Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
A/N: Thanks for all of your lovely reviews! Many thanks to tiffthom for BETA'ing this chapter.
Song Inspo: Way Down We Go by Kaleo
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FOUR
"Oh, Father, tell me
Do we get what we deserve?"
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Unsurprisingly, the first thing Sakura encountered upon that first step into the unknown was a tarantula to the face, and if that didn't set the scene to Orochimaru's little house of horrors, she didn't know what would.
Muffling a screech, she grabbed the terrifying creature and threw it as far away from her as she could. If there was one thing she hadn't gotten over, it was her disgust towards any and all insects.
Shino understood.
Grumbling irritably and shuddering at the phantom feel of eight hairy legs on the delicate skin of her face, Sakura descended further into the abandoned facility. Air pressure increased as she continued underground and she flexed her jaw to relieve the popping in her inner ears.
The farther she went, the darker it became until only a little bit of moonlight was reflected from the stones overhead and she reached out with a steady hand to grab an abandoned torch mounted on the wall. A quick katon jutsu set it ablaze and she blinked at the onslaught of light.
Before her were more steps leading deeper below the Earth and she strained her ears to listen for any movement. When all that reached her was the sound of the howling wind blowing through the open entrance, she relaxed minutely.
Even though she was still on her guard for traps, she didn't feel like she was about to be ambushed. The place seemed well and truly abandoned.
To her, the slow beating of her mostly dead heart seemed unbearably loud in the wake of such pervading silence. Even the sounds her heavily booted feet made as she descended were muffled by the stonework. There weren't any traces of moss on the walls the further she got from the entrance, nor were there any more creepy-crawlies or moisture in the air.
It reminded her of a catacomb. Which, knowing Orochimaru and Kabuto, it probably was.
Reaching the bottom of the steps, Sakura's torch illuminated what lay before her and she inhaled sharply.
"Shit."
Her solitary voice bounced loudly off the stone walls as she took in the seven different pathways surrounding her from all sides. Each one led to pitch and she scowled because she knew there were all sorts of traps waiting for her.
Hokages forbid Kabuto or Orochimaru make this easy for her.
But it wasn't that she was afraid of these traps—she was a legendary shinobi, she could handle traps—it was the fact that somewhere in those pathways was a blade that would inevitably stab her.
And Sakura hated getting stabbed.
Getting stabbed was part of her job description and, even though it hurt, she never used to complain about it. Hell, Sasori and Madara had both stabbed her in the gut (though she'd swear that feeling your stomach acids leak into your guts was the most agonizing thing in the world) and she had taken it all in stride.
But that was before Kabuto had fucked her whole world up.
Now…now she had to be extremely careful of anything that could slice her. Sakura grimaced at the memory of a time at the nurse's station where she'd gotten a papercut and had to hastily stuff herself in a locker until her fury and homicidal urges subsided.
Whenever she started to turn, as she liked to call it, Sakura lost all sense of humanity and she had a small window of three seconds to acknowledge the inevitable and separate herself from whoever's around her.
Hence why she stuffed herself in a locker. Zombie-Sakura was dumb enough—well, maybe not dumb, so to speak, just completely oblivious to anything other than bloodshed and food—to not simply push it open and escape.
Or so she'd hoped.
Episodes brought on by non-life-threatening situations were like seizures: they could last a few seconds or a few minutes before she came back to herself.
Thankfully, that one episode only lasted a whole minute before she stepped out of the locker the same moment a nurse walked into the room.
Poor Aiko-chan had never looked so confused.
So, the point was, Sakura hated getting stabbed because she hated the feeling of turning.
Exhaling deeply, she took a moment to steel herself against the impatience brewing under her skin. If she didn't take the time to go through each hall patiently, she'd most likely miss something and that would suck.
But maybe if luck was on her side, the first path she took would be the one to lead to Kabuto's lab.
Taking a moment to think, Sakura pursed her lips. If she were Kabuto, where would she place her lab?
Would it be the hall directly in front of her? Surely his lab would also double as a treatment facility and Sound's shinobi would know to take the direct path to get there.
Or would it be the first one on the left? At her 10' o clock. Or maybe the one all the way to the right, at her three.
A huff escaped irritably from chapped lips. Who was she kidding? She didn't know where anything was placed in this little slice of Hell.
Choosing the pathway at her three, because the exit was to her six, she stomped towards it resolutely and hoped that there weren't any death pits waiting for her.
