Two weeks after the Kumo mission Sakura found herself sitting at a table with the other members of the rookie nine (except for the Uchiha and Uzumaki, of course) and Maito's genins. At the end of the table, the four jōnin sensei were commiserating over drinks.
Sakura was sat between Hatake- near the end- and the Nara, looking over the ten assembled children in bemusement. It was likely just because of the volume of time she'd spent either in ANBU or running assassinations, but listening to the conversations about D-ranks and the 'cool new jutsus' they'd been learning made her feel as though she was experiencing whiplash. Even Nara, her fellow chūnin, was describing straightforward escort missions and basic courier runs.
She was grinning but it held an edge of bewilderment despite her best efforts.
(Had the volume of time she spent behind a mask affected her facial control?)
"No way is forehead prettier than me!" The Yamanaka screamed and Sakura tuned back into the conversation to see the blonde pelting cutlery at Lee.
"I totally agree." Sakura added before leaning forward with a sly smile. "Though, I was posing as a civilian for a mission a couple of weeks ago and this shinobi spent the entire time hitting on me. I kept telling him to go away in less and less subtle ways until I just gave up and called him a pervert and an idiot." The Yamanaka had apparently forgotten about her jealousy and instead had a dreamy look on her face.
"What did he do? Was he cute?"
"He gave me a brooch, apologised and tagged along through a festival but then I- I left. And I guess? If you're into awkward fifteen year old?" Sakura replied with a chuckle. Yamanaka nodded decisively.
"You should go see him again!" She smashed a hand on the table. "You'd be perfect for each other!"
"You just want less competition." The Nara laughed.
"You just don't understand true romance." She said.
"Who cares about all this girly stuff, anyway?" Complained the Inuzuka, with a noticeably not dropped voice.
"You will, once puberty hits." Sakura said, taking a chunk of meat from the barbecue.
"Never!" He insisted. "Me and Akamaru will rise above such disgusting foolishness and learn cool jutsus instead!"
"You are misguided, why? Because it is in the basic nature of a species to want to procreate." The Aburame said and the table dissolved into a feud between the prepubescent and the hormonal.
"Sakura." Hatake said from next to her, holding out a small, black book. She took it and read the page it was open to before blanching. "It's Kumo's."
Sakura looked down at the Bingo Book entry, a drawing of a black-clad figure with her facial scars in white and the featureless chokutō glowing electric blue looked back at her. Underneath was an order to 'capture on sight' and a bounty for five million ryos.
"Am I going to get in trouble for this?" She asked quietly and his head tipped.
"Probably not. It's not linked to a specific village and its vague enough that even if they did link it Kumo wouldn't have a leg to stand on if they wanted to complain." He replied and she grimaced but nodded.
"But B-rank? Seriously?" She handed the book back and he eye smiled down at her. "Isn't that a little much?"
"No." He said before whipping out his porn and ignoring her incredulous expression. She huffed but turned back to the argument that had somehow shifted into a war about the which affinity was better. She stood up for her water and lightning and laughed at the offended expression on the Hyuuga's face.
Sakura walked into the Ro team room and was immediately assaulted with a flurry of confetti.
"Congratulations!" Four voices called at once. Sakura closed the door numbly.
"What?" She said, her voice toneless. The room was decorated with strings of balloons, a thin layer of confetti, a pink and green cake in the centre of the table and a giant banner reading 'You're a wanted man!'. The four members of team Ro were wearing pink, glittery party hats.
Monkey bounded over to her and slipped on her own party hat whilst Sakura was still reeling from shock.
"We're celebrating your first entry in a bingo book." Tiger said, arms spread wide.
"I… thought everyone would be mad." Sakura said.
"Why would we be mad?" Monkey asked, placing a gentle hand on her shoulder.
"I'm in the bingo book because I screwed up. I was discovered and I failed to kill the one who discovered me."
Cat laughed. "Everyone fucks up, Sparrow."
"It's considered something of a right of passage for ANBU members." Added Panda. Monkey directed her to take a seat at the conference table. "Well, except for this guy." Panda jerked a thumb in Tiger's direction.
"You've never been in a bingo book, Taicho?" Sakura asked as he took position at the head of the table, dragging over a blackboard as he did. The others all settled into seats to watch him.
"Ah, never." He replied, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly. "I spent my younger years being drilled on the importance of keeping the mokuton secret and I got too good at it, I suppose." The man mumbled and Sakura's eyes narrowed. She could smell a story in that, but she knew this wasn't the time to poke.
"That's impressive." Sakura said. "Why are the ANBU not wildly known though, if it's so common to get caught?"
