Previously:

The fake Naruto smirked. "Impressive that you knew..." he said, releasing the transformation jutsu in a puff of smoke.

April and Sasuke braced themselves for another attack.

"How did you know?" the long-haired grass ninja asked. "That I was a fake..."

"We knew you were listening to our conversation from under the ground," Sasuke replied coolly. "That's why I made the codeword like that."

'Huh!? That's news to me…!!' Sakura thought, completely taken aback by the revelation.

"Yeah… There's no way Naruto could remember something that long…" April added. "So you had to be a fake." She loved Naruto, but there was no getting around his poor memorization skills. "Now! Where is he?" she asked sternly, prepared to beat it out of him.

"I see… Neither tired nor ill prepared, are we?" their opponent asked with a sinister expression on his face as he removed his straw hat. "This will be more fun than I thought."

Chapter 46: Predator!!

"Uu… uugh… ouch... Naruto groaned, lying on the ground in an awkward position after being blown away by that weird wind. "Gu," he grunted, rolling over to pick himself up. "…! Huh?" he said, puzzled when he didn't see any of his teammates. "… Where's April, Sakura-chan, and that bastard, Sasuke?" His eyes widened in shock when he saw the monster that was staring down at him. "Wha… Wha…?" he stuttered as its shadow fell over him. "Hu… Hu… It's huge!!!" he yelled, staring up at the enormous snake in a combination of fear and awe. 'I… I've never seen a snake so… big…! What's up with this forest…?'

The gigantic snake tilted its head.

"!!" Naruto tensed.

WHAMM!

He managed to dodge just in time to avoid being crushed by it's deadly strike. His eyes flicked to follow its rapid movements. "Behind!? Gu!!" he grunted in pain as its strong body wrapped around him. "!!" He gasped when he realized he had misread the attack. "Tail?!!" Then, where the heck was the head!? "!" He was startled when the snake answered his question by coming up to face him with its mouth opened wide. "UWAAAAA!!!!" he screamed as the beast swallowed him whole. 'He ate me...' Naruto thought in disbelief. "Let me out!!! Damn you!!"

'I can believe it wasn't Naruto again?!!' Sakura thought, still shocked. 'Yeah, April's right… if it had been Naruto… He'd say something like 'I forgot the codeword!!'' she realized quickly.

"Where's Naruto?" April asked again, tightening her grip on her kunai.

The long-haired grass ninja smirked darkly at her. "Don't worry… I'm sure you'll be seeing him again soon..."

"…!!" Sasuke and April tensed when the enemy in front of them started to move.

'This one is too creepy...' Sakura thought, furrowing her brow as a bead of nervous sweat slid down the side of her face, getting serious. 'And where is Naruto?'

Instead of a weapon, the grass ninja held up his scroll. "You want my Earth Scroll, right?" he asked them. "Since you guys have the Heaven Scroll..." He raised the hand holding the scroll, opened his mouth, and wrapped his long tongue around it.

The three leaf genin watched with wide eyes as he forced it down his throat, swallowing it with a loud gulp.

"Now, let's begin… The battle for each other's scroll..." he said, holding his hand over his eye.

"!!" the three teammates flinched in shock.

'He means to make us cut him open to get it…!?' April thought, horrified. This guy was insane!

"With our lives on the line," the grass ninja concluded, digging his fingertips into the skin of his face, pushing down on his lower eyelid, while he glared at them.

All three of them flinched, eyes and mouths opened wide with shock and horror when they were suddenly hit by wave of violent images of their own lives being violently snuffed out. Painful lacerations… bodies eviscerated… foreheads pierced through their steel protectors by kunais. And then, it ended just as abruptly as it had begun. They stood there, frozen, but completely unharmed, and then collapsed to their knees. All of their strength had left them. They were scared stiff, too terrified to move.

'… Genjutsu…!?' April thought, mind reeling to find an answer for what had just happened. "Guu!" She gulped, almost choking on the vomit that rose from her churning stomach. She managed to keep most of it down, but Sasuke wasn't so lucky.

"Guu! Blahh!!!" he coughed, losing the full contents of his stomach to the forest floor, panting heavily.

'No… I've experienced something like this before… This is just fear… The killing intent communicated through his eyes caused us to instinctively sense our own deaths...' she thought, struggling to calm her breathing, while her whole body shuddered violently. 'Who is this guy? I haven't felt bloodlust like this since...' Her pupil's constricted, and her fingers dug into the dirt as tears formed in her eyes, and images of a man getting his brains blown out by a gun at point-blank range and a screaming woman's back flashed through her mind. There was blood on her hands. "Guu!!"

'Who is this guy?' Sasuke wondered after coming to the same conclusion as her, terrified. "April… Sakura..." he said, glancing at his teammates. "!" he gasped when April threw up, unable to hold back in the face of the second wave of terror brought on by her past trauma. "…!!" He was disturbed when he saw that Sakura was trembling too, so terrified that she had lost control of her bladder. 'This is bad… We must run...' he thought desperately. 'Otherwise… there is only death!!'

