The scroll came a week after the Uchiha'd defected. Hatake had disappeared on a mission and the Uzumaki was still bed bound. Sakura mostly spent her time taking monotonous d-ranks- most of them labouring in the areas of Konoha still being reconstructed- and training with Shiranui, Tatami, and Namiashi, since their status as Hokage guard meant they were some of the few shinobi actually in the village at least half the time. She was mainly working on refining her elemental transformation and dropping the chakra requirement for her shunshin.
It was currently using up a fifth of her reserves and was entirely impractical, but every time she performed one she got just a little bit better and was sure she was just a little bit closer to a breakthrough.
…Maybe.
She couldn't help it. The idea of shunshining everywhere was just far too tantalising for her to give up on the minuscule chance she'd find a way around the chakra requirements.
The scroll was almost blank, with nothing more than an address to report to, but she recognised it instantly. ANBU had come knocking.
She rushed through getting dressed in practical shinobi black and flak jacket, ensuring she had enough supplies packed to comfortably survive for a week or two, and choose to put her hair up into a practical, senbon laced bun. The wind whistled past her as she rushed over the rooftops. The completely nondescript building came into sight. A tiny bell rang over the door as she entered.
"Good evening!" Greeted a silky voiced woman, a wine red kimono dripping off her figure. "You must be Haruno Sakura." She purred, walking around Sakura, eyeing her like a piece of meat. "Scroll." The woman held out a hand, perfectly manicured black nails threateningly sharp.
Sakura wordlessly handed the scroll over and allowed herself to be ushered into a back room.
There, the woman hounded Sakura into stripping and threw a series of black bundles at her. They turned out to be various parts of the standard ANBU uniform so Sakura dressed and enjoyed the high quality material. Layers of breathable material, complex sealing work, and ninja fishnet to protect from abrasive wounds; it fitted snugly to her frame, just the right combination of tight fitting to prevent excess fabric and baggy to maintain full range of movement. She did, however, feel oddly exposed with the cold air brushing her shoulders, even if some quick stretches confirmed the slightly increased range of movement compared to her normal gear. The weight of the armoured vest would take some getting used to, but it was well fitted enough to stay put as she moved, at least.
Her thighs were bandaged and fitted with her holsters and her chokutō was strapped over her shoulder.
Lastly, she was handed a blank white mask which, after a small burst of her chakra, stuck comfortably to her head, seals on the inside keeping her breathing and line of sight unaffected.
"Off you go, come back to me when you start growing in, sweetheart!" The woman crooned as she pushed Sakura through yet another door.
Inside the door was a giant man with a bear shaped mask and a messy shock of brown hair.
"Blank." He said, the mask's seals making his voice sound hollow. Apparently that was Sakura's designation for the moment. "I'm Bear, the current commander. You'll have to henge your hair colour for training. After that you can do what you want."
She nodded and took a moment's thought to change her hair black, the henge settling over her like a second skin. The man paused, likely observing the lack of chakra bleed-off.
"Interesting." He muttered before motioning her to follow him as he moved down a set of steps. "Normally we put potentials through a test but frankly we don't have the manpower to be messing around and I trust Ibiki's judgement. You're the second recommendation he's ever made and his first is one of our most successful captains. Your training period will last the next three months. You're to report to headquarters at 0600 sharp every day you're in the village, but don't expect that to be often. We don't have the manpower to train you normally so instead you'll be shadowing teams on milk runs. You have three days to be competent in ANBU hand sign."
Sakura nodded.
"From what I understand you're gearing up to be a silent assassination specialist. Typically those mission are done solo and are exceedingly delicate so don't expect to shadow one of those for at least the first month. Ibiki said you could imitate chakra signatures?"
"Yes." She said, smoothly copying the man's next to her as demonstration. "I can also successfully open any seals keyed to just a signature."
"If you had a measure of their blood could you do blood and signature?"
"I've never tried but I don't see why not."
"Hm, what about summoning?"
"I have no idea."
The man nodded. "Some things to try." They entered into a surprisingly brightly lit lobby, a series of doors spanning off the space in seemingly random directions. Bear smoothly headed through one on the opposite side and down an identically confusing, brightly lit, and featureless hallway. They stopped in front of a door with a small yellow square in the middle. "You'll be spending today with Robin, he'll show you around and put you through your paces." He opened the door to expose a fairly normal office space, complete with filling cabinets, a wooden desk and piles of paperwork. Well, fairly normal except for the spindly man perched on the back of the chair, feverishly writing with a pen in each hand. Bear cleared his throat with an air of long suffering exasperation. Robin made a show of startling, throwing the pens wildly and launching up off the chair only to smoothly land back in the exact same position. "Robin, I have the Blank for you."
