Pulling My Weight

Chapter 21 || Return

A week after they got back from Kiri, Genma showed her his Hiraishin.

Sakura's jaw had hit the floor, then she'd ended up in various trees, bushes and general shrubbery sixteen times in a row and had a sprained wrist and multiple strained muscles to show for it when she'd tried it herself. She squashed down the disappointment before it even fully registered, then took Genma out for a celebratory dinner because the man had singlehandedly reconstructed a legendary technique with nothing but hazy memories and a dead man's notes to help him and that deserved a lifetime supply of free food if she had anything to say about it.

(the twinge of bitterness that reared its head and screamed that she'd been promised that technique, that Genma shouldn't have kept it from her, that it was her right scared her. So she made sure Genma didn't see a hint of it on her face and kept the stream of praise and encouragement and inquisitive questions up for the whole time they were in the restaurant until Genma pulled her to his side and thanked her for her support so sincerely that she felt a lump form in her throat and a wave of guilt so profound that she wanted to cry-!)

A month after that, Genma finally made the jump to full jounin, right after getting chewed out by Tsunade because of the Hiraishin, Shiranui? What next, you gonna take a shot at Mokuton and conveniently forget to inform anyone about it?

Three months after that, right after Sakura's fifteenth birthday, her probation as tokubetsu jounin was up. As a sort of 'last-hurrah', Tsunade assigned her, Anko, Tonbo and three other T&I shinobi on a reconnaissance mission to what remained of the Land of Rice Fields to investigate some info Intelligence dug up about Orochimaru's empty bases.

If anyone asked, that was the precise moment Sakura would cite as the metaphorical match that was thrown on the pyre.

Alternatively, the moment when everything went wrong.

Because they did find Orochimaru's bases. But Intelligence was wrong.

They weren't empty.

Whatever Orochimaru did to the Uchiha, these must have been the test subjects. Suddenly, Sakura understood just why Genma had come home so shaken, so broken after his ANBU team infiltrated that base: the failed experiments were monsters, yes, undoubtedly so. But right before Sakura's team broke into the base, they were children. Children sleeping in their own filth, locked up in cages or on wooden cots, dressed in rags and absolutely filthy. The moment they registered the presence of intruders though, their skin burned, their chakra tripled, their restraints broke as their bodies grew and contorted into something decidedly not human.

Then, the fighting began.

Somehow, all six of them ended up outside, the curse marked children along with them – it was easier, Sakura thought, to use lethal jutsu when the sunlight caught on the hideously deformed faces and made them look like the monsters they were and not the children they'd first stumbled across.

At some point, Tonbo went down, and Sakura knew at that moment that they had to retreat. They could've kept fighting, but guarding an injured comrade and dealing with overpowered monsters would only end in more casualties. Calling for a retreat, she spammed the field with her explosive tags, waiting until her comrades were out of reach before she unleashed the contained inferno of her seals, then methodically went to every fallen body she came across and slashed at the main arteries, robotic and thoughtless and deadly.

Then, just as she was straightening up from one of the last bodies, she heard the unmistakable sound of chirping birds, and a familiar voice calling what she knew was Anko's strongest technique.

Sakura froze.

As if in slow motion, she turned around and her heart leapt to her throat: about fifty metres in front of her was Anko, snakes extending from both sleeves of her trench coat, her face smeared with blood and gore and a determined scowl pulling at her lips.