"Hehe… you can no longer move..." the grass ninja taunted them.

'Just a little bit… move!!' Sasuke thought, urging his petrified body to move his hand toward his dropped kunai. If only he could move, even just a little...! "!!" His eyes widened slightly in surprise when April slowly began to rise from her knees, gripping her kunai tightly, while shaking as she strained against her tense muscles and fear to stand.

"Stand… Stand up!!" April shouted at her teammates, glaring ahead at the dangerous enemy. "Move!! It doesn't matter if you're scared!! Do it anyway!! If we falter here, we'll die!!!" She knew exactly who he reminded her of now. This bastard… This bastard was the same as those men from eight years ago!! Back then, she had also been petrified with fear. "Move!!!"

"..." the bloodthirsty grass ninja narrowed his eyes slightly as he gazed back at them.

The instant he twitched, Sasuke activated his Sharingan to read the attack. What happened next left him stunned. Before he could even move, at the same time two kunais left the grass ninja's hand, April lunged forward and managed to successfully deflect them, charging straight at the enemy without hesitation. The grass ninja dodged her first strike by a hair and was forced to draw back to avoid a second jab. April threw three kunai to push him further back. She slid to a halt, focusing on keeping her breathing even, while she held herself in the bai jong fighting stance, a position designed to provide optimal defense and offense options. Her shaking was gone. Her hands were steady, and her eyes were sharp.

'Oh…?' their enemy thought, surprised. 'This one has already stopped trembling…' He narrowed his eyes again. Despite the terror she had just experienced, she was ready to kill him. She might be interesting after all. "How were you able to recover so fast?" he asked her.

"You… are not what I'm most afraid of..." she answered grimly. She was still scared, but not of dying. She was scared of ending up alone again. She was scared of letting the people she cared about suffer because of her own weakness. Reliving the memory of her parents' deaths woke her up. She never wanted to experience anything like that again. She wouldn't let Sasuke, Sakura, or Naruto die. She was going to protect them this time. "I won't … let you kill my friends!!! We're going to survive you… We're going to pass this test…" Memories of hanging out with her teammates and all of the fun times they had together flashed through her mind. "And we're going to go on lots more missions together…" She saw their sensei waiting for them, Kakashi's smile. "I won't let it end here!!"

"!!" Sasuke and Sakura gasped, snapping out of it when they heard those words and their own reasons to continue living flashed before their eyes, replacing the image of death.

'That's right… I...' Sasuke thought, gritting his teeth as he made himself move, remembering his goal when a familiar silhouette and with a pair of glowing red Sharingan appeared in his mind. 'Can't die here…!!'

'I… I also...' Sakura thought nervously, doing her best to pick herself up despite the fact that her body was still trembling. She wanted to live! She wanted to live with Sasuke-kun and the others!

The crease in Sasuke's brow deepened, and he frowned at how difficult it was to keep his legs steady enough to stand, unable to completely shake the aftershock of the grass ninja's brutal stare. He tightened his grip on his kunai and stabbed himself in the thigh. "Gu!!" he grunted in pain, grimacing as he pulled it out again.

"!!" Sakura gasped, so focused on the concern she felt for him that she was able to finish standing on her own.

April tilted her head slightly while keeping her eyes on the enemy, her face cast partly in shadow. She could guess what had just happened behind her after hearing the noises they made. "Sasuke..."

"I know…!!" he said, also getting ready to move. "Let's go!!" he shouted, giving her the cue to turn tail and help him guide a surprised Sakura away, each of them grabbing one of her arms so they could escape together quickly. There was no time to explain. To hesitate would mean death!

'To injure his own body to erase the feeling of fear with pain… hehe… As I thought, he's no ordinary prey…' the enemy ninja thought, licking his lips. 'That girl wasn't bad either. To think there was someone who could withstand my gaze to that extent… not mention that foot work.' Her first attacks were made clumsy by fear, but that last move to flee had been completely unreadable. It was only in the last second, when they grabbed their other teammate, that he knew what they were up to. Maybe the old man wasn't as soft as he thought he was for letting that outsider in.

"Damn you!!! Barf me out!!!!" Naruto yelled at the snake from inside its stomach. Its muscles were squeezing him so tightly that he could barely move. 'Damn it… At this rate, I'm really going to be melted,' he thought anxiously. 'How can I make him throw up?' His eyes widened when he remembered how he and Sasuke threw up after overeating during their mission in the Land Waves, and a lightbulb lit up inside his head. "Take this!! Shadow Clone Jutsu!!!" he shouted, wiggling just enough to get his hands together to form the seal, creating an explosion of clones.

The snake's struggle to keep its dinner down proved fatal when the pressure caused by the solid clones burst through its flesh from the inside out, almost completely decapitating it in the process.

