It's been four months.
Sakura is feeling herself plateau.
She stands across from Guy, chest heaving, and he grins at her, too many white teeth in his smile.
"Our spar today has been Most Youthful, Pseudo-Student!" He's bleeding from a cut on his forehead. There's dried blood by his mouth. "But I would understand if you were too tired to continue!"
Sakura has learned recently that Guy's name for himself—the Glorious Green Beast of Konoha—is inspired by the rest of the world's name for him.
The Mad Green Beast of Konoha.
Every time she hits him, she sees it, when he looks up at her from where she has forced him to a single knee (she's never gotten him on his back or hands and knees so far), and, well—she hasn't told anyone, but when she met Kurama, saw him smile, his smile reminded Sakura of Guy, when he looks up at her after she's punched him to the ground—when he says Excellent Job, Very Youthful—and then, again.
Sakura vanishes into a cloud of petals, and his eyes track her easily. She swaps behind him, and then back a moment before he snatches the petal she is out of the air.
He charges forward, and she transforms back into herself, dodging punches he hasn't made yet, harassing his guard with punches that even with her newfound super-strength aren't hard enough to break his guard. He kicks, a mean slash of green, but she sees it coming, sees the opportunity. She swaps behind him, drives her fist into his side, letting her chakra explode from her fist—a
Although he grunts in pain, he doesn't go down, while her entire form is shattered, her own fist flying back from her own punch, her body tossed back, and he is there, punching her into the ground.
Sakura hits the ground with a deafening sort of crack she only sort of manages to shield with chakra, and she turns on her side, hacking and coughing into the grass beside her. (No blood, which is good—if there's blood, Guy will make her go to the hospital.)
She glances up at him, and there's that stupid smile again.
She growls, heaves herself to her feet, and throws herself back at him.
Jab, dodge, knee, dodge dodge block, cross at full strength, but he dodges her easily, his counter forcing her into a petal and then catching her when she swaps with a petal behind him.
He releases her, and she snaps back into herself.
She stomps irritably at the ground, cracking the earth a little more.
He moves this time, a punch she dodges before he starts into a maze of knees and kicks and elbows and headbutts that has her dipping and dodging back until she has nowhere to go, forced to swap with a petal across the clearing. He body-flickers after her, only a hair slower than her, even though he's being forced to travel the distance. She pops back into herself, blocks his punch, swaps behind him, taking advantage of his pause to plant her feet properly, pull her body into proper alignment so her own punch doesn't break her, and drive her fist into his side.
Her fist crashes into his side, and a sharp crack echoes through the clearing.
A crack which is neither Sakura's arm breaking, nor Guy's ribs breaking—a sound not unlike two blocks of concrete slamming into each other, then both falling away, unbroken.
Before her, Guy's entire side glows with chakra.
He has not moved an inch.
There's that stupid grin again, followed quickly by a flash of green that sends her retreating to the pond, the surface not even rippling under her feet, and Sakura grinds her teeth.
So—as you might be able to tell—Sakura has a problem.
She's not strong enough.
It burns something deep inside of her, because her last punch was perfect—she couldn't get more power unless she was willing to start breaking herself.
The problem isn't her chakra control—she could easily blast out enough chakra fast enough to literally tear Guy a new one, but if she does that, all that force comes back at her, too. The problem here is Sakura's literal strength. She already has her body maximally reinforced with chakra—there's nothing to the chakra reinforcement technique but chakra density—no technique, no way to leverage her chakra control to her advantage. If Guy has the time to do it, he can reinforce his body just as well as she can.
Better, in fact, considering he has at least triple her reserves, and he's working with a body which can take more punishment to begin with. (Chakra-reinforced paper tears before a chakra-reinforced boulder cracks.)
It doesn't matter how much chakra she can throw out of her fist or how fast she can do so if she has to be on the other side of that blow.
Theoretically, one possible way to work around this is to not be on the other side of the blow. Instead of pushing the chakra out from her own body, she's tried creating an orb of chakra, and make the chakra all push itself away from that single, central point.
Translation: instead of punching chakra, she could throw chakra bombs.
Great idea.
Doesn't work.
(Yes, she's tried it.)