The man clapped once. "Wonderful!" He flowed off the back of his chair to reveal an almost seven foot frame and long, spidery legs. "And so small, too!" He stopped in front of her and ducked down, putting his hands on his knees and bending to be on her eye level. "The small ones are always the most interesting!" He spoke like he was sharing some great secret with her.
"I'll leave you to it." Bear said, ignoring the other's antics entirely and wondering off down the hall.
"Now, blankipops, let me show you around!" Robin said, throwing an arm over her shoulder- more just putting a hand on the shoulder furthest from him, tucking her under his wingspan as though she were a particularly shiny rock he was intent on protecting- and ushering her around the building.
Sakura's mind was melting. Robin had dumped such a sheer volume of information she wondered how anyone was expected to remember any of it. She remembered every detail, of course- she hadn't worked her ass off to train her memory for nothing- but she didn't see how they could possibly expect her to.
Though to be fair, it basically all boiled down to 'don't fuck with other people's stuff' and 'here's a spot where you can shower and sleep when you're too fucked to go home'.
Everything was disturbingly empty of people, a product of the high mission demand, and frustratingly confusing to navigate.
Sakura had been looking forward to hitting the physical part of the day and getting to unleash her frustrations but now, watching Robin seem to unfurl into the serious lines of a formidable predator, she questioned her own judgement.
She sighed.
At the very least getting soundly beaten might force her to learn something.
(It did. Sakura sucked. She desperately needed to get better.)
(At least Robin didn't think she did too poorly if his delighted cackling was anything to go by.)
The next day she was assigned to a redheaded woman designated Egret.
"I'll be your seduction and culture tutor for the next few months." She said, gesturing for Sakura to sit at a small table, a delicate tea set laid out. "Participation in seduction missions is entirely voluntary, but every member of ANBU goes through a standard training course. How do you feel about potentially taking those kinds of mission?"
"I'm mostly indifferent." Sakura replied, tilting her head. "I don't particularly have anything against them, but I also don't particularly want to do them."
"Fair enough." Egret nodded. "You likely won't be assigned seduction specific missions, then, but they're a useful set of skills to have. Too many members in ANBU see them as something other than just another set of tools in their arsenal and make it harder on themselves by refusing to use them."
She poured two cups of tea, the calming scent of rose wafting through the small room.
"You're welcome to take off your mask," She said, slipping off her own and revealing a henged face. "But until you finish training it's required you and anyone around you applies a henge before doing so."
Sakura nodded, slipping off her own porcelain after copying the woman's henge. The corner of her lip's twitched.
"Now, I might not be as you imagined a typical seduction specialist." Egret started, a humorous smile on her face and Sakura nodded. The woman did not look like someone who professionally got into other people's pants, dressed as she was in a comfortable tracksuit over a fairly plain frame. "When people think seduction they typically think of legendary beauties, throwing themselves at men with loose innuendo and exaggerated promiscuity. Beauty can help in this line of work, sure, but too much just ends up becoming suspicious. Most people don't just have ultra stunning women rubbing themselves against them and the high stakes targets you'll find in ANBU will be far too wary to be snagged that way."
She took a sip of tea and Sakura copied her, enjoying the pleasantly floral taste.
"And to be honest, the real secret to seduction is that the easiest way into someone pants isn't being irresistibly sexy, though you will be learning how to move and dress to ensure you the target sees you as a viable sexual candidate. No, the real secret to getting in someone's pants is providing them one thing." She held up a finger and leaned in. "Emotional fulfilment."
Sakura's third day was spent with Robin, testing an itemised list of possibilities with her signature manipulation.
They tested various combination of blood, chakra and password locks; trying both with her knowing the signature she was copying and ones she was not. In the end they figured out that if Sakura had access to the correct blood then she could get into just about anything, some seals requiring a few minutes of 'jiggling' to manage but most being fairly instantaneous. The longest it took her to open a seal was an hour and forty eight minutes, which was a giant one designed for high-value vaults and required four different signatures and their accompanying blood at the same time. Sakura had to smear the samples of blood on four different fingers and then produce four different flavours of chakra out of each finger simultaneously.
By the time she had finished she had a head-splitting migraine that Robin- thankfully- healed even as the man cackled wildly.
"The other village's aren't going to know what hit them!" He cried, putting both hands on his shoulders and shaking her excitedly. "Come on, come on, we'll be testing summoning now!"
He sliced his palm and swiped a line of his blood across the floor. Sakura easily copied his signature- having been using his the most throughout the day- and sped through the hand signs for summoning.
Her palms hit the ground and the seal stretched before her, a warm feeling flooding her chakra before it tugged and she was falling.
Sakura landed hard in a bed of yellow grass, in the centre of a circle of delicate looking trees. She was entirely naked and weaponless, down to even the hairbands in her hair having disappeared. The soft pink spread out in a halo around her, a gentle curtain down to the small of her back as she pushed herself up to sitting.