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As luck would have it, the first hall she took led to the prisons—or rather, cages. There was also a curious absence of traps (and death pits), which would indicate that they either left in a hurry or someone had disabled them. Either way, it worked out for her.
The air smelled like rotting corpses and human waste; which made sense when Sakura's torchlight fell upon the decomposing corpses of two prisoners huddled together against the cold seeping through the walls.
Without exposure to the elements, the human body decomposes at a slower rate than normal. These two souls looked like they'd been dead for a few weeks, but the state of abandonment of this place implied that they'd probably died months ago. Their distinctly civilian yukatas were still intact and hanging off their sagging frames.
Sakura could make out their sunken features by the crackling light of the source in her hand—stricken and sorrowed in their final moments.
Her heart reached out to them. What must they have felt in this panoptic stillness? In these cramped halls where the only things that kept them from freedom were deceptively frail iron bars—knowing that they were left there to rot in the darkness for all eternity?
Did they weep for loved ones that they'd never see again? Cry out for their mothers and curse the gods who damned them? In the end, had they held onto hope of salvation?
She felt the lingering sadness and misery deep in her bones. They stifled the air around her, made her want to claw off her own skin and gasp for breath, and she hurriedly turned away from the sight.
Closing her eyes, Sakura breathed against the distress that bubbled in her chest. Death was a part of life; death was a part of her life. So why did these two bodies affect her this much?
Because they had suffered.
Because they were innocents whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because, in the end, they had clung to each other for warmth and comfort.
Because no one deserves to die afraid.
Opening her eyes and blinking against the tears, her blurred gaze landed on a closed door in front of her. Wiping her running nose with the sleeve of her cloak, Sakura took purposeful strides towards it before easing it open.
Kabuto's lab.
Bracing herself and smothering the hope for what she might find, she stepped inside and shut the door against that overwhelming anguish, determined to put the image of their hollowed faces out of her mind.
Unsurprisingly, this one room felt colder and heavier than the rest.
Holding the torchlight out in front of her, the warm glow casted shadows over the steel table placed in the center of the room and the wooden cabinets along the walls. There was a wooden desk and file cabinet in the farthest left corner of the room and she quickly made her way to it.
She resisted the desire to go for the filing cabinet first and went for the desk. Often, researchers unknowingly left important documents where they had fallen behind the drawers. Carefully placing the torch in a holder on the wall by the desk, Sakura wrenched the drawers from their places. While the drawers themselves were empty, the places behind them had a few slips of paper crumpled against the desk frame.
Pulling them out delicately, she placed them on the desk and smoothed them out with shaking hands. She swallowed against her suddenly dry mouth, a cool sweat breaking out on her lower back. While the lettering was small and the light of the torch was too dim to make out what they said, they were most definitely data sheets and Sakura had a deep feeling that whatever was there was an important piece to her puzzle.
Dipping her head beneath the desk, she felt around for any more sheets of paper and found one stuck between a crevice in the wood and the metal brackets. In her excitement, she pulled it too roughly and she cursed when the paper ripped. Reaching in again, she grabbed the ripped portion and placed it on top of the desk with its source as she stood.
Turning, in a half step she was opening the file cabinet and grabbing whatever folders and file jackets were left. There weren't many, but there was enough for hope to bloom in her chest and a smile to curl her lips. Unlike the desk, there weren't any loose paperwork in the filing cabinet—not even behind the drawers—and she moved on to the cabinets along the wall.
Disappointingly, they were all empty. There wasn't even an empty bottle or beaker left behind.
Chances were that Orochimaru told Kabuto to grab all the materials and chemicals first before taking only the most important of files with him.
Her jaw clenched; that probably meant that whatever he had left behind was irrelevant to the new Cursed Seal and Virus.
Shutting the cabinet doors forcibly, Sakura raked a hand through her tousled hair and hissed when her fingers caught on a snag. Gently undoing the knot in her short locks, she had a fleeting girly yearning for it to grow. Yes, cutting it had been an announcement to the world that she cared more for her career than her looks; but she had loved her long, silky and luxurious hair.
Funny how you realize how much you love things when you can't have them anymore.
Walking back towards the papers and files on the desk, Sakura swore that she'd grow out her hair as soon as she was back to normal—as a grand ol' fuck you to Kabuto.
Pulling a sealing scroll from her pack and carefully arranging everything nicely on its blank surface, Sakura bit her thumb and smeared it across the scroll's surface. The documents disappeared with a soft 'pop' and she grabbed the scroll before it fell to the ground and replaced it in her hip pouch.
