After leaving Konoha, it had taken her three months to reach Frost Country, and another week after that to get to the little hut in the mountains of Shimogakure that the elders had told her would be her new quarters for the foreseeable future.

Hut was perhaps too strong a word. House was too generous. So she settled on calling her meager accommodations a hideout - and resolved to never call it home.

Inside, the main room held a wood stove, a rickety table that possibly once had four legs, and a single chair. The bedroom held nothing but a mattress and a graying blanket. The previous occupant had left behind a few logs for the wood stove, enough for a few nights, and nothing else.

Well, that wasn't entirely true. Sakura crinkled her nose; they had left behind the smell. The austerity of the place had reminded her of Sasuke's bare apartment, but the similarities ended there. At least he kept his place clean. He had always been so neat and tidy, keeping things in their assigned spaces, absentmindedly organizing things in his kitchen while she sat on his couch, lecturing him about just letting his arm heal before he got into any more tussles with Naruto, and couldn't they just get along, he'd only been home for a few weeks….

The errant thought of the man she loved lodged in her heart like a splinter. Months back, she had decided that she was going to push all thoughts of him out of her head; to try to forget him, like he undoubtedly was forgetting her. But it was futile. Her thoughts of him were carved on the walls of her veins, imprinted into her blood cells, woven into her DNA. She angrily wiped away the tears that had begun to sting the corners of her eyes and continued her search of the apartment.

The only other thing in the entire structure was an unmarked scroll sitting on the derelict table, with plain black edges. She approached it slowly and held it in her hands for a moment, running her thumb over the smooth paper.

After a few beats, she sighed and peeled it open.

Inside was a map of the Hidden Cloud, with a red X over a mountain range and a name: Kano. Next to the name, in black ink, someone had scribbled civilians killed: 28. And that was all. She turned the scroll over, looking for more information, but there was nothing. She'd been hoping for more to go on than a name and a kill count, but then again, she had been hoping for a lot of things. Disappointment was the flavor of the month. Of the rest of your life, a tiny voice squeaked in the back of her mind. She waved it away with a frown, running a finger over her target's name.

So she gave herself two days of rest and planning in her little cabin, molding what little information she knew of the curse mark and the geography of Sky country into something that resembled a strategy, which consisted of nothing more than "find out who and where and then punch him really hard, I guess." And then she set back out into the snow, carefully tucking her pants into her boots and covering her tracks behind her - although she couldn't imagine anyone would want to find this place, better safe than sorry.

Cloud was over a week away by foot, and reaching his hideout was sure to be no walk in the park. She didn't have much experience with mountainous terrain, although she'd traversed quite a few in her exodus from Konoha, and disliked it immensely. She could expect no home court advantage.

On her journey, she tried to collect more information. A single name was hardly enough to march into an assassination with. So she had turned her hair and eyes brown with a henge, discarded her usual red garb for simple civilian clothing, and tucked her Konoha headband into her backpack. Then she had ventured into the villages along the way to see if there had been rumors of any men or women with strange seal marks terrorizing locals or recruiting for any uprisings.

Much to her chagrin, but not to her surprise, no one was willing to talk to her. The war was still fresh in people's minds, but beginning to fester. Tales of the Fourth Hokage's son and the last Uchiha defeating a god to rescue everyone from coffin-like cocoons had dissipated and given way to the dull settle of lifelong mourning. Sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, parents, children - everyone was missing someone.

Or something. The injured crowded the streets, and many were missing a leg, or an arm, or a hand. The smell of decay was overwhelming. She could see how easy it would be to sow the seeds of distrust from these people's pain, and from there begin to turn people against each other. People would frown at her if she got too close to them, and ignore her if she tried to speak.

Finally, she stopped at the small town at the base of the mountain range that had been marked on her map. This was as far as she knew to come; her attempts at gathering information thus far had been more or less fruitless, and her prospects promised only to worsen. So she paid for a room in an inn, threw her bag at the wall in frustration, and fell asleep to dreams of a home she would never know again and a man with black hair and mismatched eyes that she would never really know at all.