"It has been many generations since a shifter has appeared." A low, trilling voice reverberated. It shook in her very bones and sent a wave of dread through Sakura's gut.
Her eyes traced the outlines of small figures on the trees, hundreds of small birds perched in the branches. Her gaze was invariably drawn to a red-plumed tree directly in front of her, and a proud looking, pug sized bird glaring down at her. The only bird in the clearing unusually sized, it was a steely grey colour with a belly of black and white stripes. Shrewd yellow eyes peered down at her.
The more she looked the more the dread in her gut disappeared. It was hard to be afraid of creatures she could crush with a foot.
"Speak! For what purpose should we align ourselves with you, potential summoner?" It called and her eyes narrowed.
"Why should I even want to summon you?" She replied testily, the last remnants of the migraine pounding in the back of her scull as she pushed herself up to standing and crossed her arms. "I didn't mean to end up here, nor do I know how you could be of use to me."
The birds chortled, the clearing filling to bursting with low pitched warbling.
"You hold in you much spirit, child!" The head bird cried. "You shape yourself to fit amongst your broodmates all while growing into something utterly unlike them! We are not fighters and we do not do anything for free, but we Cuckoo's are skilled at locating and stealing into other's nests and scaring away those that would challenge us. If you sign with us you will find your own abilities changed and when summoned we are powerful tracking and information gathering tools."
Sakura tilted her head and considered the prospect. As much as being able to summon village sized animals to fight for her would be useful, Sakura would never have the chakra reserves to handle those kinds of summons. However, small birds that would work as tracking and information gathering tools? Barely a drain on her reserves and very, very useful.
She smiled.
"Alright."
Eight small grey and brown coloured birds flew over with a giant scroll between them, setting it before her and unrolling it to reveal a series of blood splotches.
"So do I-" She asked but was cut of by a hot flash of pain in her cheek, three stinging lines opening in her skin and a wave of blood running down to her chin, pooling on her jawline before dripping onto the scroll.
The world blurred away to the sound of birds laughing, Sakura found herself falling once again to land on her knees.
She blinked at her surroundings, the familiar sight of the ANBU training ground greeting her. Her uniform was strewn on the floor beneath her and a flash of pink in the corner of her eye confirmed that her henge had melted away.
Bear and Robin had paused from where they had been whispering furiously in one corner. Two pairs of the black voids of the mask's eye holes pinning her in place.
Before any of them could react further, her chakra boiled. Burning and bubbling out of her skin and sending Sakura screaming. The world melted away until all she could focus on was the way every atom in her body was being destroyed and remade, an otherworldly heat setting her alight and remaking her in the fashion of itself. She could feel her skin splitting, her nails twisting, her hair sparking and she was sure she must resemble little more than ground meat.
And then it stopped. As suddenly as it had started her chakra was settled once more, a little different to how it used to be but undoubtedly hers all the same. There were hands pinning her to the ground and her throat rasped as she breathed. The floor underneath her was sticky with blood and every muscle was aching.
"Well that was disturbing." Came the gleeful comment from Robin, the sound wrong. Too sharp and too clear, she could differentiate the layer of the distortion seals and the man's natural voice, something that should be impossible.
Sakura didn't stay awake long enough to hear a response.
She awoke clean, warm and staring up at the familiar sight of a hospital ceiling, but warped. Her range of vision was a touch too wide and the indents a touch too crisp.
In the fashion of a true Konoha shinobi she felt the immediate and irrepressible urge to escape, pushing herself into a sitting position.
"Don't even think about getting out of bed!" Came a sharp voice from her right. Sakura turned to watch the Hokage walk through the door, march to her bedside, and use a steel grip on her shoulder to force her back into the bed. Every movement seemed to catch her vision, every time motion of the woman's body standing out against the still surroundings.
"I'm fine." Sakura protested even as the woman's hand lit green and she scowled.
"Exactly!" The Senju growled. "According to the commander you're body turned itself inside out and back again and yet there's absolutely nothing wrong with you! If anything you're too healthy!"
"Great!" Sakura smiled cheerily up to the aggravated woman. "Can I go home now?"
"Absolutely not!"
"You can't keep a healthy person prisoner in the hospital."
"I'm the Hokage, I can do what I want!"
"You're the Hokage, you have a million other things that would be a better use of your time."
The Senju lifted the glowing green hand off her and snarled angrily. "Fine, but I'll see you at training ground five tomorrow morning, 0500 sharp, your appearance at headquarters isn't due until later that afternoon."
"Oh?" Sakura asked, a bubble of excitement in her chest. The Senju smiled a toothy, vicious smile.
