Kill Your Heroes

-Chapter Fifteen-

Ligyrophobia (Part I)

Sakura retrieved Naruto after a brief inspection of the somewhat ragged bite marks in Sasuke-kun's neck convinced her that they were less worrying than the dark blotches pooled like ink beneath his skin, forming some kind of seal. Or at least that was her best guess. Fuinjutsu was leagues beyond Academy material, so she had to accept that whatever purpose it was meant to serve, she could only take away from it that he'd wanted Sasuke-kun alive and all she could do was wait it out.

If she handled Naruto more roughly than was strictly called for because she was more than half-convinced this was his fault, even if Sakura knew logically that their escape was unlikely from the moment that man decided that Sasuke-kun was his 'prey,' she was still angry enough at him that she didn't feel a shred of guilt.

She dropped him unceremoniously to the branch where she'd left Sasuke-kun, grimly considering what needed done and what she was capable of doing. She needed to get them out of this forest. Sakura didn't care if they forfeited this exam. She didn't care how upset her teammates might be. They could still be angry with her in another six months, when they'd be eligible to take the exam again.

But that was only what she wanted. Unless a proctor intervened, or something else occurred, the chances of reaching safety without encountering the Oto-nin team were dismal. It was a large forest, yes, but someone like that wouldn't promise a visit from his team without being certain that it would occur.

Not when she was absolutely certain that the man they'd met was Orochimaru, because how many people in the world could possibly be able to summon giant snakes so easily? There was a part of her that wanted to know why he needed Sasuke-kun at all, and another that wondered why he'd left Naruto and her alive and not just taken him when he'd collapsed.

But the reasons didn't matter at this moment, just surviving until there was a safer time to worry about those things.

So what she needed to do was retreat to somewhere more defensible than this, somewhere where she could wait for Naruto to regain consciousness. Their chances still wouldn't be good, but they'd be better. She hadn't noticed any blood on him that hadn't come from where she'd touched him and his temperature and color were much better than Sasuke-kun's, so after attempting to a standard genjutsu dispel in case it was a subtle one she couldn't sense failed, she left him be.

Sakura was mightily proud of herself for not kicking him in the side to test that theory.

That reminded her that she still needed to bind up the wound in her own side, which didn't take her very long. She just swabbed it down with an antiseptic towelette and pressed a bandage firmly over it. Because she hadn't torn away, it was a fairly clean puncture and the pain, compared to Wave, was hardly worth mentioning. If her arms ached from holding herself up inside the snake, that too could be ignored.

First aid finished, she tucked her trash back in her pouch and considered the next pressing issue, which was one of logistics.

There were two of the boys and only one of her. And she was fairly certain they both happened to outweigh her. She'd carried Tazuna before, who probably weighed as much as both of them combined, but that had been for a short distance, just like when'd she'd snatched Sasuke-kun. And even if she managed the weight itself, there were still two of them.

Sakura kneaded her temples—probably smearing more blood across her face as she did so though she'd scrubbed her hands with her towelette—as she considered the issue. It wasn't possible in the normal course of things for one girl to be capable of carrying that kind of burden.

But, she realized as she stared at their battlefield, it's not as if the normal rules apply. I can leap over twenty feet from a standstill. It's not as if I don't know how to augment and reinforce my muscles and joints with chakra. There shouldn't be anything to stop me from doing that continually. That's the whole theory behind the Shunshin no Jutsu. Kakashi-sensei said I wasn't ready for that, but while that kind of speed would be useful, I just need a little more strength.

That much she thought she might be able to do.

As for her other issue, she found her solution in taking a great deal of pleasure cutting the arms off Naruto's jacket, as he was the only one with fabric to spare. She had wire in her kit, but she didn't keep any kind of rope. She tied the resultant strips into three different lengths.

She crossed Naruto's arms across his chest and used the shortest of her lengths to tie his forearms together, forming a loop which she dragged over her head. That left Naruto draped down her back and she pulled his knees forward, tying him into a piggyback position that she further secured by the last length, which she looped under his arms, drawing the length between them and over her own shoulders, pulled it down under her own arms and tying it behind her back. By the time she was done, her shoulder joints felt mildly abused, but Naruto was as secure as she could make him.

She'd been careful to try this close enough to Sasuke-kun that she wouldn't have to kneel and then rise again with Naruto's weight on her back and she gathered Sasuke-kun up far more carefully than she had her blond teammate. As he lay quiescent in her arms, she experienced a brief flash of jealousy. She wanted Sasuke-kun to be carrying her hime-style and taking responsibility for getting all of them out of this forest alive.

There was only one good thing about this, she thought as she stood up carefully. Sasuke-kun's weight balanced out Naruto's, so she didn't have to worry about leaning forward or back to counterbalance. And they weren't as heavy as she'd feared, but she could feel it as a steady drain on her chakra.

If they'd ever taught a lecture at the Academy about going to ground with your teammates unconscious, Sakura had somehow missed it, though at just this moment it seemed like an awfully practical lecture to have. But she had sat through lectures on defensible positions and though their practicals hadn't been conducted in forests quite like these, she had some idea what she was looking for.

Almost forty minutes of making toward the Tower later, where there were guaranteed to be adults whereas the borders of the zone were probably less well-patrolled, she found what she was looking for.

Large branches that had broken out of treetops and caught on their way down, somehow tenuously held in place without any guarantee of staying there, were called widowmakers for good reason. Sometimes it was whole treetops, ripped free in especially violent storms. At other times, it could refer to whole trees, twisted or broken midway up the trunk and not yet come down.

With these behemoth trees, even branches were the size of the normal tree trunks and when Sakura caught sight of an immense branch suspended by what seemed a very tenuous, fraying little section and the unsteady support of some nearby branches, she had a flash of inspiration.