Here's the problem—chakra control falls off as the square of the distance between a user and their chakra. Sakura has the chakra control needed to blow a hole in Guy's defenses when she's forcing the chakra out of her fist, using her own body to ground that force, but at a half an inch (half an inch!), she can only make a chakra bomb as strong as the punch she just gave Guy. A foot, and she's just making a normal punch. Any more than that, and it gets completely hopeless.
There's a reason this technique is said to require perfect chakra control—it's hard. It requires controlling a reasonably large amount of chakra to move very quickly in exact synchrony.
Sakura would like to repeat: it's hard.
The distance between her and the chakra bomb should, in theory, dissipate some of the force, let her punch the other person harder than her punch is… well, punching her back, but the exact math of the thing (which, yes, Sakura has done), almost entirely erases it. (She's working with a force emanating from a point, and she cares about the total force on not just a point but over an entire surface a fixed distance from the point, blah blah blah whatever.) She does get a bit of a benefit, but it's not enough to justify how much harder it is to perform.
(Sakura spent a whole week on this, and got nowhere. She's pretty mad about it.)
Sakura flicks her fingers angrily at the memory.
The other solution is, if she can't hit harder, hit faster. The one advantage her chakra control affords her with regards to the chakra reinforcement technique is speed. She can reinforce her body faster than Guy can.
Except—there's the second problem.
Banging her head into the brick wall that is Guy, Sakura has discovered a problem with the Hidden in the Petals technique. It wasn't a problem for Sakumo, but Sakumo killed with a jutsu, channeled through a blade—starting the jutsu as a leaf, and unleashing it the moment he was human—but Sakura can't do that.
With the stresses she needs to put on her body to punch Guy without throwing herself around or breaking herself, her form has to be perfect. Her form has to be perfect, and her transformation jutsu just isn't good enough to get her into that perfect form—after breaking her transformation jutsu, she has to take a moment to fix her form, set her feet. It isn't very long—no one else would notice—but against Guy, it might as well be an eternity.
This wouldn't be a problem if she had the Hiraishin! As long as her form started perfect, it would end perfect—she could start a punch in one place, teleport, then finish that same punch—but controlling the exact positioning of your body after breaking the transformation technique is… not something she understands.
It's not something even Sakumo understood. You generally come out of the transformation technique in sort of kind of the pose you want to, through methods he never uncovered (because he didn't need to). All of Sakura's efforts to break her transformation technique into the perfect form have come to naught.
She doesn't even know where to start.
So: Hiraishin would solve her problem.
But nooo.
It's too dangerous, says Kakashi.
Wait until you're a jounin, says Kakashi.
Even though she knows he's gonna make her do something stupid like beat Guy before letting her!
So, here she is.
Rock to her right, hard place to her left.
The unknowable void of what on earth happens to your body during the transformation technique, yawning before her.
She henges her hand into a cloud of limbs, turning it inside out into talons, tentacles, mouths, and teeth—and then collapses it back into her hand in a little fidget that has the upside of making Kakashi look vaguely sick. (Guy, of course, has never even flinched.)
He's waiting for her, still smiling.
She's missing something.
She has to be.
If she could just ask Tsunade, but nooo, Tsunade is grumpy and selfish and won't teach people apprenticed to other people.
(Then what was the Closed Loop technique, huh, Tsunade?)
Sakura looks down at her hands, clenching them into fists and then releasing them again.
She looks down at her hands, and she remembers Tsunade, flicking Jiraiya in the forehead so hard she literally threw him across the room.
She blinks.
That… she hadn't thought anything of it at the time—obviously chakra-impulse strength would let you do that, but—
No!
No it wouldn't!
That should have broken Tsunade's finger! Chakra impulse strength doesn't protect you against breaking yourself.
That should have broken Tsunade's finger.
It should have.
But it didn't.
Actually, wait—
Sakura has seen Tsunade fight before.
She saw Tsunade break a ninja's block with a single finger, she saw Tsunade kick someone into the wall while mid-air, her body impossibly still.
Sakura blinks.
She was thinking like she had before she had inverted. She's seen Tsunade fight before, which means she can see Tsunade fight again.
Sakura pulls about twenty limbs from her body, and shoves them into the first memory of that fight she can find—which turns out to be a red-eyed black toad a couple hundred miles to her left.
For the second time, Sakura watches as Tsunade erupted from nothing before her, punches one of the ninja in front of them both before her feet touch the ground, and then turning and kicking the other, also before her foot touches the ground.
