chapter 8

Sakura jumped from rooftop to rooftop back toward the forest in the north. She could feel the subtle bulge of the 'Phone' Shouto had given her in her belt.

'It's all charged up. You shouldn't need to charge it very often if you don't use it too much.' He handed her one of his brother's burner phones. 'My brother, Natsuo is kinda a computer nerd and uses these for all of his, um, projects. He won't mind if I give you one.'

Shouto watched Sakura turn the phone over in her hand. She looked confused.

'It's new. I wouldn't give you a used one.' Did she not like it? Was she used to nicer ones? Oh, she didn't know what it was did she?

'This, um, you use this to talk to people? Like a transmitter?' She looked at the phone he had in his left hand, his phone.

'Well, yeah. It's a transmitter but you can use it for a lot more than that.' She had never used a phone before.

Sakura still wasn't exactly sure what the device was but she understood the basic concept of it. Shouto had spent another hour downloading what he called 'Useful apps'onto the phone for her convenience.

He assured her she would like it once she got the hang of it.

'I put my number in it for you. You can call me if you want, whenever, or you can text me. To do either one you hit this button here.' He showed her how to pull up her contacts, how to choose call or text and then how to both call and text.

'Here is a map you can use. If you know the address of where you want to go, just type it in here.' He pulled up the navigation app on her phone and showed her how to put an address in. He put his address into her phone and hit 'Start', then 'Save'.

'See, it shows you what streets to take, how long it will take you to get there and different ways to get there if you want to stop by any stores on the way.' He handed her the phone. 'I'll text you later, to make sure you got home okay.'

Home.

Sakura dropped down at the edge of the industrial district where it butted up against the forest. Distracted by her own thoughts she hadn't felt him, but as she stood at the edge of the forest, the lights of the city behind her, the darkness of the welcoming forest before her...she realized she could sense him.

Shigaraki.

No, he didn't have a chakra signature, that wasn't what she was feeling. It wasn't life energy or anything she could name but there was something, something she had felt before, earlier that day at his crappy bar. An aura perhaps, a presence like the kind you feel when you're being watched but are unable to see who it is that is watching you.

Call it a hunch.

There was nothing bold enough to say, it was him, and she could be wrong but she didn't think she was. She was sure. Somewhere, over her shoulder among the tall factory buildings and the empty parking lot lights was Tomura Shigaraki, and he was watching her, waiting to see what she would do.

Would he follow her? Was he following her? Sakura didn't believe in coincidences.

She snorted through her nose, adjusted her belt and her packs. "Catch me if you can."

Tomura hunched over the safety rail of the tallest factory at the end of the industry district and watched Sakura dart at lightning speed into the forest and beyond, into the abyssal black. If he had blinked. He would have missed her.

Fast, so damn fast. She was so irritating. He shoved all but his pinky fingers into his pockets, turned and walked down the stairs to the street. "Now I know, kunoichi. Now I know where you go. Kurogiri, bring me home. I'm done here."

A swirling black and purple warp gate appeared before him, enveloping him, taking him back to Kamino Ward.

Tomura stepped out of the warp gate, back into the bar All For One had made his home, and sat down at one of the bar stools.

Kurogiri set a flute of champagne before the young master.

"Was your outing a successful one Tomura Shigaraki?" The warp villain inquired politely.

"Yes." Tomura ignored his drink, his head bent over the newspaper that had been on the bar before he had sat down. A picture of a new hero, their smiling fake face, was plastered all over the front page. The words 'Up and coming new star', 'Brave new world', popped out at him making his blood boil.

"Did you find the young woman and who she has been spending her time with?" All For One's voice came from the end of the bar.

Tomura crumpled the newspaper to dust and picked up his glass of champagne. "I found her Master, but she was alone. I couldn't follow her even if I tried. She was too fast." He complained.

"Of course she was, but you found her Tomura, that's what's important. A connection has been made. I am interested to find out if she feels it too. You feel it, don't you Tomura? That's how you found her. Give her time. I'm confident that one day, and soon, she will seek you out of her own accord and when that day comes, we'll make our move and set all of our efforts into motion." All For One's voice was smooth and as confident as ever.

"Of course Master." Tomura set his empty champagne glass down on the counter. "Is that Nomu ready? The one you and the Dr. have been working on Master?"

"It is nearly complete. Through trial and error I believe I have found the perfect set of quirks that is needed for you to reach your goal. Another month or two and he will be ready for you Tomura. Make sure you are likewise ready. When the time comes, you must act without hesitation." He advised his successor.