It was a deathtrap waiting to happen.

And it was just what Sakura needed.

She kept a wary eye on the branch as she came beneath it, flinching every time the wind made it creak, but she didn't have time to waste on fear. One of the trees almost directly below it had heavy curtains of moss growing up its roots and she carefully pulled them up and away without tearing them. A kunai was not a shovel, but it was the best thing she had to work with and she set to it with an industriousness born of fear.

Luck seemed be slightly on her side in this instance, for she hadn't done much digging when she collapsed a wall of earth and discovered some sort of animal den. Its entrance was from the other side of the root, which was why she hadn't noticed it to begin with, but it lessened her need to dig considerably. It seemed abandoned, with no fresh tracks leading in, which was why she felt fairly confident in stowing her teammates inside once she'd widened the entrance on her side enough. She sealed it back when she managed to shove both of them inside, restoring the moss to as much of an undisturbed position as possible, counting on the animal's entrance to provide fresh air. Sake hoped that neither of them woke up and panicked, thinking that they'd been buried alive, but she didn't have much time to spare for their feelings.

She made her way into the trees next, using Sasuke-kun's wire and blasting powder to rig a deadfall on a scale she'd never imagined it could be done. And when she was finished, she layered the Magen: Kokoni Arazu no Jutsu over it, so that to anyone not paying much attention or to anyone insensitive to genjutsu, it looked like a normal branch.

Most of her quick-and-dirty trap knowledge relied on using young saplings to fling kunai or shuriken or pull tight snares, but these trees were so enormous and well-established that there wasn't enough light or water for much underbrush. This sort of environment, or really any sort of environment, was why Doton users were considered the trapmasters of the ninja world. She didn't have enough time to dig pitfalls by hand, so she crossed that off her mental list, alongside anything that required complex seals or blasting powder or much in the way of equipment.

So, minefield was out. She wasn't certain she would have been able to stomach the results, regardless. Shrapnel damage was an ugly thing, even in photographs, and having seen the result of fire, she didn't know if she was frightened enough to do such a thing with premeditation.

In the moment, to save herself, she might do anything, but there was a vast gulf between that and setting out to do something as likely to maim as kill outright. What would she do if they survived the initial blast? Would she have enough composure to finish what she'd started? And if the answer to that was yes, how much would she have to pay for it in her nightmares later?

She didn't take too much time to consider what-ifs, though. Just enough time for a deep, stabbing feeling of regret on how limited her equipment was. She'd already lost four kunai inside the first snake and she couldn't raid her teammates' supplies entirely, so even a clever system of trip wires hidden in the grass that would pull tight wire at throat level was costly in terms of supplies. She limited herself to only those points of ingress that would be difficult for her to keep under surveillance. In the other places, she rigged devices more aimed toward alerting her to anyone's approach than causing harm, all of which were done with scavenged materials.

And when that was finished, all she had left to do was wait. And worry.

As that waiting dragged on and on and she found herself twitched at insect noises, she had a brief thought that she suddenly understood why Kakashi-sensei dragged that nasty book everywhere. It wasn't the preparation that was the worst thing. It was the waiting, where her imagination was free to invent all sorts of terrible things, that was proving to be the hardest obstacle to overcome.

Because, now, she had time to consider just what she was staying to face. Time to lose her nerve, to consider abandoning her teammates. If it was just her, she knew that she'd probably make to the Tower.

She'd live on, without having to endure the pain she was certain was coming.

But, she thought as she dropped her head into her hands, if she ran now, that would be it. She'd be the trash Kakashi-sensei had talked about.

At the same time, she really, really did not want to be here.

Those two conflicting emotions were pressing so hard on her that she was almost glad when something tripped one of her alerts and she raised her head to see three shinobi stride into the clearing.

She recognized them from registration, but the notes on their hitai-ate would have given them away regardless. Sakura didn't say anything, just stood and waited to see how they would proceed. She remembered how Kabuto had fared against them, so she wasn't about to risk herself in a head-on attack.

They seemed somehow surprised to see her. Of course, she had a good idea that she looked like an escapee from a splatter film, blood drying in her hair and turning it into a stiff-spiked mess, making her clothes stink like a slaughterhouse, and itching as it flaked from her skin.

It was the bandaged ninja with the strange gait who moved into the clearing first, and demanded gruffly, "Girl, where's Sasuke?"

Sakura shrugged, relieving some of the tension and stiffness in her shoulders from where she'd been sitting and anticipating this fight.

His single eye narrowed. "I'm not in the mood to play games with you, girl. Get Sasuke. He's the only reason we're in this village. Or is he too much a coward to come out and fight? Got himself a girl protecting him?"

That earned him a dirty look from his female teammate, but Sakura acknowledged that had either Naruto or Sasuke-kun been conscious, that sort of taunt would have brought Naruto out of hiding and at least primed Sasuke-kun to reveal himself.

"Sorry to disappoint," Sakura said curtly. "But apparently Orochimaru's 'presents' cut two ways."

She was interested to see Dosu's eye narrow at the mention of Orochimaru's name.

"What do you mean by that?" the one in the middle demanded. Dosu? Yes, something like that. And the one to his left was Zaku, and their kunoichi was Kin.

"Does it matter? Maybe the sound of us killing his girlfriend here will be enough to flush him out of hiding," Zaku sneered.

Given how he'd looked when she'd walled them up, Zaku could have tortured her for days without achieving that.

"Maybe she'd be more willing to talk if we roughed her up a little?" Kin suggested and that made a smirk break across Zaku's face.

So she wasn't surprised when the three of them leapt toward her. Her substitution was as quick as certain knowledge that no one was coming to help her could make it and before they could even look up, she'd already slammed her hands together in the final seal for the Magen: Narakumi no Jutsu.