"For most of us we will gain a bingo book entry and then fade into obscurity until it's removed, the anonymity of ANBU makes it too hard for other villages to keep track of us so we end up gaining many individual entries over the years, but none greater than c or b-ranks as they don't know the full scope of our movements." Cat explained. "You have a very distinctive fighting style, however, which makes your achievements easy to pinpoint. Other villages will begin to pick up on your identity and it will likely become common knowledge that you're ANBU, not unlike how Kakashi's position was well known. You will be targeted."
"In other words, you either get stronger, quickly, or you die." Panda said, his tone matter of fact beneath the mask's distortion.
"To prevent the latter from happening, we will be stepping up your training." Tiger said and the dread in Sakura's gut built. The man was already a slave driver, she didn't see how it could get worse without her simply dying outright. "There's a good chance you will die."
Ah. That explains that then.
"But in reality if you do not get dramatically stronger then you will be inevitably culled by the other villages, so you dying during training would just mean it was meant to be and your death is not our responsibility." The captain said callously. Sakura felt a smile pulling at the corners of her lips. "The commander also knows this and your solo missions will likely receive a massive increase in difficulty. This is sink or swim, but I promise if you swim you'll be a legend when you reach the other side." The man's hand flew across the blackboard Sakura's eyes widened as watched.
It was insanity.
An exact regimen for food pills, medical ninjutsu and chakra stabilisers. A schedule for fourteen hours a day, seven days a week of training. Increasing masses of training weights, going to upwards of two hundred kilos.
She was probably going to die.
Or she was going to LIVE.
"Hai, taicho." Her voice was breathless with anticipation. He slammed the piece of chalk into the bottom of the board, turned around and clapped his hands.
"And now, cake!" He said and Cat and Panda cheered, both reaching over to cut a piece and ending up in a scuffle over the knife. Monkey ignored the pair entirely and drew a kunai, slicing serves and setting them out before them on flower patterned paper plates. "We have a mission as a five man squad this afternoon, so we'll worry about this more when we get back." He said, grabbing the chalk and flipping the board to the other side.
Sakura pushed her mask forward, tilting her chin down to hide anything that was shown by the action, and took a mouthful of extremely delicious raspberry cake. The others doing the same. It was something of a taboo to take the mask off in ANBU headquarters outside of the private dorm rooms and the showers. A habit born of long years of paranoia and maintained through that continued paranoia. It mean that outside of teams it was rare to know who the other members were. Only the commander and the Hokage had a full list of its recruits.
It perhaps made the corps too easy to infiltrate- which is why the security measures around the headquarters and any information were immense- but it also made it near impossible for an infiltrator to gain any real knowledge of the organisation.
"Right, the village received a tipoff of a possible Orochimaru lab. Our job is scope it out and, in the event we find evidence linking back to the traitor, perform a full cleanse." Tiger's voice was clear but there was an undercurrent of sadness to it. Cat's hands tightened their grip around the fork. Monkey breathed in an audile gasp and Panda froze, completely still.
The monster inside Sakura lifted its head and bayed for blood.
"Sparrow, your job will be to…"
Sakura bit her thumb to draw blood and sped through the hand signs of a summoning jutsu, slamming her palms into the ground and creating a burst of smoke with a small bubble of chakra.
"What do ya' want, huh?" The small bird said haughtily. "I was busy!"
"I need you to scope out all the entrances to the cave in front of us as well as any information you could tell me about the layout inside." Sakura said. "I'll feed you a hairy caterpillar upon completion."
"Five caterpillars." The bird demanded.
"Two."
"Five or I'm not doing it!"
"Three. I'm not here to make you fat as well as lazy." Sakura's tone was firm, the bird trilled angrily.
"Fine, but they better be juicy or I'll peck your eyes out!" It said before taking flight, moving rapidly through the leaves and in the direction of the cave.
"Are your summons always so… argumentative?" Asked Cat from behind her and Sakura chuckled.
"Yep!" She said. "Their entire evolution was based on laziness, to the point where they refuse to raise their young, instead hatching them in other bird's nests and forcing them to do it instead. But because of this, they're experts at adapting to different situations, locating all the entrances and hidey holes of a building and avoiding confrontation, wether by infiltrating other populations or scaring their opponents into fleeing. They're not any use in a fight but they're super useful for the preparation for one."
"That does sound useful."
They waited in silence for her summon to return, the five perched in the branches of a giant pine tree. The bird arrived in the gentle flap of wings and quiet birdsong. It flew down to the ground and Sakura followed.