As she walked through the market the next morning, she kept her ears alert for any mention of something might help her. Orochimaru. Cursed seal. Kano. But the townspeople patronizing the stalls were all unusually reticent, for a Saturday morning marketplace. They somberly paid for their wares and walked home, heads down. This place was stricken with the same affliction as all of the other villages she had passed through: festering grief and clouded, cold malcontent. But she pushed her sympathy for these people out of her heart; she had a mission. And all she needed was one. One person brave enough, or dumb enough, to talk to her.

And she did find one, but not through nonexistent whispers in the market. A young woman sat propped against a wall, roots for sale laid out on a mat in front of her and a dirty brown bandage stained with old blood wrapped around her right arm. Sakura's heart twinged in pity; her parents had always told her that her tenderness would get the best of her, someday.

Sakura knelt in front of her, turning a root over with her fingers.

"What kind of root is this?"

"Don't know. It's edible." The woman shrugged, cringing with pain as her arm moved.

"It looks like a willow root. Good for poultices," Sakura said, glancing at the wounded arm. "For inflammation."

"Are you going to buy it or not?" She narrowed her eyes. "I don't care what you do with it."

"I'll buy two." Sakura dug into her bag for a few coins, and handed them to the woman, gathering the soft roots silently and shoving them in her bag. Her tongue was nearly jumping out of her mouth, but she knew the look in the girl's eyes: pain, fear, distrust. Anger.

"I'm a healer," Sakura said hesitantly.

"Good for you."

"I could heal your arm," she offered. "It wouldn't take long."

"Do I look like I have money for a healer?" the woman snorted. "I'm selling roots on the street."

"I meant for free."

"I don't need charity from strangers."

Yes you do. Sakura thought dryly. "For the roots then. It could be infected - the sepsis will kill you."

The woman squinted at the rest of her roots. "What's sepsis?"

"When your blood gets infected," Sakura shrugged. "And from there, an infection can get anywhere."

"And you could do it fast?"

"Less than five minutes."

"Fine." The woman stuck out her arm. "For the roots."

Sakura smiled and begun to unwrap the bandages. To her dismay, the woman's skin came off with the dirty cloth, peeling away in chunks. A swollen, seeping slice traveled from the woman's shoulder to her elbow.

"What? Can you not heal it?" The woman's voice became infused with panic at the changing expression on Sakura's face.

"I can. I just wish you'd seen someone about this earlier," Sakura said, letting her chakra flow from her fingertips. The damage was deep and her tissues were inflamed and angry and beginning to rot, but slowly, the muscle began knitting back together. As she had thought, infection had begun to set in, likely worsened by the rags she'd wrapped her arm in.

"Not like real healers come through here often. Our only good one was killed a few months back," the woman sighed in relief as her pain subsided.

"Killed?" Sakura raised her eyebrows. New, healthy blood cells began generating and running through newly structured veins.

"Lot of people being killed around here. Ever since Kano moved in." The woman frowned at her own admission and looked suspiciously at her arm, as if Sakura's chakra was forcing things out of her mouth.

"Kano," Sakura repeated, excitement filling her stomach. "Kano who?"

"Kano nobody. Are you done yet?"

"No," Sakura murmured, deliberately slowing the rate of healing. "I heard the villages around these mountains were having problems."

"That's not Kano's fault. That's because we were the collateral damage in Konoha's war."

"Konoha's war," Sakura repeated, rebuilding the sinews in the elbow.

"Or the great ninja war or whatever you want to call it. The problems were already here, thanks to those people. And Kano is just a side effect of that."

The animosity the woman clearly harbored toward Konoha and all ninja made Sakura feel uneasy. It was not the first time since leaving home that she'd heard this sentiment expressed. "But if he's killing people, Konoha didn't make him do that. He wasn't sent to target this town by the hidden villages."

The woman shrugged. "I don't know that. All I know is he came to the area after the war ended and has killed a bunch of people. He hangs out in bars trying to turn people into rebels when we've got it hard enough as it is. Are you done?"

"Huh?" Sakura looked down. The ugly gash had healed, leaving behind sensitive pink skin. At this point she was just wasting chakra, but she had become distracted with the new information. She patted the girl's arm. "Expect some tenderness for a few days. Otherwise, you'll be fine."