After all, her most important items went there.
Grabbing the torch once more, Sakura turned slowly to sweep her gaze over the room one last time to make sure she got everything. Satisfied that she did, she left the lab and somehow that sadness from before wasn't as ominous when in the face of her newfound optimism.
Still sad, though.
Keeping her head turned away from all the prisoners stuck in their death throes, she focused on the sounds of her boots landing heavily on stone until she reached the end of the path. On a whim, she turned to face the mouth of the hallway, clasped her hands together (torch and all) and offered a silent prayer for those departed souls who might have lingered.
Pivoting on the ball of her foot, she made her way towards the stone steps leading out of the base with a small grin on her face. For the first time in a long time, she was excited about something!
A low moan pierced the silence of the catacombs and the lightness of her heart.
Breath catching in her throat, Sakura whirled around to stare into the darkness with wide eyes. When another terrible moan came from the same pathway she had just left, an embarrassing squeak fell from her lips.
"Oh, hell no," she breathed as she turned around to sprint up the stairs like a bat out of hell. "Fuck that."
When she made it above ground, Sakura quickly turned and shut the doors. With a fire style jutsu she learned from Sasuke when they were on good terms, she welded the doors shut before running over to grab the lone boulder on the clearing to place it on top.
Breathing heavily (which was completely melodramatic because she didn't even need to breathe), Sakura ignored that ugly little voice in her head that told her that she was doing too much because she had known, without a doubt, that everyone in those cells were dead.
Dead as doorknobs, dead like Madara, dead like the skin on Naruto's unpedicured feet.
Zombie she may be but there was no way in hell she was fucking around with ghosts.
A sudden heat warmed the toes of her boots and she looked down curiously before a slew of curses tumbled from her lips. How stupid was she to have dropped the torch in her irrational fear!
Hastily putting out what was quickly becoming a brush fire with a Suiton jutsu, the small rosette woman huffed as she began walking away from the stuff of nightmares.
Looking up at the sky as a judge of how much time she had left until sunrise, she was surprised to note that it was already peaking over the horizon. It washed the heavens in peaceful shades of gold and blues, pinks and purples.
When Sakura had been younger, back when she was naive and little and believed that friendship and bonds were forever, she had likened Team 7 to the sunrise. On the surface, the colors matched. She was clearly pink, Naruto was obviously orange, Sasuke was blue, and Kakashi was the transitioning shadows.
But it was deeper than that; to her, they were as constant as the sunrise. Just like the sunrise would always come to be, so would Team 7—her Team 7 was forever.
When it proved to be untrue, she had been unable to look at the sunrise for years.
Now though, now that Team 7 was whole again, she likened it to other things. Like the blue of Naruto's eyes when he was happy, the orange of Sasuke's proud Katon, the pink of Kakashi's cheeks when he was reading his smut, the purple of the seal on her forehead and her strength, and the transitioning shadows the color of Sai's great tigers.
Sakura loved sunrises.
Summer days were more humid in Birds Country, but she enjoyed the coolness of the wind as it caressed her cheeks and gently mussed her hair. Unfortunately, she couldn't enjoy the scent of dewy grass and cool air any longer. She had to get back home and review her new findings.
Brushing off residual dirt from her cloak, Sakura groaned unhappily at the gritty feel of sand between her fingers.
She wasn't even in Wind anymore!
This is why no one liked sand, in her grand opinion; it got into places it wasn't supposed to and stayed there. Shaking her hand free of the devil's exfoliant, she adjusted her pack tightly to her back and then leapt into the trees towards home.
If she had been paying attention, or even bothered to look back, she would have noticed that the sand followed.
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Sakura crossed the border to Hi no Kuni three days after her departure from Birds Country and felt the heat immediately. Just because she couldn't sweat didn't mean that she couldn't feel the effects of the weather, and Konoha was going through the bitchiest of heat waves right now.
She could already hear Ino-pig bemoaning her melting foundation and eyeliner.
Chuckling to herself, she stopped on a branch to remove her cloak and change out her long-sleeved mesh shirt for a short one without sleeves. Over that she zipped up a cropped red vest with a hood and made sure to zip it up only just so in the way that Ino suggested.
Actually, Ino-pig said she'd look a whole lot sexier if she got rid of the mesh shirt entirely and stuck with the vest, but Sakura was too pale for that—she'd probably blind someone. Regardless, mesh shirt or no mesh shirt, Sakura looked pretty damned badass with her tops, combat pants, and closed toe boots.