"The main entrance is one thousand, eight hundred, and twenty four metres in that direction." The bird started and sketched an arrow into the dirt with its beak. It continued to draw what- in Sakura's experience with the creatures- would be an exactly to scale map. "There are three main entrances here, here, and here. Each with five guards protecting them. On top of that there are two secret entrances, one had two guards disguised above it here, the other had no protections. In fact, it looked as if the occupants were not even aware of the others existence, it was very dusty." The bird marked doorways as it drew. "From what I could see, the insides went something like this." It then proceeded to mark in hallways and doorways from each entrance, up until the hallways reached a corner and they disappeared out of the line of sight. "The distance between these two entrances was eight hundred and fifty one metres." It indicated the closest and the farthest from their position.
"Good job." Sakura praised, pulling a jar of caterpillars from a stasis scroll and tipping three of them onto her hand. She stroked the bird's belly as it perched on a finger and gobbled up the insects, moaning and muttering about the taste under its breath as it did. Once finished, the bird burped and disappeared in a cloud of smoke. Sakura packed away the jar.
"Alright, looks like we'll be taking a door each." Tiger said, grabbing a stick and pointing at the diagram. "What's your preference for an entrance to infiltrate, Sparrow?"
She pointed to the unmanned entrance. "If the members of the lab don't know about it, then it's likely this entrance will be keyed to Orochimaru's signature alone. If that's case I'll be able to open it and that would serve as evidence to link him to the base. If it's not his signature then I should still be able to open it and I'll infiltrate from there."
"Will he not have protections in place to protect from that kind of thing?"
"It's unlikely. Before I came along, Orochimaru was the only person capable of mimicking signatures and to nowhere near the extent I'm able to. He did see a snippet of my abilities when he attacked my genin team but they were fairly untrained at that point and since the entrance is excessively dusty then he probably hasn't touched it since before that confrontation."
"Alright." He nodded. "Monkey will take this entrance." He pointed to the entrance with two men before it. "Cat, Panda and I will take here, here and here respectively." He pointed to the three main entrances, positioning himself the nearest to monkey whilst Panda was the nearest to Sakura's. "Upon Sparrow's signal Monkey and Cat will take down their guards and then hold their positions at the entrances whilst Panda, Sparrow and I will make our way through the building, cleaning as we go. Cat will use her sensory abilities to ensure no one escapes and Monkey will standby for support and medical treatment. We will move in a clockwise pattern through the building. Since my abilities are good for it, I will be capturing who I can from the workers I come across for T&I, but aside from that we can't risk it. Leave no survivors."
They split up, moving silently and unseen though the trees as the four settled in wait to attack the entrance guards. Sakura activated full stealth and worked her way around the small hill the lab was set into, coming upon a blank piece of rock embedded with a doorway, only visible due to a slight shimmer her enhanced eyesight picked up. She approached the rock, twisting her signature into the cold sharpness of Orochimaru's and pushing a trickle of it into the rock. Sure enough, it swung outwards silently.
She pressed a button on the radio around her neck and spoke quietly. "It opened to Orochimaru's signature."
"Confirmed. Move in." The captain's crackly voice whispered over the device and she drew her chokutō, swinging herself onto the tunnel ceiling and heading down the hall. The door swung shut behind her and artificial lighting flickered on, revealing the dusty tiles.
She moved unerringly into the depths, coming to a stop at a wooden trap door. It opened to a giant laboratory, twelve glass tubes with children floating in their depths lining the walls and tables filled with piles upon piles of lab notes. She flickered off the transparency jutsu (unable to maintain the use of her elemental transformations at the same time) and pumped chakra into her sword. She sliced through the glass of the first tube and straight through the head of the test subject. The machines monitoring its vitals abruptly stopped.
Eleven children's eye snapped open and locked onto her. Their bodies began to morph and change, limbs bubbling and shifting into grotesque caricatures of wings and swords and giant claws. They smashed against the glass as they changed, eight forcing their way out of the tubes as two pounded unsuccessfully against their cages.
The eight pounced, rushing at her in a wave of pure, murderous rage and super human strength. Sakura knew they wouldn't stop until they'd torn the very flesh from her bones if they caught her.
Her heart pounded in her chest. Her breathing quickened. Her hands were steady on her blade.
A feral smile stretched her face.
Sakura danced through the crowd of murderous children in a flurry of electric blue. Her chakra emboldened sword slicing cleanly through morphed grey flesh and leaving streaks of red in it's wake. The children presented a challenge through sheer numbers and their tenacity, continuing to throw themselves into the attack when even their limbs were severed, but they lacked the intelligence that seasoned warriors contained. They were little more than dumb, hungry animals.
Sakura did not take long to put them down.
When she was finished she slashed through the remaining two test tubes and left the room. There was a cleanup crew not far behind them that would take care of the bodies and collect the experiment notes.
She encountered three more rooms with test tube babies in them as she walked, the second one she encountered had attacked her in the same manner as the first but the other two had not even woken up as she disposed of them. There were a series of very dusty, very empty rooms before she came upon a set of double doors.
