AN: It is worth noting that if Sakura is present for an event, particularly a violent one, she will be interacting with it. She's not the type to stand on the sidelines and watch things when she doesn't have to. Also that'd be kind of boring.

The Next Dimension Over

Chapter Twenty-Three

She frowned, staring at the trees again. It still didn't make very much sense: if he was faking his weakness, what had been the point? Demoralizing her? If that was the case, he wasn't as good as he thought he was: she wasn't about to be scared off so easily.

Or...he was so strong that it didn't matter.

If it was the last, she couldn't afford to hold back when Goku was a potential hostage. "Goku. Don't move."

She kicked off of the ground, flickering into the trees. When she'd moved, she hadn't been sure where her enemy was. As soon as she appeared in the trees, though, the figure of her attacker stumbled, and jumped away through the trees.

Again, despite surviving her previous attack, he moved at the speed of an inexperienced genin. Barely faster than a civilian, in fact. It took only hopping across two branches to catch up to him. Chakra gathered in her fist, and she crashed down on him.

Once again, he put up no sign of resistance, slamming into the ground and then lying still.

She hesitated for a few moments, waiting this time for a clone to dispel. Nothing happened.

Just as she turned to leave, a shiruken flew at her from another point in the forest. She knocked the weapon away with a kunai, and immediately spun back toward the prone form of the ninja on the ground.

...It remained.

"What...?"

"You may as well give up now!" The voice cackled through the trees in the distance. "No matter how many times you defeat me, I'll simply rise again stronger! I have complete control of this floor!"

A leaf split, and she twisted backward at the last moment just to evade a dart of some sort from the left, far from where the last shiruken (and voice) had come. Two kunai struck the ground, only barely missing her position, from the proper direction.

"Your only choice is to run or to die!" Cackling rang across the air, echoing off of what seemed to be every surface of the floor.

She clasped her hands together and quickly spiked her chakra. "Release!"

...Nothing. She didn't even feel any resistance or intruder on her network at all, let alone something that would have seized it in a genjutsu.

Stone grinding against stone rang throughout the air, followed by an alarmed shout from Goku. She raced across the grass, knocking away a rain of shiruken as she went. "Goku!"

When she broke free of the trees again, Goku stood where he had when she left, looking down at the stairs they'd come from. She followed his gaze...and found the top-most stair had elongated, blocking off the passage to the lower floor.

The voice from the other floors suddenly spoke up. "You should have taken the opportunity to flee that you were given. Now, you've run out of chances!"

High above on the ceiling trap doors fell open, and a hail of large black shapes fell to the ground. One crashed to the ground between she and Goku. He jumped out of the way in the opposite direction she moved. Whiteish-blue smoke shout out in all directions on impact. Around them, the other packages fell to the ground as well, spreading the slow-moving cloud across the ground as they went. Wisps of smoke curled up her legs to her thighs, and engulfed most of Goku's body.

Laughter rang out across the room once again. "Now that this floor has been sealed, you'll have no choice but to breathe in Red Ribbon Army's special toxin! Consider it mercy that your death will be less painful than what I would have given you!"

She grit her teeth. If this were her dimension, if this were home, it would be easy to figure out what poison they were using, and then find an antidote to it. Here, even if she had the resources available to make one, she wouldn't know anything about the poison or the antidote.

It wasn't likely they could make something that mitotic regeneration couldn't handle. Even if she shared her regenerative abilities with Goku, though...his body was so small that he might die before she could help him.

"This is cheating!" Goku shouted, waving off the smoke...causing it to stir up into his face all the more.

"Fool! A true ninja uses any tactic to defeat his enemies! With my antidote, I am immune to this toxin, but the two of you will die no matter what you attempt to do!" Laughter again seemed to ring from every direction. "Truly, I am invincible!"

Goku coughed, and then his expression brightened. "I know!" That strange tail of his lifted into the air, and then began to spin behind him in a manner much like the thing on Roshi's strange boat had done. The gas surrounding them began to dispel, chased away to the edge of the wall. "And this! Ha!" He pulled out his red staff again, and begun to spin it in front of him.

Clicks echoed through the room, and more panels opened above, dropping two more volleys of the toxin bombs.

"How long can you keep up your little trick before you tire?"

She leaped forward and knocked away a wave of kunai aimed at the small boy.

The voice from the trees chimed in with the other disembodied voice. "And how will you defend yourself while you try to breathe?"

...Of course. Before now, it would have only been a matter of time before she tired out her opponent, or at least figured out what trick he was using. Now...she didn't have that kind of time. Even if she used shadow clones so that she could defend Goku from attacks while she fought the ninja, there was no telling how long Goku's endurance could last. Or how much more of the toxin they could fill the room with.

Damn...

If she collapsed the floor, she'd take the support pillars with it. There was a chance the rest of the tower would fall on their heads after she did. Whether or not they could survive it, there were multiple reasons not to collapse the tower into pieces before they were done searching it.

That really only left one good option.