Two and a half seconds of memory—between Tsunade erupting, fully formed, and two Root ninja thrown unconscious (or maybe dead) across the stone floor.
She reaches the end, watches it again.
When Tsunade punches the first ninja, a fine web of chakra is laced around her knuckles, spreading all the way up her arm, down through her torso, and her legs before it spreads down from her knees, through the empty air, and then across about ten square feet of the floor beneath her the moment before chakra explodes from her knuckles.
Sakura has to take a moment.
What she had felt Isogashii use was… nothing like this.
Isogashii fought low and steady, spreading her stance and keeping her form tight, so that her punches wouldn't break her form. That's what Sakura has been doing, because that's what she thought the technique was!
She's never been more wrong.
When Tsunade makes that kick, a web of chakra flows down from the knee of the leg she has pointed towards the ground—adhering her to the ground, even though she's still more than a foot above it. The moment her foot connects with the root ninja's side, that web extends to wrap around Tsunade's foot as well, protecting it from the sheer power that sends the root ninja flying.
Sakura watches the whole fight again, seeing (or well, chakra sensing, whatever) when she hits a Root ninja's block with a single finger, a tiny web spreading over her entire body, down into the floor, making her finger as good as a fist. When she's in the middle of the air, falling too slowly, but still faster than she should, Sakura sees the web of chakra beneath her dragging her out of the air.
With each of Tsunade's blows, a web of chakra blooms under her skin to take the force of it, and then to dissipate it into the ground. There is hard muscle under Tsunade's skin, stronger than Sakura's, she is certain, but not even Guy's ridiculous, decidedly inhuman muscles could take those kinds of forces, and it doesn't matter, because Tsunade doesn't need to take the force of her blows—her chakra and the earth itself takes them for her. Getting struck by someone who has properly mastered chakra impulse strength, Sakura realizes, must be like having the Hokage mountain dropped on you—brutal, completely unforgiving, and decidedly inhuman.
Sakura had thought that chakra-impulse strength was a technique to be used in tandem with the chakra reinforcement technique.
She's never been more wrong. It completely replaces it. Why reinforce yourself when you can simply offload all of that force onto something else?
And here Sakura had thought she had understood why this technique was said to require perfect chakra control. She had thought about how hard it was to just get all of her chakra going in the same direction at the same time. That is the least interesting and easiest part of the technique.
Remember what Sakura said about chakra control getting harder as the square of the distance between the user and the technique?
There are lines of Tsunade's web of chakra that are ten, twenty feet away that don't break under the force of a punch that can shatter stone.
Yeah.
Thankfully, though this is not a technique that is limited by her body, or even yawning void of knowledge before her about the transformation technique. This is a technique defined entirely by raw chakra control.
Sakura fits herself back into her body, takes a deep breath, and releases it. She opens her eyes to meet Guy's, and matches him grin for grin.
What was it Kakashi said?
Don't sharpen all your kunai—
Sharpen one until it can cut the world in two.
Sakura charges, ducking under a punch, blocking a knee, punching into his dodge, her form off, one legged, and he blocks.
She spreads a web of chakra out from her foot, up through her torso, and out to her fist, and—
The web breaks, and Sakura's world goes black with pain.
When the world resolves itself again, she's on her knees, her right arm clenched in her left, tears in her eyes.
"Very youthful!" Guy declares, hand on her shoulder. "Next time, we will work on how to do it without breaking your arm!"
Out of the corner of her eye, Sakura sees Guy's left hand hanging, limp and faintly discolored at his side, and she smiles through her tears.
In the aftermath of it all, Sakura is on her bed, arm healed but under orders not to punch anything for a week, and she is still grinning with her whole face.
Gamami, sitting beside her on her bed, snorts.
The stupid human in her chakra is loud, but only just barely non-verbal.
(Gamami is in Sage mode, because she's been trying to perform the mind-inversion technique since Sakura managed it by accident. That cold pit of envy is still there, simmering beneath her skin.)
(It's fine.)
(They're still friends.)
(This all means she isn't actually helping Sakura in spars anymore, but—)
(That's okay.)
(She isn't really that much help anymore, anyways.)
Two days after Sakura broke her arm breaking Guy's, Sakura bites off the end of a couple million tentacles, and only half of her mind breaks.