"I'm going to teach you how to destroy mountains." And with that the blonde stormed from the room, shouting orders down the hall, leaving Sakura to change into her shinobi blacks and flak jacket.
She headed up to the Uzumaki's room before she left, spending an hour with the exuberant blonde before she headed home, too eager to experiment with the strange new aspect to her chakra and the noticeable changes to her sight and hearing to stay long.
Sakura stared at her reflection in the mirror. She looked exactly the same aside from three thin white scars underneath her right eye, and yet she knew she had changed.
Her range of vision was wider and her eyesight clearer. Movement seemed to stand out more, tiny shifts of leaves and blurs of passing shinobi she would have once missed now seemed like neon lights to her brain. Her hearing was better, too. Not just the range of sounds she could hear but her ability to differentiate between the layers. Where a crowd was once white noise it was now a series of different, hearable conversations up to two or three streets away.
Both of these were extremely cool and entirely overwhelming. Just walking home left her head ringing from the sheer volume of noise and movement in Konoha.
She'd given up and climbed to the rooftops halfway there. It was… easier up high.
Sakura'd also discovered (don't ask how) that her control over and ability to produce killing intent had multiplied exponentially and she was able to send a whole block of people sweating with just a passing thought. (Don't. Ask. How)
Then, there were the shape changing abilities.
Eyes intent on the pink of her hair Sakura applied a small amount of chakra and willed it brown. The hair changed. She stopped supplying chakra to it. It stayed brown.
It didn't have the distant quality of a henge nor the chakra requirement of a jutsu. It was just brown. She had willed her hair brown and It turned completely, physically brown.
A few hours of gleeful messing around with her body led to a few discoveries:
First; she could not change the size of anything. She could affect shape of her face and hair- i.e. flattening her nose, giving herself curls- but she couldn't remove or create mass.
Second; changing her colouring was easy as breathing but affecting her shape was far harder, it was done with an uncomfortable pinching sensation and long minutes of concentration, unless she was changing back to her natural features.
Thirdly; she could not change the shape, positioning, or colour of the scars on her cheek. She could cover them up with makeup or a traditional henge but it itched horribly.
And lastly; for all the changes were permanent until she changed them again, her lizard brain found itself wanting to change back to her natural features after a few minutes of looking otherwise. Her changed face feeling dissociated uncomfortably from herself.
That night, she changed her hair purple before she went to sleep. It was still purple when she woke up.
Sakura arrived at the training ground five minutes early to find the Senju already standing in the middle of the field, an excited grin on the blonde woman's face.
"Good morning, Hokage-sama!" Sakura called and the grin turned into a grimace.
"It's too early for that shit!" The Senju groaned. "You can call me shishou!"
"How about baa-san?" Sakura asked and the blonde raged, appearing next to her and a fist pounding the back of her head.
"Shishou! Shishou!" The Sannin insisted. "Don't make me sound like some old woman."
"Ah, sure, shishou-oba-san."
The blonde groaned and pinched the bridge of her nose. A hand clasped Sakura's arm and she was dragged to the centre of a training ground, where a series of boulders were set out in a semicircle.
"Right, my enhanced strength follows some fairly simple theory but the execution is impossible for someone without near-perfect chakra control." The blonde said. "For you, it should be easy, but it takes time to build up your body's tenketsu points to handle the pressure this technique puts them under. You are not, under any circumstances, to perform this technique without my supervision until I give the go ahead. We'll be meeting here every morning you're in the village for the next three months, I aim to have you on my level of destructive force by the time you officially become ANBU."
Sakura nodded and they shared a smile. The blonde pulled a marker and grabbed Sakura's hand, making a series of dots over the skin.
"Your main tenketsu points on a fist are here, here, and here." She gestured to three slightly larger dots across her knuckles. "To release a burst of strength, your aim is to gather your chakra into those points and at the exact moment of impact force it out of your body. As they become acclimated to the process we'll work on getting you to activate the smaller one's as well. The important thing to remember is it's not so much about the amount of chakra you can build up, but instead the pressure you build by condensing it in your tenketsu points and the speed with which it is released."
She let go of Sakura's hand and walked over to the first boulder.
"To demonstrate." The Senju said, pulling her fist back. Sakura focused the feel of the chakra in the air, tasting it gather in the front of the woman's fist and then explode as it struck the rock. The boulder shattered, blowing outwards and into tiny, tennis ball sized chunks. Sakura smiled.
"Go on." The Senju said, pointing to the next boulder.
Sakura pulled her fist back, concentrated on building her chakra, and struck the rock. The chakra left her hand sluggishly, forming a small crater but with none of the explosive power.
"Good, try again."
Sakura's morning became a monotonous process of punching and releasing, but by the end of it she could make a boulder split in two and the Hokage had an excited gleam in her eyes.