A/N: Merry (belated) Christmas! Sorry for the delay. In real life, I am a retail drone and this time of year leaves me with little time for writing. I am still not quite happy with this chapter, but here it is. Thank you Goose for all your efforts at sending the link! Everyone else can check it out on goinggoose on tumblr.

For those who wondered why Sakura can suddenly use Hiraishin, you'll have to go back a few chapters. Kakashi teaches it to her as a legacy jutsu. Given how intensely trapped he was by the past, I think my Kakashi would have taken the time to reverse-engineer the technique if he wasn't taught it outright. And before anyone claims that it would be impossible, I think that someone who'd copied as many jutsu as Kakashi would be the ideal person to ask to reverse engineer just about any technique. Even space-time ones. As for it being a clan secret, Minato originally learned it from Tobirama and though they were both Hokage, they weren't from the same clan. Therefore it's more a personal jutsu than a clan one.

This chapter has two songs on my writing playlist: Rise Against: The Violence, then Dropkick Murphys' rendition of The Green Fields of France on repeat. Naruto versus Pein is a shounen-style battle; for everyone else it's charging entrenched artillery.

Kill Your Heroes

-Chapter Fifty-Eight-

Jusqu'au-boustisme

She was fairly certain that the new orders were dispatched as soon as Tsunade-sama read the report that cleared Kama, Neji, senpai, and herself for active duty. There was really no time to do more than eat, collapse into a heap and sleep for twelve hours, wake to the news that they'd managed to stabilize Shino, and sit quietly for a few minutes with a very solemn Sai before Kakashi-senpai broke the seal on the scroll carried by the special-dispatch hawk.

They were ordered to rendezvous with the remaining members of the squad who'd taken out Hidan, after which they would take up the hunt for Kakuzu. The Hokage had received reports that despite the total annihilation of the first hunt team, they'd managed to gravely injure the missing-nin.

Konohagakure before the invasion had been in the habit of leaving enemies to lick their wounds. Strength through calculated mercy, the legacy of the First and Third and Fourth, shinobi strong enough—a village strong enough—to be able to afford it.

Tsunade-sama wasn't in the same position and she'd gambled and lost too many of her jounin in Operation Headhunter to let someone as dangerous as Kakuzu go.

Find. Fix. Finish. Those were the orders and there was no apology in them for not giving them time to rest or the other team time to grieve. She didn't expect it and couldn't ask the others, though Sakura wished privately for the kind of world where a few days to catch your breath wasn't a luxury. We are securing that world, she reassured herself as she perched gingerly on the edge of Sai's bed. We are saving those days for someone else, so that Ino can worry about forever boys as part of her forever team and my father can putter around the house writing terrible jokes to my mother and the civilians back in the village can go about their day without expecting enemy shinobi to bring the walls down around their ears.

"We're leaving," she told Sai inanely, because she didn't—why wasn't there training for this? Something that would have told her what to say to a squadmate—and a friend—who wouldn't be coming with them. Not on this mission, not on the next one. Not because he didn't want to, but because the last mission had cost him in ways that money would never be able to repay.

"You shouldn't make that face," Sai told her. "You're ugly enough as it is."

Sakura couldn't help it. She snorted with unwilling humor. "Well, I can't compete with you, all pale and swooning against your pillows, but this is this only face I've got. You shouldn't make fun of it."

"Lies," Sai replied. "Witch."

A small smile tugged at her lips.

Sai's gaze dropped to his hands, flexing his long, pale fingers. "My jutsu doesn't rely on my footwork," he told her. "My hands are fine. I can manipulate ink, give it an animal's nature so that you can fly like you were born with wings. You think that I can't modify a prosthetic? Someone has to finish that madman's seal on your back and watch while you light yourself on fire with wild chakra."

"Root…," she began, checked herself.

Sai's expression hardened, but he didn't retreat inside himself like he'd done in the beginning. "What was done to us—I know now that it wasn't…right," he said carefully. "But it wasn't done out of cruelty. There was a methodology. And those of us who survived the training are valuable. Valued. I won't be discarded. I will be in the field again."

She found his strange brand of loyalty to a man who'd broken his childhood only slightly bizarre; after all, she kept returning to Gozen-san of her own volition even though she knew the old lady was cruel and poisonous. Sakura reached out, fingers pressing gently against his own seal. Which as the jutsu had collapsed with just the two of them, was nothing more than an elaborate tattoo unless someone else was willing to risk untested jutsu produced by the less than safety-minded ANBU Team Nine. But it was a symbol of their bond—she'd told Sai things she hadn't even told Kakashi-senpai, because while every time she walked away from Gozen-san she was a little blacker in her soul, Sai had come to her black all the way to his bones.

"I'll hold you to that," she replied, pulling away.

"No," he told her gravely. "I'll be the one holding you to that."

[Kill Your Heroes]

Mariko's hug was enthusiastic enough to nearly knock her off balance and if she hadn't sealed the soles of her boots to the ground with chakra, Rie would have taken them both down. She'd known the kunoichi was on the Headhunter mission, but hadn't known which target her team had received.

Hadn't let herself think about it, especially when the casualty reports came in, giving only numbers and not names.

When all your friends were frontline shinobi, it was statistically improbable that they would all make it to retirement.

It was part and parcel of why she'd been so determined to be worthy of Kakashi-senpai, who was cursed to outlive them all. Some part of her knew this was both fundamentally untrue and extremely unfair to senpai, but this belief was one of the twin pillars of her existence. Kakashi-senpai will live forever. Shinitakunai.

"Look at you," Mariko crowed. "I didn't have time to comment on it at the briefing, but you're certainly all grown up. I hope you make the boys go to their knees and beg before you let them into your bed. You have to start training them early. And consistently."

Sakura snorted laughter. "Really?"