"What's your name?"

"Ino. Like the pig," Sakura lied. "What's yours?"

"Miko. You could make a lot of money if you stuck around, Ino. There's a lot of people like me floating around the streets."

"I'm not here for money. Can you… would you be able to tell me more about Kano?" Sakura asked hesitantly. "Does he live near here?"

"What business do you have with that thug?" Miko squinted. "If you're just passing through, better to just move on. He's trouble. A murderer, like you said."

"I could teach you what to do with these roots. In exchange for information." Sakura held up a willow root from the mat. "You could sell them as poultices and salves. It's good for pain and swelling. Even headaches. Around here, that would move better than just bitter roots."

"You're a weird healer. What kind of healer makes trades like that?"

"That's not a very nice thing to say," Sakura humphed. "I'm just interested in what's happened to this village."

"Fine. But I could get in a lot of trouble, so these things better sell. And you'd better take me to a nice lunch."

"I will," Sakura vowed, a triumphant smile hiding behind her solemn lips. Now the tides were turning. Finally.

That night, her head churning with the information given to her by the surprisingly well-informed Miko and her bag heavy with the maps of the mountain range she had purchased in the market, she crawled into bed and passed out. She did not dream of anything but red hair ribbons wrapped around mountain cypress boughs.

The next morning, she woke early. She counted her kunai before leaving the inn, making sure they were all strapped in and accounted for before traveling the edge of the village. Here, she removed the council's scroll from her bag and burned it with a weak fire jutsu; water was her chakra element, and fire never came easily to her. But if all that came of this mission was her corpse lying in the snow, it would not do to have her written objective so easily recovered by the enemy.

For six hours, she trudged through the snow up the mountain, occasionally pulling out her maps to check she was on the right course. If Miko had her facts straight, he was living somewhere in the network of caves on the east side of this mountain, just below the line where the trees could not survive the altitude. She couldn't blame the trees; the air was uncomfortably thin at this height. About two hours in, she had let the henge hiding her real appearance fall; nobody here was going to recognize her, unless the rabbits and deer could talk. At the fifth hour, she started to tune her senses to any evidence of Kano's existence; the trees were starting to thin, and the cave network was dwindling. He must be close. Although she had never been much of a chakra sensing type, Tsunade had taught her a lot about tracking the physical signs of life. Recently disturbed snow, dirt, and leaves could paint a subtle picture of a man trying to hide…

Or it could paint a garish picture of a man making no apparent attempt to conceal his existence whatsoever. Rabbit bones, cracked open with the marrow sucked out, began to litter the snow, and a certain smell began to permeate the cold air. She recognized this smell, although she wished that she didn't; decaying flesh. She swallowed her fears and trudged on, following the putrid path of bones and grayed snow to the rocky, icicle-toothed mouth of a generously sized cave. She worked on calming the visible puffs of breath escaping her lungs. Remember who you're doing this for.

At the mouth of the cave, she stopped and pressed her body flush up against the cold stone. Something wasn't right.

Voices.

Voices. More than one. There wasn't just one man in the cave.
There were three.

Turn around. Her survival instinct whispered, tugging at her heels. If the unexpected guests were civilians, she would have to come back another time. She hoped they were civilians. She swallowed and checked to make sure her chakra signature was completely hidden before stealing a glance into the cave.

Three men, sitting on the floor, talking in voices too low for her to hear. They seemed simultaneously tense and relaxed - like friends that were arguing, maybe. Two were large, one was average sized. And all three had curse marks on their necks.

Turn around. Now. Her instinct urged her, louder this time. Her heart was racing. She knew she should leave, come back when she was more prepared, or wait until she could take Kano alone.

But when would she have this opportunity again? Three targets in one place?

Prove to them they made a good choice. A different voice in her head whispered. Prove it was a fair trade. Keep him safe.

I could die. She argued with herself. And what kind of trade will that be?

So don't die. The voice wheedled, growing louder. If you die, who will be left to clean up with mess? Your friends? You're here to protect everyone. Not just him.

Sakura clenched her fists, pushing extra chakra into her fingertips, letting them buzz with nervous strength.

