Sakura had been stymied in her efforts to decode Orochimaru's book.
It was a book code cipher, that much was clear, and given that Orochimaru wasn't in the habit of sharing Sakura would be shocked if another one of his journals wasn't the code the journal she had.
Which was problematic, because she only had the one journal.
Still, she knew the book was about medicine, and included drawings—he'd not wanted to make his work obvious, but it was still a journal he used to work, and so sometimes the utility of a drawing was too important to leave out.
So she'd quickly found the code for about 50 or so words, and would no doubt be able to figure out another 50 or so in short order.
Others were just simple; connector words like 'and' and 'or' were just too obvious in their frequency and placement.
It was slow going, but at least it was going.
Orochimaru, she knew, was having far less luck.
He was getting to the point of bashing his head against the wall. (Not particularly violently, but still.)
She'd thought he might be somewhat successful—which was why she'd given him one of her less encrypted earlier journals, one which covered medicine and only medicine, and even then almost none of what Arden had her dream up.
She'd really thought he'd get somewhere, after all. Parse out something.
He hadn't.
Between his experiments—which were increasingly infrequent, as he grew wary over the limited number of bodies and the lack of progress of his work—Orochimaru literally stared at her journal.
After week three he'd come up to her and asked, very seriously, if she'd not just written gibberish.
She assured him the journal contained information.
Despite the slight difference in progress, though, both were now well and truly stymied.
And so, unfortunately, was Orochimaru's work. And as long as that particular aspect remained unmoving, Orochimaru's talk of the need for more bodies, more experimentation only grew.
Soon, though, both of them—as well as the rest of Konoha, and even the rest of Fire—were distracted by a greater issue.
There were of course the existing concerns; the slow progress of Konoha's railroad, the fast-paced troop movement for Kumo enabled by theirs; the situation in Tea, too, the civil war happening just across their border, was also a matter of great concern.
But the biggest thing was the drought.
They were finally in fall, the rice harvest (given the ongoing lack of rain) was officially dangerously small, and they hadn't yet figured out how to get through the winter.
Kiri was doggedly after every boat the privateers spotted, which made fishing a difficult venture, and while they were already importing some food from their neighbors Fire was traditionally the breadbasket of their region; there just wasn't enough food.
Even outside of food, however, there was a more immediate issue.
The reason that Orochimaru and Sakura stopped working on their code-breaking.
The reason no experiments would be performed that day, the prisoners instead given masks and blankets and buckets of water, just in case—they were some distance from the walls, after all.
The reason Konoha had to scramble to turtle up, had to recall everyone not actively fighting, draft every retired shinobi in a matter of hours.
Fire.
They should have seen it coming, really.
They did, really.
A months-long drought?
Fire was inevitable.
They'd done what they could—D ranks to clear the worst of the kindling from the forest, keeping roads as clear and broad as possible to act as fire breaks, even a half-baked idea for storage seals full of water to be dumped up and down the country by shinobi and samurai patrollers alike—
But then Kumo's railroad had gotten to the front, or near enough anyway, and suddenly everyone who could be was redirected to Frost and everyone else was scrambling to pick up their former duties and Kiri was making a pest of themselves and more and more Fire residents were becoming more and more concerned about food and –
It had fallen in priority.
Which was when, inevitably, the fire started.
It reached Konoha on day three, days one and two spent wrought destruction through a significant portion of the countryside.
They couldn't stop it; it was too large now, had started from the southwest where the fewest soldiers were.
They could only try to outlast its effects.
Telegraph lines collapsed.
Radio towers did too.
Civilians scrambled to flee, to keep ahead of the wall of smoke and death.
Konoha opened its borders; that, at least, they were prepared for, had specific holding cells to rush through vetting every Fire citizen should they ever have to take shelter in the city's walls.
Konoha held firm, of course, its massive walls more than capable of dealing with a bit of heat, but embers kept hopping over the barrier, dropping tantalizingly closely to leaves and buildings inside before being put out by the guard.
The air was suffocating, and the gas masks only helped to breathe—sight was still a problem.
Konoha was on the back foot.
They'd only had a day and a half to prepare—a day and a half since the first warning had come through the telegraph—and it wasn't enough.
Couldn't be; not with the amount of danger a wildfire of such a great size could be.
But Konoha was still going to try as much as they could.
Everyone who'd come had been dutifully taken in, of course, and all the houses had been cleared—any non-shinobi was now in one bunker or another, waiting out the worst.
The wall was full.
Just about every sensor that existed was spaced apart based on their sensory range, with plenty of fighters in between, waiting.
Sakura sat, stone-faced, on the wall, her chakra sense awake and searching.
The fire had arrived at noon, bright flames almost completely hidden by the amount of grey smoke, white smoke.
Trees cracked and fell mere meters in front of her.
It was now halfway to dusk.
She kept searching.
And searching.
They were on the back foot.
They knew it.
Now would be the perfect time to—
A shout, from far enough down the wall that Sakura barely heard it, then another:
Enemies spotted.
The guards to either side of her tensed, shifted into an even more ready position, and Sakura squinted through the smog, squinted through her chakra sense –
There.
"100 meters out!"
The shinobi didn't wait for the threat to become visible—the one to her right, an older one-legged Akimichi with an incredible range of earth jutsu, immediately shot dozens of small projectiles into the air while the one to her left, a half-deaf Nara, lashed out with her shadows and tried to snag anyone that might come within reach.