She turned on her heel and charged toward the outer wall of the tower. Using her momentum and a spike of chakra, she jumped into the air and swung her leg at the red-stone wall. "Try...this! Chyah!"

The sturdy barrier exploded outward in a rain of jagged shards and oddly shaped pebbles, and the poisonous smoke billowed outward into the freezing air.

No matter how much the army tried to fill the room with, as long as they stood near this side of the tower, they wouldn't be in very much danger.

"Now..." She turned back toward the forest, gripping her hand into a fist. "Where were we? Being good ninja? I guess I should start by knocking down all the trees you're using to hide."

Goku jumped backward as another set of kunai shot at him. "Hey! Don't attack me, that's not fair!"

"Don't you get it?" The voice yelled out...from a man standing not far away in a tree, apparently attempting to hide behind it. Poorly. "You've only managed to prolong your death, choosing a far more painful option than the one I mercifully gave you!"

So far...he'd refused to make head-on attacks, or even truly dangerous ones. Every time she found him (easily), she defeated him without effort. Every time, he seemed unskilled. Yet, he kept reappearing. Perhaps she could have believed he had a strange, dangerous skill that needed to be overcome.

The ceiling trap, however, led her to believe something else entirely. Well, that, and his comment to Goku.

Hiding behind his tricks and traps, he was little more than an especially arrogant genin. Given his lack of jutsu other than whatever he was using to project himself, chuunin seemed too generous.

She jumped to the tree where he hid, and punched through its trunk. As she expected, the person in it simply flailed and screamed as it fell, rather than leaping out of danger. As he crashed to the ground, she pounced on him.

Unsurprisingly, the moment she knocked that one unconscious, she saw him sprinting away in the distance. Even less of a surprise: he made no actual attempt to deflect the kunai she threw, and collapsed with a pained shout.

"That looks like it hurts." She eyed the area, searching for the next sign of movement. "How long do you want me to keep this up?"

For a few moments, the only sound that passed through the room was the howling wind from the open wall.

Finally, the purple clad ninja appeared in front of her, hands outstretched. "Okay, okay! I give! If you stop...I-I'll take you to this tower's secret! If you kill me, you'll never be able to find it!"

"Secret?" Goku ran up to where she stood, expression bright and interested. She could hardly blame him...knowing him, having to stand and wait on the sidelines so long without even a real battle to watch had to be boring. A secret probably sounded incredibly exciting.

More importantly, there was the slight possibility the 'secret' might be the dragonball. Maybe, If they had it.

She crossed her arms. "Why should we believe you?"

"W-well...what's the harm? If I'm lying, surely you'll kill me. And the two of you are so strong, you've proven I can't hurt you!"

If she weren't so confident of his ineptitude, she'd be concerned enough of the obvious trap to ignore his offer. But...there was just enough chance that the secret was real, despite the trap, to humor his attempt anyway. So far, every single attempt he'd made on their lives wasn't any real danger, anyway. At least if they left the floor it was unlikely he could pull off his trick so easily anymore. Whatever it was, the way the floor was structured to block off vision and confuse people inside it no doubt played a large part.

She smiled, and gestured toward the upper stairs. "Well in that case, I'm sure there's no reason to disbelieve you at all."

Goku glanced up at her briefly, and then nodded. "Yeah, I wanna see what this secret is, too!"

"Well...just wait." The man smiled and clasped his hands together, before starting toward the stairs. "You won't believe your eyes."

...So definitely a trap.

When they climbed the stairs, the roof that had shut to seal them in slid open easily (as accommodating as any military would behave toward a traitor). As she'd guessed, the floor above looked like the others before, excluding the one they'd just left. Dark, empty, stone. In the distance, a tall cell stood, locked tightly shut.

It was a bit of a surprise to her that he didn't immediately run over there and release whatever beast they had trapped inside. Instead, he walked the other direction, gesturing for them to follow. "It's just over here. There's a secret panel on this wall, you'd never find it if you didn't know where to look."

She squinted at his back as they walked. Could it be he planned to distract them with something while he quietly opened the doors behind them? Surely not.

"Right here." He pointed at the wall. Goku ran up to it and reached up to place his hand against it, curious. She stayed in place, a step behind Goku, watching the would-be ninja instead.

He shook his head when Goku looked up at him in confusion. "No, it's not there. It's here."

He shoved a slightly misaligned brick into the wall nearby. It really wasn't all that well hidden, for an undetectable panel. Or even switch, really. When the stone shifted in, it knocked its neighbor violently out into the sky. Destabilized, the rest of that section of the wall crumbled and collapsed in front of them, plummeting to the snow below.

She turned just in time to see the oversized dead-weight slam into them.

AN: Murasaki's true power has got to be being so pathetic 90% of the time people underestimate him and just let him do as he pleases.

(what's that you say, the murder hole and people-catapult traps didn't exist in dragonball?

...

well...

they just didn't use them, okay. Murasaki spent almost the entire fight fooling around, gettin' trolled by Goku. Kid Goku derails things pretty well.)