"Really-really," Mariko quipped. "Why do you think we Inuzuka woman live such long, happy lives? We train our men like we train our dogs."

Though she knew Mariko hardly needed the encouragement, she replied slyly, "I'm still working on housebreaking senpai, but my boyfriend knows sit, stay, and roll over."

That made the older girl practically howl, hands clutching at Sakura's shoulders as she laughed. It hadn't been all that funny, but Sakura knew what scrabbling desperately for brighter things looked like. The movies always made it look like shinobi mostly came in grim, silent, and resigned and while there were those times and there were those people, most of them compensated by laughing a little more readily, talking a little more loudly, living a little more in the moment.

Swiping at tears with the palm of her hand, Mariko gasped, "Kami, I've missed you. Is he good-looking, this well-trained boyfriend of yours?"

"Almost painfully pretty," Sakura replied. "What about you?"

She grinned sharply at that. "Whatever man I settle on, when I'm ready to settle, will find that he enjoys my experience. Until then, I'm making certain that experience is as wide and as varied as possible. Just in case, y'know."

"…I can sense you want me to ask, In case of what?, but I've decided I really don't need to know," Sakura told her dryly.

"That's no fun."

"Oh, it's plenty of fun. For me."

"I hope your boyfriend likes denial-play," Mariko quipped as she stepped back.

"Didn't you just say that you train your men like you train your dogs? Mine knows when to beg."

"That is more than your poor, innocent senpai needed to know about what you're doing to that unfortunate boy," Kakashi-senpai interjected wryly from the doorway. He pretended to wipe a tear from his eye. "And to think, I can still remember the days when you couldn't even read a smutty novel in public."

"Other people have mentors they can aspire to," Sakura told Mariko, "I just had a collection of bad habits to inherit."

"Ha-ha," Kakashi-senpai said drolly. "If you're finished with your gossip, come read the files. You can lead the briefing."

Sakura scowled at him.

"If you're thinking that as squad leader I should lead the briefing, you should know that part of my role is developing the people under my command. You need the experience." He tilted his head, eyes narrowing slightly as his gaze swept the room. "Your menace seems to have mysteriously vanished."

"Mysteriously," Soudai scoffed as he slipped between Kakashi-senpai's legs and the doorframe. "I simply have no desire to watch Sakura engage in the banality of the social grooming ritual. You have finished re-establishing your standing in this little monkey troop, I assume?" His tone made it clear that whether she'd actually finished or not, he expected that she wouldn't waste any of his time with what he considered a pointless triviality.

"Kami, what an asshole," Rie muttered.

"Speaking from experience?" came Soudai's snide reply.

Sakura scooped him up even as she sighed, depositing him on her shoulder, where he made a pleased sort of sound as he looked down on the dog.

"You're not even going to say anything to him?" Mariko asked, her tone of amusement edged with irritation.

"Selective deafness makes it pointless," Sakura replied, though she did tap him gently atop his triangular head. He took this as an invitation to duck upwards into her hand, rubbing his head against it and purring in self-congratulation. "He's just lucky he's handsome."

"And terribly clever," Soudai contributed. "Shall we go look over the reports? I don't trust that Hatake can both read and comprehend."

"Yes, yes," Sakura sighed. "I'm not leading the briefing, though," she told Kakashi-senpai. "You could pretend to take things seriously."

"It makes people nervous when I start taking things seriously," he told her with a lazy wink as she brushed past him on her way through the door.

"Yes," Sakura acknowledged. "But it also causes resentment when your squad leader appears to sleep through the briefing."

"They'll survive," was his blithe reply.

[Kill Your Heroes]

Officially speaking, they weren't merging the squads. Shinobi weren't rank-and-file soldiers like samurai—their training wasn't designed to make them interchangeable pieces in a greater military machine. Without time to run exercises together, close-quarters combat was delicate and awkward and anxious and not at all what you wanted to be doing in front of an S-class enemy. They didn't have that kind of time, not if they meant to press the advantage bought for them by their predecessors.

Instead, tacon—tactical control—had been deferred to Kakashi-senpai, who made this easy by devising a plan of brutal simplicity that Sakura wasn't certain she liked at all. Witch and Hound were a wedge; everyone else was a hammer. Kakashi-senpai could go toe-to-toe with Kakuzu's ninjutsu and none of their intelligence said that the older ninja would have Deidara's practiced immunity to genjutsu. Senpai would neutralize, Sakura would keep him off-center and off-balance. While they had him hamstrung, the others—Neji and Kama—would go for the throat.

Metaphorically speaking, of course, as they were all aware that Kakuzu had almost as many lives as a cat.

The second squad was there to provide support and to prevent their target from fleeing; they would also close and kill if for some reason the primary squad was unable to do so.

Because she seemed to be weak to the people she loved, she'd ended up giving the briefing after all, while Kakashi-senpai had slouched down in his chair, using a second one as a footrest. Some five minutes into the process of introducing themselves and their combat specialties, she sensed when his mock-sleep actually settled into a light doze.

Liar, she thought with mingled worry and fondness, because it was precisely like Kakashi-senpai to manage to get himself cleared for combat when he was clearly still dealing with residual fatigue. Though her ability to sense his chakra shifts with such clarity was indicative that her battlefield hyper-sensitivity hadn't faded to everyday functionality either—and probably wouldn't, not until they were recalled to the village. If the missions dragged on, she'd pay for it in increasing paranoia and nightmares whenever she managed to sleep deeply enough for a full REM cycle.

Sooner than most people would give it credit for, it would begin to dull her reflexes and blunt her ability to make split-second decisions.

"And there's been no further word on where Kakuzu has retreated to?" Eishun asked without looking up from the maps. The jounin who'd been in charge of the hunt for Hidan was probably no more than four or five years her senior, but he had a hard, worn look that made him seem much older. His black hair was growing out of its neat, short cut and he hadn't bothered to shave the two or three days' growth of facial hair that shadowed his jaw.

