AN: Sakura's been in some pretty stressful situations lately, going up on a year away and then looking at forever, or another year, away from the world without knowing exactly what happened. She's definitely been a bit harsher during that point, but it's likely she'll mellow out. Once she can deal with knowing what happened.
The Next Dimension Over
Chapter Sixty-one
The halls didn't get any more populous no matter how far they ran. It worried her. The outside was so well armored, so prepared for some kind of an attack...how could the inside be so...empty? Even if all of the people were busy controlling it...surely there would be some kind of force to ensure people couldn't sneak inside and kill the ones operating it?
But there wasn't anything. There weren't even warnings to be found.
Goku stopped looking in the doors as they went, but even so, there were never any suspicious lights or shadows coming from under the doors, never sounds or signs of life.
It was a giant place, designed to house even more soldiers than the Red Ribbon Army's base...and it seemed to be completely empty. Yet...it drifted through the sky actively, not at rest, not carried by the wind. Someone must have been there. Someone must have hidden the dragonballs inside somewhere.
Someone must have picked up the man who ran away. So then, where was that someone?
It wasn't long before they came to the end of the hall and were presented two doors. The one to the right was labeled with a bright yellow sign proclaiming 'Dragon ball storage unit'. The other was marked... 'Nothing interesting'.
...Really.
Goku looked between the two of them for a moment, and then took a step toward the door on the right.
He paused and made a face.
"Well...one of them is a trap." She sighed, planting her hands on her hips, and looking between the two.
He looked up at her with a frown. "The one to the right is closer to the place we're going, isn't it?"
"Well...it depends on what turns are ahead." She frowned. "But if they're going to put it somewhere secure, they wouldn't put a big sign on it proclaiming where it is, would they?"
"But how else would they find it?"
"If that's the way to the dragonballs, what's that way?" She pointed at the...blatant door. It was so blatant, actually, she was almost worried it was a reverse trap. But that...would be absurd. Just who would they expect to be this deep in their own fortress?
Honestly, she wouldn't have expected a trap to exist in this form at all, except that this was...
Painfully obvious.
She walked up to the door to the left and pressed the button next to it, allowing it to slide...up. Interesting. She'd assumed it would at least go somewhere into the wall like a few of the ones at Bulma's home, or swing open like a normal door. It led ahead a few feet, and then sharply turned right.
The walls on the other side of the door were made of a darker blue metal. Perhaps that was a good sign of getting closer to the exit?
She turned the corner, just to see the path terminate only a few feet away from it. On the wall was an amusingly poor doodle of a face, sticking out its tongue in a taunt.
So...
Trap.
The ceiling next to the door she'd entered clicked.
The sound could have meant anything. She moved on instinct more than certainty when she noticed her companion step up next to her. She lifted Goku by the back of his shirt and flung him through the air. He slid just under the door to safety before it slammed shut behind him. His yelp of surprise and arm was barely audible through the thick door.
Around her, slots in the smooth metal ceiling opened up and thick blue gas began to billow down into the room. Really, it looked similar enough to the one from the tower that the gas was probably the same thing. Or at least it was based off of a similar toxin. She still hadn't gotten the opportunity to research the poisons of this world. Still, if it was the same toxin, then the ones behind it were probably the Red Ribbon Army after all.
If she punched through the door directly, not only was there a chance she might hit Goku if he were too close, but the gas might escape into the hall where he was. There wasn't good ventilation in the hall, and clearing the air might be difficult. Punching through the strange looking walls, however, held neither danger. And wouldn't any more difficult to achieve than the first option.
The blueish mist curled around her feet as she walked near to the door. She'd need to catch up to him wherever the path through the other door led, so finding an adjoining hall would be best.
The wall hummed softly when she pressed a gloved hand against it. It felt...warm. So it probably didn't lead to the outside. It likely lead to some other hall that the opposite door went to. Or a room, but that would be the same effect in the end.
But...
The hand she'd lifted to strike the spot on the wall trembled to a halt.
In genjutsu...
She'd felt pain. She'd been hurt before while in this world. Waking herself up with pain didn't work. It couldn't be some simple genjutsu. She hadn't felt anything wrong with her chakra network, either.
But a genjutsu cast by the Rinnegan...
If...if the kind of genjutsu cast by an advanced Sharingan were unbreakable, a Rinnegan would be even more powerful, wouldn't it?
Maybe a genjutsu could only be broken by an illusionary death breaking the mind out from its cage. After all, it would be almost impossible to break, requiring the victim to turn their back on the most basic rule of survival, just to return to reality.
She shut her eyes.
Her hands shook, and her legs felt weak.
It might all be a dream.
Right now...Sasuke and Naruto might need her. Kakashi and their old enemy might need her chakra, chakra she kept wasting and had no true control of while she was trapped here, distracting them, useless to help in the battle.
If it was an illusion of sufficient strength, then...maybe her perception of time was warped. Moments might only have passed since she was caught in it. Such a thing was possible, wasn't it?
And if so...
On the outside...
Sasuke and Naruto...might still be...
Her legs collapsed under her, and the thick fog engulfed her.
(*)
The robot stood in the hallway silent for a few moments, and he almost was willing to believe it might have just...turned on for a second and then off again. But that was way too much to hope for, in the middle of a giant flying ship of death.
"You possess the other dragonballs!" The voice that came out of the robot was...weirdly kind of human.
Wait.
He squinted and took a step forward. Was...the giant lens in the middle of its chest actually a glass over of something else? Maybe a seat? Something did seem to be moving around in there, after all.
Yamcha rubbed at his hair, looking pretty unimpressed for being face to face with a giant robot. Or giant other thing. "Huh. Do we?"
The gun raised immediately. "D-Don't play coy!"
