By the time Naruto and Sakura stepped out into the streets, night had already fallen over the desert. Bringing the two boys up to speed had taken little time, but persuading Darkest Timeline Naruto to stop pestering Minato had required far more effort. To keep him from blurting out to his counterpart that Minato was their father— and to spare themselves that particular rabbit hole— Sakura had been forced to threaten him with unbirth. It wasn't, all things considered, such an unreasonable threat, given that this nexus event concerned them all.
In the end, to prevent any careless leaks of future knowledge that might lead to their retroactive undoing, Minato judged it best to divide them into two teams. Sacred Timeline Naruto, Darkest Timeline Naruto, and Sakura would search for the missing villagers, while Minato, Chōza, and Shibi escorted Princess Sāra to the Ryūmyaku to sever the puppets' power source… and, with luck, to find the missing queen.
"No good," Sakura muttered to herself, as her blue eyeshadow faded away. "Can't sense anyone…"
"…ya know…"
"…ya know?"
"…ya know!"
"…ya know!?"
A vein popped on Sakura's forehead. If she heard ya know one more time, she…
"Ya…"
"Ya know this, ya know that, dattebayo, dattebasa, shove it up your arse!" Sakura screeched, swivelling on the spot to face the two Narutos behind her, chattering away obnoxiously about their experiences in their respective worlds. "Enough already! Could you please just give it a rest for one second? I can't concentrate with all this yapping!"
The two Narutos did their best to look contrite. Scowling at them one last time, Sakura knelt and slammed her palms against the pavement, channelling her chakra through the ground like a ground-penetrating radar.
The Ryūmyaku's presence was so prominent, and the atmospheric nature energy so dense, that its aura blotted out any of the finer chakra signatures Sakura could have sensed using Sage Mode's sensory abilities. However, this was precisely where knockoff, Temu versions of sensing jutsu like the Area Scanning Jutsu could shine!
Sakura had a fairly good idea where she would be able to find Queen Sēramu's missing subjects; if they weren't aboveground or in any of the towers or spires, then they necessarily had to be underground.
And as expected…
"I found them!" Sakura called. "They're beneath the city! We should be able to reach them through the sewers."
"Nice going, Sakura-chan!" Darkest Timeline Naruto cheered.
Sacred Timeline Naruto was rather surprised to see Sakura being so proactive. His Sakura was also quick to anger, but she usually went along with Kakashi-sensei's plans or tagged along when he went on ahead, always one step behind him to heal his wounds in case he got hurt.
Sakura popped open a nearby manhole cover and hopped down through the opening. Thankfully, her chest was not yet so bulbous that she got stuck in the opening, but it was still a tight squeeze. She dropped into the maintenance tunnel below, and the two Narutos followed after her.
Following the map of the city's underbelly in her mind's eye, Team Sakura crawled deeper into the winding maintenance tunnels. Taking the sounds of machinery and the rising temperature as a good sign they were on the right path, they continued until they reached a particular grate in the floor.
They gathered around it, crawling on their bellies, and stared through the metal grille. They had just found Lōran's inhabitants, toiling away on what looked like an assembly line, though it was hard to tell through all the steam in the air.
"I've got this," Sacred Timeline Naruto mouthed, producing a kunai.
"Stop staring at Sakura-chan's cleavage!" Darkest Timeline Naruto hissed. "You're making us look like perverts!"
With a weary sigh, Sakura channelled chakra to the tip of her forefinger and flicked the grate open while the two Narutos bickered over nothing of consequence. Once the metal bars were clear, she began to lower herself through, only for her breasts to smack her in the face, blocking her view. She sighed again, gathered her chest under one arm, released the chakra from the soles of her sandals, and twisted her body mid-drop to land in silence atop a wide, rust-coloured pipe.
"It's a puppet factory," Sakura murmured, activating her Sharingan.
There were hundreds of people chained to their assembly lines, putting puppet parts together as they arrived before them on conveyor belts. Thousands of purple chakra streams shimmered into view before her eyes, spreading across the vast underground factory like spider threads. They all seemed to originate from the same place, a furnace-looking apparatus in the middle of the room…
"Sakura-chan, your eyes!" Sacred Timeline Naruto gasped as he and his counterpart landed next to her. "They're just like Sasuke's!"
"Yes, yes, we'll talk about it later!" Sakura whispered. She tapped her wrist and summoned Makoto, and her fingers closed around her sword's handle. "I'll take care of disabling the puppets guarding the prisoners. Naruto number one, you free the people on the right! Naruto number two, you've got the left! Got it?"
The two Narutos pointed at themselves and at each other in confusion.
"Wait," Darkest Timeline Naruto whispered back. "Who's Naruto number one, ya know?"
"Didn't we cover this already? It's you, since your timeline is closest to mine," Sakura sighed. "The other Naruto's timeline diverged long before ours, on the day after we graduated from the academy, I suspect."
"Hang on," Sacred Timeline Naruto said indignantly. "I don't want to be Naruto number two! It makes me sound like I'm some sort of mistress, ya know!? Why can't I be number one?"
Darkest Timeline Naruto smirked at him.
"Fine, then," Sakura said, annoyed. "You can be Naruto-san, and he'll be Naruto-kun."
The two Narutos looked at her in dismay.
"That's so cold of you, Sakura-chan!" they whined in chorus. "You dropped the honorifics with me ages ago! It makes me feel like our lovey-dovey relationship took a step back, ya know? Pick something else!"
"First of all, what lovey-dovey relationship? Who are you trying to fool, Naruto number two? I bet your Sakura is still in love with Sasuke! And you told me your Sakura was a hikikomori, Naruto number one!" Sakura said tremulously. "And second of all, I'm not your Sakura-chan, and we'll never see each other again once this is over, so what does it matter what I call…!"
Sakura's voice faltered.
Unconsciously, her voice had risen to a shout by the end of her rant, alerting the puppets below to their presence. She wiped her tear-streaked cheek with the back of her hand and raised her sword, while the two Narutos unsheathed their anti-puppet string chakra blades.