Though some of his shinobi had looked skeptically on Kakashi-senpai's display, Eishun had instead fixed his attention on Sakura and ignored the older shinobi entirely.

"No," was Sakura's reply. "We're still tracking him from the site of the battle."

"Fantastic," he muttered. Eishun pulled a clear plastic overlay that had population density marked out in shades of red over the map he was examining, scowling down at it. "With his lead, we're going to have a hell of a run. Unless they've all but killed him, there's seven or eight villages within an easy three days walk that he could slaughter out of spite or hold hostage against us before we ever get to him. Do we know how or how long it takes this asshole to integrate a new heart? Because if he can just walk in, yank someone's heart out of their chest, and walk away, it won't matter what the first team managed to do."

If there was an optimist in the room—a Maito Gai or an Uzumaki Naruto—he or she might have taken the moment to say something like, "Then we'll run faster" or "Then we won't let that happen." But the only reason that the first team had managed to make their damage permanent was a jutsu that had imploded their bodies when the heart had been yanked out of its place in the chakra network—a jutsu that their teams would also be utilizing.

Sakura said, "Then all he's done is given us a clearer trail to follow. Intel suggests Kakuzu's too canny for that—he'll make his escape quick and clean. He's more mercenary than zealot, though it can't hurt to have a contingency plan in place. As for his jutsu, it allows for immediate absorption and incorporation of a new heart, but if he's hunting civilians he's desperate. I don't even know if they have enough innate chakra to be useful to him even for regeneration; I do know that if he tries to channel any kind of serious chakra through them, they'll fail."

"Let's hope you're right," Eishun grunted. He looked up at her then, lips turning up in a wolfish smile. "Even if this all goes to hell, at least we'll all get to see Witch and Hound in action before we die."

[Kill Your Heroes]

It was one of those summer days that happened along only once in a great while. The sun's heat was tempered by a sluggish breeze and the sky was as blue and clear as it had ever been, the grass and leaves that precise, vibrant shade of green they were only in those hours before her blood and body might soon be feeding them.

Kakuzu's eyes were nearly as luminously green.

She couldn't read his expression behind the fabric that shrouded his face, but his body language conveyed only relaxed contempt from his seat on the raised planter bed. Probably a public beautification project, it sat in a pretty little square where the everyday life of everyday people carried on around him. Housewives swept in and out of shops and stands, baskets or bags brimming with fresh produce. A few children careened around the square, engaged in a round of onigokko that involved more shrieking than she remembered from her own childhood.

They glanced occasionally at the shinobi in their midst, but they eddied around him without much other disturbance.

There were countries where civilians feared shinobi and would have scuttled indoors at the first sign of someone in a hitai-ate; Sakura almost wished that this country were one of those.

"He thinks he's got us hamstrung," Eishun breathed from his position next to her. Neji had confirmed Kakuzu's presence and grimly related his position, which had left Sakura and Eishun to execute their contingency plan for civilian hostages. It didn't deviate much from Kakashi-senpai's original tactics, except that it temporarily splintered Sakura from the main group.

Kakuzu had clearly analyzed his options and chosen to advantage of the Konoha-nin's conditioning to avoid causing harm to bystanders. Killing them or terrorizing them before they'd arrived would have drawn their outrage; leaving them to make the first move put them at a distinct disadvantage.

Not every team had a genjutsu-specialist; Sakura wouldn't have liked to have been in the position of a team that had come in without someone capable of casting a genjutsu net wide enough to blanket the whole village. There were only a handful in Konohagakure left after the massacre and of those, most lacked flexibility with their illusions. They would only be able to force down unformed things: fear, exhaustion, exhilaration. Things that people reacted unpredictably to, except for the second, which would have been about as useful as using ninjutsu to the same effect.

Not Sakura.

She took a deep breath as she built the framework that her victim's subconscious mind would fill with detail, like hedging in a dream, then closed her eyes as she held that breath. It was poor technique to close your eyes and Gozen-san would have had more than just scathing words about poor technique, but Sakura had never done something on this scale and if she failed, it would be the blood of innocents on her hands.

It was stretching her abilities. This many people, even in the relatively compact space of the village—she would have to work to keep the edges tethered and not let it dissipate, to hold so many minds firmly while at the same time maintaining a gentle enough touch that she didn't cause an intracerebral hemorrhage in a brain that couldn't process chakra in the same way a shinobi's could and would.

This was the kind of genjutsu that made people view the whole field with the suspicion that more than the most superficial grasp of it made you the next Orochimaru, the next Uchiha Itachi.

The ripple was less subtle than she would have liked as it swept out from her like a tidal wave, washing away whatever these people had been and filling them temporarily with an impulse as undeniable as an ophiocordyceps unilateralis' to an ant.

Women dropped their shopping, children stopped their play. A man sweeping the sidewalk let his broom fall from his hands even as he began to sprint—there was no hesitation, no moment of indecision. Even as Kakuzu rose from his position, black threads spreading, Kakashi-senpai was there like natural lightning striking from the sky, leaving crackling trails of light in his wake.

Sakura unfolded herself out of his shadow—he'd never given her anchor back and she would never ask—cursing herself as she felt her illusion quaver in the moment she was not-here-not-there, but it didn't fail. She didn't have the space for relief; she wouldn't have had the time to do anything about it if it had slipped.

Fighting Kakuzu was a little like fighting Sasori all over again—he wasn't limited by traditional constraints like reach or flexibility or number of limbs. He could attack from any angle; he could attack from all angles, quick as thought, without the recovery interval of muscle contraction. His spatial awareness was profound, almost impossibly so, like he'd learned to use those threads like antennae.