She fits herself into her body, looks down at her hands. She opens her hands, closes them.
She runs through a quick form, three different henges, two replacement techniques, and a clone.
She returns to her mind, and her mind is still half-broken.
It is, however, half-whole.
Four months.
(Her mind finishes healing, and Sakura's intuitive knowledge of the location of her memories and her emotions return to her.)
(Four months, and she is nowhere near done.)
Jiraiya is gone, but not as much as he used to be. He comes back, every couple of weeks. He drops by to see her sometimes, but mostly… mostly he drops by to see Naruto.
Sakura sees them around the town, tries not to interfere.
(The last time she saw them, Jiraiya's eyes were clear of the Seal of False Self.)
(When Sakura stopped and gaped as he and Naruto walked past her with a nod, he turned back to her with a smirk.)
(He flicks her jaw closed with a wind jutsu and called back—)
(Close your mouth, kid.)
(You'll catch flies.)
Over the months, she watches as Naruto's expression when he is with Jiraiya goes from angry to guarded to fake-happy to actually happy.
They're with Iruka sometimes, but mostly not.
Sometimes, they're at the third training ground, because it's tradition.
The Second Hokage to the Third Hokage to Jiraiya to Minato to Kakashi to her.
And now, also, to Naruto.
The clearing has started developing some very conspicuous holes that Jiraiya only sometimes wipes away with earth jutsu.
Sakura sees Naruto sometimes, outside of that.
She and Ino are no longer required to watch Naruto, make sure he doesn't go too foxy on them, and doesn't start eating people's livers, but they really did become friends.
(They're actually forbidden from watching Naruto for foxy cannibalism.)
(Leave it to me, Tsunade told her.)
(That's my job.)
(The At this point, you couldn't stop him, if worst comes to worst goes unsaid.)
(Naruto now has all of the nine-tailed demon fox's chakra at his fingertips—if he's willing to go insane with bloodlust, he can bring it all to bear.)
(Sakura is, despite her best efforts, still a chuunin—she can't beat the nine-tailed demon fox in human form.)
(Not… yet.)
She sees Naruto, sometimes. Not as much as Ino, but sometimes. He's kind of like a leech. The harder you try to pull him away, the more he sticks to you.
(Sakura and Naruto do not talk about what she saw in his mind, what Kurama said to them both, what her presence in his mind meant.)
They spar, once.
Sakura wins.
(Of course.)
(She's a chuunin.)
But she has to beat him back and forth across the training ground for three hours before he finally starts staying down.
The only way she can think of bringing him down any quicker would be to snap his neck, and… no.
Orange chakra courses through his veins like water, and his bruises and broken bones heal and again and again and again he comes up, runs at her, until finally, he doesn't get up.
(He still could, though.)
(He just doesn't.)
After that, he constantly follows her around, trying to wheedle her for training. She explains that actually, none of the things she does are useful for him. (Because he can use real jutsu.) He doesn't listen to her, so she runs away, drop-kicks him at the Hokage monument, and transforms into random civilians to make him leave her alone.
Sometimes, Ino and Sakura and Naruto get ramen at a tiny little shop Sakura didn't know existed until she met Naruto.
Sakura takes a deep breath, and opens her eyes to the blue sky above her.
Kakashi is late, because he's somehow tied being late into his self-identity. Why couldn't he have integrated a good habit into his self-identity?
Being a nice and helpful person, for example.
But noooo.
It's being late.
She can feel him in the Hokage Tower. Probably getting debriefed from the S-class solo mission he got back from yesterday.
It was an assassination mission, probably. His Hiraishin can do a lot of things, but in peacetime—
It's an assassination technique.
Sakura closes her eyes, sinks down into her half-broken mindscape. She looks down at her single severed tentacle, already repairing itself—tiny, smaller tentacles leaping from the severed end and slowly rebuilding it.
She slides down the broken hallway before her, careful to avoid the mind-melting empty spaces. She stops before a door with Kakashi's name chiseled into the white wood, and disregards the way blood drips from the gashes.
She pushes it open, and there is nothing beyond the door but madness.
She's not so sure this is possible, anymore. Learning her her coils, her tenketsu, her cells, had been trivial in comparison. They were physical—they were real.
This… this isn't. This is all of her feeling for Kakashi, her love and her irritation and her jealousy and her hate and—
All of it.