As if to bolster her confidence, she could almost hear Kiba's obnoxious voice shouting, "Official~"
Oh, wait, that was Kiba's obnoxiously loud voice.
Turning towards the sound of panting breaths and loud footfalls, she watched with a raised brow as Kiba skidded to a stop in front of her with a fanged grin.
"You look like a badass assassin from the comics, Sakura." He said with a wolfish grin, winking at her and waggling his brows. "You know, the hot ones?"
Sakura shook her head with a fond smile. "Hey, Kiba."
Looking around, she spotted Akamaru standing behind a tree with his tail tucked between his legs and she raised a brow. "What's wrong with Akamaru?"
Kiba blinked. "Huh?"
Quickly spotting the cowering Akamaru, Kiba's brow furrowed as he called, "C'mon, boy! It's just Sakura!"
But Akamaru only whined and slunk further behind the cover of the trees, his fur standing on end, and Kiba frowned.
"Is he okay?" Sakura asked, even though unease started to curl in the pit of her stomach.
Kiba shook his head, bewildered at his companion's strange behavior. "I dunno, he's never been like this…"
Kiba went over to talk to his familiar and Sakura suppressed a wince when Kiba looked back at her strangely, his eyes narrowing with unfamiliar intent and she didn't like it.
"Hey," he started slowly as he stood, his hand surreptitiously moving towards his kunai pouch, "Sakura—"
"You know what, Kiba? I've really gotta go make this report and I can't keep Naruto waiting so I'm justgonnagobye."
Leaping into the trees, Sakura ignored his affronted shout and sprinted as fast as she could towards the Hokage tower. She flashed her hitai-ite to the gate guards who nodded her in and when she made it to the tower, she threw her mission report at a sleeping Naruto's head before speeding home with the blonde's, "Welcome back, Sakura-chan!" at her back.
When she made it to her door, Sakura's paranoia took form when she wrenched it open with a flourish, closed it with a bang, then locked all four of her locks, checked the traps on her windows, and made sure that her 'food' scrolls were hidden.
It wouldn't do to have Kiba sniffing around her apartment, and that look in his eyes made her suspect that he'd do just that.
Everyone knew that Kiba was a conspiracy theorist to the highest degree. When Orochimaru first appeared to them as Genin, he had been droning on and on about the existence and proof of lizard people for weeks. Then during the war when the dead came back to life, he had been the first to shout: "I fucking knew zombies were real!"
He was sorely disappointed when said zombies didn't try to eat anyone; but Sakura was sure that if he even got a whiff of the fact that she did, he'd be spreading rumors and talking about it in every bar in Konoha to anyone who would listen.
He'd probably try to kill her, too.
Oh, God.
Kiba would probably try to fucking kill her!
Sakura suddenly felt sick, and she quickly plopped down onto her ugly couch to place her head between her knees.
No, no. Kiba wouldn't try to kill her—he was her friend! They fought, bled, and cried together! Surely that had to count for something. Surely he wouldn't lead a mob of people bearing pitchforks and torches to her door, right?
Oh, gods. She was too young to be having crises like these.
Sakura sat on her couch with a kunai in her hand for about thirty minutes, certain that Kiba would come pounding on her door and demanding answers, but when those thirty minutes went by and nothing seemed forthcoming, she finally let herself relax.
Sighing, the tension left her shoulders as she walked to her bathroom. All she wanted was a shower and a nice meal with plenty of hot sauce and a battery acid drink. Then maybe she'd be able to sleep for once and go over those files with a clear head.
Sakura gasped. The files!
In all her excitement and worry she had forgotten about the files! Anticipation made her skin tingle and her fingers twitch, but the rational side of her said that she'd be able to go over the files tomorrow and compare her research to what Kabuto's notes said.
The stubborn part of her, the one that was solely Inner Sakura but not really because Inner didn't exist anymore, whined that she didn't even need to sleep so she could just do everything right now!
Her mind said yes, but her body odor said no.
That was one thing Sakura wished would have changed: the fact that she still smelled after a while. Was it illogical to wish that a girl could smell like daisies all the time?
Pouting, Sakura started stripping on her way to her bathroom (while griping about getting changed for nothing since she came straight home) and the hot water felt amazing once it touched her tensed muscles.