There wasn't space for thought, not against this kind of enemy. Everything was reflex and implementation of a strategy you'd discussed beforehand, because at best you kept your blades and your jutsu from doing the work Kakuzu hadn't managed.

The threads weren't edged, but with enough speed and force, you didn't need edges. And with wind-natured chakra, he could give them teeth.

So could she.

She needed the reach—her knives might have been generously coated in contributions from the Irukandji jellyfish, but whatever leeched from the severed ends of the threads, it wasn't blood and didn't conduct electricity.

It was like being the whirlwind, always in motion, her teeth bared behind her shemagh as she reaped great swathes of black threads. She shoved aside guilt as more and more of the buildings that surrounded them began to show evidence of the battle between two S-rank shinobi. Her role wasn't just pruning, however—that belonged to Kakashi-senpai and the vicious ninjutsu that even now fenced Kakuzu in with dragons of fire. It was flashy and terrific and dangerous because no one could see worth shit, but it gave her the moment she needed to start layering her genjutsu. It was the subtle knife beneath senpai's excessive force.

Just like most people didn't notice the first edge of drunkenness creeping up on them, with Kakashi-senpai pressing him hard, even someone like Kakuzu didn't notice the first 'misreads' as he grew less able to sense the exact position and trajectory of their attacks.

Kakashi-senpai noticed, though, and the earth ruptured like some great beast was trying to drag Kakuzu down into the deep places. Wind howled as Kakuzu countered and the clash filled the air with choking dust, which meant that she was all but blind as she threw an anchor hard enough to have penetrated steel on force alone.

The tip of a spear, she reminded herself as her mind threw up warnings about how stupid and reckless and stupid it was, what she was about to do. But they could lop threads all day and without reaching the core—reaching Kakuzu—it wouldn't do any good. Kakuzu was fast and inventive and if one of his hearts gave out from chakra exhaustion, he had others; Kakashi-senpai didn't.

She counted out the seconds and folded herself away, feeling the tearing of her larger illusion and letting it go without a fight. Her secondary one, however, she clung tight to, even as she let the chakra constructs that had lengthened her blades diminish. She didn't need reach; she needed the naked blades and their deadly sting.

Sakura's knives weren't made for piercing, but for slashing and her targets were embedded deep and not-quite-here in Kakuzu's body. More than one average-sized human heart wouldn't fit within an equally average ribcage and though Kakuzu wasn't a small man, he wasn't that large. She could hardly sense the dark, tangled nexuses of energy that denoted the location of what had once been other people's hearts. And if that weren't enough, they moved and shifted more than organs had any right to.

She didn't let it matter.

Whatever Kakuzu was made of, it was close enough to flesh and bone for her knife to cut and she turned the blade to its purpose, screaming but not flinching when the threads tried to burrow into her arm and she felt something give with a dry snap.

He broke her bone, tore her skin, crushed and bruised her muscle, but she took his heart and Kakuzu didn't have that many to spare any longer.

Even an S-class nin wasn't immune to the kind of pain and for a long, suspended moment in the choking haze everything seemed to still as his threads seized.

It wasn't invisible to Neji, who'd been watching, and Kama was only waiting on Neji for her own cue.

Kakashi-senpai took his pound of flesh before either of them though, roughly yanking Sakura free of the clinging threads before his hand opened another channel in Kakuzu's chest. His hand was shrieking with lightning again and, even if Kakuzu's not-blood no longer conducted electricity, it still stunk like ozone and burnt meat.

Neji was there, then, and his quick and sure hands kept the other nin paralyzed even as the dust began to settle. Then he was ducking and one arrow, then a second following the same trajectory, buried themselves deep in Kakuzu's back. She knew that Kama too used poison, aside from the nastily barbed steel broadheads that would do as much damage being pulled out as going in.

And that was the end of it, without a single word exchanged. Oh, she was still bleeding and the village was still burning and there were civilians screaming and shouting, but Kakuzu was dead and he was the only one.

[Kill Your Heroes]

She was still getting phantom twinges in her arm when the crow came and she scowled at it, because it wasn't one of hers, which made her think it must be one of his.

The little spiteful girl that would always be a part of her wanted to tell it to Go Away, but aside from the huge and looming shadow of his decisions concerning Sasuke, she mostly respected Uchiha Itachi. And because she entirely respected him as a shinobi, even if she was slightly dubious of him as a person, she held out her arm and allowed the crow to settle on it.

She felt a frisson of unease when she saw how short the message was. In person, Itachi was quiet and gently teasing and not at all like his assumed letter-writing persona, who called her nicknames that would have sat awkwardly on his tongue and used the excess of words to disguise the core message.

This was not disguised.

Went to have a look at the weather with our old friend. It was sunny in Amegakure. Will try to meet up from my end, please wait at home to receive our guests if I can't ask them to visit another time.

She wasn't aware she'd stopped breathing until Kakashi-senpai said sharply, "Sakura?"

"We have to get back to Konohagakure," she said sharply.

"We haven't received orders," Neji replied, brows furrowing and lips dipping into what wasn't quite a frown. They'd sent in their reports on the successful mission and settled in to wait for word from Tsunade-sama, whether that would see them recalled to the village or sent out again for another hunt.

Though they maintained varying degrees of silence on the subject, everyone was hoping for the former. They were tired and more than a little stressed from two S-class hunts without any downtime between them; a third would be hard not just physically, but psychologically. Without time out of the field and without free access to their coping mechanism of choice, personalities you'd been professional enough to deal with in the beginning turned grating.

Tempers were already fraying; while most of them were hoping for privacy or new novels or enough time to lose themselves in someone else, some of them had families—the kind of family you wanted to come home to each night, not just the obvious biological one.