What are you going to do? The voice , that voice sounded like Tsunade. She knew what Tsunade would do: bust in there and break their necks and have a drink, ready to do it over again. But Sakura wasn't Tsunade.

Sakura also had already lost everything, but somehow had so much more to lose.

I'm going to fight.

She took a deep breath and curled her fingers into the rings of four kunai, two in each hand, one on her index finger and one on her little finger. She was careful not to touch the blades, as they were coated in one of Shizune's most sinister poisons. She'd spent a few weeks building up a basic immunity - it wouldn't kill her like it would someone else, but it would paralyze her for a few days. During which she would have horrible hallucinations of the veins being plucked out of her eyes like strings. She shuddered.

If you're outnumbered, take out as many of them as you can in the first swing. One of the only things Kakashi had taught her. That, and a thousand excuses for being late. And where to hide when Tsunade was on a rampage.

Focus. If you're going to die, take them with you. Three less sins for Sasuke to atone for. Three less people for your friends to have to face.

She took one last look up at the sky - clear, blue, blinding - and one last breath - shaky, scared, determined - and pitched herself and her knives into the mouth of the cave.

Two of the men were quick to react. The third was not so lucky - her knife tunneled straight through his neck, and the gargle of the man drowning in his own blood was punctuated by the wet slap of his writhing, bloody body collapsing on the floor.

The two left alive scrambled to their feet, shouting with wordless exclamations, looking around for the source of the kunai.

They didn't have to look long.

"You're going to get rabbit poisoning," Sakura said breathlessly, pointing to the raw rabbit on the cave floor. God, she said the dumbest things when she was nervous.

The remaining two men looked at each other in disbelief, faces and shirts speckled with the blood of their partner.

"I thought you said your cave was a safe place!" the smaller of the two men accused the other. Sakura assumed the larger man was Kano.

"It was," Kano growled, glancing at the now-still body on the stone floor and rolling up his sleeves before turning murderous eyes to Sakura. "You killed my friend."

"Your friend was a murderer."

"My friend nonetheless. I heard someone was asking around the mountain villages for me. Was it you?" Kano took a threatening step over the body.

Sakura tensed, her hand instinctively flitting to the remaining kunai at her hip. "Did you think no one would come looking for you? You're one of Orochimaru's experiments. You killed innocent villagers all over this country."

"And you're here to punish me for that?"

"Someone has to."

"Have it your way. It's not my fault if you get killed - you killed one of mine first. Akihito, I can take her. You head back down the mountain." He cracked his neck, rolling his head around on his thick shoulders, and the black, worm-like lesions of the curse mark began to travel across his skin, and the whites of his eyes began to blacken. He started to form symbols with his hands in a pattern that she didn't recognize.

Sakura took several steps back, her boots crunching on the snow. She had to get them out of this damned cave and into the open. She wasn't suited to fighting in enclosed spaces.

Before Kano could move, the second man lunged for her, black claws swiping at her throat. She dodged them easily.

"You smell like Konoha," the man growled, and Sakura could see that his curse mark was also expanding across his body, leaving tufts of black fur in its wake. His teeth were slowly growing, sharpening into fangs. Like Kiba, but bigger and uglier.

"I said I'll handle her!" snarled Kano, pushing the weird dog thing called Akihito out of the way.

"Why is Konoha sending their hounds after us now?" Akihito growled, ignoring the command and taking another swipe at her neck; she deflected. He was sloppy - sloppier than Kano, who aimed a blow at her gut that very nearly connected. She'd caught them off guard - they seemed to have no weapons on them. But they didn't seem to need them.

Sakura could see Kano frown as she parried another blow of devastating power from him. She returned the hit with twice the force, flinging his body into his friend, sending them both flying into the cave wall. In the same movement, she sent three of her knives flying after them. Two missed, but the third hit its target - square in the middle of Kano's chest.

To her dismay, the knife hit him with a bare thunk and fell to the ground beside him, it's tip bent and blunted from the impact.

"That was hard," Kano frowned, brushing himself off and standing up. "Not very ladylike at all, if you ask me."