"I'll be ready. I've gathered as many low level thugs and creeps as I could. There's no shortage of rabble that hates the heroes as much as I do and All Might, they hate him even more than the others. They were eager to join my cause." Tomura assured his master.

"Good Tomura. Good." All For One closed their connection.

"Kurogiri, I'm going to my room." Tomura slid off the bar stool, pulled his hood from his head and walked out of the main barroom toward the stairs.

"Good night Tomura Shigaraki." Kurogiri bowed from the waist politely.

The young master had changed. He could see it with his own eyes. Yes, their Master was a genius. Bringing the woman here for Tomura had been a good decision. Kurogiri rubbed the inside of a clean glass with his rag and set it on the shelf above the bar. He should know by now, not to doubt their master.

Sakura bit her thumb and pressed it against her seal on the side of her cave, stepped into the dark, and resealed her new home behind her. Using the phone Shouto gave her to light her way she moved slowly into her cave toward the back, pulled her storage scroll from her pouch and began to set up her fire, pressing the button on the side of her phone to shut it off and save the battery like Shouto had shown her.

Once her fire was going, she moved to the water's edge, filled her kettle and set it just inside the hot stones she had set up to contain the flames, and waited. Looking around her small cave it didn't look like much, it wasn't as nice as Shouto's house, but it served its purpose.

She thought about everything Shouto had told her about his world, about UA and how it could help her. She knew his thoughts were coming from his limited view point but what he told her about UA wasn't completely useless to her.

No, she didn't need to go to high school but if they had as many connections and resources as he said they did, it might be to her advantage to take the entrance exam with him. She didn't know where to look to find the answers to her questions. She didn't even know where to start but UA, that could be the start she needed, that could, as Shouto had said, help lead her to the answers she was looking for.

Sakura had no interest in becoming a hero. She didn't care about villains or the problems this world faced. She just wanted to go home if she could. School had never been difficult for her. She had been one of the best students at the academy. It had been practical application she lacked, fighting, strength that was needed to complete missions, fortitude and drive.

...but she had that now.

Experience. She had more experience than anyone her age here, she thought to herself. Maybe this High school, as Shouto called it, wasn't such a bad idea after all. She wasn't a child and she was sure that being treated like one would be extremely annoying and frustrating but if she were honest, here, she had less knowledge about her surroundings than the smallest child from this world.

Crawl before you walk, wasn't that the old saying? Maybe UA could teach her how to crawl here.

Sakura pulled the book she had bought with the money Todoroki had given her from her belt and flipped back to the page she had left off at. It seemed she had guessed correctly. Ninja clans were no more here. Over the last two centuries they had been hunted down, killed and then in the last, more modern times, disbanded by the government.

Even so, she found nothing in the book that spoke of the shinobi of their past manipulating or using chakra to fight. There had been a few small battles, one great shinobi war here but it had been nothing like the battles or the shinobi wars of her world.

There had never been any chakra here.

Sakura walked over to one of the many cubby alcoves that lined her cave wall and picked her tea cup up, carried it to her fire and sat down, pulling the kettle from the hot stones to make her tea.

Sitting back against the cave wall, tea cup in one hand, her book in the other she continued to read, and read until she finished the book.

"Incredible." Sakura closed the book, setting it on the ground beside her. "To think people have come that far here."

She wondered if in her own world, given their time, would they have come up with such innovations as airplanes, automobiles or computers. The people she had met here thus far weren't any more intelligent than the ones back home in her opinion, different of course but no more sophisticated than the ones she was used to.

Was the existence of chakra to blame? She looked at her fire. She had lit her fire with a minor fire jutsu, she had sealed and protected her cave with seals and had everything she needed thanks to the seals in her pouches and storage scrolls. Chakra made everyday life easier that was for sure, but it was also functional in the sense she could push chakra to her feet and run much faster than a normal human here, jump up into trees with little effort, skip over the roofs of buildings and punch holes through mountains.

She could heal fatal wounds on the spot without having to transport the person to a hospital, like they did here. She could stop or start someone's heart just by pressing her hand to their chest using her chakra. Sakura could even cheat death with her Yin seal. She laid her hand over the cover of her book looking down at it thoughtfully.

Yes, maybe without chakra her world would be as technologically advanced as this one, or maybe not. It didn't matter, no, what mattered was that she wasn't in her world anymore, that she needed to accept that, and find her way back home.

Shouto was right. She needed to go to UA with him. She needed to take the entrance exam, and she needed to pass.

A small buzzing noise filled the silence. Sakura looked down at her phone, the face was lit up and a little envelope was blinking at her in the middle of the screen. Sakura pushed the envelope button just like Shouto had shown her to do and a message appeared.