This was the first mission back in the field for one of the kunoichi on Eishun's squad, who'd recently given birth to her first child and had a grim prognosis about the situation at home; her parents had moved in and she was worried that not only would she be facing pressure from them to resign from field duty entirely, her husband might have been converted and she'd have to face opposition on all fronts if she ever wanted to do anything riskier than operate a stapler.

That was what waiting did—it wore you down, made the little things into rough chainsaw edges that caught and tore until it was hard to hold onto the bigger picture. Until something like this, which made her feel small and guilty and ferociously angry that even this—the blood and the pain and the sacrifice—wouldn't be enough. The comforting fantasy that if you gave anything your everything it would all work out in the end was buried in the same grave with the rest of her childhood.

"One of my assets just sent word that Pein has left Amegakure," she announced grimly and the pronouncement was greeted by a silence heavy with the knowledge that their time had run out. She didn't have to argue or countermand anything; there were already contingency plans in place if someone received word that Akatsuki was attempting retaliation. Tsunade-sama would have been stupid not to expect it; their Hokage was a lot of things, but not that.

No one ventured the thought that perhaps he was leaving for some other reason than making war on Konoha.

There were only realists here.

[Kill Your Heroes]

It took discipline to not run themselves to the ground; the wave of relief that she felt in seeing the village in the distance almost brought her to her knees. The protective wall was whole and unbreeched; Neji confirmed that the sentries were still posted at their regular intervals along the wall and none of them were displaying any behavior outside the norm.

"We made it," Mariko panted. Much like the dogs they partnered with, Inuzuka clan shinobi emphasized speed over long-distance stamina and the kunoichi had been suffering these last few miles. "You wouldn't happen to conveniently stashed one of those engraved knives under your bed, would you?" she asked Sakura.

"Do you have any idea what it costs to have anything forged in black steel?" was Sakura's reply, though the last was slurred as she bit down on her thumb and summoned Yoko.

The otherwise unprepossessing little crow could fly faster than a well-rested shinobi could run—though not for any distance—and she soon had her winging her way toward Tsunade-sama with the news of their return; she presumed that if Itachi had managed to get word to her, Jiraiya-sama would have done the same for the Hokage. Even if he hadn't, they were hardly the only assets with their eyes turned to Amegakure.

It came just as Yoko was about to crest the wall: a pillar of fire that roared up like it would swallow the sky, the concussive wave enough to make the sentries stagger and send Yoko tumbling through the air, though the little crow managed to right herself before she crashed into the ground.

"No, no, no!," Mariko howled, each repetition more strident than the one that followed it.

"Hyūga," Kakashi-senpai snapped, "status?"

"A summoned spirit," Neji reported grimly, "ruptured a gas main and immolated itself and anything within a hundred feet. There are more of them appearing throughout the city. Dozens of them, some of them as big as Gamabunta."

"What about the rest of the invasion force?"

"I can't—," Neji paused, frowning ferociously. "It's small, whatever the actual number is." Hard for him to see among the tens of thousands of people inside the wall, she parsed from his terse statement.

"Ambush?"

"Negative."

Kakashi-senpai eyes were half-lidded and dangerous as he looked out toward the village as if he, too, could see through the wall. "You know your orders."

Sakura had been in some awful battles, ones she'd been poorly prepared for. Mentally, physically. Wave had been the worst; that Sakura had been little better than a civilian. It felt wrong to say an invasion was better than anything else, but except for the last long stretch out in the woods, there'd been a solidarity to Orochimaru's invasion. Standing up and fighting with your comrades-in-arms was a different beast than fighting alone and outnumbered.

She'd thought she'd prepared herself for what she'd see behind the wall as they sprinted for the gate, which was already becoming a crush point as civilians tried to flee.

Orochimaru had wanted to capture Konohagakure. He'd focused his attack on the shinobi population and avoided crippling infrastructure that he'd need once he was in power.

Pein wanted to break its spirit and make an example of the village that had been systemically hunting the members of his organization.

It actually took long, precious moments for her brain to process what she was seeing as she scrambled up to a rooftop. Sakura only realized how much chakra she was cycling through her eyes when she noticed how clear and sharp her vision was, even well beyond the range where normal humans could pick out detail.

Enormous summoned animals were carving out paths with their passage, buildings collapsing in their wake. Water lines ruptured, turning the streets into a slurry of mud and bodies and debris. Even as she watched, a vicious blue flash in the distance heralded the deafening sound of a substation exploding. Dark smoke was beginning to hang over the village as if a storm unlike anything they'd ever seen had settled in to stay. Another eruption came with a fountain of fire that blossomed and spread, the horizon turning an ominous orange.

Chaos reigned; civilians flooded the streets and became a river of fragile flesh. Jiraiya-sama's message must not have come, she thought with growing horror, or it didn't come in time.

There were actually two separate sets of orders for a second invasion, dependent upon whether it occurred when most civilians could be expected to be at work or at home; Pein had come on the latter. In this scenario, Sakura was assigned to a district that housed a large percentage of what Tsunade-sama had designated as high-value civilian assets. Master carpenters, civil and electrical engineers, water and waste management system designers.

She couldn't have been further from that district and still be within the walls if she'd tried.

Kakashi-senpai was a comforting presence at her side as he too surveyed the village, but that wouldn't last. Her objective was the preservation of life; his was to coordinate with other frontline jounin to contain the threat.

Sakura believed in Kakashi-senpai's ability to survive like she believed in the sun rising or the tides shifting, but she'd never seen anything like this.

And there was a terrible knowing as she watched her world die around her.

This was what fear was. This was what fighting without hope was.

This was the march into a battle you couldn't win; this was the charge that ended in a fall.

This was stepping forward knowing that you're going to die—knowing that your friends were going to die, that there were going to be so many corpses on the field it will take them days to count you all and they might never get all your names sorted out, because some of you will be sent to your parents in numbered pieces, if they can identify you at all, if anyone is left to dig the graves or sort the dead because it seemed like the whole world was falling down.