Naruto panted as he climbed out of the mess and got back on his feet again. "I'm a shinobi who will become Hokage!! I can't be turned to shit in a place like this!!" he said, wiping the snake's blood and other body fluids from his face. "Ok!! Time to go find April, Sakura-chan, and Sasuke!"

The rest of his team stopped to catch their breaths as soon as they felt they had put a decent distance between them and their enemy.

April used the time to wrap a bandage around Sasuke's leg. 'This isn't good...' she thought, frowning with concern. The physical injury itself was relatively superficial, but she could tell Sasuke still hadn't completely recovered from the mental shock they received. 'Sakura's already starting to look better, but he…' April had also come to the conclusion that grass ninja wasn't an enemy they should engage, but Sasuke was too on edge. He was trying to act tough for them, but it was beginning to make him sloppy. If he had been thinking straight, he would have seen that it would have been better to punch his leg instead of stabbing it and creating a wound that would slow him down. 'And we still need to find Naruto…! A scary guy like that won't stop until he's killed us. If he's like the men who murdered my parents, he won't stop killing until he's dead. I'd rather not kill when possible, but there's no time for that. Right now, it's kill or be killed. We need to regroup and set an ambush to finish him off!'

"Sasuke-kun, are you alri—!!" Sakura started to ask, startled when he cut her off by slapping one of his hands over her mouth.

'We must run before we are found again...' Sasuke thought anxiously, looking around wildly. 'But how… How can we run away?'

'For Sasuke-kun to panic this much… I've never seen him like this,' Sakura thought, starting to get scared again.

"!" Both girls noticed a slow, sliding movement on the edge of their vision and looked up. "!!" they gasped in alarm when they saw what it was.

"Mmmm mmm!!" Sakura cried, her warning muffled by Sasuke's hand.

"Sasu—!!" April opened her mouth to warn him, but was quickly silenced by his other hand while he kept looking in the opposite direction. She wanted to reach for a weapon to defend them with, but she was worried that kind of movement would trigger an attack.

Fortunately, while she was thinking that, Sakura managed to push away the hand covering her mouth. "Sasuke-kun, snake!!!" she cried as the giant thing arched its body to attack.

Sasuke immediately whipped his head around to look, and all three of them were gone before the large serpent could strike.

April threw shurikens at it as they fled, but the snake displayed unnatural reflexes, dodging to slither up a thick branch. It turned its cold eyes on them, following their every move.

'Damn it… I was panicking so much, I didn't notice the snake…!!' Sasuke thought, gritting his teeth.

Sakura and April managed to land safely in another tree, but the snake suddenly picked up speed and launched itself at Sasuke.

"Look out!!" April shouted at him, throwing several kunais at it in an attempt to knock it off balance. They all hit their target, and the snake hissed in pain, but it was too intent on going after Sasuke to let an attack of that level stop it.

"!!" Sasuke gasped and pushed off his new perch to evade it. "!!" his eyes widened with terror when his eyes met the snake's as it opened its mouth. It sent a chill up his spine that reminded him of the grass ninja. "Uwaaa!!! Get away!!!!" he screamed, throwing a wave of shurikens at its head and down its throat.

BAM!

The snake finally fell, landing in the crook of a tree branch with a loud thud.

Sasuke landed on another branch, panting heavily.

April reached into her pouch for more kunais, thinking it might be a good idea to double-tap the dangerous creature, just to be sure. It seemed dead, but appearances could be deceiving.

"!" all three of the leaf genin gasped when part of the snakes neck started to bulge out.

Having seen every Alien movie ever made, April instinctively threw her kunais at the moving mound of flesh, but the grass ninja deflected them as he emerged through the snake's broken skin. 'He was inside…?!!'

"You guys shouldn't relax for even a moment. Prey should always be trying their best to run away… in the presence of a predator, that is..." he lectured them, licking his lips with a sinister look in his eye.

April shuddered. She should have added explosive tags to those kunais! She and her two teammates flinched in surprise when his body stretched, and he started slithering up the branch even faster than the snake. 'He's aiming for Sasuke again!!'

"!!" Sakura gasped when April launched herself forward to stop the dangerous enemy. She jumped up the branches to chase after him, but the gaps were large, and without chakra to supplement her moves, her speed suffered. 'I'm not going to make it…!' she realized with wide eyes, muscles burning as she pushed harder.

SHINK! SHUNK! SHINK! SHINK! SHUNK! SHING!!

The grass ninja flinched, grinding to an abrupt stop in order to avoid the shurikens and kunai that almost pierced his skull. "..." He looked from the weapons stuck in the branch before him to the direction they had come from.

"I'm sorry, Sasuke!! April!!" a familiar voice apologized.

"!" Sasuke gasped, whipping his head around in surprise.

Naruto grinned down at them from his high perch in another tree. "I forgot… the codeword!!"