'I hope you got home okay. I sent you the location of a coffee house in this message. Can you meet me there after I get out of school tomorrow? Hit reply on the bottom left and use the keypad to type in your reply, then hit the green button in the corner of the pad to send me the message.' -Shouto

Sakura furrowed her brows as she looked down at the phone in her hand and tried her best to follow the instructions he had given her.

'I'll try.' -Sakura

She hit the green button in the corner of the keypad to send him her reply. She watched as a little envelope folded itself up and flew away off her screen. She waited, nothing happened. Did she do it right?

Her phone buzzed again.

'I got your message. To get directions just hit the address written in blue on your screen from my message, the map will automatically pop up and show you how to get there. See you tomorrow.'

Sakura looked at the screen, pressed the blue address in Shouto's message and watched as her screen changed from his message into a map. It was like magic to her. "Incredible."

Turning her screen off, she set the phone back on the ground beside her and looked out over the black shimmering water of her cave. She could see little flashes of orange and red from her fire, dark hues of black and blues that reminded her of Kurogiri's smoke and mist, on the water.

"I suppose…" She voiced her thoughts out loud to herself in the privacy of her cave. "...this is much like discovering a new Hidden village, or going from one side of the Land of Fire to the foreign country of the Land of Oni." If she thought of her situation like that, it wasn't that bad, this world wasn't that different.

She turned her head to the picture of her genin team. They had traveled all over their known world, but they had traveled together. Even after Sasuke left the Leaf, she still had Naruto, Kakashi sensei, shisou and the others.

Here she only had Shouto and some creepy stalker who thought it was hilarious she didn't know how to use a vending machine or ride the bus.

Sakura looked back down at her book. Two centuries. It had been two centuries since the last known ninja had occupied Japan. Sakura pulled her kunai from her pouch and laid them out on the ground before her.

Six. She had six kunai.

She pulled out the rest of her weapons and took stock of her supplies. Six kunai, eight shuriken, three rolls of long wire, four packs of chakra infused sealing paper, her kunoichi Konoha headband and her chakra gloves.

"Hum." It wasn't much considering she wouldn't be able to replenish her supplies. The chakra paper wasn't a problem, she could make her own sealing paper, and wire, as long as it was of good quality, it wasn't an issue.

Her kunai and her shuriken however…

After Sasuke had left the village and Naruto had left to train across the country with the great Sannin Jiraiya sensei, Sakura had gone to Kakashi and asked him to train her in wire techniques like he had trained Sasuke. When the other great Sannin Tsunade Senju had returned to the Leaf, Sakura had begged her to train her in medical jutsu.

Fighting Sasori of the Red Sand had been her first real battle, her first battle in which she hadn't been able to rely on Sasuke or Naruto to protect her. She had carried her own weight in that battle, had gotten her own hits in and had eventually, at the end earned her enemies respect. He had been impressed not only with her battle skills but her medical skills as well.

She had created an antidote to his poison after saving Kankuro's life. A skill, like her others she had taken to the next step, learning all there was to learn about both poisons and antidotes.

Poisons and antidotes weren't the only things she had taken away from her battle with Sasori though. Ever since that fateful day she had been practicing in secret, the art of chakra strings and object manipulation. She wasn't proficient enough to claim success yet, but she hadn't given up on honing her skills either.

Following Pein's attack she had taught herself the art of sealing, fuinjutsu, but she hadn't stopped there.

If she had learned one thing from Naruto in their time together, it was to never give up. That if you really wanted something, you kept trying, even if it seemed like it was going to kill you, to learn from every experience good or bad and use it to better yourself.

There weren't many medical ninja in her time. Tsunade, her shisou, had been a modern pioneer as far as the healing arts were concerned. Kabuto Yakushi, was another shinobi who had a decent medical background, but he served Orochimaru, a heinous monster who used his medical curiosities to experiment on both adults and children, turning them into vile and disgusting half life forms, all because he simply wanted to see if he could.

Sakura had learned one thing from Kabuto though. Instead of using medical jutsu for healing purposes only, he had shown her that it could be used for offensive fighting as well, for subduing and killing, for battle.

When she had brought the subject up to Tsunade shisou, had told the woman her interest in taking Kabuto's methods, his techniques to the next level she had been shut down immediately.

"That is what our strength is for Sakura. The refined chakra that is required to make a chakra scalpel is for healing, for saving lives Sakura, not for killing, not for taking lives."

"Yeah, but it's different now isn't it shisou?" Sakura flexed her fingers, making a fist, then letting it relax, pushing her chakra into a focused point at the tips of her three middle fingers until she saw it. A thinly defined point.