They were already dying—and it stunk like the insides of people, this place that this morning was beautiful and will never be again—and some part of you knew that this wasn't a battle, this was a slaughter, and there was no god who will save you and no tactic that can spare you.

And when Kakashi-senpai clapped her on the shoulder, she stepped forward anyway.

Naruto would have gone because he would have believed that at the end of all things, he would win, because he had never really lost; Naruto was not here and she was glad.

Kakashi ran at her side because he didn't know any other way to be, because he had been chasing this death since he was old enough to run.

Sakura felt trapped by their courage, because there was no space for personal cowardice here, for the wailing child closed up in the dark places in her chest, but there was also a strange peace that swept through her when the fear swelled up and burst beneath her skin. There wasn't hope, but neither was there uncertainty; there wasn't an escape, but there was purpose.

No more sleeping beneath the kitchen table or beneath the bed or in the shower—no more waiting for the knife to catch her in the back or the next mission to go to hell.

Because hell was here—they were running through it—walking on it, as she dropped to street level and dodged falling debris and the clinging, grasping, pleading civilians who were someone's mother-daughter-father-son but weren't her mission. It was every nightmare she'd ever had, every genjutsu she'd ever conceived, except there wasn't any dissonance that promised a real world where this wasn't, wouldn't, couldn't be happening. The world was smaller than it had ever been—there wasn't room for rhetoric or dogma or the reason that this was happening, just room enough for the friends who'd already been swept from her side and the fact they weren't all going to survive.

This was the first time she'd felt free since Wave, before she'd settled into her place in their culture of fear, before she'd truly traded in her childhood for a well-fitted combat vest and a handful of kunai. There would be nothing to fear after this, because the dead were free of fear and because she was as good as dead, she too felt like someone had loosed something that had wrapped crushingly tight 'round her chest for so long she'd all but forgotten what it was to breathe.

A wild laugh, loud and cackling, made her jerk her gaze upwards, where she caught sight of Gozen-san perched on the edge of a half-toppled building that was supported only by the building next to it. She wore body armor—not a carefully preserved relic of some long-ago war, but a sleek modern statement that for her, the war had never found an end. Other laughter joined hers, rising out of the screaming and the collapsing buildings in an incongruous bubble of sound.

"This is how the last of the first should go out!" she shouted and received in return a fierce reply from men and women Sakura recognized—and some she didn't—as belonging to the first generation of ANBU.

They shouldn't have looked fierce. One of the men had a prosthetic leg and was leaning heavily on a cane; one of the women had no left arm below the elbow. But the man was heavily tattooed and even as she watched, his skin blackened, the tattoos beginning to gutter with red light like something was burning beneath his flesh. The woman was yanking tight the straps of a harness that held a great saw-toothed blade fast against the stump. And as Gozen-san laughed again and shouted out, "Magen: Tosatsujo!" the earth seemed to quake and what stood before them weren't old men and women wasted by the passage of time, but the ghosts of a force that the whole world had learned to fear superimposed over the living.

For the first and the last time, the Witch looked up at the Foxwife, who looked down at her as if she'd called out and inclined her head like some wild woodland god bestowing a blessing. Her hair was long and white and caught up by the wind; she might well have been the most beautiful woman Sakura had ever seen even as she turned away and donned the laughing fox mask. Her range was vast—Sakura couldn't see where the edges of her illusion was and she wondered whether the other people who'd survived the days in that blood-stained journal were somewhere out there anchoring the edges of this great illusory net.

Sakura didn't have time to admire it, though she picked out that this illusion didn't stab fear into the enemy; it buoyed the courage of the Konohagakure shinobi, shored up their faltering morale, and soldered their shattered selves into something that could hold back the tide just a little longer.

Konohagakure's jounin weren't this weak—they shouldn't have been falling this fast, not to so few. But their strongest techniques were meant for battlefields far from home, where it wasn't their own civilians that would be caught by the flames or torn apart by the hailstorm of steel or crushed beneath the undiscerning weight of a summoned spirit.

Pein had crippled them when he'd struck without warning in streets that had before seemed so broad and now kept them pressed so close. They were choosing in every moment what kind of blood they were willing to bear; samurai might say that shinobi sold their morals and had them rewritten fresh on every contract, but here was evidence that wasn't true. Frontline shinobi who might have been monsters on a field far and away were dying before they'd risk killing a civilian child.

He wasn't killing them just with force; he was crucifying them on the strength of their scruples.

Not all of them—the ANBU and Root and some very grim jounin had found their definition of acceptable losses and were pressing ahead, pressing through, even as their brothers-in-arms and those they'd lived to protect were caught in the crossfire.

Sakura thought they were right and that they were wrong, but she knew that there wasn't another moment in which they'd be truer to themselves than in this time. These were the moments that made men and these were the choices that broke them.

There wasn't time for philosophy; agonized indecision was bleeding out in the street.

And she was running, running, running through it all, this world of fire and terror, until she was at her assigned sector. It had been a neighborhood of master craftsmen, with large multi-generational homes. Several hassled-looking shinobi were already trying to muster the residents, but these fine houses were full of fine things and sometimes people had bizarre reactions to approaching death.

They were, for example, convinced that it would hold off for just one more minute as they gathered some last, vital thing—Sakura slammed down a fresh genjutsu matrix not unalike to the one she'd used in that village. This time she didn't spare any thought to moral quibbling, she just made them docile and orderly and alert to danger, locking them in the illusion that they were Academy students and their instructors were running a simulation. In a shinobi village, most civilians spared at least a few moments to a what-if fantasy; today they got to live it.