She had learned the rest of her mind by finding alternative methods of—the room before her snaps into comprehensibility—winding her way through her own mind, spending hours upon hours understanding how the pieces of her mind that represented her body moved, how they fit into her mindscape.
Sakura submerges herself in the irritation she's currently feeling at Kakashi's tardiness, takes a good, long look at the room she's in from a million different vantage points before she slides one of her mouths around the end of tentacle and bites down.
The room shatters into madness again, but she watches it happen, watches how nothing has changed, how all the points she had been staring at must mean what they used to mean, even if she can't understand them anymore. She tries to link the mindless cacophony she sees with what she remembers, and—
Something settles just that little bit into place.
Then the world twists, and everything Sakura remembers becomes moot as she's dumped into the surface of a black sun. Sakura sighs a million mouthed sigh, and opens her eyes to Kakashi's incredibly displeased face.
"Sakura," he sighs. "Why are you like this?"
She might (might) have used the transformation technique to turn into a corpse. Specifically, her corpse. Body stiff, skin a blueish white, cheeks sunken. Combined with the death aura effect of the Hagoromo's direct-delivery technique, it's quite the impressive illusion!
She smiles at him, breaking the henge.
"That's what you get for being late. I have to entertain myself somehow, Kakashi."
He sighs, beckons for her to stand up, and she does, willing her mind to regenerate that severed tentacle just that little bit faster.
It doesn't help, just like always.
Before her, Kakashi does not bring out a book.
"So, can I be a jounin yet?"
"How can you be a jounin if you can't even beat me?" he asks, smiling smugly.
Sakura narrows her eyes, and he ducks before she can punch him in the head from behind.
Sakura would like to note!
Kakashi is like.
Third strongest ninja in the village?
Fourth?
Tsunade.
Jiraiya.
Kakashi/Guy.
(Depends on who you ask—they both claim the other is stronger, because they're both incredibly difficult.)
Point is.
There are a lot of jounin weaker than Kakashi.
Why can't Sakura beat them?
"I know what the test is, Kakashi. I can pass it."
Kakashi hums, not answering her.
"Why do you even want to be a jounin?" he asks, body-flickering and burning eight Hiraishin into the ground in an irregular pattern across the clearing. Sakura pulls off her fang necklace and tosses it to land around Gamami's neck where she's meditating by the pond.
"Yes," she hisses when she doesn't miss, and Gamami flickers her chakra irritatedly at her.
"Do you want to have a genin team? They tried to force one on me, but don't worry, adorable student of mine, I failed them."
Sakura glares balefully at him, conjuring a cloud of petals and distributing them evenly across the clearing.
Kakashi destroys about a hundred of them with a wind jutsu, because he's the worst.
"I'm strong enough to be a jounin," she says. "So I want to be a jounin."
He hums, and then the humor drips out of his face.
"You're going to have to beat me, first," he says.
They've had this argument before.
They'll have it again.
Sakura spawns ten clones of herself around Kakashi, because unlike Guy, Kakashi can't distinguish her clones from her actual body, and spreads a couple thousand chakra strings in a web through the leaves of the clearing, because Kakashi can't see those, either.
Kakashi activates his Sharingan.
See.
Kakashi seems to think he's weaker than Guy.
Sakura doesn't know where he got this idea.
If you ask Sakura her Konoha ninja rankings, it's definitely—
Tsunade.
Jiraiya.
Kakashi.
Guy.
The problem with Kakashi is that he's fast.
Where Guy was durable and strong, Kakashi is just so, so fast.
His Hiraishin is instantaneous, now. He arrives at the same time he vanishes. The flash of chakra that used to foretell his movement now arrives with him. Not only that, he seems to decide on his destination within whatever weird space he enters to teleport (meaning he must have more time in there than she does, see: his hiraishin being literally instantaneous). Not only that, he can attack mid-body-flicker, his Sharingan giving him the vision to see counter-attacks and react to them. (He's learned The Third's chakra feints, just for her—which isn't speed, but is super obnoxious, and she does hate it.)
Proper chakra impulse strength grants her strength, but not speed. She still has the same speed limit as she did before—the webs of chakra she weaves protect her body from the forces she exerts upon the world, but if she wants to move her limbs faster, there's nothing it can do to protect her delicate human flesh from that force.
