Chapter 61: Kurotsuchi's Departure
"Sakura!"
Kakashi spotted her from a distance — a pink-haired girl drenched head to toe in blood — and his heart skipped a beat.
Father, teammates, a teacher... and now a student? Is that how this goes?
"Kakashi!"
Sakura spotted the white hair and the green spandex blob jogging up beside him and waved.
Seeing her very much alive and bouncy, Kakashi let out a quiet breath of relief.
"What happened?" he said, arriving at her side and immediately launching into it before he'd even checked her over. "We agreed on a signal flare. Where was the signal flare?"
"Uh... about that..."
Sakura's gaze drifted sideways. She scratched her cheek.
"That's not important."
Meanwhile, Might Guy had drifted to the edge of the battleground — the scorched earth where Sakura and Orochimaru had traded blows. He stood there staring at the carpet of shredded snake carcasses, his expression unusually serious.
Guy was eccentric, but he was still a jōnin. He had the instincts to match.
"Kakashi," he said, not bothering to avoid the mess, picking up a severed snake head between two fingers. "It was Orochimaru."
"I already had Lord Enma notify the old man," Sakura said, tearing a strip off her sleeve and gathering her sticky, bloodstained hair back into a knot. "He should know by now."
"You were reckless," Kakashi said. That one eye of his, normally half-lidded and disinterested, had gone uncharacteristically sharp. "Going toe-to-toe with Orochimaru alone."
"Yeah, yeah, I hear you."
Sakura waved him off. She'd taken a sword through the chest. It had hurt like hell, and she still hadn't caught the bastard. She was already annoyed enough about it without the lecture.
"Pass word to the exam officials and add security. The exam continues."
"The old man won't want it stopped."
She knew Hiruzen too well. A solo exam run by Konoha? Maybe he'd consider it. But this was a three-nation joint exam. Suspending it over one missing-nin — even one named Orochimaru — would be an embarrassment the First Shinobi Village couldn't afford. The exam would go on.
"Besides," Sakura added, "Orochimaru's in no shape to try again right now. He took a full-force hit while I had Hundred Healings running. And his clock is ticking — he's running out of time in that body."
She'd taken stock of the fight. Orochimaru had been careless about letting her close the distance. He'd paid for it. If he'd opened with ranged attacks from the start, she'd have had a much harder time.
That was the gap she needed to close, she noted to herself. Her Body Flicker still had a fraction of a second's freeze on entry — a split second where she was locked in place before she could act. Against someone like Orochimaru, who had decades of battle experience, that pause was an exploitable window.
She needed a sensing technique. Something that could feed her a live picture of her immediate surroundings — read the situation in a bubble around her before she even landed — so she could compensate for the Flicker's freeze.
Ideally one that moves with me. A hundred-meter range would be perfect. Even fifty. Hell, I'd take twenty.
She thought, briefly and involuntarily, of Karin's Mind's Eye of the Kagura.
"Alright. I'll handle it." Kakashi looked at Sakura — blood-soaked, improvised bandana holding her hair together — and visibly wanted to say more. "...Take care of yourself, Sakura."
"Go, go."
She watched him and Guy disappear into the trees.
She turned back toward the battlefield — specifically, toward the base of a tree about ten meters off, where something small and metallic winked in the dappled light.
"There it is."
Her headband. She'd lost it in the fight. She crossed toward it —
—and her hand snapped back in a flicker, flinging a shuriken straight up.
CRACK.
An earth spike, launched from high altitude, collided with the shuriken mid-air and shattered in a burst of dust and stone chips.
Sakura picked up the headband, wiped it off, and — headband strap having been cut, unable to tie it properly — stuffed it into her pocket. Then she looked up.
Red ninja gear. Short black hair. An Iwagakure forehead protector.
"My, my. Spring Sakura Haruno," Kurotsuchi called down, arms crossed, hovering on her rock platform with the easy confidence of someone who'd mastered the Light/Heavy Rock technique while most kids her age were still struggling with tree-walking. "You look like you've had a rough morning."
She's already got Light/Heavy Rock down at fourteen...
"Yeah," Sakura said pleasantly. "Ran into a difficult opponent."
She let her eyes drift over the girl with the same assessor's calm she'd used since she was eight.
Not that she'd say it. But even at this chakra level? Taking her down isn't the problem. The problem is she won't land.
"Oh?" Kurotsuchi's fine brow arched. A gleam in her eye that wasn't quite hidden. "Feel free to read that as a challenge."
"Hmm, I could," Sakura said, smiling. "Though my tank is running pretty low at the moment."
"Ha." Kurotsuchi's expression shifted — just slightly, a flicker that most people would miss.
She's not dismissing it as an excuse. She's filing it.
"Then consider yourself lucky, Haruno. I'll let it go this time."
She tossed her head.
"Next time we meet, don't expect the same mercy." A long look, sharp and evaluating and something else underneath that. "Watch your back."
And she was gone — a flash of red retreating over the canopy.
Sakura watched her go and scratched the back of her head.
She kind of reminds me of Naruto. The loud confidence, the way she can't quite hide that she's paying attention...
She shook it off. She'd just gone a full round with Orochimaru. She had zero interest in picking another fight today.
And more practically: Kurotsuchi refused to come down. Short of throwing Enhanced Strength punches at her from thirty meters away — which would be a fantastic way to accidentally kill Ōnoki's granddaughter and blow up the entire Fire-Earth cooperation agreement — there wasn't much Sakura could do.
And then there's Gaara. If I back him into a corner, he opens the Tanuki. Messy.
She filed both of them under:
"leave it."
"Sakura," said a small voice from her shoulder. "Naruto and the others are in the northwest. About a kilometer."
She glanced down. The slug fragment — Katsuyu's projection — had been clinging to her collar through the whole fight, patient and unobtrusive.
"They've got three captives. Sound-nin, same headbands as the guy from earlier."
Sakura absorbed this without comment. She started walking northwest.
Sasuke with Lightning Cutter, Naruto with Rasengan, and Sasuke boosting himself with lightning discharge to spike his speed...
If those two couldn't handle three Sound genin between them, she was going to have to have a very different conversation with the old man about her team assignment.
— End of Chapter 61 —