Sakura just had time to shout about sensing a second body when the first came within reach to be killed by the Akimichi's jutsu.
And she'd barely begun to warn of the third when the second was taking on the Nara, having somehow avoided every projectile the Akimichi had sent.
They were Ino-Shika-Cho, however.
They knew how to deal.
The Akimichi didn't hesitate, sending out a new volley—based on what Sakura had been able to get out, they were being swarmed.
The Nara could hold her own easily, too; every enemy that somehow evaded the Akimichi's volley of death would become caught in her shadow, immobilized until she'd dealt with them.
But more kept coming.
They were Kiri, that much was clear from the beginning—they weren't even in disguise.
They were Kiri, and they were not bothering to hide their presence, and there was a lot of them.
They were also—
Not so much untrained; they were certainly trained. But they were also not brilliant; chuunin at best, on average.
Not exactly the backbone to a good attack on the city, then.
So: a distraction.
Mere seconds after Sakura had made her deductions shouts came from up and down the wall; the leaders had come to the same conclusion.
Sakura fell back even more, allowing the Akimichi and Nara to work without her input, and waited.
Another enemy came, died.
Another.
Another.
Sakura's eyes darted back and forth, breath baited as she awaited the inevitable.
The enemy's skill was still proficient enough that she barely caught him.
It wasn't even a true shape of a human, just a small flicker of chakra which shouldn't have been there. But then, that was why chakra sensors were trained; to pick up on what should and shouldn't occur in nature, to be able to pick up presences even when those presences were doing their best to go unnoticed.
She screamed, fired a flame straight at the target—it was tiny, tiny enough to almost definitely do no damage, but the jutsu was startlingly bright, easy to aim, and long-distance:
The ANBU was on the enemy in seconds.
The wave of Kiri soldiers gradually died down, stopped.
Hers wasn't the only caught enemy—she'd caught sight of at least one other flare—but that didn't mean Konoha had gotten every threat, or that there weren't more enemy shinobi waiting just outside a sensor's vision for them to begin to relax.
Within Konoha's walls her people stayed locked up in cellars, bunkers, siege shelters.
ANBU, Police, and Trackers darted every which way, avoiding set paths and checking every nook and cranny.
Those on the walls—just about every other shinobi in Konoha—waited.
The smoke worsened as it grew close to dusk.
Most of it was just the lack of light, but Sakura had no doubt that a few embers had been burning throughout the day, waiting for the most inopportune time to restart the fire, and they'd found it.
For the first few minutes of the new dense fumes this seemed to be a negative; the smoke and heat and setting sun seemed to kill all but chakra sensing to alert Konoha of possible threats.
And then –
After a few minutes, after the smoke got even thicker, what little kindling remained in the surrounding foliage filling up the air, anyone in the forest couldn't wait any longer.
Kiri had attacked following the worst of the fire earlier, had actively avoided hiding in the middle of it.
Gas masks might exist, but they didn't create oxygen: Kiri's shinobi were suffocated out.
They came as a rush, the one or two hundred remaining enemies sprinting in every direction, just wanting to get to fresh air, and Konoha's shinobi grabbed the suffocating men one by one by one—or, more often, just slit their throats.
The prisons weren't endless, after all.
It was horrible to watch.
The first few minutes were fine, could be gotten through with the knowledge that the enemies in front of her would be more than happy to slit her throat if given the chance.
It was as it continued…
There was only so much you could watch people be killed in what, given their shape, amounted to cold blood.
Sakura's ears started ringing five minutes in, and they didn't stop.
She kept watch through the night, taking shifts with a member of the Hyuuga clan, and when morning came and no more enemies arrived Konoha began to scramble to pull itself into shape again, to deal with the new prisoners, to deal with their own dead and injured, to fix the telegraph poles and radios and release every Konoha resident and neighbor back to their own lives.
The forest was grey, now; only the rarest touches of moss provided any shade of color.
It was possible to see in every direction, too; the smoke had finally cleared, and the fires had burned off so much that the range of vision on the walls was better than even the dead of winter, when the most leaves had died and fallen away.
It started pouring six hours later.
Sakura was in the hospital before that, though, so she didn't get wet.
Juro sighed, shuffling his paperwork as Sakura woke with a start; her third failed attempt to get some rest.
She hadn't slept on the wall either.
"You'd already been having sleep issues, you know." He said, far too knowingly. "Ever since you started to work for Orochimaru."
"I'm fine." Sakura said. "I just need some pills to tide me over until my body stops overreacting."
Juro hummed; he didn't believe her.
That was fine. She didn't believe herself.
It wasn't an overreaction, not her reaction to the Second Great War or her time in Frost's mountains or Orochimaru's experiments or last night's executions.
Arden had lived in a world where she hadn't seen any of that, and she was better for it.
But Arden had also seen what Orochimaru could become, what Danzo was capable of, what might happen to the Uchiha.
Sakura had that knowledge, was varying levels of sure of its authenticity.
It was up to her to make sure that none of it came to pass.
She turned over again, facing the wall opposite Juro, and closed her eyes.
They wouldn't give her medication unless she couldn't sleep well for forty-eight hours straight, so she might as well keep trying to get what little rest she could until then.