"Is that your secret? You're some sort of statue?" She felt sweat beading on her brow despite the cold. Not good for a taijutsu user.

"Unbreakable skin," he grunted, cracking his knuckles. "It's not a secret."

She concentrated her energy into her ankles, springing off the ground and at the men with unnatural speeds; Kano made no attempts to dodge her blow. She drove her elbow into his clavicle with bone-shattering strength, and when the impact of her contact forced him down, she followed with a kick that landed solidly on his shoulder, sending him flying back into the stone walls of the cave.

Springing out from behind where Kano's body had just been, Akihito sunk his fangs into her left shoulder, barely missing her neck. His teeth tore through her muscles, severing sinew and crunching bone. With her other arm, she grabbed the scruff of the man-dog-thing's neck and flung him against the wall. Her left arm fell limply to her side - no feeling, no movement, blood draining fast from her subclavian, but no time to heal - Kano was back up and charging at her, and he was making hand signals she didn't recognize and -

Crack. His fist connected with her skull, ten times harder than any human fist had the right to be, and lights splashed through her vision, bright and distracting and painful. She'd let herself be distracted by trying to figure out his hand symbols, and underestimated his speed.

Sakura recoiled, leaping backward sloppily. Not good. Not good. Not good. Are you fucking kidding me? Unbreakable skin? Iron bones? Was he made specifically to defeat her one offensive talent: punching things really hard?

Breathe, Sakura. Think. Thinking had always been her strong point. No bloodline limit, but a brain and a desperate will to see the sun rise the next day. She was now squarely in the cave, in enemy territory, and there was only one exit. She needed to put some distance between them to give herself time to think of a strategy. But she was losing consciousness - blood was still flowing freely from her torn arteries and veins, and her head was pounding. She stopped the bleeding with just enough chakra to clot the blood, but dared not waste any more. If Kakashi was here, if Naruto was here, then they would… what would they do? They wouldn't need to think. They were so much stronger, so much smarter than her when it came to fighting. What would they tell her to do?

Collapse the cave. She glanced around the stone walls, trying to find a weak spot where the stone was thin. There. Toward the back, at the leftmost side, the walls were cracking.

Kano saw her notice the cracks the same moment she made up her mind to cave in the structure. He lunged for her as she lunged for the wall, charging her palm with glowing green chakra. At the same time that her fist made contact, she pushed a thin layer of chakra away from her skin, creating a momentary but strong burst of air -

The rocks tumbled around her, but bounced away from her actual body. Her impulsive shield had worked and left her standing amongst the debris that had once been a cave. The snow swirled lightly around her, and it was eerily quiet for how violently charged the air had been just moments before.

You did it. She breathed a sigh of relief. Her muscles relaxed slowly, and she directed a small amount of chakra toward her arm to rebuild her shredded veins. The architecture could wait, but the infrastructure could not. It was a good thing collapsing the cave had worked, because her air shield consumed much more chakra than she had expected. I'll work on it. She looked around, trying to determine where the bodies might be underneath the piles of debris. She took a step forward to test the stability of the rocks - not too wobbly.

A hand burst through the rubble to grab her ankle.

She stepped back frantically, driving her exhausted body backward, trying to shake the hand off of her ankle and pulling a kunai from her hip. It wouldn't let go.

Kano was still alive under the rocks. She kicked at the hand with what little chakra she had left - still allowing her some monstrous strength, but not much.

But he was strong too, and he yanked her down, pulling his body up and out of the rubble. She fell, scrambling against the jagged stones to right herself.

"You might be strong." Kano growled. "But I'm unbreakable."

A sharp elbow landed in between her shoulder blades, forcing her forehead to snap into the hard rocks. A fractured rib was forced into one of her lungs as she was pressed harder into the remnants of the cave.

Heal. Immediately she forced her chakra outward, into all of her cells, directing it to stop the damage. Not fast enough - white spots appeared in her vision, a crack in her skull bloomed, blood stung her eyes. The crack could be fixed, but if the soft brain tissue was damaged…

Wait.

"This is the best Konoha could muster to send after me? I'm almost insulted," Kano growled, stepping on her hand, crushing her bones, forcing the kunai in her hand into her skin and through the thick muscle of her palm.

