Ameno and Kōji took up defensive positions on either side of Shishio, who knelt and pressed his palms flat against the ground. Glowing lines shot outwards from his hands, forming a hexagram in the grass.
"They're right on top of us!" he yelled, his eyes widening in shock as four enormous dots appeared on his technique's display. "Six, seven! And ten and twelve o'clock!"
Sakura whipped off Tenten's camouflage cloak.
"Crystal Style: Jade Crystal Prison Jutsu!"
"Scatter!" shouted Ameno, as a glowing circle appeared at their feet.
Ameno and Kōji instantly leapt aside as the light grew harsh, but Shishio, still on his knees, was slow to react. Before he could rise, Naruto's figure suddenly shimmered into view as he drove a kick into his back, causing him to fall face first into the ground.
"Naruto, no!" Sakura screamed.
But it was too late.
Blinding light spilled from the circle, forcing Sakura, Ameno and Kōji to look away, and when the light faded, a pink pillar stood where their two comrades had once fought. Encased within crystal were Naruto, his foot planted firmly up the other boy's arse; and Shishio eating dirt; the two of them locked in this undignified position for posterity.
Just as Sakura was about to cancel her jutsu— before someone accidentally shattered the crystal pillar and their respective comrades along with it— the blond-haired boy trapped inside vanished in a puff of smoke, leaving a dive-kicking-Naruto-shaped void in the crystal.
It had been nothing but a Shadow Clone from the very beginning!
"Oi!" Naruto's voice echoed from above in double. "Over here!"
Ameno and Kōji barely had time to react before two Narutos fell from the sky, punching them in the jaw in perfect sync and sending them sprawling. The two Suna Genin did not get back up.
"All right!" Naruto cheered as his clone vanished in column of white smoke, raising one hand for a high-five. "Nice teamwork, Sakura-chan!"
Sakura stalked over to Naruto, but instead of giving him five, she started drumming her fists on his chest. Even though she was well aware that fooling one's teammates was the best way to fool one's adversaries, but she honestly thought her heart would stop when she saw him get crystallised.
"I thought I had caught you in my jutsu!" she said furiously as she repeatedly pummelled his chest with light blows. "You worried me for nothing, Naruto, you idiot! And when did you learn the Transparent Escape Jutsu!?"
"Sorry about that, Sakura-chan," Naruto said, laughing sheepishly. "Pervy Sage told me not to tell anyone…"
Jiraiya had taught Naruto the technique, but he had warned him that it wasn't exactly wise to go around advertising to others that he could go invisible, so he hadn't told anyone. Naruto continued laughing as Sakura's small fists kept falling on his chest, making his voice quaver wildly with each blow, until a sharp crack split the air.
Naruto and Sakura whirled around to see fissures spiderwebbing across the crystal pillar; the Shadow Clone's disappearance had created an irregularly shaped void of negative pressure within it, destabilising its otherwise stable crystalline structure…
"Shit, shit, shit!" Sakura swore, as she hastily reversed her technique. "Cancel, cancel!"
The cracks propagated rapidly from the Naruto-shaped void to the frozen Shishio, shattering his crystallised body from the feet upwards, but just as the area around his groin was about to fracture, the crystal encasing him exploded into a shower of pink dust. The newly freed Shishio immediately began howling in pain, but Sakura quickly delivered relief in the form of a swift football kick to the chin, and he fell silent once again.
"Mystical Palm Jutsu!"
Sakura placed her hands on Shishio's legs, which were spurting copious amounts of blood.
What had happened to his legs was perhaps a hundred times worse than what Gaara had done to Lee in the original timeline. His bones had been reduced to dust. The femoral arteries, the iliac veins, let alone the smaller blood vessels, were all torn beyond repair. His flesh and muscles had the consistency of the lone, mouldy cucumber that Sakura had once found in Naruto's malfunctioning fridge; the poor, abandoned vegetable had been repeatedly frozen and thawed into mush.
There was no healing this; all she could do now was keeping him from bleeding out by cutting off the blood flow at its source.
Even though she knew the last thing she ought to be doing was wasting her chakra on healing an invader— especially since she still had to face an invincible ninja with four Kekkei Genkai before lunch— she couldn't help feeling that she was somehow at fault for Shishio's injury. This Genin, barely a few years older than she was, dragged into a war he had probably never asked for, would never walk again, because of her negligence.
"Sakura-chan…" Naruto said hesitantly as he reached out to her. " I know that… I mean, we still need to hurry and save Kakashi-sensei, ya know…?"
The touch of Naruto's hand on her shoulder jolted her out of her trance, and the green glow enveloping her hands faded. This wasn't the Chūnin Exams any more. These people were here to kill and plunder the riches of the Land of Fire, her home.
The Sand was the enemy… for now.
"Yeah, I know," Sakura said shakily, as she rose to her feet. "Let's go."
The Sand's main force would soon realise that the Genin vanguard they had sent ahead to scout had run into trouble and send backup. Unless Naruto and Sakura wanted to get bogged down fighting the entirety of the Hidden Sand on open terrain, the time to leave would have been ten minutes ago.
…
Meanwhile, standing on the back of his new hawk summons, whose summoning contract he had obtained at Howling Wolf Village at the same time as Sakura's special eyedrops, Sasuke grimly observed the war machines below as he soared over them: gigantic shuriken slingshots, catapults and trebuchets, and all sorts of other siege engines, all hauled along by interminable legions of Stone-nin…
A flash of blue lightning below suddenly caught his attention. "Raikiri!"
"Take us lower, Garuda," Sasuke ordered his summoned beast. "But keep us outside those weapons' range."
Garuda screeched and swooped down, giving Sasuke a clearer view of the situation. A few kilometres from the Stone Army's main force, a solitary scouting party had stumbled upon a white-haired man. In a flash, the lone shinobi sliced through them with cold precision, wiping them out before they could even radio for help.
"Kakashi-sensei…?" Sasuke murmured.