(Except the chakra reinforcement technique, but she's at the end of that.)
So:
She's too slow.
She needs to get faster.
And oh yeah.
Also.
He knows every jutsu that ever been used against him, including—
The clearing is suddenly suffocated in a corrosive chakra cloud, and all of Sakura's clones and chakra strings break. Her leaves slowly start to wither.
Kakashi raises an eyebrow at her.
He started doing this last week.
She'd been hoping he'd stop.
Guy can fight Kakashi using only his fists, but Sakura really can't.
She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes. Kakashi doesn't attack her because he's uh—you know—not eleven.
(Sakura is, so shut up.)
Now, unfortunately, the jutsu might not look it, but it's an earth jutsu. Because something something makes the air heavier?
Something?
Look, Sakura has no idea.
She would, however, like to put money on the idea it is because the universe hates her.
You know, because her primary elemental nature is water.
Weak to earth.
Sakura tries to spread a chakra string wreathed in a protective lightning sheath between her fingers. It sputters, and dies.
Her clones are a lost cause (clones cannot be infused with elemental chakra, unless you go full elemental clone, which is basically a totally different thing, because jutsu suck), but theoretically, if the Suffocating Horrible Jutsu was something like Fire, then she could easily make water chakra strings, and they wouldn't break.
Sakura frowns, and Kakashi laughs because he's smug and super mean.
"You'd have to lead people, too," he says. "Think of what a pain that would be. Learn everyone's names and—"
Sakura launches herself at him, spreading her chakra over half the clearing to keep the ground from buckling under her feet. She's halfway to him when he disappears. She can't feel the end of his Hiraishin, because it's completed in not-space, but she feels him the moment he reappears, in the second-closest Hiraishin seal. (He picks Hiraishin seals randomly, weighting towards the two closest, but occasionally appearing at the more distant ones.) She ducks under a kunai, once again spreading her chakra through the ground to let her pull herself down faster than gravity would let her, flings herself back at him.
She throws six lightning strings at the petals near the closest two Hiraishin, hopes they'll hold for long enough, and he teleports to the kunai directly above her, faux-Rasengan in hand. His chakra sings two different paths to her, but one of them feels just a little wrong, and she rockets herself up directly into it, intending to drive her fist straight into his chest.
She picks the wrong one, takes an airball to the face instead.
Kakashi laughs. "—and their abilities, let me tell you, it's more trouble than it's worth."
His Sharingan stops spinning, and his corrosive air jutsu recedes as he takes a moment to recover his chakra. (Because chakra recovers faster at higher percentages, they can spar for longer if he rests between downs than trying to do a whole afternoon at once.)
Sakura glares at him, not deigning to dignify his stupid question with an answer.
"And you have to go to all the jounin meetings," he continues, pulling out his gross orange sex book. Sakura really does not understand the draw. She asked Kakashi what the draw was, once, expecting him to say something snide like you'll understand when you're older, which is his go-to non-answer. Instead, he looked vaguely green, and asked her very sincerely not to break into his stuff and look at his books any more. Sakura, of course, didn't listen, but reading the book made her vaguely nauseous, so she just inserted little flower petals between the pages so that he'd know she was there while doing her best to not actually read any of the words. "Tsunade doesn't even let me read during them."
Sakura spreads five chakra strings between her fingers.
"Do you have any useful advice for how to use lightning release?"
He shrugs.
"I was struck by lightning one day, and it taught me its ways."
Sakura pours on the killing intent until he twitches faintly.
"Children really shouldn't be that good at killing intent," he grumbles.
"It's your own fault."
"Is it, really, though?" he asks. "I feel like you picked it up really fast. Are you sure you weren't something like a Mist Hunter nin in a past life?"
Sakura glares at him.
He charges his fake, mini-Chidori in one hand, then holds it out to her.
"I can't charge chakra strings with lightning," he says, "so this will have to do."
Sakura studies his hand, tries to imitate it, holds it for only a moment, and then loses control of it.
Again.
And again.
Sakura hates lightning so much.
After about ten, fifteen failures, Kakashi tucks away his book.
"Ready?" he asks, and Sakura nods, jumping back.
"You know, you could just use earth chakra," he says lazily, his Sharingan spinning into existence, performing the eight seals for the Suffocating Horrible Jutsu. (Orochimaru isn't around to name it, so Sakura got to do it.) "That is your secondary chakra nature, and would probably hold. Lightning is your tertiary release, if not worse."