He lifted her by her collar, his nose centimeters from hers. Frontal. Temporal. Occipital. Maxilla. Her mind whispered, and through the blood clouding her eyes and filling her throat, she visualized all of the parts of the skull in front of her. She only had one chance. Her breath was shallow, escaping her body in strained gasps.

"You all deserve what is coming to you. Pathetic."

Now.

With the last surge of chakra she had in her body, she rammed her forehead into his, forcing chakra back down her neck to counteract the force and keep it from breaking.

For a moment, nothing happened, and she was almost too drained to care. But then Kano staggered and released the hand holding her collar. And then he fell to the ground for the last time, eyes unseeing, heart still.

In the end, unbreakable skin and iron bones or not, his neurophysiology was the same as hers; a soft brain suspended in fluid in a hard cavity. Send it ricocheting in his own skull, and nothing but sludge remained.

She collapsed on the ground, gasping, blood falling from her lips. She fumbled with her vest, removing it and flinging it across the snow, and placed both of her hands on her chest, pumping glowing green chakra into her shredded lung and broken rib.

"Stay awake, stay awake." She muttered to herself, forcing herself to focus on knitting her torn lung together as black spots encroached on her consciousness. Slowly, her breathing became easier, and the piquant taste of blood stopped flooding her mouth with every haggard push of air from her lungs.

Finally, when she could do no more and her thoughts had deteriorated into nothing but instinctive bursts of resolve to live, she let the blackness usurp her senses.

When she woke up, daylight was glinting off of the snow. Gingerly, she turned her head; Kano's body was still there, staring into the sun. Her broken hand was aching, but she could still feel it. If she could feel it, she could fix it. Her head was pounding, and blood had crusted one of her eyes shut, but all of her limbs were still attached, and she could breathe.

She let her chakra ebb and flow from her core like the tide, circulating over her injuries, patching sarcomeres, weaving skin and muscle back together, fighting off infections that had tried to settle into her injuries during the night. She constricted the vessels in her skull and her headache gradually subsided, and the aching in her muscles dulled. It was just a patch job, but it was good enough to stand, although she swayed on her feet a little.

She burned Kano's body first, nausea settling in her stomach. If she left the bodies behind, she would lose the element of surprise. Someone would come looking for him, eventually. And they would find his body and know he was targeted, and know how he was killed. She did not know what they would make of a body with no visible injuries except a liquefied brain, but these were her instructions from the council: leave no trace.

She then dragged the other two bodies out of the rubble. They were broken and blackened - their blood had started to pool in their extremities, bruising their backs and fingers and toes - and rigor mortis, spurred by the freezing cold, had locked their joints in place. Their skulls were caved in and spines crushed. She laid them in the snow gently, closed their eyelids for the final time, and lit the tatters of their clothes on fire.

As the bodies burned, an absolute despondent desolation settled into Sakura, into the fractures and fissures of her being. Her soul felt desecrated and forsaken, stripped raw and whipped into a bloody mess. The smoke wrapped around her and cradled her body gently to the cold snowy ground, where she sobbed, forehead touching the ice and fists pounding the into the soft white. She sobbed for how close she had come to death, yes. But mostly she sobbed in mourning of her old life, the old Sakura, and in recognition of the new life she was starting. She sobbed as her new normal stared her in the face, in the form of glassy, unseeing eyes reflecting the voracious fire that she had set to erase what had once been a human being.

When she finally rose, the bodies were nothing but ashes and nothing remained of her old self but quivering scraps, forced into the corner of her newly hardened heart. There was only one thought in her mind: get stronger. She knew she had won by a mere fluke and she couldn't count on the next enemy letting his guard down. She couldn't count on anything or anyone but herself. She had no bloodline limit. No ninja companions, no family artifacts. Hell, she didn't even have a fucking weapon except for basic kunai. And she marched right into the cave of a killer.

She would have to do better. She would have to be smarter. She would have to be more prepared.

But there would be time for that tomorrow. For now, she had to get off this godforsaken mountain before any more unwelcome company came looking for anyone who was now dead; either in body or in spirit.