After the shower, she paused in front of the mirror and contemplated her reflection in a purely aesthetic fashion. Her eyes were too large for her face, her nose small and pert, her skin way too pale for a normal human being, and her lips were pouty and, without lip stain, also pale. Her breasts were supple like her hips (and yes she'd heard that rumor about her being flat-chested, which was a load of bull because guys always conveniently forget the existence of chest bindings), and her legs long and lean.
She had a phenomenal ass and a great personality, and it pissed Ino-pig off to no end to know that she was single.
Which, from a purely logical standpoint, would not be in her best course of interests right now. But she had to admit that life got pretty lonely sometimes. All of her friends had either gotten married and were starting their own families while she was stuck in limbo.
Not only did it sting, it chafed.
But it motivated her to keep on her pursuit for a cure. The information was out there somewhere—she just needed to get her pale hands on them.
Dressing quickly in one of Kakashi's old shirts and fuzzy socks, Sakura cursed sleep to Hell and headed to the kitchen where she heated up some instant noodles, tossed in some brain matter, and topped it all off with a liberal dose of hot sauce before taking a bite.
Balancing her bowl and pre-made drink that she grabbed from the fridge in one hand as she walked to her office, Sakura reached behind her and swiped the hot sauce off the counter as an afterthought.
You could never have too much damn hot sauce.
Settling everything down on her desk and hissing when some broth spilled over the rim onto some patient case files, the petite woman wiped it with a stray napkin before rushing over to her discarded hip pouch and grabbing the scrolls within it.
In true Sakura fashion—well, the new Sakura, not the old one—she had forgotten which one contained her files. Two empty scrolls and a heap of dirty underwear later, Sakura found the scroll she was looking for.
Triumphant, she laid all the files and paperwork before her, careful to avoid bumping into her noodles. As she slurped on something she once would have gagged at the thought of, she flipped through pages and pages of data.
Within twenty minutes, she was ready to pull her hair out and go on a man-hunt.
The files contained nothing.
She was right; there was a reason why Kabuto left all of this crap behind and it was because it was all a load of outdated bullshit.
Most of the files talked about the necrotizing agent in Orochimaru's arms—which, admittedly, was an interesting read—and the rest were files on the effects of starvation, dehydration, and hypothermia on those with the Cursed Seal of Heaven.
The Cursed Seal of Heaven from ten years ago. Sasuke's Cursed Seal.
Something in her broke a little at reading the collected data. Though she wasn't sure if the mentioned test subject was Sasuke himself, the thought that it could have been still made her heart ache. After all, Sasuke would have subjected himself to anything for even a small ounce of power back then.
Even the loose sheets of paper had nothing of value to her.
A few of them had the names of the civilians Kabuto and Orochimaru (would it make her unprofessional to refer to the two of them as Satan's Ballsack? She didn't think so) had taken as test subjects for different types of poisons. Most of them were materials lists for some type of chemical agent or maybe even poison, but just to be safe, Sakura kept them separate from the rest.
They didn't mention Hashirama or Zetsu, but she wouldn't put it past Kabuto to give them some type of codename to deflect any spies he might have had.
Defeat was already settling wearily into her bones and she ran a tired hand down her face. Another dead end, another wasted trip in a place she didn't even have to go to. Was this what her life was becoming? A series of dead ends and trips that lead to nowhere?
There was one more sheet of paper left—the ripped one—and Sakura reached towards it with the type of resignation people felt when they knew they were playing to lose.
Holding it close to her face, Sakura blinked blearily at the characters until they started to make sense, and when they did she just about peed.
It was data on the virus.
Or how Kabuto liked to call it: The Serum.
Licking suddenly dry lips, Sakura straightened and hastily grabbed her journal to jot down notes, her eyes scanning each ounce of information and research written on this one slip of salvation.
Kabuto hadn't written much, only observation of the changes brought by administering the pathogen by blood. In his studies, he noted that the serum couldn't be transferred by contact nor through being in the immediate area and seemed to be transmittable only through contact with the host's body fluids.
That made sense; most bloodborne pathogens were only transmittable that way. Other ways too—like sexual secretions and what not. But this was much worse than the AIDS virus; the AIDS virus didn't make you want to go murder a whole village.
Besides, AIDS was curable in the wake of innovative medical ninjutsu. This was not.
The physical description of his test subject matched that of her own until they veered off into the grotesque: cells growing and multiplying rapidly to form highly contagious tumors with the tendency to burst and transmit noxious gas, and the loss of cognitive reasoning and self-control.