"How many elemental releases do you have?"
"Sakura, I'm a jounin."
"I thought I had to beat you to become a jounin."
He sighs. "I can use all five elemental releases, even though I'm no good with wind."
Sakura gives him a look, and he sighs, raising his hands.
"Fine, it's not like I'm your teacher or anything."
Sakura sparks chakra strings wreathed in lightning, and they break. She repeats the process with earth, and they hold.
Thankfully, Kakashi can't see chakra strings.
Unfortunately, he's been her teacher for like four years.
"You did it on your first try, didn't you?"
Sakura swaps with the petal behind his head, reforms with her fist a hair's breadth from his shoulder, her feet on the ground. She doesn't have to hit Kakashi as hard as she has to hit Guy, so it'll hold—
He vanishes a moment before she makes contact, and they engage in the time-honored ninja tradition of swapping behind each other about five times in a row before he charges his left hand up with a baby chidori and appears to her right, hand buzzing. Three paths sing to her chakra senses, and she picks one on instinct, charging into it, stepping around his hand and driving her hand into his chest. He vanishes a moment before she connects, standing on the Hiraishin closest to the pond, spinning through seals she has no interest in letting him complete. She swaps towards him as he begins his hiraishin, but he gets there before her, a single finger blazing with chakra slamming into the petal she's pretending to be and shattering her henge.
The world blinks as she is suddenly thrown back into her human body—
To find herself inside of Kakshi's guard, almost pressed against his chest.
She doesn't have time to process what happened, and just punches on instinct.
Unfortunately, Kakashi's instincts are faster (they always are), and the back of his fist hits her face before her fist can connect with his stomach.
Sakura goes down like a sack of bricks, rolling across the grass and coughing.
Just because Kakashi does not particularly like taijutsu and prefers to use ninjutsu to kill people does not mean he doesn't punch like a freight train.
She blinks up to find him above her, making an awkward, regretful face.
"I thought you were supposed to be the taijutsu master between the two of us," he says, but he doesn't really inject it with the mocking humor he usually does.
Kakashi tries really hard not to hit her much at all. When they spar, he primarily uses custom or crippled versions of lethal jutsus. This meshes nicely with his combat style—middle-distance (at least with her) and ninjutsu based.
When she really tests his instincts, though, they run true.
He doesn't like it.
It's currently showing on his face, which is spinning a little—Sakura's fine.
Sakura thinks his whatever about hitting her is stupid, so she pushes at him and makes a face that makes her face ache. She floods it with chakra to reduce the pain and swelling, doing her best not to let the pain show on her face. The chakra reinforcement technique is not medical ninjutsu, but it'll do in a pinch.
She stands in a single motion to show how okay she is, only to find the world suddenly tilting and twirling around her, dumping her unceremoniously into Kakashi's waiting arms.
"Hospital it is, then."
"I'm fine!" she protests, pushing at his chest.
Much to her surprise, he releases her. This time, he doesn't catch her when the world (rather outrageously) spins her into the ground. Said ground is supernaturally soft, and she hits it with a painless oof, but that doesn't stop her from glaring up at Kakashi's raised eyebrow.
"What was that?" he says, pulling his hands apart with a smug little eye grin that, ironically, doesn't reach his eyes.
"You're the worst," she whines up at him. "I'm injured."
"That's what I thought," he says with the barest hints of a laugh, leaning down to scoop her from the ground.
That night, staring up at the inky darkness of her bedroom ceiling, Sakura goes over her memory of what had happened in the last few moments of that spar in her head, just like she's been doing all day, from the moment she finished her replacement jutsu, and then Kakashi striking her petal hard enough to break her henge, and then—
And then she was immediately within his guard, a good foot in front of where she had been. She had felt Kakashi's chakra start when she appeared—it wasn't him, and, not only that, he didn't see it coming.
If she had been ready, she could have taken him down easily.
For lack of a better word, she had teleported.
What… was that?
It was obviously the transformation technique.
It broke, and she moved.
She's done a lot of transformation techniques in the past. She's even had them broken by other people more than she'd care to admit, but she's never teleported before.
(Y'know, aside from whatever the replacement technique is.)
It's possible she… accidentally performed a replacement technique?