It opened to a cavernous space, split in half by a wall of metal bars. An unassuming, middle aged man sat in the centre of the other side, eyes closed as if meditating.
He didn't react as she stepped into the room, nor did he react when she walked the length of the bars to observe them, but he did react when she hovered a finger over the 'open' button on the control panel.
"Are you my lunch?" The man rasped, unending black eyes boring into her. "A little skinny for a meal but I'm not picky." His lips stretched in a smile that exposed sharp teeth. "It's been so long since I ate."
She pressed the button. The door in the centre of the bars swung open. The man leapt out of it on all fours, shifting and bubbling into a monstrous panther out of a nightmare as he did. His face formed a snout and his teeth lengthened, his body bent and bowed and grew jagged spikes of grey. His hands and feet twisted into paws with oversized claws and a tail covered in razor sharp quills sprouted from the base of his spine.
He leapt across the tiles at her and bat at her body with a giant paw. She ducked underneath the swipe and gained a slash on the mans' arm before he backed off, only for the skin to almost immediately reform. She dodged a second strike and slashed at his face as he went for a bite. The man reacted too quickly to her strikes, dodging before she could do any lasting damage, and there was a calculating gleam in his eyes she didn't like.
She couldn't use her chakra-enhanced attacks for risk of caving in the entire building and since there was almost nothing in the room she couldn't kawarimi. Chakra intensive techniques were out of the question as she didn't know how much more of the lab they hadn't explored yet and her sneaking abilities would require her to un-infuse her sword, significantly reducing it's cutting power.
Her control over the technique was shaky and she could only get it to work on her arms and a small portion of her legs, but Sakura begun circulating her electric blue nature release, mimicking the feeling from her S-rank mission. Her speed and strength increased and she jumped over one of the attacks, landing on the man's arm and using it as leverage to stab her chokutō.
He twisted, jagged rows of teeth reaching for her and she raised her left arm guard to protect herself. His mouth closed around her forearm at the same time her sword slid through his brain. The man's powerful jaws shattered the protective metal, teeth sinking through flesh to scrape the bone, before his eyes rolled back into his head and he collapsed backwards onto the floor. His body morphed back into a normal man's and she double checked his pulse. Dead.
Sakura looked down at her torn up arm for a moment before she slashed the remnants of the guard and bicep-length glove off, bandaging up the torn flesh tightly before she moved back towards the door.
She turned two corners, opened three doors to see a library, a bedroom and a weapons room, and nearly walked straight into Panda.
"Sage, what happened to you?" The man hissed and she tilted her head. Apparently his search had not been as eventful. The man had a few splashes of blood over his uniform and no injuries. In comparison, Sakura knew she must look dramatic, with her whole body practically bathed in blood and a rapidly reddening bandage wrapped around her left forearm.
She raised her bandaged arm and waved it before him.
"The test subjects were hungry." She deadpanned.
"Fuck."
"That was the last of them." Cat crackled over the radio.
"Confirmed." Crackled the captain. "Retreat to point A."
"How close is your door?" Sakura asked the man in front of her.
"Pretty close, I circled back to it a few times."
"Alright." She gestured forwards. "Lead the way." The man did, setting down the corridor at a comfortable pace. Sakura followed, relived when his door was, indeed, far closer than hers had been and they were soon making their way through the trees and to the meet up location.
"What the fuck happened to you?" Said Monkey, the man already moving forward to press a green coloured hand onto her forearm.
"A monster bit me." She replied and he snorted.
"I've stopped the bleeding but this will need to see a hospital." He said, sadly removing the green hand of pain relief and happiness and unwrapping and rewrapping the mangled flesh with clean bandages. "You're not in danger of dying but if I set it wrong you could end up losing a lot of manoeuvrability in the limb. Obviously don't use the thing until we get it checked out."
"Aah." She replied. "Thank you, Monkey."
"Any other injuries?" The man asked the squad and they shook their heads. Sakura noted that Tiger was covered in far more blood than Panda but far less than her. Was she an unusually messy fighter or did she just get lucky?
Either way she didn't particularly mind.
"Let's head off, we should run into the cleanup crew on the way and we'll fill them in." Tiger said and they took off into the trees, heading for Konoha. She was not looking forward to dealing with the screaming agony in the limb for the entire trip.
Sakura was lucky and her arm was pieced back together and healed fairly easily, the magical ninja powers of this world making flesh wounds a half hour procedure with a competent medic rather than the months of pain and suffering it would have been in Tristan's old world. The only real difficulty they experienced was when they came across pulverised bones, organ damage or the myriad of genetic diseases the population held.
She did gain a wicked, distinctly bite shaped scar from the whole ordeal, however.
(She did not get anytime to admire said scar as Tiger immediately launched her into evasion drills until she dropped.)