Basically, in layman's terms, they turned into bonafide movie zombies—but uglier and a whole lot more dangerous.
But this was only one case, she didn't have the files for the rest—if there were even more out there.
It stumped her, though. If this was the same virus Kabuto had infected her with, why hadn't all of this happened to her? What, besides her Byakugou Seal, made her so special?
Her eyes scanned the page hungrily, searching for something she must have missed until they landed on a little post note at the bottom of the page.
After the failure of our sole recipient of the Test 3-Serum, Orochimaru-sama ordered I focus on the Basic-2 and the CS-2 serums as they were the two that showed most promise. It was disappointing that our most innovative and pioneering serum had been unsuccessful, for I had promised that it would have and he was most displeased.
However, the B2 and CS-2 serums are proving to be a success with few mishaps. These grotesque features caused by the CS2-Serum are nonconsequential when taking into consideration the strength and power manifesting in the subject. I am hesitant to annotate such developments on paper, but without a trigger, recipients of the CS2-Serum are more spectacular than I could have ever hoped for.
B2 recipients are more likely to attack without warning and die quickly with little effort. Even if they are not meant to last, they are merely a means to an end.
I personally believe that the CS-2 serum will be the culmination of our hard work.
The day they are perfected will be a joyous one, indeed.
Sakura sat back with wide eyes and a breathy whisper of "fuck" falling from her lips.
Then she repeated it three more times with conviction because fuck.
Kabuto had more variations of the virus, more unique formulations and chemical makeups than her own, and if she was sure of anything, it was that these two—the B2 and CS2 viruses—were even more dangerous than she could imagine.
She also had a feeling that the mention of the sole recipient of the Test 3-Virus was in reference to herself, and while it felt nice to finally have a name to what was coursing through her veins and altering her DNA, it also made her worry that he'd thrown out the data to her case.
She personally never kept failed data unless told to; and it seemed that Kabuto nor Orochimaru had plans to try the T3-Virus again.
Glancing at the post note again, her eyes narrowed at the names of Kabuto's new viruses. What could he mean by Basic and CS? She was intelligent enough to know that Test meant her own virus had been just that: a test.
Leaning her elbows onto the desk and cradling her head in her palms, Sakura thought long and hard about anything Kabuto could have said to her to give her an idea of what his sneaky squirrel brain could have meant by that.
He had spoken of White Zetsu's and Hashirama's cells in combination to her Byakugou seal, and then the newly developed Cursed Seal...and Sakura nearly slapped herself in realization.
The three components to her virus were White Zetsu cells, Hashirama's cells, and the chakra contained and controlled in her Byakugou seal. Therefore, she could logically infer (or rather, guess, because there were only two people on this god given Earth that could manifest the Yin seal) that the two components to the basic virus were White Zetsu cells and Hashirama cells; and CS could only stand for Cursed Seal in combination with WZ and H cells.
Sakura's nostrils flared. "Well, shit."
Kabuto and Orochimaru, as per their modus operandi, were out making monsters again.
If she was right, it was the White Zetsu cells that made her want to eat people and Hashirama's cells were the ones that induced cellular growth. Without anything to balance them out, they were simply ugly, toxic, and incredibly dangerous cannibals.
An awful, cavernous pit formed deep, deep in her belly and heart as she thought of how many test subjects there were. How many were successful...how many weren't?
Suddenly, that low moan in Birds Country didn't seem like a ghost…
Focusing on the page's header, she tried to make out identifying details—numbers, names, anything—but found that the characters were cut off.
Glad that she had the foresight to also grab the torn piece of paper rather than leave it behind, Sakura hastily searched for it but quickly became frustrated when she couldn't find it among her clutter.
Growling and very close to sweeping everything off her desk, she spotted a piece of paper under her untouched cup and she gingerly picked it up. Her lips tightened into a white line at how drenched in moisture the paper was, but there was nothing she could do that didn't require patience so she fitted it to where it had been torn from.
Her mouth felt like cotton had taken residence and absorbed the moisture right out of her as her vision tunneled on the digits written innocently on the missing piece of paper as if they didn't just make her life ten times harder.
As if they didn't just drape a big sack of weights over her shoulders and tell her she was on her own.
That number just changed everything; because now it wasn't just about her anymore, it was about the future of the rest of the world—her loved ones' futures.
Because somewhere out there, Kabuto and Orochimaru were playing God and creating monsters.
Because this sheet was part of a CS2 case numbered #83 and was dated seven months ago.
Gods help her.
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tbc
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