Or… lost seconds of her memory from the punch?
She thinks on it for a moment, before dismissing them both—
There was no detritus within his guard for her to swap with, and she can't move fast enough to surprise him—losing seconds doesn't explain Kakashi's spike of surprise, sharp enough he, even briefly, operated entirely on instinct.
Hence—the concussion.
(Thankfully, ninja healing techniques are awesome, so concussions are just minor inconveniences to be healed rather than month-long debilitating conditions to be lived with.)
She goes over the memory again, and again, and—
Oh.
So, remember how Sakumo had a variant of the henge that allowed him to transform into an object several feet away from his center of mass? AKA transforming into a leaf a foot to your right? (Sakura calls it the remote transformation technique, because Sakumo didn't name it, so she gets to.)
Fun fact: Sakura mastered that about six months ago. (It's really hard.) She currently uses it when she's expecting an attack—picking a random direction and distance (using some Anbu random number lists Kakashi got her), and transforming into a petal in that relative location to her center of mass.
When she had transformed into a petal during that spar, she had moved about a foot diagonally backwards. When he broke her transformation, she had moved that same about-a-foot diagonally forward.
…directly into Kakashi's guard.
Duh.
Except, actually—no.
Here's the thing—Sakura's never experienced this before.
Sakura's performed a lot of remote henge techniques while she was learning it. A lot.
And she's never experienced this before.
The exact correspondence of distance and direction are damning enough it was undoubtedly something to do with the remote transformation technique, but—
She's missing something.
Sakura pushes herself off of her bed, flicks on her lights, and then drags her blood lockbox from her closet. She opens it with a bloody thumbprint, and pulls out Sakumo's scroll on the transformation technique.
She finishes it, starts again—
Reads through the others—
And… nothing.
Sakura sits back on her heels, feeling the unknowable void of what on earth happens to your body during the transformation technique, yawning before her once again.
Sakura sighs.
Here's what she knows—
When the transformation technique is broken, the user is not returned to the relative position they started from, as you might naively expect.
In other words, if you transform into a leaf, it flips over, and you break the transformation, you will reappear right side up, and not upside down.
If you transform into a leaf a foot to your right, and you break the transformation, you will reappear at the location of the leaf—you won't "snap back".
(Well, with this single exception.)
The controlling factor here appears to be something like your mental image.
So if you imagine yourself coming out of the transformation technique upside down, you come out upside down.
If you imagine coming out of it lying on your side, you come out of it lying on your side.
Except—no.
Imagine is altogether the wrong word.
It's not how you imagine coming out of your transformation technique.
It's what your internal mental model of your body is when you break your transformation technique.
Which feels very much like a distinction without a difference, but Sakura knows from experience that it very much is not.
Even when you are actually a leaf, or a kunai, or a shuriken, ninja still instinctively retain a mental model of their body, sort of hovering around the object they've transformed into, which is why it can be so uncomfortable to be, for example, sheathed when you've transformed into a kunai, because there's suddenly no room for this mental model you have hovering over yourself.
So—
It is not where you are imagining you are, not really—it's that weird pseudo-kinesthetic self-image.
(And, notably, this is much harder to control than a simple mental image.)
That's how breaking a transformation works.
You can transform into a leaf to your right, immediately break it, and not be snapped back.
(She's tried it.)
So… okay.
Sure.
Then… why didn't it happen this time?
Sakura goes over the memory again.
Immerses herself in it.
Lives it again.
And—
For just a moment, she sees from between the time she transformed into her petal, and the moment Kakashi broke her henge—
Sakura had no kinesthetic self image.
Sakura has done a lot of transformation techniques. More than most ninjas ever perform, by several orders of magnitude.
She is not discomfited by transforming into a kunai, and then being slid into a sheath, because she instinctively knows she is a kunai at that moment, and not a person.
So, for just a moment, in that spar, when she was entirely focused on Kakashi, how to make her approach, she had no kinesthetic self-image.
So when her transformation technique broke, she was snapped back (or, well, forwards) to her original relative position and stance.
Sakura flops herself onto her back, and stares up at the ceiling.
Performing a jutsu takes time.
Sakura is good at the transformation technique.
But she is not enough to perform it faster than she can move.
However.
Breaking a jutsu is instantaneous.
Slowly, Sakura smiles.