AN: Sufficient Velocity and Space Battles are super far ahead, and the Pa tre on is on CH 115. You can find the link on my profile if you wanna just get there.
I'ma update this more often than normal for a couple of weeks to catch it up, but you know, go elsewhere if you want the chapters now.
When she woke up this morning she really wasn't expecting to be sitting in a circle, right around eternally flaming grass, surrounded by a pool of blood, and playing rhythm game with her sword and Ino. Well, that's what it feels like. He claps her hand, she claps Ino's hand, Ino claps his hand, and they do it in sequence without any room for repetition. Sometimes the grass explodes into a puff of smoke randomly, and they swap ways to spice things up. It's been going on for like five minutes now and while it's incredibly awkward for her, she can't help but agree it is slightly stimulating. If nothing else she's been allowed the chance to take in the environment without being overly concerned about the fact that her sword is so chummy, and it's not like she's a stranger to repetitive and pointless games.
He feels like a real person, talks like a real person, he even looks like a real person, sans the horns. He's based on her, she got that right, but why is he so much smaller? Why not take on her age if he's going to be following her patterns, and why call her mom and not sister? She'd be okay with another brother, but mom is a bit much.
It seems to be wearing on Ino, but this entire thing has been wearing on Ino. She's not about to speak up if Ino's not, this could be so much worse. She's savoring the good vibes for once, it's nice. "How long are we going to waste time like this?" The young boy asks. "I want to show mom the red room."
"I thought we were doing this because you wanted to." Sakura says.
"I was playing along." Ino pipes in awkwardly.
"Huh." He smacks his lips together.
"We should stop then." Sakura says, clapping Ino's hand, only for her to continue the train.
"Yep." Hunger nods.
"Just another minute, it's relaxing." Ino reveals that this is probably totally her fault.
"Well, we figured that out." Sakura says. Escaping was easy, they just waved at the boy and walked out, he even parted the red sea for them and waved them off. Which brings them back to her clubhouse with Ino, otherwise known as the interrogation cell. They never did figure out what the 'red room' was but if she's fully one hundred percent honest, the very idea of going anywhere else with him terrifies her. What if it's some room meant to possess her, or worse, what if he gets younger somehow and she has to take care of him in some kind of illusionary headspace?
"How did that answer anything?" Ino asks, "I have more questions than before we started!" The natural blonde throws her hand up, "do you have any idea how messed up that was?"
"It wasn't," Sakura takes a guess, and based on the frown on Ino's features, she's wrong, "we figured it out though! He's not messing with my head because he likes me, simple."
"Why does your demon sword have an avatar, Sakura," Ino grumbles, huffing at her with crossed arms, "either you created one for it, terrifying, or it's infected your head and made one itself, which is probably worse. It liking you is the tip of a very unsturdy iceberg."
"Probably worse?" Sakura asks.
"... Yeah, I need to make my report to daddy. You should go back to whatever it is you were doing before this." Ino's never looked so tired, it's very sad. Her best friend is so drained just from an hour with her and her sword. They used to spend entire days cuddled up in her bed, her best friend watching her play her gameboy and commenting on the adorable sprites. Now that she thinks about it, she probably should have seen the crush a lot sooner.
At least this time she knows whatever the problem is, it isn't her fault, it's Kakashi's. She can feel good about that. Screw Kakashi, that's just a rule of life. "How's the uh, system doing?"
"System?" Ino asks her, looking up from where she's already started writing that report.
"The thing that happened after you touched the core." Sakura explains, swiping to bring up her own windows, even though Ino likely can't see them.
"Core? Uhhh-oh, right!" The girl startles on her own, jumping in her seat, "I haven't had a lot of chances to explore it. We wanted to keep it a secret, remember? So I can't use it with my team, and I can't use it in the private clan training grounds, I'm pretty much only allowed to look at it in my room after a day of training. Nothing's changed so, I guess it's doing whatever it is it's doing."
"That's too bad." She'd seen quite a few stat gains almost immediately after she got the system, but then she'd also been a little obsessive and had a lot more clear weaknesses than Ino does. Maybe she's not trying, but whatever the case, it seems it won't be a miracle cure for weakness like it was for her.
"I think it's fine, I'll explore with it more formally when I get a good chance." Ino says, "I want to see if it'll let me learn a new skill like it does you, I'll be practicing poisons with it soon."
"Ah, well um, good luck with that." Sakura gives her a thumbs up, and accepts her clearance to leave. She wants to get back to what she was doing anyway, that being making paper airplanes to throw into Haku's room during streams so that he has some ambience. She's a great manager, she swears!
"Are you a good boy? Is that why you don't hurt me?" Sakura can't help but rub down her sword with some polish, sitting on her bed in her room. Contemplating the reality of what she saw earlier today leaves her troubled, after-all having the avatar of a demon sword in a room of the damned covered in blood and corpse parts in your head is troublesome. "Why did you hurt Tenten then? Or any of those other people. That can't really be you, but then what if it is? What's a sword doing with a personality anyway?" Disgruntled is one way to put it, but really she's just sad. If he's alive in there, does he want to talk? He said he was happy she visited, does that mean he's conscious and alive all the time she's not there? Is her sword lonely? It'd really put a spin on wanting to make her stab people if he's lonely, that's just interacting with people. She's pretty sure Naruto did something similar for a while? Causing problems to get attention?
She has so many questions, she wishes her system would just put things into perspective for her.
[Quest Alert - Hunger? Boy? Girl? Sword?
Description: You've dived deep inside yourself and found a safety bastion for your sword, but is it your image of your sword, or the sword's infection you found.
You have a couple of months before you can go back into combat, train hard and figure out your sword more deeply.
Condition: [0/1 Hunger Awakening]
Reward: Hunger Specific Trait]
Well it couldn't get any clearer than that, she needs to train with her sword and get to know it better, it's the only way! At least this way she has a goal in mind, she can work with a goal in mind.
"Gai." Standing in a field, the older man is proud of his place across from her. Running through one tricky movement at a time, she finds it's hard to keep up with him even when he's being rather slow to intentionally give her a chance to catch up.
"Sakura." His acknowledgement of her existence makes her question why she said his name in the first place, only for the memory to ram right back into her when the kata loop resets and he makes her do a damn frontflip into a kick.
"This is ridiculous, when am I going to use anything like this?" She grunts, huffing hard and pushing herself anyway.
"You'll find that a good taijutsu foundation will get you farther in life than anything else, even a good solid mind." He mixes the order up intentionally, forcing her to adjust on the fly lest she get hit in the face by an out of place fist. It's disorienting, but she finds the need to focus hard on her surroundings a pleasant change from her recent life.
"Is that official advice?" She asks, "work myself to the bone learning how to fist fight and ignore my mental woes?"
"Your youthful journey to health is admirable, I've been observing it since you first learned to sleep, Kakashi was quite flustered." Gai says firmly, "you are an incredible young woman, Sakura, but you have much to improve, and you'll find that while working on your headspace will take you everywhere you want to go, that journey will never end. You'll need skills and power to stay alive, or your efforts will be meaningless."
"I don't get it." She gulps.
"These two months you have been barred from missions are not a burden. You have far to climb, and climb you must. Let us claw our way towards the sky, and when we're face to face with the moon, we shall punch it in the face." Kakashi might be right, Gai's crazy, but he's her kind of crazy. He's the kind of crazy that makes sense to her, he's not the kind of crazy that gives her a freaking demon sword or teaches her how to make her own jutsu by explaining the theory before abandoning her.
"Can't wait to punch the moon in the face." She agrees with a smile, getting down to continue the next set, a series of punches and deflections for when you're on your knees or your leg is injured.