ride out the blast, whose hot wind carried shrapnel like large, sharp ceramic knives. One caught her hard in the side, nearly knocking her from the eagle and causing her to gasp like a fish thrown from the water, though the flak jacket did its work. Though she felt like it had cracked a rib, that was far better than being skewered. As the eagle swept this way and that Sakura found herself clinging with only her hands—and then there was another one she didn't avoid cleanly and it took the flesh off the back of the fingers of her right hand all the way to the bone. Her distraction cost her, as another piece caught her eagle hard enough in the chest to dispel it and she was falling out of the sky.
If she couldn't breathe before, it certainly felt like she couldn't breathe now, and there was an instant of animal panic before training asserted itself and the wings that had been painted down her arms were unfurled and spread wide. She'd fallen far enough that she'd only need to watch for falling debris from above, but movement in her peripheral vision caught her attention.
Sai!
She immediately used the Haraishin, recklessly yanking herself toward the anchor she'd lost sight of in order to get beneath his falling form. She shoved off so hard against the ground and spent her chakra so freely that a huge pit formed beneath her feet, the displaced earth rupturing up like a rammed-earth wall around her. Some people handled freefall badly; she'd hoped that was the cause of his loss of consciousness. However, as soon as she took his weight in her arms, she knew it wasn't the case.
His left leg had been sheared off just below his knee joint—it was cleanly cut through the front, the bone, and the tendon, but at the back there was a ragged flap of skin and trailing bits of muscle where it had been torn off.
Her second-to-last eagle became a trauma platform as she hastily sealed shut the veins and arteries that were allowed his blood to flow like water from a tap, but as soon as she was convinced he was stabilized, she directed the eagle up out of the way of combat, knowing that without direction it wouldn't do anything but maintain its altitude and drift in broad circles. Calling on the one she'd left to fly aimlessly at the beginning of the battle, she and he plunged downward into a steep synchronized dive.
If the others had been injured, no one else was as badly off as Sai and they'd been no less busy than she in trying to regain the ground they'd lost when Deidara had forced their retreat.
She'd worked with a large team before, but never in one so synchronized, as they silently coordinated to open paths of attack. Without Sai, they all only had a single construct left—if it was destroyed in midair combat, the chances of recovery were very poor.
Her whole side felt like it was on fire, with the pain radiating out from that rib she was now certain had been cracked and beneath the shell of her flak jacket her skin was slick with sweat. People might train for hours at a stretch, but live combat was a different beast entirely. Every sense was stretched to its limit as she tracked the actions not only of her opponent but also her allies, because now she'd dipped her fangs in poison. For that reason she kept close to Neji, who had the highest battlefield awareness and whose style complimented hers well.
Deidara made it very difficult to close with him, even though Kakashi-senpai pushed himself near to his limit with the Kuroimon and no one else stinted on chakra-sapping abilities either. It was Shino who managed to land enough of his kidaichū that eventually there came a moment when their enemy stumbled.
She might have deep reservations about the Sharingan, but as Kakashi-senpai saw that instant of weakness and rammed his arm—wreathed with shrieking lightning—deep into the chest of their opponent, she had a moment's bright and blazing approval.
Long blond hair slid forward over his shoulders as Deidara tucked his chin in to stare down at his own chest in disbelief. A short, strangled chuckle escaped his lips and when he looked up again, his eyes were wild. "It's not a party if it doesn't end with a bang, yeah?"
His body began to swell grotesquely, which made them instinctively begin to retreat even before Neji called out, "There's something changing in his chakra—it's a suicide jutsu!"
Kakashi-senpai withdrew his arm and this time lightning really screeched as he thrust it back into the mass that had recently been a human being. The lightning crackled and arced, but the thing only continued to grow at an alarming pace. "Dammit," senpai hissed softly. "I won't be able to open a gate that large. Aburame?"
"My beetles are almost glutted," Shino reported in a voice hard with resolve. "I'll have to stay nearby to force them to feed."
"Chances of us getting outside the blast radius without taking measures?" senpai asked Neji.
Sakura was swiftly considering her own skillset, but she knew what earth or wind manipulation she possessed wasn't going to be equal to the task until the seal that allowed her to make use of natural chakra was complete; she hadn't thought ahead to plant an anchor somewhere outside of the combat zone so she could ferry them out using the Haraishin.
Haraishin—a moment in time, neither here nor there. A technique she'd never practiced with another person; the timing that would have to be so incredibly precise.
"Go," Sakura said sharply. "Take Sai too and get as far outside the blast radius as you can." She tossed an anchor to senpai, who caught it easily. "We'll get as far back as we can, before Shino loses control; when the time comes, I'll bring us through to you."
There wasn't really time for arguments, so Kakashi-senpai only nodded sharply before signaling the retreat to the others.
"Right," Sakura said, taking a deep breath even as her muscles quivered with tension. "Let's do this."