Did it just stutter? Was that a stutter or an audio glitch?
"Am I being coy?" Yamcha looked really confident. Even cocky. "If you're so sure, why did you even ask?"
Jeez.
For the one between them who hadn't been trained by the invincible turtle hermit, he sure sounded confident facing down an unknown killer robot looking thing.
"I-I didn't ask!" The voice increased in pitch high enough to crack briefly, and then the hulking thing took a step forward. "You have them! Give them to me!"
Okay.
Okay. So it wasn't a robot. Which meant...that big thing in the middle must have been a cockpit after all. Actually, once it was close enough for the light not to reflect off of the entire glass surface, it was kind of obvious what it was.
No wonder Yamcha looked so unimpressed from the start. From his different...vantage point...it must have been obvious from the start what the robo-armor was. And he probably also saw that pretty unimposing dog-man inside it. It was kind of hard to be intimidated by the dog-man, honestly.
"Are you crazy?" Bulma laughed from behind Yamcha. "Like we'd just hand them over to you!"
"If that's the case...I'll have to take them by force!" The green armor...suit lifted its hand toward them, and quite abruptly shot out a jet of flame in their direction.
He yelped and immediately jumped out of the way of the direct path of the flame. In his peripheral vision, he noted Yamcha grab Bulma and jump in the other direction. She screamed loudly enough that he couldn't catch whether the other man also made any kind of (potentially embarrassing) sound of surprise. He probably did, though.
The flame licked at the ground near him and then shot off down the path beyond them for a few moments before it died down to a flicker and vanished again. He scrambled to his feet, ready to move out of the way of the next attack.
The super heated steel beneath his feet sizzled right through his shoes to his feet.
"Augh!" He stumbled back against the wall again, as far from the strip of hot metal as he could, and glared over at the culprit. From where he was, he could probably make a flying kick through that glass. And then he'd kick that dog right into the hot spot.
Yamcha sprinted toward the enemy.
He clearly possessed better shoes, but that was beside the point. Now was probably the best time to attack, while their enemy was distracted by the obvious target. It would keep anything unfortunate from happening. Like a flamethrower in his general direction.
He gave a shout, and jumped forward, leg extended.
From the bottom of the round compartment that held its pilot, to small metal panels fell open.
Inside, two large missiles aimed directly at him.
And fired.
(*)
Alive.
She felt a little cold. It wasn't as cold as she expected to feel, lying in the middle of the snow.
Someone shook her roughly, either out of a kind of panic, or a lack of care. It might have been a shadow clone of Naruto's, it might have been Kakashi, trying to snap her out of her daze and back into the battle where her friends needed her. It wasn't Sasuke, but maybe it was that guy returning the favor.
She needed to do get up and help.
She had to wake up, so that she could get to the battle in time, warn them before it was too late. For them, and for everyone else. She had to warn them that Kaguya would be ready.
Someone called her name.
Wake up
The world felt warmer than before as she adjusted to it. Maybe it wasn't as cold as she remembered.
She needed to.
Sakura!
They needed her to.
Hey!
Her friends...
If she didn't help...Naruto and Sasuke would...!
She forced herself through the unnatural haze of the lingering genjutsu with fresh determination and a surge of chakra. With effort, her eyes opened again, adjusted to the bright light around her, and took in the world she found herself in.
...She wasn't sitting in a genjutsu.
Goku, who relentlessly shook her shoulders while she struggled to open her eyes, finally let her go with a wide eyed look of relief. "You're okay!"
It wasn't the frozen wasteland she expected, imagined herself in. Naruto, Sasuke, Kakashi, even Obito were nowhere to be seen. Light metal walls still surrounded her on every side, and the small figure of Goku hunched over where he'd propped her against a wall. Behind him, the door that trapped her previously had been twisted and blown inward. Undoubtedly, from that kind of damage, it had been by his Kamehameha.
This world...
Naruto and Sasuke's...
It wasn't a dream or a genjutsu that she could so easily escape. It wasn't a nightmare she could wake up and run away from.
Her gaze fell to the ground, where thin wisps of the smoke curled lazily out through the door, apparently having stopped some time around when he'd broken the room to get into it. "Goku..." 'Okay' didn't really feel like an appropriate word to use.
He beamed, and nodded enthusiastically. "I've gotten better at the Kamehameha now!" His expression soured slightly as he glanced back at the door behind him. "But that was a mean trick. We haven't even done anything to them yet!"
Well...they were infiltrating an enemy base with the intent of stealing dragonballs.
Considering what those things were supposed to do, deadly traps were somewhat to be expected. Even if she hadn't completely anticipated that one. But...it seemed awfully far for traps to be set up, when people should live somewhere in the base, and could encounter them just doing their daily business.
"Are...you okay?" He did, after all, have to go in after her, if he dragged her out as it looked like. Asking him about himself meant she didn't need to confirm if she was okay.
Naruto...
He nodded again, turning his attention back to her and straightening up. "I held my breath!"
She pulled herself up to her feet, careful not to stumble and worry him any more than he already had. They couldn't afford to just sit around and wait for her strength to entirely come back. Now that there'd been a small explosion involved in their infiltration...those dragonballs might get moved anywhere. Any kind of security might be implemented to protect the prize that much more. They were working on even more limited time than before.
Sasuke...
Goku gave a small huff as they passed through the right-side door instead, and started down a strange, diagonal path.
Kakashi
She stumbled and caught herself against a wall. Her gaze focused on her hand. A nail had chipped and broken at some point, but there was no other sign of the explosion she'd gone through so recently. Her seal struggled to heal nails, because she usually sealed it up again before it finished 'repairing' that kind of tissue.
It really was a worthless jutsu to have.