She was sucking air raggedly through her teeth at this point and that air was beginning to taste bitter and gritty from the smoke, so she slipped on her mask. "Where are we on the evacuation of this sector?" she asked one of the other shinobi.

"Now that you're here to keep people from going back in for their damned photos, we're ready to move this group. The dig team went ahead a few minutes ago to open up the graves."

"The graves" was a slang term for the catacombs that ran beneath certain parts of the village and served as storage and safehouses and evacuation passages in turn. She didn't know where or when it had originated from, but it clearly spoke to the civilian fear that without a competent team of shinobi skilled in doton, the bare limestone caves were just cells to die in.

Sakura nodded sharply at this information, slitting open her thumb on a kunai blade as she summoned Soudai. The cat only spared her a baleful look before loping ahead, flicking his tail imperiously. A nervous silence prevailed as they herded the civilians down the street, the eyes of their shinobi minders flicking from one alleyway to the next, sweeping over roofs and windows, always returning to the fires looming to their right.

She tried to reassure herself that if there were only a handful of invaders, it was unlikely that her group would encounter anything other than an animal summons. Which, while dangerous, didn't intimidate her nearly as much as the prospect of meeting an Akatsuki member with this team.

She didn't even believe herself and all she could think about was how desperately thin Tsunade-sama had been forced to spread her jounin forces outside wherever the main battleline was established. Even though they were protecting an important group essential for the restoration of infrastructure, there were only a handful of high-ranked shinobi here. The bulk of their force was composed of chūnin.

Her heart almost stuttered to a stop when she saw the fluttering fabric of an Akatsuki cloak. A very large man had stepped out of an alley just ahead and to their right. She'd noticed a trend among the terrorist group, which tended toward extremes of attractiveness or the grotesque, this latter one falling into the second category. He had a crown of spikes protruding from his bald head, which sat atop an unnaturally broad neck, so much so that it almost seemed to protrude beyond his jaw.

He had eerie eyes, purple and divided by concentric rings without any sclera to speak of. The teachers at the Academy had made them memorize all the active doujutsu they were likely to encounter, allied or otherwise, and this hadn't been one of them. Whatever they did or didn't do, no member of Akatsuki they'd encountered thus far had been anything less than S-class.

Only this time she didn't have Chiyo-sama and Naruto or Kakashi-senpai and the squad from Operation Headhunter. She had a few jounin she'd never been in active combat with, a handful of chūnin, and enough civilians to outnumber their shinobi protectors some four to one.

The seal isn't finished, the anxious voice in her head protested. And without it you're A-class at best.

It's finished enough, the truest part of her contested. It will hold for eight, maybe ten minutes before the natural chakra starts overrunning the matrix.

It will hurt from the first, the little girl whimpered.

There was a long, suspended moment where she waited for someone senior, someone stronger, to give an order, but none came.

"Get them out." She almost didn't realize she was speaking until the words had escaped her.

"Ma'am?" the chūnin nearest her queried.

"I said go!" she snapped, yanking chakra into the seal was as much finesse as something approaching blind panic allowed. The pain stole her breathe away for a moment, but with so many civilians at risk she couldn't test the waters and use the seal as a last resort. She thought she caught the scent of burning flesh and hoped it was psychosomatic as the seal manifested and spread.

She channeled the flashflood of chakra into a jutsu, her hands flexing through the signs and her palm slamming into the ground. A wall of rock speared up through the asphalt, thick as her forearm and three times as tall as she was. She didn't delude herself into thinking it was more than visual impediment and launched herself at her opponent.

Her first premonition of how badly wrong this battle was about to go came when the enemy blocked her blow not with a knife, but his arm. It penetrated the skin, but beneath that there was the horrible screech of metal against metal.

The blade wedged and when the shinobi went to wrench himself away, Sakura used her chakra-enhanced strength and the near unbreakable nature of black steel to duck beneath his arm and gouge a long stripe down it. Much good as it did—like Kakuzu, this one didn't bleed, but she didn't give herself any time to think about that. She swept around, wanting to take advantage of being at his back, but another arm caught her upside the head hard enough to have stars burst in her vision and set her ear to ringing.

Blinking, she regained her footing and found her enemy shrugging off his jacket, which no longer comfortably accommodated his six arms. His already bizarre-looking head had become even more so with the addition of two more faces, like some asura stepped fresh from its temple pedestal. Undulating behind his back was a tail-like blade, something like serrated flexible sword, highly reminiscent of Sasori's scorpion tail.

Aside from the ringing, there was only ominous silence from her right ear, and his hands were big enough that if it hadn't been for her mask dispersing the force of it, he might have broken her cheekbone as well. Sakura tried to ignore it, her anchor already in her hand. She'd always had to use the Hiraishin sparingly due to how much chakra it required, but now she was all but overflowing with it, taking in more than her body could process.

It was leaking out of her skin like streaky black electricity and it trailed her through the not-space as she twisted around her enemy, her fang catching and tearing and she trying to keep out of the way of his retaliation. He had almost no blind spots and too many arms and unlike him, she bled when she was cut. That tail opened up a nasty gash across her shoulders, the blade catching the fabric above the plates.

She sheathed her knife after that, because it was becoming clear that this wasn't an enemy she could target with precision. What she needed instead was catastrophic damage and she could do that better with her bare hands and ninjutsu. She'd tried genjutsu early on, but those purple eyes saw through it like it wasn't even there.

Now every punch she threw was filled with devastating power and she stopped being careful of things like property damage or civilians that might be caught by collapsing walls or asphalt turned into shrapnel. She drove her heel hard against the road and it cracked, rippled, and exploded in a fan-shaped wave of destruction. The wall of dust obscured her jutsu, which made the road behind her enemy erupt in quartz spears. She managed to catch one of his arms cleanly and she was there before he could pull away, her fingers dancing in a wind jutsu that came down on him like a house.

His impaled arm was ripped free of his body, coming off in a spray of sparks and flapping skin as she tried to grind him to dust.

Sakura's skin felt stiff and strange, her limbs too long, her teeth sitting strangely in her mouth. The natural chakra that she was pulling recklessly from the world was burning away her human self, but she didn't care about that anymore either.

She had never been so strong or so fast; her reflexes had never been so quick or her hands so sure. Sakura was seeing the world in impossible colors and the pain had reached a point where it was something powerfully euphoric.

Her eyes were seeing micro-movements now; she saw the twitch of his tail before it thrust forward and she stepped just far enough aside that she felt the air shift with its passage. She responded with a different wind jutsu, this one a shearing crosswind.

It tore gaping holes through his body—any normal shinobi would have been finished after having their arm torn off, but there wasn't even any pain reaction. It was like fighting one of Sasori's puppets.

A silent scream of frustration and pain escaped her as a projectile caught her hard enough in the side to knock the air from her lungs and she heard the ceramic plate in her flak jacket crack even as the rib beneath it gave way.

It wasn't going to end, she realized, not until he was in so many pieces that he wasn't a threat to anyone.

She flashed forward and it was in the not-space that another thought struck her like lightning. This time she didn't try to stab or slice or gouge. This time her hand closed, ever so slightly, over his shoulder and she yanked him into the space between. She'd never tried to do anything there aside from getting out again as quickly as possible, because from the first time she'd stepped through, she'd been terrifically afraid of the space she had to step through to get there.

Now, though, she stopped in that place-that-wasn't; she didn't have long, not here, because whatever energy it was that existed in this place wasn't something she could use like she could natural chakra. The wild chakra she'd taken through with them hemorrhaged off of her even here, bright blue sparks here in this place without light, and her eyes began to see things that she didn't think she could unsee.

It took everything she had to lift her strange, long-fingered hand away from the bare shoulder of her enemy and even after she'd managed that, it took several confused moments before she managed to come back to a place-that-was.

She clawed at her mask as she stepped back through into the world, but it didn't help the sensation that she was drowning. Drowning in fire, her skin so hot and tight she thought it might peel away and reveal something entirely different beneath. Her toes had grown as long as her fingers and broken through the seams of her boots until her nails scraped at the jumbled mess of the road. She stumbled then and her knees came down with a vicious crack and she curled into herself from the pain of it, vomiting half-digested food and chakra onto the dirt. Something atop her head scraped the ground at the movement, but she was too miserably caught up in her body trying to purge itself of the excess.

Sakura tried to cut off the flow, but it was too late; she'd let the flood in and it had washed away the dam and flooded over the wall of all her careful channels. Her muscles began seizing and she bit through her tongue. The world became a small space of confusion and pain and exhaustion and she choked on the blood pooling at the back of her throat. Her stomach rebelled, but her muscles were weak and unresponsive to her diminishing efforts to turn herself back onto her side.

Her mind still struggled, even though her body didn't have the strength. All that powerful sense of purpose was fading now, leaving her drowning in her own blood and sick. I don't want to die, she thought with a desperate half-sob that only drew the liquid deeper into her lungs, I don't want to die.

But I won.

[Kill Your Heroes]

It was strange for both Tsunade and Shimura Danzō, this fighting side-by-side when only a little while ago they'd been having another less than polite discussion about how they were going to handle negotiations with the other villages.

Tsunade was aware that Shimura didn't respect her record and doubted her commitment to the village as well as her competency; he knew that she didn't respect his ethics and found his warhawk philosophy repugnant. But her guard and his lay in pieces around them and he doubted that the blue-haired kunoichi and her three orange-haired companions were interested in waiting for reinforcements to arrive.

One of the orange-haired ones was using an interrogation technique that seemed like a distant, more effective cousin of the Yamanaka one; it seemed that while Akatsuki was here mostly to lay waste to the city, they were being efficient and gathering information about the location of the Kyūbi while they were at it.

Danzō let his cane fall away as he sneered at the group, which caused Tsunade to glance briefly over at him. Her face was already bearing the distinctive markings of her most infamous jutsu; she raised a golden brow at what was exposed as he cut his bandages away. "Provided you survive," he said acerbically, "I'll listen to your scolding."

"Provided you survive," she snorted, "I'll cure your delusions that a scolding is all you'll get."

[Kill Your Heroes]

Kakashi could feel his skin seizing along the length of his arm, as if his lightning had crawled beneath his skin. His thoughts were slow and watery and there was something warm leaking from his nose that he couldn't be bothered to brush away.

The long, slow rasp of his breathing was strangely loud in his ears as he stood above the body of an orange-haired stranger. The world stretched and swayed around him, but what fixated him lay just beyond the black puddle of the stranger's cloak.

Pakkun.

So small and so still and so quiet.

The rest of the ninken were pressing so close to his legs that he was wading through them to get to the little pug, who'd been so large and present in life.

Now he fit in one hand, which was good as Kakashi had to use the other and the mass of the ninken to keep his balance and get back up again. Exhaustion was a weight that pressed down on him, but he couldn't rest just yet. Not while the village was still burning. But surely he could take just a moment and tuck Pakkun out of the way—he was so small and even if he was no longer there in that battered little shell, he didn't want him to be trampled.

A half-collapsed wall had formed a triangular alcove in a nearby alley and Kakashi stooped down to lay Pakkun gently on the ground. It took both hands to steady himself as a wave of nausea and disorientation swept over him and he shifted so that his back was against the upright wall. He slid slowly down it, promising himself that once the world stopped spinning, he'd go out again and fight the good fight.

Warm, furry bodies pooled on his lap, but Kakashi could hardly feel their weight or their warmth.

Just, he told himself, a moment.

And then he was gone.